Old Town's Summer On Wells Street: What's New, What's Back, And What's Already On The Fall Calendar
July 23, 2026
July 23, 2026
The Wells Street corridor spent the last eighteen months looking a little thinner. Old Town Pour House had shuttered its 1419 N. Wells flagship, and a few storefronts sat behind paper. If you walked the strip in March, it did not feel like a neighborhood losing altitude, but it did not feel like one gaining any either.
Summer 2026 is telling a different story, and the pattern is worth naming. Old Town is not being reinvented this year. It is being restocked, mostly by operators who already know the neighborhood or already know Chicago. Here is what that actually looks like between North Avenue and Division.
The most concrete arrival is FARE, the Chicago-born fast-casual spot built around seasonal bowls and all-day coffee, opening a new Old Town storefront at 868 N. Wells Street this summer. Co-owners Kasia Bednarz and Britni de Leon started the business back in 2010 after they met working at a restaurant in the city, with their first location at a food hall downtown. This is a second-location bet, not an experiment.
The address matters. The Old Town outpost lands on the west side of N. Wells near Layla & Ringo's Cafe, DJ's Great Room and Petite Edith, tucked into the base of a new luxury apartment building. Ground-floor retail in a new residential building is a specific kind of vacancy. It needs a tenant that can serve the building's own residents in the morning and lunch windows without depending on destination traffic. A coffee-and-bowls concept with a proven Chicago customer is exactly the profile a landlord in that pocket underwrites for.
Meanwhile, the departure at 1419 N. Wells has a coda. Old Town Pour House is coming back, though not to Old Town. The sports bar will take over the former City Social space at 120 N. LaSalle St., aiming to open by July. The original location at 1419 N. Wells Street opened in March 2012 and became known for its large beer selection, with 90 craft beers on draft at the time. Take those two moves together and the corridor's turnover reads less like decline and more like sorting. Concepts that need Loop office traffic go to the Loop. Concepts that need residential density stay on Wells.
The story of Wells Street this year is not a wave of new brands. It is proven Chicago operators filling the ground floors of new residential buildings and letting the neighborhood do the marketing.
Nothing on the Old Town summer schedule matches the Wells Street Art Festival for sheer footprint on the block. The 2026 edition marked the festival's 51st year. Spanning Wells Street from North Avenue to Division Street, the festival featured more than 125 juried artists from Chicago and across the country showcasing original works in painting, sculpture, photography, ceramics, jewelry, glass, mixed media, digital art, and more. Annual attendance runs approximately 50,000 visitors across the two-day event.
A few details worth holding onto if you are new to the block:
The same weekend also carries the Old Town Art Fair in the Triangle Historic District, which is a separate event with its own gate. If you have lived here for a while, you already knew that. If you moved in over the winter, that is the piece of the June weekend most first-year residents miss.
Old Town has a sister neighborhood, and the tie-in shows up every July. The Near North branch of the Chicago Public Library hosts a Bastille Day celebration with Old Town neighbors marking the twin/sister relationship with Montmartre in Paris, with French-inspired crafts, art, and music, in partnership with the Old Town Triangle Association and the Old Town Merchants & Residents Association. The 2026 date was July 11.
That is one of three Bastille Day options in the general orbit. The Alliance Française de Chicago held its Bastille Day Evening Event on July 11, 2026. And down at the lakefront, Polk Bros. Park hosts a free, family-friendly celebration of French culture featuring live music, food, dancing, pétanque, and the Bal des Pompiers. The neighborhood-branded one is the library's, and it is the only one that treats Old Town and Montmartre as siblings rather than a French party that happens to be in Chicago.
If you are curating a July for out-of-town guests, the sequencing writes itself. Library event in the afternoon, dinner on Wells, a late show at Second City.
For residents who want a low-planning Friday, the reliable answer is still 1616 N. Wells. The Best of The Second City: Chicago-Style runs Friday and Saturday nights across July, August, and into September, with shows at 8:00 p.m. The revue also has weekend matinée slots on Saturdays at 3:00 p.m. and Sundays at 3:30 p.m. through early September.
Two things about that schedule are useful to know. First, the matinée slot is the one locals underuse. It is walkable, air-conditioned, and finishes early enough to still get a table on Wells. Second, this is the greatest-hits revue, not the mainstage. If you have not been in a few years, that is a different show than what you saw last time.
Zanies is the other institution on the block worth checking week to week. Zanies has been a standup comedy club since 1978. The room is small and the lineups turn over fast, so the calendar is worth a look on any given weekend.
Old Town picked up a James Beard nod this cycle, and it happened in a room a lot of longtime residents have not been to yet. SHŌ Omakase opened in August 2025 and has been named a 2026 semifinalist of the James Beard Award for Best Chef Great Lakes Region. That is the same corridor that has held Kamehachi, Chicago's first sushi restaurant, owned and run by three generations of women, for decades. Two sushi rooms of very different formats on the same stretch of Wells is a specific kind of density.
The neighborhood's older anchors are still doing what they do. House of Glunz was founded in 1888 by Louis Glunz Sr., who emigrated from Westphalia, Germany, and is the oldest family-owned wine shop in the U.S. Fudge Pot has been an Old Town chocolate staple since 1963. If you have out-of-town guests who want the neighborhood's actual history and not a rehearsed version of it, those two doors are the walking-tour version.
One item to put on the September calendar now, because it books up: Old Town Oktoberfest returns September 19–21, 2026, continuing a tradition that celebrates the neighborhood's German heritage and community spirit. The German-heritage framing is not marketing gloss. The area was settled in the 1850s by German immigrants whose community life centered around St. Michael's Church, which survived the Great Fire of 1871.
Read the summer this way. The Wells Street corridor is not chasing a reinvention. It is filling the ground floor of a new residential building with a proven local coffee-and-bowls operator, holding onto a 51-year-old art festival, running an improv revue that does not need a marketing campaign, and adding an omakase counter picking up national recognition in its first full year. If you already live here, the takeaway is practical. The block is denser than it looked in March, the calendar between June and September is heavier than any other stretch of the year, and the operators arriving now are the ones planning to stay.
For residents who want a serious read on how these ground-floor and building-level changes are shaping condo values across Old Town, River North, and Gold Coast, Hudson Parker publishes building-specific market work and can put together a building-level plan on request. Request a Building-Specific Market Plan.
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