Logan Square Just Finished One Plaza and Started Building Another

In late June, Mayor Brandon Johnson stood in the middle of what used to be a traffic lane and posed for photos with a Ballet Folklórico troupe. The occasion was the ribbon cutting for Logan Square's redesigned traffic circle, a project that had been debated, redesigned, and rebuilt since before most current residents moved in. Ald. Anthony Quezada was there. So was Carlos Ramirez-Rosa, the former 35th Ward alderman who now runs the Chicago Park District and who had pushed the project through planning stages years earlier as a staffer. It read like a finish line.

Five weeks later, a bulldozer showed up half a block away.

That second detail is the one worth sitting with if you live here. The square did not finish changing in June. It moved into a different phase of the same project, and knowing where the next fence line will go, and which crosswalk to avoid trusting, is more useful this fall than knowing which ribbon got cut.

Twenty Years to Cut One Ribbon

The redesign that debuted this summer rerouted Milwaukee Avenue around the Illinois Centennial Monument, converted the old bus turnaround into a plaza called La Placita, and turned two-way conflict into an actual roundabout with protected bike lanes. None of it happened quickly. Design concepts were presented to the community and selected back in 2018. Quezada was involved with the project from its start in 2017 as a ward staffer, years before he held the seat himself. Construction on the Milwaukee Avenue segment kicked off in April 2024, and the neighborhood's long-anticipated two-way traffic pattern didn't actually go live until November 6, 2025.

By the time the ribbon was cut, the project had added 70 sidewalk extensions, new street trees, dotted bike lanes, and a walking path around the square, along with the two new plazas, according to reporting from Block Club Chicago. At the completion event, U.S. Rep. Delia Ramirez praised the project as a model for federal spending, and coverage from Streetsblog Chicago put the federal contribution at $21 million, a detail that matters because it explains why a single intersection took eight years from selected design to finished pavement. Projects funded this way move through review cycles that a privately financed streetscape never has to touch.

The Farmers Market Finally Has a Forever Home

The plaza's completion mattered most, in practical terms, to one Sunday-morning institution. The Logan Square Farmers Market spent 18 years a few blocks away on Logan Boulevard, then relocated to a temporary spot on Kedzie Boulevard for two years while construction tore through its old footprint. In April, the market moved again, this time into the newly finished Milwaukee Avenue plaza and a stretch of Logan Boulevard between Kedzie and Milwaukee. Market producer Nilda Esparza, who runs the market for the Logan Square Chamber of Commerce, called it the market's "forever home" at a community meeting reported by Block Club Chicago.

That's not a small claim. Even while operating out of the cramped temporary site in 2025, the market pulled in roughly 270,000 visitors across the season, according to Esparza. The market runs Sundays from May 10 through October, with one break: it heads out to Humboldt Park on June 28 so the Logan Square Arts Festival can take over the plaza that weekend. If your Sunday routine includes the market, the schedule swap is the kind of detail that's easy to miss until you show up to an empty plaza.

A Few Steps Away, the Fences Are Already Up

Here's the part that separates this year's story from a simple ribbon-cutting recap. Construction started in July on a second project, tentatively called the Logan Square Megamall Plaza, on a portion of the old Megamall site at 2550 N. Milwaukee Avenue, near Andros Taverna and La Boulangerie. The plan calls for outdoor seating, new lighting and landscaping, a performance space, and a children's play area, according to Block Club Chicago's reporting. Quezada described the goal as creating a welcoming public space that supports local economic development and gives the neighborhood more room for gathering and events, a vision explicitly framed as complementary to the traffic circle work rather than a separate initiative.

The site had a homeless encampment on it for a little over a year before construction began. City officials, including the alderman's staff, had been visiting the encampment regularly since 2025 to coordinate on relocation, and Quezada's office has continued working with the city's Department of Family and Support Services to connect residents with shelter and case management, some of whom have since moved to the plaza area across the street near the Comfort Station. La Boulangerie's outdoor patio, which sat on city land, was removed to make room for the plaza work. No firm completion date has been announced. One estimate points to early 2027, though the city has said updated timelines will come later.

What to Actually Watch For on Your Way Through

The new layout is safer on the whole, but it introduced a couple of real trouble spots that a resident driving or walking through the square daily will hit before a visitor ever notices. Streetsblog Chicago's on-the-ground account flagged two specific spots worth knowing before you go:

• Near the new cul-de-sac by Lula Cafe at 2537 N. Kedzie Avenue, where northbound Kedzie's service road used to connect straight through to Logan Boulevard, the reconfigured street layout catches drivers who are used to the old cut-through.
• At the three-way intersection of Kedzie and Milwaukee just west of the Blue Line station, a "Right Turn On Green Arrow Only" sign is meant to protect pedestrians crossing Kedzie, but drivers commonly ignore it, and the unmarked south leg of that intersection sees pedestrians crossing without a signal or a painted crosswalk at all.

These are the kinds of friction points that don't show up in a press release about a ribbon cutting. They show up the first time you're walking a stroller through that intersection at rush hour.

The Trail Run Marks the Turn Into Fall

Away from the plaza itself, the neighborhood's outdoor calendar has one more marker before the weather turns. The Bloomingdale Trail Run returns Saturday, September 26, with a timed 5K plus quarter-mile and half-mile dashes for younger runners. The race is put on by the Friends of the Bloomingdale Trail alongside the McCormick YMCA and the Chicago Park District, starting and finishing at the trail's west end at the YMCA on North Lawndale Avenue. Recent editions of the run have drawn around 750 participants. Registration pricing steps up after August 30, so if it's on your calendar, that's the date that matters more than race day itself.

Taken together, the traffic circle, the market's new home, the Megamall Plaza groundbreaking, and the trail run form less of a list of separate updates than a single, ongoing story about a neighborhood that keeps investing in its own center. The ribbon cutting in June looked like an ending because that's what ribbon cuttings are built to look like. The fencing that went up in July is the more honest signal. Logan Square's square is still under construction. It's just building something different now.

If you're already living in the neighborhood and keeping half an eye on how it's changing, or if this is the kind of block-by-block detail that makes you think about what your own home is worth in a market that's actively reshaping its public spaces, Fogel Slate Group knows this stretch of Milwaukee Avenue as well as anyone working the North Side. Schedule a consultation when you're ready to talk through what any of this means for your own address.