For most of the last five years, a walk through downtown Long Grove meant counting empty windows. Realty signs in the glass. A few anchors holding the line. Neighbors quietly asking whether the covered bridge was going to end up the only reason anyone still drove in.
Then, on Sunday, May 3, 2026, two storefronts cut ribbons at the same time on two different streets. That is the moment worth paying attention to. Not because two shops opening is a headline anywhere else in the region, but because in a 120-business historic district that has been losing more tenants than it gained, a coordinated grand opening is a signal about what the block is becoming.
What Actually Opened On May 3
The two new tenants sit a short walk apart, on the two streets that carry most of the downtown's foot traffic.
- Artistic Creations of Long Grove at 405 Robert Parker Coffin Road, a shop of handmade and artisan goods
- The Olive Tap at 302 Old McHenry Road, an olive oil and balsamic vinegar tasting room
Both details matter. Artistic Creations is a first venture for Ellen Glassman, who spent close to four decades as a senior consultant and project manager at Allstate before deciding the empty storefront she kept passing on her way to morning Pilates was worth a lease. That is a specific kind of tenant, a resident who was already in town for another reason and chose to plant a business on the same street.
The Olive Tap is a different signal. It is not new to Long Grove. The original store opened in the village in 2006, moved once to a larger space, and closed around 2021 when the founders relocated to Colorado. Kelly Petrocelli, who lives in Long Grove and grew up working in the original shop, reopened it under the same name. A returning brand carries a different kind of underwriting than a first-time concept. It says the operator ran the numbers on the current rent roll and the current weekend traffic and decided the block pencils again.
Why The Timing Isn't Coincidence
The easy read is that two independent owners happened to sign leases in the same month. The harder read, and the correct one, is that both openings are downstream of a decade of public spending most residents saw as construction inconvenience while it was happening.
Village President Bill Jacob attributes the current momentum to years of infrastructure investment — upgrading the streets, the streetscape, the sidewalks, the streetlights, and renovating the Robert Parker Coffin Bridge. Those are not cosmetic line items. The bridge alone was a multi-year saga after a truck strike in 2018, and its renovation resolved the single most visible piece of downtown iconography.
The economic geography flows from there. A district with new curbs, working drainage, and a functional signature bridge is a district a returning operator like Petrocelli can raise a family in and a first-time operator like Glassman can walk into without hedging on foot traffic. The village's own economic development framing acknowledges the same causal chain: a town-wide restoration plan with upgraded roads, sewers, lighting, public water, and sidewalks meant to pave the way for a new generation of businesses.
If you live here, this is the part most worth internalizing. The two openings are not a bounce. They are the first visible payoff on capital that went into the ground years ago.
The 120-Business Number Is Doing More Work Than It Looks
The village likes to cite that downtown contains some 120 businesses, most open seven days a week year-round. That count includes professional offices, service firms, and long-tenured shops, and it has been stable for a while. Which means the vacancy story residents actually see on a Saturday walk is a story about a small number of high-visibility storefronts on Robert Parker Coffin Road and Old McHenry Road, not the whole district.
That is why the May 3 openings register out of proportion to their size. Two leases on the two most-photographed streets change the pedestrian experience of the district far more than two leases in a back-office building would. The vacancy that resident and shopper Cris Melliere described as a pendulum swinging both ways is a pendulum measured almost entirely on those two blocks.
"We have seen Long Grove go up and down. Now it's on the upswing again." — Cris Melliere, Long Grove resident, speaking at the May 3 openings
What The Block Feels Like Now, Practically
If you have not been down to the historic district since last summer, here is what has actually changed on the ground and what to plan around this season.
The tasting room at 302 Old McHenry gives the district something it lost when the original Olive Tap closed: a destination with a reason to linger past a single purchase. Tasting formats create dwell time, and dwell time is what surrounding shops need to convert a browsing visitor into a two-stop visit. Watch how the shops closest to 302 Old McHenry adjust their hours over the summer. That is the tell.
At 405 Robert Parker Coffin Road, Artistic Creations sits in the higher-foot-traffic corridor closer to the covered bridge and the Historic Downtown Long Grove Business Association's core event footprint. Its inventory of handmade goods overlaps with the district's existing specialty retail without duplicating any one shop, which is the kind of tenant mix a healthy downtown produces on purpose. Existing anchors like the Blu Fig cafe and the popcorn from Sock Monkey Snack Co., which carries on a tradition from an earlier local operator, now have a denser cluster of reasons for a visitor to stay a second hour.
The Historic Downtown Long Grove Business Association, which programs Long Grove Irish Days and coordinates the shoulders around the festival calendar, is the group whose email list is worth being on if you want to know which weekends will be busy before the parking gets tight. The festivals themselves have drawn mixed reactions from regulars in recent seasons on pricing, so a non-festival Saturday is often the better read on how the block is actually recovering.
The Historical Frame Most Residents Don't Cite Correctly
Long Grove residents talk about the historic district the way people talk about a family recipe, generally right on the sentiment and generally off on the specifics. Worth getting the detail correct: the first historic district in Illinois was created here by Village ordinance in 1960. Not a state designation. Not a National Register listing. A village-level ordinance passed by a post-war community that had already decided its main street was worth protecting before most of the surrounding suburbs had a main street to protect.
That ordinance is the reason the streetscape investments Jacob points to were possible without the tear-downs and consolidations that reshaped comparable downtowns in Lake and Cook counties. The 1960 line in the sand is why the 2026 openings are on the same blocks, and in some cases the same building footprints, as the shops residents remember from the 1980s. Continuity of built form is doing quiet work here.
What To Actually Do With This Summer
A practical way to read the next three months if you already live in town:
Walk the block on a non-festival Saturday morning first, before the tour buses that the village's economic development page still lists as a source of visitors arrive. Start at the covered bridge, work north on Robert Parker Coffin to 405, cut over to Old McHenry, and end at 302. That loop is roughly a mile with stops. It gives you the current tenant mix as it actually exists in July 2026, not as the older listicles describe it.
Second, notice which storefronts still carry realty signage. That is your leading indicator for the next 12 months. Two openings on one Sunday is a signal. Four or five openings across a summer would be a trend. The vacancy inventory is small enough that residents who walk the district weekly can track it by eye.
Third, keep an eye on operator profiles. Glassman is a resident. Petrocelli is a resident. If the next wave of leases skews toward operators who already live in Long Grove or immediately adjacent villages, that is a meaningfully different pattern than the destination-tenant model the district relied on in the 2000s, and it tends to be more durable.
Why This Post Isn't A Roundup
Because two openings on a Sunday in May are not the news. The news is that a downtown that has spent a decade being described in the past tense by its own residents just produced a functioning present tense. A returning brand and a first-time resident-operator signed leases on the same weekend in the two most visible storefronts on the two most photographed streets, and the physical infrastructure that made those signatures make financial sense has been under our feet the whole time.
If you have been putting off the walk, this is the summer to take it.
Whether you already own here or you are watching what the downtown resurgence means for values on the streets that feed into it, I keep a close eye on how neighborhood-level shifts translate into real numbers for Long Grove owners. If you want a current read on your home's value in the context of what is happening downtown, Jennifer Haug is available for a conversation and a free home valuation.
