Fall Fest wrapped up its seventeenth run at Lake Park on September 20, carnival lights packed away, the petting zoo trailer gone until next year. If you walked down toward downtown afterward, past the Metra station and along Ellinwood Street, you'd have passed two buildings that have been the subject of city council meetings for the better part of two years. One has scaffolding, a signed construction contract, and a completion window. The other is still gutted, still unnamed, and still without a public date.
Both projects involve public support, but not through the same arrangement: the city owns the bank building and is paying for its restoration, while the Oliveti's project received a city loan for a private ownership group. Both were presented as additions to downtown dining. Two years of council votes later, their timelines differ, reflecting the different structures of the two deals.
The bank building has a bid, a tax break, and a target tied to its own birthday
The building at 678 Lee Street opened in 1927 as the Des Plaines State Bank. It sat vacant from 2019 until the city bought it in 2024 for $1.9 million, with the plan of turning it into a restaurant now called The Dime. The name is a nod to the building's original purpose, and the flag design commissioned for the exterior even works in a nickel-sized silhouette of Franklin Roosevelt, whose face has appeared on dimes since 1946.
The people behind it aren't strangers to Des Plaines. Restaurateur David Villegas, a Des Plaines native, already converted a former Park District church building on Howard Avenue into Foxtail on the Lake in 2023, and it's become one of the restaurants locals actually recommend. He and business partner Tim Canning are running The Dime through a company called 10 Scents, and, as the Daily Herald reported, Mayor Andrew Goczkowski said:
"It's very clear that they know what they are doing. They create a product that people want to spend money at and spend their time at. They know how to execute."
The mechanics of the deal are specific. The city is spending up to $12 million to bring the roughly 18,000-square-foot building up to code, while Villegas' team covers an estimated $4.5 million in kitchen equipment, furniture, and fixtures. In July, the city council declared the building blighted, a designation that clears the way for a Cook County Class 7b property tax incentive worth an estimated $3.5 million to the restaurant over 12 years. A contractor, Paul Borg Construction Co., submitted the winning bid at just over $10.3 million to restore the interior. By June, photographers touring the space described rough concrete floors, exposed steel beams, and broken windows covered in plywood, everything gutted except the original bank vault, which Villegas plans to keep as part of the seating.
Construction on that scope of work runs about eight months once it starts, and the target has shifted as the contract process dragged. Early reporting in February pointed to a March 2027 opening. By July, after a two-week delay in council approval pushed the contract signing later than planned, the estimate had moved to late 2027, timed to land near the building's 100th anniversary. That puts the opening roughly nine months later than the original estimate.
Two blocks east, the old Oliveti's site is still just an address
Walk east on Ellinwood past River Road and you'll hit 1575 Ellinwood Street, where Oliveti's Italian Ristorante operated until it closed in 2012. A country-western bar called Firewater Saloon was announced for the space in 2018 and never opened. The building sat there for over a decade, brick and mostly forgotten, until two limited liability companies, Miner Street Station and D-4 of Des Plaines, put forward a redevelopment plan tied to the operator of Park Ridge's Harp & Fiddle restaurant.
The city council approved a $3.6 million loan for the project in March 2025, structured to be repaid over 10 years at 3 percent interest, with up to $1.2 million forgiven once the restaurant secures its occupancy certificate. The plan called for the two-story brick structure to be renovated rather than demolished, keeping its century-old charm while adding three apartments and storage space above an 8,200-square-foot ground-floor restaurant with outdoor dining.
Interior work began in June 2026, which means the building has been actively under construction for about the same stretch of time as the bank on Lee Street. But there's no name yet. The Park Ridge ownership group has said publicly they don't plan to call it Harp & Fiddle, and no completion date has been reported since the demolition permits went through. If The Dime's story is a series of dollar figures and dates you can circle on a calendar, the Oliveti's site is still mostly a construction fence with a rendering taped to it.
The difference is who's holding the risk
Both projects ran through city council votes. Both involve public money subsidizing a private restaurant build-out. But the structure of each deal explains why one has a hard number attached and the other doesn't.
The city owns the bank building outright and is paying directly for its restoration, which means every step, the contractor bid, the blight designation, the tax incentive, has to clear a public vote before Villegas can touch the space. That's slower to get moving, but once a contract is signed, the scope and schedule are locked into a public document anyone can request. The Oliveti's site works the other way. The city loaned money to a private ownership group that owns the building and controls its own construction schedule. There's less friction to get moving, which is why interior demo started there before The Dime's big contract was even finalized, but there's also less obligation to report a firm date to the public once the loan is disbursed.
For residents who live two blocks from Ellinwood and wonder what is happening behind the plywood, the difference is how each deal handles timeline reporting. The bank project's schedule is in the public record; the Oliveti's project has no firm public date.
What this means for the next year of walking downtown
If you're downtown for the holiday season, expect the bank building to still look like a construction site, just a more organized one, with Paul Borg Construction Co.'s crews working through a scope that's now fully priced and contracted. Don't expect a soft opening before late 2027, whatever the earlier March target once suggested. The Oliveti's building will likely keep changing quietly, apartment framing going in upstairs, kitchen rough-in on the ground floor, with no announcement until the ownership group is ready to reveal a name.
Plans call for both buildings to reopen as restaurants a few blocks apart on the same street that already hosts Taste of Des Plaines every summer, the two-day festival that sets up right between the Metra station and the Public Library. If they do, downtown will have three restaurants a few blocks apart: Foxtail on the Lake and The Dime are tied to restaurateur David Villegas, while the Oliveti's site is being developed by a separate Park Ridge ownership group with city loan support. Whether that turns Ellinwood and Lee into the kind of corridor Goczkowski keeps describing depends less on the buildings themselves and more on whether both projects actually make it to opening day.
If you're watching these two buildings change month to month and want to talk about what downtown's build-out means for property values or timing on the west side of town, Jake Kubota knows this stretch of Des Plaines well enough to walk you through it block by block.
