The New Corner at Clark and Fullerton, and the Pub That Opened With Its Street Closed
October 1, 2026
October 1, 2026
As the Chicago Sun-Times reported, the Fourth of July storms did more than knock out power along Lincoln Avenue. They opened a sinkhole, and the pipes underneath the future home of Gunny's Pub filled with gravel and debris. The city told owners Marty O'Connor and Mary Nedbalski the street work would be done by July. It wasn't. By September, the block in front of their new restaurant at 2642 N. Lincoln Ave. was still a construction cone and a closed lane, and they had a full menu, a hired staff, and a debut date they weren't willing to move again.
They opened anyway, on September 16.
O'Connor and Nedbalski had spent over a year renovating a 145-year-old building, work that began in August 2025, that once housed Racine Plumbing Bar & Grill. What sold them on the space, by O'Connor's account, was a skylight in the back room he felt practically demanded a proper dinner service. They built a menu around it, Midwestern bistro fare with what O'Connor calls a hunter-gatherer flair, a nod to his late dog Gunny, a pheasant and duck hunting dog the restaurant is named for.
Then the street closed. Nedbalski ran the numbers using Pacer.ai foot-traffic data and found the block was down more than 5,000 to 6,000 visits a week since the closure began, a decline she said was "only getting worse." Rather than delay the opening further, the two turned to Instagram to explain the situation with some humor, O'Connor telling followers "the City of Chicago decided to give us a massive twist" and that closing the road didn't mean they couldn't open. Their bet was straightforward: ask neighbors to walk or bike over instead of drive.
"The road might be closed, but the neighborhood certainly isn't," O'Connor told the Chicago Sun-Times ahead of opening night.
The payoff for making it past the cone is a menu built on shareable Midwestern staples with technique behind them. The stuffed cheese bread, made with Midwestern cheese and crispy chicharrón-style duck cracklings, anchors the food side. The bar leans into craft cocktails that aim for approachable without skipping the real work, including a goat cheese foam drink the staff was still refining two weeks before opening. O'Connor and Nedbalski have said they want Gunny's to function as a third space for the neighborhood, alongside two businesses already doing that job nearby, Delilah's and Rose's Lounge.
Whether that ambition survives a closed street through the fall is the open question for anyone who lives within walking distance. The restaurant is there. No date had been set for reopening the street when Gunny's welcomed its first guests.
While Gunny's was fighting for foot traffic on Lincoln Avenue, a different kind of gathering space landed six blocks over with none of the same problem. As Block Club Chicago reported, Piccadilly Market opened its Lincoln Park flagship in September at 444 W. Fullerton Pkwy, the corner that had operated as Emilio's Tapas for close to two decades before its closure. The new space is 5,200 square feet, a scale that dwarfs the original Piccadilly Market shop that opened in Lincoln Square in February 2025.
Owner Aaron Zacharias, who also built the Northman Beer & Cider Garden on the Riverwalk and Bar on Buena, designed the Lincoln Park location as an expansion of that original concept rather than a copy of it. The ground floor holds an all-day sandwich cafe and coffee program led by chef Mark Mendez, previously chef and owner of the West Loop Spanish wine bar Vera. Upstairs there's a wine shop, a bar and lounge, and a balcony with umbrella-lined seating over the sidewalk. Behind the building sits an 80-person outdoor courtyard the company named Piccadilly Square, modeled on European public squares and built to host acoustic music.
The sourcing list reads like a map of Chicago food producers rather than a generic grocery aisle:
Zacharias described the concept in blunt terms. "Piccadilly Market is essentially the evolution of the corner store from my childhood," he told Chicago Food Magazine, adding that the goal was "a third space that engages the community in so many new and exciting ways that I could only have dreamed of when I was younger." Mendez put the sourcing logic just as plainly: a local tomato that hasn't traveled 500 miles simply tastes better, and local fruit usually does too.
The building itself does some of the work for them. Piccadilly's ground floor sits at the base of Park West Tower, a 20-story residential condominium built in 1972 that houses roughly 200 units. A market this size, with a cafe, wine shop, and courtyard, opens directly beneath a building full of people who already live there.
Both September openings describe themselves the same way. Zacharias wants Piccadilly Square to be a third space. O'Connor and Nedbalski want Gunny's to be one too, alongside Delilah's and Rose's Lounge. The word shows up in both stories because both owners are chasing the same outcome: a room people choose to sit in, not just pass through.
What separates them is the math each concept is running to get there. Piccadilly Market opened under 200 residences that never had to decide whether to show up, on a corner that already carried decades of foot traffic from the Emilio's years. Gunny's opened onto a street the city had partly shut down, with the owners' own data showing thousands fewer weekly visits than the block saw before the sinkhole. One concept inherited its audience. The other is building its audience by asking people to walk around a cone to find out if the room is worth it.
Both doors opened in September. Piccadilly Market's cafe, bar, and courtyard started daily service at Clark and Fullerton. Gunny's welcomed its first guests at 2642 N. Lincoln Ave. on September 16, cone still sitting out front.
If you're keeping track of how Lincoln Park's corners keep changing hands, or what a building's ground floor says about the address above it, Nancy Tassone follows these shifts block by block, the same way she follows the market itself. Let's Connect.
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