Durty Nellie's to Big Grove Brewery: Downtown Palatine's Next Chapter

As the Daily Herald reported, "We are not a late-night place."

That's Big Grove Brewery chief operating officer Mike Wehr, describing to the Palatine village council this month what a downtown institution dating back more than five decades is about to become. He wasn't hedging. He was describing a plan that trades one of downtown Palatine's longest nights for a considerably shorter one, and that trade is the part worth understanding before you notice it on your own front door.

On September 8, the village council voted to grant a special use permit letting Big Grove Brewery take over 180 N. Smith Street, the building that has housed Durty Nellie's since December 19, 2003. The village's planning and zoning commission had already recommended the plan unanimously two weeks earlier. The liquor commission signed off on a license too, though the village won't actually issue it until the new restaurant is ready to open. Council members were, in their own word, wistful. As the Daily Herald reported, council member Doug Myslinski said, "This is a little bittersweet." He added, "Durty Nellie's has been a staple of our community for a long time." Fellow council member Brad Helms called Big Grove "the exact venue that our downtown has been looking for." Both things are apparently true at once, and the building at 180 Smith is about to prove it.

What the Council Actually Approved

The plan is a full reconfiguration, not a sign change. Big Grove's renovation tears out the existing stage on the first floor to make room for the brewhouse and a full-service kitchen, relocates the bar, and turns the second floor into private event space for things like corporate gatherings and weddings. Outside, the project expands the ground-level patio and adds a covered canopy structure, which means the surface parking lot shrinks by about 11 spaces. Pan American Bank & Trust, the existing tenant at 190 N. Smith, stays put. Big Grove plans to brew five to seven rotating taplines on site and told the council it's producing an estimated 200 to 300 barrels a year at the location, distributed under a name that's already the 62nd largest brewery in the country and sold across seven Midwestern states.

None of that is small. Durty Nellie's has operated as a tavern since 1972, and the current building has spent more than two decades as what industry listings call the top live music venue in the Chicago suburbs. The stage has hosted Violent Femmes, Johnny Winter, Filter, Local H, Big Head Todd and the Monsters, and, memorably, the Jonas Brothers before most of downtown Palatine had heard of them. That stage is the thing coming out first.

What Stays

Big Grove isn't pretending the address has no history. Wehr told the council he intends to keep the 7,800-pound boulder out front, dedicated in 2007 to Ted Nugent's mother, sitting exactly where it's always sat. As the Daily Herald reported, he said, "I do believe we'll be able to pay homage to Durty Nellie's and what they meant to Palatine over the years." As the Daily Herald reported, Wehr said, "It would be dumb of us just to forget that Durty Nellie's ever existed." He's even floated brewing a beer with a Durty Nellie's tie-in once the taproom opens, which the company is currently targeting for next summer.

That's a real gesture, and it matters to anyone who's marked a birthday or a wedding anniversary in that room. But a boulder and a commemorative beer are not the same as a concert calendar, and the calendar is where the actual change lands.

How the Hours Compare

Here's how the schedules compare. Durty Nellie's current hours run Wednesday and Thursday from 11 a.m. to 1 a.m. and Friday and Saturday from 11 a.m. to 2 a.m., the kind of late window a touring band's 10 p.m. set requires. Big Grove's stated hours are 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. on weekdays and 11 a.m. to 11 p.m. on weekends. The Daily Herald reported that Wehr was explicit about why: "Ninety-six percent of our business happens before 10 o'clock, and so we are not a late-night place."

That sentence offers a snapshot of how the change may shape downtown Palatine over the next two years. The building that used to charge a cover for doors-at-7 tribute shows, card 18-year-olds at the entrance and 21-year-olds at the bar, and stay loud past midnight on a Saturday is becoming a room where, in Wehr's own description of Big Grove's typical crowd, retired women play Mahjong, couples have dinner dates, and families bring young children. Both are legitimate downtown businesses. They are not the same downtown business, and if you've built a Friday night around catching a band at Nellie's, that specific option is going away at that specific address, whenever construction actually begins.

It's Not Just One Corner

Zoom out and this is part of a pattern this year, not an isolated deal. Burger Baron, the Louckes family's burger-and-gyro spot that closed its Arlington Heights location on Golf Road in 2023, is opening a new spot at 828 S. Hicks Road in Palatine, right at the intersection with District 211's north campus, sometime this fall or winter. And over on Rand Road, the long-vacant former Whole Foods space in the Park Place Shopping Center is now home to Shop & Save Local Market, after the village extended the redevelopment deadline from October 2025 to June 30 this year. The grocer's own CFO explained the delay in a letter to the village: lifting the existing roof for the renovation "proved far more extensive and costly than originally anticipated."

That's the same lesson Big Grove is about to learn on a smaller scale at 180 Smith. Converting a legacy downtown building for a new use in Palatine isn't a coat of paint. It can involve structural work, added expense, and time.

What This Means for Your Holiday Trolley Stop

If you've done the Downtown Palatine Business Association's Holidays on the Town walk in past years, you know the drill: buy a passport, hop the DPBA trolley, and watch it circle downtown roughly every 20 minutes. For years, Durty Nellie's has been stop number one, the trolley's first pickup at 5 p.m. before it heads out to the rest of the participating shops.

With the building's interior gutted for a brewhouse sometime between now and a targeted next-summer opening, this year's route is genuinely up in the air. The DPBA hasn't said where the trolley starts if Nellie's is mid-renovation, and neither has the village. It's worth checking downtownpalatine.org closer to the holidays rather than assuming the old stop still holds. The rest of the DPBA's fall lineup, Halloween trick-or-treating at downtown storefronts and Shop Small Saturday among them, is proceeding as usual on its published calendar.

Downtown Palatine isn't losing its downtown. It's losing the version of downtown that stayed loud until 2 a.m. on a Saturday, and gaining one that closes its kitchen by 10. Both versions can be good neighbors. They just aren't the same one, and if you live close enough to hear the difference, it's worth knowing which one is coming before the sign changes.

If you're weighing what a corner like this means for a property nearby, or you just want someone who tracks these changes as they happen, Sharon Lynch would love to connect.