The Vault, the Bricks, and the Drive-Thru: Downtown Des Plaines Is Rebuilding Itself Three Different Ways

Drive down Lee Street past Ellinwood on a weekday afternoon and you'll pass two buildings that have sat empty for years, doing nothing, waiting. One is a three-story marble bank built in 1927, vacant since 2019, with a walk-in vault still sitting inside it. The other, a plain brick storefront a few blocks east, hasn't served a customer since Oliveti's Italian Ristorante closed its doors in 2012. Both buildings now have plans attached to them. What's easy to miss, reading the last two years of city council minutes and local news one story at a time, is that the city is paying for those plans in two completely different ways. A coffee chain a few blocks over is doing something different again.

The City Bought the Bank So Somebody Else Wouldn't Have To

The marble building at 678 Lee Street spent most of the last century as a bank, first Des Plaines State Bank, then Des Plaines National Bank, then PlainsBank, then Huntington. When Huntington moved out, the building sat empty for five years. In December 2024, the city of Des Plaines closed on the purchase for $1.89 million, buying it outright from property owner George Brousis rather than waiting for a private buyer to take the risk.

The tenant the city had in mind was already local. David Villegas, a Des Plaines resident, had opened Foxtail on the Lake about a year earlier inside the former Good Shepherd Lutheran Church at the north end of Lake Park, a project built as a public-private partnership with the Des Plaines Park District. It worked. So when the city needed someone willing to take on an 18,000-square-foot former bank with a walk-in vault and a marble facade, Villegas and his company, 10 Scents, were the obvious call.

The name came together on a trip that had nothing to do with Des Plaines. Villegas and his business partner were driving to JFK Airport after scouting restaurant ideas in New York when they passed a building called the Dime Savings Bank of Brooklyn, a bank that had operated from 1859 until 2002 under the premise that anyone could open an account for ten cents. "We saw this bank building in Brooklyn named The Dime Savings Bank of Brooklyn," Villegas said in an interview. "We liked the name The Dime. We thought it was kind of cool. It stood out." The name became official in February 2026, complete with a flag mockup designed by Villegas's niece, Natalia, showing a reproduction of a ten-cent piece.

Here's the part that separates this project from almost anything else happening downtown: the city isn't lending Villegas money to fix up the building. It owns the building and is paying for the renovation itself, up to $12 million to bring the structure up to code and make other improvements, under a deal inked with 10 Scents. Villegas is responsible for the restaurant-specific buildout, kitchen equipment, furniture, fixtures, signage, at a projected cost of $4.5 million. The city is the landlord absorbing the structural risk on a building nobody else was willing to touch. Villegas is the tenant betting his own capital that people will show up. Early concept talk has included a rooftop patio, balcony seating, and keeping that vault as a feature rather than tearing it out.

Three Blocks East, a Completely Different Deal

Walk east past the library and the Oliveti's building tells a different story. The brick structure at 1575 Ellinwood had sat vacant since 2012, after a run of twenty years as an Italian restaurant. A country-western bar called Firewater Saloon was announced for the space in 2018 and never opened. Nothing else came close until two limited liability companies, Miner Street Station and D-4 of Des Plaines, put together a plan that the city council approved in March 2025.

Unlike the bank building, the city doesn't own this one and isn't paying for its renovation. Instead, the council agreed to lend the two LLCs $3.6 million toward construction, structured as a 10-year repayment at 3 percent annual interest, with up to $1.2 million forgivable once the final occupancy certificate is issued. That's a loan with an incentive built in, not a direct capital investment. The building itself is coming down entirely, replaced by a two-story, L-shaped structure anchored by an 8,200-square-foot restaurant on the ground floor, three apartments and storage space on the second, and an outdoor dining area. Some of the original bricks are being kept and worked into the new construction, a small physical thread connecting whatever opens next to the building that stood there for a century. Second Ward Alderman Colt Moylan called it part of transforming the area south of Miner Street, and the city's economic development director, Jeff Rogers, put the likely permitting-to-completion window at around 18 months from the March 2025 approval. City documents connected to the project have featured the name of Harp and Fiddle, the Park Ridge restaurant, on an architectural rendering, though officials haven't confirmed that as the final name for whatever opens on Ellinwood.

So within a five-minute walk, downtown Des Plaines has two projects with opposite financial structures. One, the city owns the asset and fronts the renovation money itself, betting on a proven local operator. The other, the city stays a lender, offers a forgivable loan to private developers, and lets them own whatever they build. Same downtown, same goal of filling empty storefronts, two different ways of getting there.

And Then There's the Drive-Thru Model

A third approach is showing up at 1401 Lee Street, where the city has issued permits for a 7 Brew coffee location on the site of a former Arby's that closed in late 2024. Mayor Andrew Goczkowski has said the old restaurant building will be demolished, though no firm opening date has been set. This one isn't a renovation or an adaptive reuse story at all. It's a straightforward teardown-and-rebuild for a two-lane drive-thru with no indoor seating, the same format the Arkansas-based chain is using at its planned Niles and Mount Prospect locations. Niles broke ground in June 2026 and is aiming for an early fall opening. Mount Prospect trustees approved a location inside Randhurst Village, on the site of a former Steak 'n Shake that closed in 2022, with company officials hoping to open that one this summer.

No forgivable loan, no city ownership, just permits and a chain that has decided the northwest suburbs are worth expanding into. It's the fastest of the three models because there's the least at stake structurally. Nobody's preserving a vault or salvaging bricks from a building that meant something to three generations of Des Plaines residents. It's infill, plain and simple, and it moves at infill speed.

What Three Corners Tell You About the Rest of Downtown

Put the three side by side and a pattern shows up that none of the individual news stories quite spell out on their own.

• 678 Lee Street (The Dime): City-owned building, city pays for renovation (up to $12 million), private operator pays for buildout ($4.5 million), no loan involved.
• 1575 Ellinwood Street (Oliveti's site): Privately owned, city lends $3.6 million with $1.2 million forgivable, full demolition and new construction, some original brick reused.
• 1401 Lee Street (7 Brew): Privately developed, straightforward permitting, full demolition of the former Arby's, no city financing mentioned.

The takeaway isn't that downtown Des Plaines is getting three new food and beverage spots, though it is. It's that the city treats buildings differently depending on what they used to be. A ninety-nine-year-old marble bank with a vault gets bought outright and nursed back to life on the city's dime, pun intended. A brick storefront that closed over a decade ago and drew no serious interest for years gets a loan and a wrecking ball. A shuttered fast-food building gets neither ceremony nor subsidy, just a permit. If you've wondered why some empty buildings downtown seem to take forever to move while others go from "for lease" to bulldozed in a matter of months, that's most of the answer. It isn't about how long a building sits empty. It's about whether anyone in city hall thinks the building itself is worth saving.

For anyone who's walked past that bank on Lee Street and wondered what was ever going to happen to it, the answer turned out to be more interesting than a simple "new restaurant coming soon." It's a small window into how a city decides what's worth keeping and what's worth starting over.

If you're watching downtown Des Plaines change and want a local perspective on what any of it means for a home nearby, or you're simply curious how these projects tend to ripple through a neighborhood over time, Sharon Lynch has been paying attention to this corner of the northwest suburbs for a long time. Let's Connect.