In the summer of 2024, the Mundelein Village Board voted to sell a former municipal building at 428 N. Chicago Avenue for $450,000. The buyer had a plan: strip out the space that had housed the nonprofit Mundelein Tool Library for three years, and turn it into the village's fourth microbrewery under the name Fenton Brewing Company. The tool library got free storage in a village-owned building on Archer Avenue and a deadline to move out by the end of July. Fenton's got a building, a liquor license application in progress, and a runway.
Fenton's never opened there. If you walk down Seymour Avenue today, you'll find Fenton Brewing Company pouring beer half a mile away, in a building it didn't buy, that another brewery had already built out and then abandoned.
The Building Fenton's Bought and the One It Actually Opened In
Tonality Brewing Co. & Scratch Kitchen opened at 169 N. Seymour Ave. and closed roughly a year later, in 2025. That left a fully equipped taproom and kitchen sitting empty two blocks from where Fenton's was supposed to be building from scratch. According to a Daily Herald report from January 2026, Fenton's changed course and moved its opening plans to the vacated Tonality space instead of finishing out its own building on Chicago Avenue.
Mayor Robin Meier explained the logic in an email to the paper: "Tonality had a unique set up much better suited for Fenton's to get up and running sooner." Village Administrator Eric Guenther added that while officials were sorry to see Tonality close, "Fenton's moving into this location makes a lot of sense." Fenton's still owns the Chicago Avenue building. Its own website still lists that address. But the beer is being poured on Seymour.
Same Address, New Name, Same Number of Taps
What that swap actually reveals is how stable downtown Mundelein's brewery count has been, even as the specific businesses rotate through it. Three microbreweries have operated downtown for roughly the past two years, and that number hasn't moved, not even during a full closure and reopening cycle.
| Brewery | Address | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Tighthead Brewing Co. | 161 N. Archer Ave. | Open since 2011 |
| Bosacki's Brewery | 610 E. Hawley St. | Open |
| Fenton Brewing Company | 169 N. Seymour Ave. | Opened 2026, in the former Tonality space |
Tighthead is the anchor of the group, adjacent to the Metra station and running continuously since 2011, long enough that Village Administrator Guenther once said he hoped the cluster of downtown breweries would draw "connoisseurs of craft breweries" to town. This year Tighthead partnered with the Lake County Forest Preserves on a collaboration beer, a 6.2% ABV West Coast-style IPA now pouring at the Beer Garden at Independence Grove in Libertyville as well as at the Mundelein taproom, with a portion of sales supporting the Preservation Foundation. Brewmaster Billy Oaks, who studied animal biology at the University of Illinois, said the training taught him to appreciate how "small details can make a big difference" in how a beer turns out.
Bosacki's has held its Hawley Street spot the whole time. Tonality came and went in about a year. Fenton's arrived to fill the exact gap Tonality left. Three buildings, three sets of taps, one thread of continuity that has nothing to do with which name is on the sign.
The Department Store That Finally Reopened as a Smokehouse
A few blocks over, the same pattern of a building outlasting its original plan played out with food instead of beer. The building at 32 E. Park St. was Abernathy's Department Store for decades before it closed in 2007. In February 2024, the village board approved a $400,000 incentive package for restaurateur Jack Bowes to convert part of the building into a restaurant then called Smoke House Bar & Grill, with the village rebating a share of future sales and gambling tax revenue.
Bowes had the standing to make it work. His family already owned Emil's Sports Bar & Pizzeria on North Lake Street and the Crossroads of Ivanhoe restaurant on Park Avenue. By the time the doors opened in the summer of 2025, following a renovation the Daily Herald described as costing seven figures, the restaurant had a new name: Smokin' Jack's BBQ. The concept shifted from the original plan, but the address, the incentive money, and the operator's family name stayed the same. Corner Health Foods, the longtime tenant in the other half of the building, stayed put too.
The restaurant's front door now faces Park Street rather than Seymour Avenue, a change made deliberately to connect with the block's existing outdoor dining setup. Each spring, a stretch of Park Street closes to car traffic so restaurant patrons can eat and drink at tables set up on the roadway, a feature Bowes credited to village leadership for turning the block into what he called a destination for dining and entertainment.
What a Saturday Downtown Actually Looks Like Right Now
Put those two threads together, the brewery swap and the department store's second life as a smokehouse, and the picture of downtown Mundelein right now looks less like new development and more like a fixed set of buildings getting reused as fast as tenants can move in and out.
The farmers market ran its usual Saturday schedule on Park Street between Lake and Seymour through September 19, 2026, the same weekend downtown hosted the 15th annual Mundelein Fine Arts Festival at Courtland Commons. That festival drew 50 juried artists working across categories from drawing and painting to glass and mixed media, alongside student work from Carmel Catholic and Mundelein High Schools, with scholarship money awarded to students at both schools. Kracklauer Park's free Concerts in the Park series, held Sunday evenings through the summer, closed out its run around the same time.
None of that required a new building. The art festival uses the same paved lot at Courtland Commons every year. The farmers market uses the same closed-off stretch of Park Street the alfresco dining district already relies on all season. The concerts use a gazebo that's been in Kracklauer Park for years. Downtown Mundelein's calendar fills the same handful of spaces on repeat, the same way its brewery scene keeps landing on three taprooms no matter which company's name is on the door that year.
If you've watched this stretch of downtown for a while, the churn probably feels less like turnover and more like a rotation. The buildings on Seymour, Park, and Archer keep doing their jobs. The names on the signs are the part that changes.
If you're weighing what a home near this corridor is actually worth, given how quickly a building here finds its next use, the team at Payes Real Estate Group has been tracking Mundelein's blocks long enough to walk you through it.
