Anyone who has walked past the Lakeview Connection building at Belmont and Halsted since 2023 knows the routine. You can bank at the Fifth Third branch on the Clark Street corner. You can look through the windows at the rest of the building and see almost nothing else. No registers, no shelving, no signage explaining what's coming. Just a two-level, roughly 60,000-square-foot shell sitting at one of the busiest intersections on the North Side, steps from the Belmont Red, Brown, and Purple Line stop, doing none of the things a new building at that corner is supposed to do.
The obvious question is whether Lakeview simply couldn't support that much retail. The timeline provides context, though not a definitive answer: Amazon later announced national changes to its physical stores, and Whole Foods signed on as the building's new anchor tenant.
The Long Wait
The site has a longer memory than most people realize. Before Lakeview Connection existed, a century-old building stood there, one that had operated as Lakeview State Bank and later Belmont National Bank going back to 1921. Preservation Chicago fought to save it, and a petition to keep it standing drew more than 2,000 signatures. The building came down anyway in 2021, clearing the way for Hubbard Street Group's new development.
From the start, the plan was built around a single anchor. Leasing materials and early reporting from Chicago YIMBY described a large-format grocery tenant, Amazon Fresh, taking the eastern portion of the ground floor and the entire second story, with Fifth Third Bank holding down the western corner at Clark and Belmont. That was the deal when construction wrapped in 2023. It just never closed. The Amazon Fresh space stayed empty, and the building sat mostly dark for close to two years while a single bank branch carried the entire storefront.
"We are excited to welcome Whole Foods Market to this key location in East Lakeview," Graham Palmer, Managing Partner of Hubbard Street Group, is quoted as saying in REjournals' report.
That quote came in April 2026, when Crain's Chicago Business first reported that Whole Foods had signed on as the building's new anchor tenant, a deal Block Club Chicago and CBS Chicago confirmed shortly after. It was real news, and the corner finally had a tenant. But the story underneath the headline is more interesting than the headline itself.
Amazon's National Store Changes
On January 27, 2026, Amazon announced it would shutter its physical Amazon Fresh and Amazon Go stores nationally and convert a portion of those sites into Whole Foods locations while leaning harder into same-day delivery. That announcement came before Whole Foods signed on for the Belmont and Halsted space.
Another Whole Foods announcement came almost simultaneously, one neighborhood over. In Wicker Park, the grocer was announced for the former CVS space inside the landmarked Home Bank and Trust Company Building at 1200 N. Ashland Ave., a storefront that had sat empty since CVS closed in 2023. The announcements concerned long-vacant North Side retail spaces and came within days of each other.
Whole Foods Already Has a Lakeview Presence
If you wanted more direct evidence that Lakeview can support grocery retail, you didn't need to wait for this deal. Whole Foods already operates two stores within easy walking distance of Belmont and Halsted, one adjacent to the Center on Halsted at 3640 N. Halsted St., the other at 3201 N. Ashland Ave. near the Lincoln and Belmont intersection. A third location a few blocks away doesn't fill a gap in the market so much as it deepens a cluster the chain has already bet on twice.
A space built to spec for one grocer's cashierless, tech-heavy footprint isn't automatically ready for a different grocer's layout, staffing model, or delivery operation, so the new anchor tenant doesn't mean an opening date is imminent. As of April 2026, when the deal was first reported, no opening date had been announced, and nothing in more recent coverage has updated that timeline. If you're timing errands around this one, the honest answer right now is: not yet, and no one outside the building knows exactly when.
The rest of the building is filling in alongside the grocery anchor. VCA Blum Animal Hospital is relocating into the space from its longtime home at 3219 N. Clark St., just north of Belmont, and Fifth Third Bank continues to hold its original corner. Between a full-service grocer, a bank, and a veterinary hospital, the building is finally becoming what it was drawn up to be in 2021, just with a different cast of tenants than anyone expected.
What to Watch For, Since Nobody Has a Date
There's no posted opening date, so the honest signals are the same ones any Chicagoan already knows how to read on a slow-moving buildout:
- Permits posted in the windows, which usually precede visible construction by a few weeks
- Interior lighting and shelving visible through the Belmont-facing windows at night
- Hiring listings for the store, which grocery chains typically post two to three months ahead of opening
- Signage changes on the building's Halsted and Belmont facades, since the murals shown in the original renderings were never added
None of those have shown up in reporting yet. The most reliable way to know it's close will be seeing it, not reading about it.
The Corner Isn't the Whole Story
While that one building works through its second act, the blocks around it haven't been standing still. Apothecary, a cocktail bar built around a pharmacist-turned-bar-owner's background in complex, ingredient-driven drinks, opened this year at 3242 N. Clark St. A new Brazilian spot, Chef Thiago Kitchen & Cafe, and a third Lakeview location for Tilly Bagel Shop have both landed nearby. And the Lakeview East Chamber of Commerce has its Festival of the Arts scheduled for September 26 and 27, with Broadway closed to traffic for two stages, live music, and more than 150 juried artists, followed by the chamber's neighborhood-wide Halloween trick-or-treat in the fall.
None of that depended on Whole Foods showing up. The corner at Belmont and Halsted will eventually catch up to the rest of the block. The deal came after Amazon's national announcement about its physical stores, while the neighborhood's momentum was already visible beyond that one corner.
If you're weighing what a corner like this means for property values nearby, or you're trying to read past the headlines on any Lakeview listing, Taylor Nirchi has spent enough time in this neighborhood to separate the signal from the noise. Let's Connect.
