From ‘ghost town’ to boom town: How Arlington Alfresco kept downtown thriving

Their live music venue and gastropub shuttered by a global pandemic, Arlington Heights business owners Chip Brooks and Chris Dungan remember being in “survival mode” five years ago.

Before COVID-19, village officials had been trying to promote more outdoor dining in the downtown — but only on sidewalks.

“We only had room for four tables. We’re gonna go broke,” Brooks recalled Thursday during an interview at Hey Nonny.

But in the weeks after the coronavirus forced a shutdown of public spaces in mid-March 2020, downtown Arlington Heights business owners and village staff met on Zoom, exchanged multiple emails and traded phone calls to develop the concept that became Arlington Alfresco, the popular annual outdoor dining experience at the center of the community’s downtown.

By allowing tables and chairs to spill onto Vail Avenue and Campbell Street, restaurants could expand their seating outdoors while indoor dining was shut down or significantly limited.

“I don’t think at that time, we were thinking like, ‘Oh, this would be a permanent thing,’” said Dungan, who with Brooks opened the local listening room and attached dining space in 2018. “It may never have happened, or would have taken forever for something like that to happen. It’s amazing what you can get done in an emergency.”

“The village did an amazing job responding to the crisis,” Dungan added. “They jumped in right away. They moved heaven and earth to get it done.”

Dungan and Brooks were among the business owners who lobbied for the European-style plaza setting at the onset of the pandemic, but the architect of the plan at village hall had already been brainstorming a similar concept months before.

Charles Witherington-Perkins, who retired in November after 35 years as the village’s director of planning and community development, commissioned a study in January 2020 to explore the potential for a pedestrian-friendly, curbless streetscape on a portion of what’s now the summer Alfresco area. The so-called Vail Avenue Promenade was envisioned for the area in front of Hey Nonny, as an expansion of Harmony Park.

Dungan remembers Perkins going door to door during the winter of 2019 to gather feedback.

Fast forward months later, the area had become “a ghost town,” Dungan and Perkins said, and village and business leaders were brainstorming how to save the downtown.

They knew sidewalks alone wouldn’t be wide enough to accommodate tables and chairs — especially at a six-foot social distancing standard — with room for pedestrians to walk by, too.

Maybe close a portion of the street between the park and Hey Nonny and turn it into an outdoor food court?

That might present logistic challenges for many of the dozen or so downtown restaurants, they agreed.

Eventually, they arrived at the idea of closing the intersection of Vail and Campbell and approximately a block in each direction.

“The village had spent decades building up the downtown,” Perkins said. “So it was really vital to come up with a concept that would help businesses through that difficult time.”

The village already had some fencing from a downtown street festival in storage, and officials quickly ordered more after the village board authorized the Alfresco concept in May 2020. The plastic fences are used to delineate restaurants’ outdoor dining spaces and 18-foot-wide pedestrian walkways that run down the middle of the streets.

Perkins feared they might not have gotten the extra fencing if they waited a few weeks, when supply chain issues became apparent. As it was, a village public works employee drove to Ohio to pick up accessible ramps needed for the Alfresco setup, Perkins said.

Establishments with dedicated patio spaces opened to outdoor diners on May 29, 2020, when Phase 3 of Gov. JB Pritzker’s reopening plan took effect.

With streets closed off, the full-scale outdoor dining initiative in downtown Arlington Heights started June 3.

Initially, Hey Nonny had 25 outdoor seats, but expanded to 70 as the summer went on and spacing requirements changed. That’s about the same number of chairs as the venue has inside.

Almost immediately, Hey Nonny’s food and beverage sales were at 80% of what they had been pre-pandemic.

“It wasn’t a boondoggle, and we weren’t where we were before COVID, but we were at an OK operating level, which was a miracle to be in the circumstances of June of 2020, and be in business,” Brooks said.

Now a fixture of the summer in the Northwest suburb, Arlington Alfresco opens for its sixth annual season May 2 and will run through Sept. 29.