Bakery, Starbucks on Tap for CityPark

September 7, 2000
Lincolnshire Review
By Jason Meisner

Developers of the CityPark center in southwest Lincolnshire had the mouths of trustees watering last week, as they told the board they were close to signing a Starbucks Coffee house and an Italian restaurant called Pompei.

The planners also indicated to the board that they need to get rolling with foundation permits, as the fall approaches and the project remains in the design stage.

The two new restaurants would round out a plan to make going to CityPark a unique experience, according to Scott Greenberg, president of Environmental Community Development, Inc.

Pompei Bakery offers sophisticated Italian food in a cafeteria-style setting. The menu includes hearty homemade pizza, hand-cut pasta and panini sandwiches, as well as fresh garden and Mediterranean-style salads.

There are currently two popular versions of the restaurant in Chicago, one in Lincoln Park and another on Taylor Street in the city’s Little Italy neighborhood.

If the two new deals wind up going through, the combination of restaurants in the new 78,000 square-foot, seven-building retail development will include the coffee house, Italian, steaks, seafood and a gourmet burger joint.

The concept is to offer the bustle and variety of the city with the space and greenery of the suburbs. “If you can’t decide what you want, you can come to CityPark and walk around and see what looks good,” said Adam Natenshon, a spokesman for the developer.

But Greenberg and the center’s architect, Jim Lencioni of ARIA Group, said time is of the essence. One of the high-end restaurants in the project — the steak and seafood chain Chart House — has indicated they would like to be working on interiors of the building by next spring, putting a burden on developers to get foundation work underway even as the village continues to debate various fine points in the project’s design, Natenshon said.

At the Committee of the Whole meeting on Monday, architects showed trustees the latest plans for a rotunda building and outdoor gazebo at the core of the retail center, a design that was met with mixed feelings.

The plans originally called for a free-standing tower that would have housed a Tower Records store, but the store dropped out of negotiations more than a year ago.
The plan changed to a similar tower that would instead house restrooms, an elevator and a stairway that customers would use to access a pedestrian skywalk leading to the rotunda building.

That idea was scrapped for an outdoor gazebo when it became apparent the restrooms would have to be moved to a more central location. By moving everything into the Rotunda building, there no longer was a need for a skywalk and elevator tower, Greenberg said.

Now, although trustees are all in agreement that the general plan works well, there remain some details that have to be worked out by the Architectural Review Board and voted on by the full board.

“The gazebo looks a little lost,” Trustee Ann Maine said. “It looks like everything got built up around it.”
Another concern was that people gathering at the pavilion — which would be used as an outdoor stage for special events as well as a commons — would have to avoid traffic on a circle drive around the structure.

Concerned about the traffic, Trustee Thomas Deloye asked developers if it was possible to move a fountain planned for another section of the property to the gazebo site.
“We looked into that, but just having a fountain there seemed kind of weak,” Lencioni said. “You need something there that has a function.”

But most agreed that the cars would be coming in to pick up or drop off shoppers, or to be valet parked by a planned service in front of the Rotunda building. That kind of traffic would be slow moving and would not pose a threat to patrons at the gazebo.

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