The Kellshore apartment building on Irving Park Road, near the Sheridan Road corner where El Palmar stood. Photo: Warren LeMay from Chicago, IL, United States, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
When crews took down the Holiday Club this fall, they also took down the storefront that held El Palmar, a restaurant at the northwest corner of Sheridan Road and Irving Park Road.
Block Club Chicago reported on Oct. 25 that demolition at 4000 N. Sheridan Rd. included the club, an adjacent apartment building, and the storefronts that housed El Palmar and Roots Smoke & Vapor Shop. Chicago YIMBY, walking the site as the wrecking moved from the alley toward Sheridan, wrote that the masonry building at 1010-16 W. Irving was already gone and that part of El Palmar’s first-floor south facade, including colored light bulbs still on the marquee, was still standing mid-demolition.
The restaurant’s closing was not a health-department story or a quiet lease ending. It was a construction schedule. Catapult Real Estate Solutions is clearing the corner for a seven-story apartment building at 4006 N. Sheridan, and the ground-floor retail planned for that project is about 2,000 square feet, Block Club reported, a smaller commercial footprint than the old row of storefronts.
Whether El Palmar finds another room in Uptown has not been announced in those accounts. For now, the corner that had a restaurant, a smoke shop and a late-night club is a cleared lot awaiting a new building, and one more independent kitchen is off the Sheridan-Irving map.
Linh Tran-Whitaker covers Argyle Street, dining and community life.
