Wheaton, Glen Ellyn Officials Join Effort to Fill Vacant Dominick's Stores

GLEN ELLYN, IL - Three years after 72 Dominick’s Finer Foods locations closed their doors in the Chicago area, a handful of those locations are still vacant.

Most of the empty retail spaces were scooped up quickly by grocery competitors like Jewel-Osco, Whole Foods Market and Mariano’s Fresh Market shortly after the Dominick’s locations closed, Crain’s Chicago Business reported early this year.

However, 10 stores — which total 700,000 square feet of retail space — are still empty.

Now, leaders from more than 20 mostly suburban communities impacted by these losses, including Glen Ellyn and Wheaton, will be meeting next Thursday, Nov. 10 to discuss what to do next to salvage their local economies despite the uninviting blocks of empty stores.

“This vacancy has significantly impacted our residents as well as our business community,” said Glen Ellyn Village President Alex Demos. “It is our hope that this meeting will not only bring to light the efforts being made by each community, but to also initiate discussions on how to aggressively more forward and fill these vacancies.”

The 72,000-square-foot Dominick’s at 880 Roosevelt Road closed in December 2013. Village officials have been marketing the space at trade shows and “working tediously with the property ownership” to find a new retail tenant, Megan Plahm, communications coordinator for Glen Ellyn, said in a news release. Elected officials have met with staff with Albertson’s, Jewel Osco’s parent company, to discuss opportunities.

“One Call, 10 Stores, a Million Customers” is an advocacy group that consists of 9 communities that banded together in 2014 to land new tenants to occupy those empty retail spaces. With the chunks of dark stores in their communities, the group claims, local economies suffer. Shops that bordered previous Dominick’s locations now get less traffic because there isn’t a big anchor tenant nearby to draw shoppers to their local businesses.

The advocacy group represents 10 stores in the suburban area, including in Barlett, Glendale Heights, Bensenville, Glen Ellyn, Wheaton, North Naperville, Woodridge, Oswego, South Naperville and Romeoville, according to its website. It also provides a coverage map for all 10 locations.

Each location has a separate page on the site that details nearby businesses that could draw traffic to the location— in Glen Ellyn that would be Gymboree, American Mattress and Jimmy John’s —and the demographics of the surrounding community. It also included how many cars pass through the area on an average day, which would be 59,300 vehicles per day at the intersection of Roosevelt Road and Bunker Hill Drive, and who leases the retail spaces. Contact information for those brokers is also provided.

The vacant 77,000-square-foot Wheaton Dominick’s, located at 92 Danada Square East, is located at the intersection of Butterfield and Naperville Roads. On Butterfield Road, 36,700 vehicles pass through each day while there 22,800 vehicles per day on Naperville Road.

Local officials will be meeting in a public press conference from 1:30-2 p.m. Nov. 10 at Maggiano’s Little Italy in Naperville. The meeting point is located at 1847 Freedom Dr.
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Anicka Slachta (Patch Staff) contributed to this article
Photo courtesy of "One Call, 10 Stores, a Million Customers'" website.