After more than 45 years, suburban Niles is seeing a redevelopment “renaissance,” with new buildings, apartments, and at least two brand-new shopping, dining and entertainment districts set to revitalize once-booming parts of the village.
“We’ve got a lot going on here in the village right now,” Niles Mayor George D. Alpogianis said Monday. “We’re in what we’ve deemed a sort of ‘Renaissance Era’ — a lot of building going on, more building that’s been done over the last two and a half decades plus.”
Work on some of that building began Monday, with the demolition of the old Leaning Tower YMCA residential building, located at 6300 W. Touhy Avenue. The demolition, the village said, will make way for a major redevelopment, with the iconic “Leaning Tower of Niles” as the anchor.
“This is one of the areas that needed to get be brought up to speed,” Alpogianis said. “We’re giving people a gathering spot where they can hang out, they can shop, they can eat.”
In 2021, the YMCA said it was permanently closing its leaning tower facility, which housed residents and a gym, citing rising costs of maintaining the aging building. In 2024, the village purchased the 6.6-acre property for $2.1 million, with plans to transform the site into a “mixed-use development featuring retail, dining, and entertainment options,” according to a release.
Alpogianis on Monday said the village was working with different consulting crews to determine what the new district would look like, though nothing has been set in stone.
“We’re starting to talk,” he said. “They’ve come up with some nice ideas, and there’s a possibility of an indoor/outdoor theater.”
The last major development in Niles was the Village Crossing, Alpogianis said, built in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Now, with $2 billion in retail sales in 2024, and the village’s new “2040” plan, economic development is taking center stage.
In addition to the new area being built around the famous 90-year-old Leaning Tower, the village recently approved a $440 million plan to redevelop the suburb’s decades-old Golf Mill Town Center Mall. Renderings for the new area include completely rebuilt stores, restaurants, luxury apartments — and even a new water mill.
Other developments in the village include new luxury apartment buildings on Milwaukee Avenue, Alpogianis said, with indoor and outdoor swimming pools, rooftop terraces and lounges overlooking the Forest Preserve.
“There’s some really neat things happening here right now,” Alpogianis said, of the plans to revitalize the area. “We’ve always had the mindset, if you control the land, you control the destiny of the village,”
