The Season Glencoe Got Three New Places to Watch the Sunset
August 20, 2026
August 20, 2026
In May 2025, a construction crew spent one day tearing down the Glencoe Golf Club's century-old clubhouse. The building that had stood on Westley Road since the course opened its first nine holes in 1922 came down on May 8, and for most of that summer the site was just a fenced lot next to a working golf course. By this spring the structural steel and roof trusses were up, and the club itself was telling golfers to expect a fall opening rather than the "summer 2026" timeline that had circulated earlier. That kind of slip is easy to miss if you only check in on the project once a year. It matters here because it is one piece of a bigger pattern: this is the first season in a while where three separate, slow-moving investments in Glencoe's evening life are all landing close together, and it changes where people who already live here are likely to end up on a Friday.
The clubhouse project traces back further than most residents probably remember. Village trustees were fielding recommendations to replace the aging clubhouse and pro shop as far back as 2012, and it took until April 2023 for Glencoe voters to approve the financing: a $15 million general obligation bond, with the nonprofit Friends of the Glencoe Golf Club raising additional private funds to push the total project closer to $18 million. Demolition was originally supposed to happen in late 2024. A disagreement with the Cook County Forest Preserves, which has co-managed the 126-acre site with the village since 1922, pushed that back, and the old building didn't come down until that one-day teardown in May 2025.
What's arriving in its place is a genuine departure from a pro shop and a snack counter. The new building, designed by FGM Architects in a Prairie School style meant to echo the North Shore's Frank Lloyd Wright houses, will include a full-service, year-round restaurant with an indoor dining room and central fireplace, an outdoor terrace facing west for sunset views, and what the club is calling the first sports bar in Glencoe. There's also a regulation croquet court, an event lawn, and enough sustainability features, geothermal HVAC, bird-safe glass, a target of LEED Silver certification, that the village is positioning it as a model for future public buildings. It's worth remembering this is a village-owned course with no membership fee. More than 45,000 rounds get played here every year, and once the terrace opens, it will be one of the few sunset views in town that doesn't require a lake-facing lot or a private club card.
Downtown's restaurant row has moved faster than the golf course. Elyon, a Mediterranean spot at 667 Vernon Avenue from chef Ozgur Ozkant, who also runs Elia in Wicker Park, has become one of the more talked-about openings on the strip, known for mezes and a mixed grill platter. A few doors down at 317 Park Avenue, RDK Sushi opened this spring in the former Meg's Café space, the same address where An Apple A Day Catering has quietly run its sandwich and party-platter business for years. RDK now shares the space with that catering operation rather than replacing it.
What makes this worth noticing isn't the newness on its own. It's the contrast with what hasn't moved. Frank & Betsie's has been serving scratch-made French-California food from 51 Green Bay Road since 1984. Guildhall, the bistro known for its wood-fired pizza and an evolving sushi menu, has held its spot since 2013. In a downtown this size, a handful of blocks radiating from the Metra stop, having two anchors that have outlasted three decades of turnover next to two brand-new concepts in the same season says something about the rent structure and foot traffic here: it supports both long holds and fast experiments, at the same time, on the same three or four blocks.
This is where the season's pieces start to connect. Glencoe Al Fresco returns for three Friday nights this summer, a joint production of Writers Theatre, the Village of Glencoe, and the Glencoe Public Library, held at WLC Park next to the theater. The first date landed June 26, running 5 to 7 p.m. with food trucks, live bands, and happy hour pricing at the Writers Theatre Bar. The theater itself, designed by Jeanne Gang's studio, has been a fixture of downtown for more than 30 years, and this July it's also hosting a standalone evening called Show & Tell: Summer Nights on the 21st.
Meanwhile, the Glencoe Park District has its own sunset draw on the calendar: a live music sunset gathering on the Esplanade set for August 24. And once the golf clubhouse terrace opens later this year, facing west across the course, it adds a third option in a completely different part of town. Downtown gets Al Fresco. The lakefront gets the Esplanade concert. The west side gets the clubhouse. None of these were built to compete with each other, they're run by three different organizations on three different budgets, but a resident deciding where to spend a Friday evening this year has more genuinely different answers than they did two summers ago, and they're spread across the map in a way that didn't used to be true.
A few other dates worth having on the calendar, some new, most familiar:
None of these are new inventions. What's different is that the semiquincentennial gave the village a reason to stretch the usual one-day Fourth of July program into a weekend, which is its own small signal that this year's civic calendar is getting more ambitious, not less, at the same time the golf club and the theater are doing the same.
For anyone stringing these stops into a longer outing, Glencoe sits at a genuinely useful junction of two regional trail systems. The North Branch Trail runs 20 paved miles from Devon Avenue in Chicago up to Dundee Road here in Glencoe, and from that endpoint you can continue on through the Chicago Botanic Garden north to Lake Cook Road. A newer multiuse trail along Lake Cook Road cuts through the McDonald and Turnbull Woods Forest Preserves and connects east to the Green Bay Trail at the Braeside Metra station, the same Green Bay Trail that runs 10 miles of paved and crushed limestone path from Wilmette north into Lake County. It's possible to link a morning at the Garden Chef Series, an afternoon downtown, and an evening at Al Fresco entirely on foot or by bike, which wasn't nearly as clean a loop before that Lake Cook Road connector went in.
Taken together, the golf clubhouse, the restaurant turnover on Vernon, the crowded Friday calendar, and the trail connections all point the same direction: Glencoe isn't adding one new thing this year, it's finishing several things it started years ago, and they're all coming due in the same few months. That's not something you'd catch from a single visit. It's the kind of pattern you only notice if you've been watching this particular few blocks for a while, which is exactly the vantage point Mary Grant works from every day. If you're weighing a move in Glencoe or anywhere else on the North Shore and want a conversation grounded in that kind of local detail rather than a generic market overview, schedule a private consultation whenever the timing is right for you.
Call Mary and learn what so many of her friends and colleagues already know: When it comes to helping you buy or sell your home, Mary will go above and beyond to get it done.
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