Anyone who has driven Sheridan Road through North Chicago in the last twenty years knows the lot at Martin Luther King Jr. Drive, the flat stretch of ground sitting directly across from the gates of Naval Station Great Lakes that never became anything. Not a strip mall, not a park, not even a for-sale sign that stuck. It just sat there, fenced and quiet, while the rest of the corridor kept moving around it.
That changed a year ago, on September 5, 2025, when city and county officials broke ground on the actual cleanup of the site. Not another concept plan. An excavator, a remediation contractor, and federal money already spent. If you have lived here long enough to have stopped noticing the lot, last September is when it started noticing you back.
Twenty Years of Renderings, Then an Actual Groundbreaking
The site has been vacant for more than two decades because of soil contamination left behind by former industrial uses at MLK Drive and Sheridan Road, the same intersection that faces the Naval Station's main gate. What makes 2025 different from every previous conversation about "someday" is who is paying for it and who is watching the work.
Lake County secured a $4 million grant from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, with backing from U.S. Representative Brad Schneider, and the City of North Chicago separately landed Rebuild Illinois funding through the state's Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity to help cover remediation costs. The county is the administrative lead and the formal recipient of the federal money. The Environmental Protection Agency oversees the soil treatment itself, which involves cleaning contaminated soil on-site before it can be safely disposed of.
Here is the timeline in order, since the difference between "planned" and "funded" is the whole story:
| Milestone | Status |
|---|---|
| Site contamination from prior industrial use | Ongoing since before the site went vacant, decades ago |
| Lake County Board approves intergovernmental agreement with the city | August 2025 |
| $4 million HUD grant secured | Confirmed, tied to the 2025 agreement |
| Rebuild Illinois state funding awarded | Confirmed, alongside HUD grant |
| Groundbreaking on remediation | September 5, 2025 |
| Vertical construction (buildings, tenants) | Not yet scheduled, pending market analysis |
Lake County Board Chair Sandy Hart called the effort "nothing short of remarkable," and Mayor Leon Rockingham has described his goal for the finished site as a walkable downtown district with ground-floor retail, apartments above, restaurants, and a hotel. That is the long-range pitch. The part that is real right now is the dirt being turned over and tested, not the buildings that might eventually sit on it.
Sheridan Road's Other Nine-Figure Project
The MLK Drive lot is not the only reason this stretch of Sheridan Road has more construction traffic than usual. AbbVie, whose North Chicago campus has anchored the corridor for years, is in the middle of a major expansion at its 1401 Sheridan Road site. Crain's Chicago Business reported in February 2026 that the company is building two new production facilities there to support neuroscience and obesity medications, part of a broader push to grow its manufacturing footprint in town.
Two large capital projects landing on the same road within months of each other, one breaking ground in September 2025 and the other detailed in reporting by February 2026, is not typical for North Chicago. It explains some of what residents have noticed over the past year: more contractor vehicles, more permit signage, more conversation at community meetings about what the corridor looks like five years from now. None of it changes daily life yet. It is worth knowing why the road looks busier.
What Never Stopped Working While the Lot Sat Empty
While all of that was frozen for two decades, the parts of North Chicago that residents actually use every week kept running without waiting for anyone's redevelopment plan.
- Foss Park Beach, on Lake Michigan, is currently open for swimming and wading after the Lake County Health Department's most recent water testing confirmed E. coli levels at a safe and acceptable limit.
- Foss Park Golf Course, an 18-hole public course that opened in 1974, still plays to a par of 72 over 6,839 yards from the longest tees, with a course rating of 71.9 and a slope of 126.
- The Foss Park District Community Recreation Center at 1730 Lewis Avenue houses a library, an art gallery, and an auditorium that hosts plays, lectures, and concerts, alongside table tennis, pool tables, and arcade games for anyone dropping in.
The district itself is named for George Edmund Foss, remembered locally as the "father of the Great Lakes Naval Training Station," which is a fitting namesake for a park system that sits practically in the shadow of the base. None of these amenities needed a federal grant or an environmental remediation plan to keep functioning. They were simply already working.
The Corner Booth That's Been There the Whole Time
If you want a sense of what has stayed constant on Green Bay Road while Sheridan Road gets its headlines, stop by Mia's Pancake House & Grill at 2314 Green Bay Road. It is a small, family-run breakfast spot where the owner, Mia, is the one greeting regulars by name. The German potato pancakes get singled out often enough to be worth ordering, and the chorizo skillet and breakfast burrito show up on plenty of tables at once.
It is also, by its own regulars' account, a place where sailors on liberty from the Naval Station show up alongside longtime North Chicago families, which says something about how small the distance is here between the base and the neighborhood around it. The restaurant opens early and closes early, built around a breakfast and lunch crowd rather than a dinner one, and it has been doing that quietly for years while bigger projects a mile away sat behind chain-link fencing.
What Actually Happens Next
It is tempting to read a groundbreaking and a mayoral vision statement as the same thing, but they are not. Remediation is a defined, funded, EPA-supervised process with a start date already a year behind it. What comes after, the actual mixed-use buildings, the restaurants, the hotel the mayor has described, was still described as depending on a market analysis and a subsequent request for proposals to developers as of the city's early 2026 update. No fixed date for vertical construction had been published as of that update, and nothing since has surfaced to suggest that changed.
That gap between the two stages is exactly why this is worth tracking rather than assuming. The remediation is the part happening now, visible to anyone driving past. The downtown district is the part that depends on decisions nobody has made yet. Watching for the difference is how you tell an actual local shift from another rendering that quietly disappears.
For twenty years, the story of that corner was that nothing happened. Last September, for the first time, something did. That alone is worth paying attention to if you live here, whether or not you ever plan on doing anything about it beyond noticing the fence finally has a purpose again.
If you are curious how any of this fits into your own plans for North Chicago, or just want a neighbor's read on what is changing and what isn't, the team at Century 21 Circle knows this stretch of Lake County well enough to give you a straight answer. Start Living Your Vision.
