Downtown Riverside Doesn't Get New Storefronts Often. This Year, It Got Two.

"I wanted people to be able to go grab a birthday gift, grab a hostess gift, and not have to leave Riverside to do that."

That's Sara Burcheri, describing the gap she saw in her own village before she opened June & Lark, a curated gift shop, at 39 E. Burlington St. on August 1. She wasn't planning to become a retailer. The lease came together, in her words, almost on a whim, when a rare vacancy opened up on one of Riverside's two commercial blocks. That detail matters more than it sounds like it should, because it points to something about how this village actually works that a simple list of new shops would miss: in Riverside, a new storefront isn't a sign of a booming retail strip. It's a sign that something, somewhere, finally became available.

A Storefront in Riverside Doesn't Sit Empty Long

Walk East Burlington and East Quincy streets today and you'll pass Sawmilly, the sandwich and ice cream shop at 35 E. Burlington that's been serving the same corner for years. Next door at 29 E. Burlington is Aunt Diana's, an old-fashioned fudge and candy shop. Down the block, Quincy Street Distillery runs its speakeasy bar out of 39 E. Quincy, and Higgins Glass Studio has been turning out handcrafted glass art at 33 E. Quincy for longer than most residents can remember. YOLO Gifts has held down 5 E. Burlington. Michael's Pancake House still does everything fresh at 25 E. Burlington. Vinette, the village's curated wine shop, rounds out the mix a short walk away on Bloomingbank Road.

None of these businesses moved out to make room for June & Lark or for Budget Box Resale, the resale shop that opened near Eight Corners earlier this August. They're still there. What changed is that two spaces, somewhere in that tightly packed grid of storefronts, simply became free, and two people were ready to take them. That's the whole mechanism. Riverside's downtown was laid out by Frederick Law Olmsted as a compact village center, and more than a century and a half later it's still exactly that: compact. There's no strip mall on the edge of town absorbing overflow demand. There's no undeveloped block waiting for a developer's pitch deck. If you want to open a shop in downtown Riverside, you're waiting for a landlord, a lease, or a retirement, whichever comes first.

A Mile Away, Eight Corners Is Built to Produce New Shops

Compare that to what's happening at Eight Corners, the commercial intersection in neighboring Brookfield, close enough for a walk or a short drive from downtown Riverside. Eight Corners doesn't have Riverside's scarcity problem, because Brookfield built its way around it.

At Progress Park, the village runs the Brookfield Shops, a retail incubator where six small businesses set up in 15-by-15-foot sheds each season, from spring through December. This year's cohort, which opened in May, includes The Vulgar Vegan, Four Star Coffee Company, The Shop Salon & Style House, custom apparel maker 34Designed, Makrame Green, and Down to Earth Herbal Infusions. Last year's group, which launched the program in June 2025, included New Book Joy and the apothecary Rites of Wellness. In its first year, the program generated more than $200,000 in sales, according to Brookfield's community development director. It's a manufactured supply of storefronts, built on a parking lot the village leases from the First National Bank of Brookfield for a dollar a month, specifically so that new businesses have somewhere to land.

That supply shows up in the ordinary shops around Eight Corners too, not just the incubator sheds. Drip Coffee, a mobile coffee counter run by Brookfield resident Elizabeth Segura, opened in March 2025 inside Beach Avenue BBQ and immediately started pulling in customers from Brookfield, LaGrange, and LaGrange Park. La Flor Michoacana, a family-run ice cream shop with existing locations in Melrose Park and Villa Park, opened its own storefront near Eight Corners at 9211 Broadway Ave. that same year. None of that required a vacancy to open up on a two-block historic strip. Eight Corners has the physical room, and increasingly the civic will, to keep adding retail almost every season.

Riverside Tried the Same Playbook. It's Still Waiting.

Here's the part that confirms the pattern rather than just illustrating it. Riverside noticed what Brookfield was doing and tried to copy it. Village officials began discussing a Riverside Shops program in November 2025, aiming for a June 2026 launch in a parking lot off East Burlington Street, the same stretch where June & Lark now operates. But by February 2026, Riverside Finance Director Yvette Zavala told the Riverside-Brookfield Landmark that the project wouldn't be real until 2027 at the earliest, and that staff were even looking at other sites beyond the original parking lot. "We're a smaller village, and it's not easy for us to ramp it up and put it out there," she said.

That's not a knock on Riverside's ambition. It's a fairly precise explanation of why the village's retail growth looks the way it does. Brookfield had a bank-owned parking lot it could lease for a dollar a month and repurpose into six sheds within a matter of months. Riverside, with its smaller footprint and more constrained public land, is still sorting out where a comparable program would even go. Until that gets solved, new retail in downtown Riverside will keep arriving the way June & Lark did: one lease, one landlord, one available space at a time.

What This Means for a Fall Walk Down Burlington Street

None of this is bad news for anyone who already lives here. It just means the rhythm of downtown Riverside is different from what you'd find a mile away, and it's worth knowing that rhythm if you want to actually use it.

If you haven't been inside June & Lark yet, it's open 1 to 6 p.m. Wednesday and Thursday, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Friday and Saturday, and by appointment the rest of the week. Burcheri has plans to add concierge gifting, essentially building custom gift packages around a recipient's interests and budget, which fits the shop's original premise: something for a birthday, a hostess gift, a small thank-you, without having to leave the village to find it.

If you're headed toward Eight Corners for coffee or ice cream anyway, that's where the newer, more improvised businesses have been landing, alongside the more structured Brookfield Shops cohort that runs through December. Budget Box Resale is the newest addition on that side, joining Drip Coffee and La Flor Michoacana as businesses that opened because Eight Corners had room, not because a downtown Riverside storefront happened to free up.

The two patterns aren't in competition. They're just two different answers to the same question of where a small business can actually start in this part of Cook County. Riverside residents get both, a tightly held, slow-turnover downtown built by Olmsted's original plan, and a fast-growing commercial corner next door that fills in space almost as quickly as Brookfield can build it.

Keeping an eye on both is a decent way to know your own village a little better this fall. And if you're the kind of person who tracks these small shifts in a neighborhood, that same instinct tends to be useful the day you're actually buying or selling a home here.

If that day comes, Gagliardo Group has been paying attention to River Forest, Oak Park, Riverside, and the surrounding villages for a long time. Search All Homes on our site whenever you're ready to see what else is changing nearby, including in Riverside itself.