"They very much would like to stay in this neighborhood." Alderman Brian Hopkins said that about Lou Malnati's during a December community meeting, and if you've walked past the fenced-off corner at State and Elm this year, you already know the pizzeria in question isn't there anymore to ask. The dining room went dark on June 30. The delivery orders never stopped.
That gap between what closed and what actually vanished is the real story on this block, and it's been building for longer than most people walking past the chain-link fence realize.
A Site That Kept Shrinking Every Time It Changed Hands
The building at 1120 and 1130 North State Street has been fought over for the better part of a decade. Newcastle Investors bought the site in 2019 for $61 million with a plan to demolish the vacant Barnes & Noble store and the Lou Malnati's building it shared a block with, then build a 42-story tower on top. Neighbors and Alderman Hopkins pushed back on the height, and by 2021 the City Council had approved a scaled-down version instead: 304 units, 345 feet.
Then nothing happened. No groundbreaking, no crane, no visible movement of any kind for four more years while the building sat there with a shuttered bookstore on one side and a pizza restaurant still serving deep dish on the other.
Newcastle sold the property this past August for $39 million, a loss of roughly $22 million from what it paid six years earlier. The buyer was Convexity Properties, the real estate arm of DRW Holdings, the same firm behind the Viceroy Chicago hotel next door at 1118 North State. Convexity didn't need a new zoning vote since the entitlements from 2021 were still active. What it did was redesign the project again, this time down to 28 stories and 307 units, with a shorter 312-foot profile and a five-story podium built around 24,000 square feet of ground and second-floor retail. That retail podium is the detail that matters if you've been wondering where your pizza went, and it's the reason this isn't simply a story about a chain restaurant losing its lease.
The Timeline That Actually Explains the Fence
If you've been trying to line up what you've seen on that corner with what you've read, here's the sequence as it actually happened:
- 2019: Newcastle Investors buys the site for $61 million.
- 2021: Chicago City Council approves a 304-unit, 345-foot tower after the developer scales back an original 42-story pitch.
- August 2025: Newcastle sells to Convexity Properties for $39 million, walking away from the project at a loss.
- December 2025: Convexity shares a revised plan at a virtual community meeting: 28 stories, 307 apartments, a five-story retail podium.
- June 30, 2026: Lou Malnati's closes dine-in and carryout at 1120 North State after 15 years, shifting entirely to delivery from a temporary kitchen run by its own staff.
- August 4, 2026: Demolition permits are issued for the former Barnes & Noble building and the Lou Malnati's space. Taylor Excavating is on site as the demolition contractor.
- Late summer 2028: Targeted completion, per the project timeline shared with the city.
Six years between purchase and demolition permit is a long stall by any measure, and it explains why the fencing that went up around the building felt sudden to anyone who hadn't been tracking the zoning fight underneath it.
Where Your Pizza Actually Went
Lou Malnati's has run its Gold Coast flagship out of that address since roughly 2011, and the company has been clear that closing the dining room was not its decision. CEO Julie Younglove-Webb said in a statement that the closure follows the building owner's choice not to renew the lease, and that the company remains committed to reopening a full-service restaurant somewhere in the near-north area while it keeps delivering from an off-site kitchen staffed by the same team.
What makes this corner different from a typical lease non-renewal is that Convexity's own director, Chris Oakley, has said the pizza chain could return to the new development's ground-floor retail once it's built. Nothing is signed. Alderman Hopkins described the Gold Coast location as one of Lou Malnati's top-performing stores and said both sides are hoping to work out terms. If that happens, the pizzeria you've been ordering delivery from all summer would eventually move back into the same footprint it left, just inside a building that looks nothing like the one it occupied for a decade and a half.
Until then, delivery continues uninterrupted through Lou's own ordering system and app, prepared from the same recipes the company has used across its other locations for more than 50 years.
The Rest of State Street Is Moving Too
This corner isn't the only piece of State Street retail in motion this year. A few blocks south, Urban Outfitters closed its multilevel store at 1100 North State in January, ending a run of about a decade at that address as its lease expired, and brokers have been marketing the vacancy to prospective tenants since. Retail turnover elsewhere in the neighborhood has run in both directions this year, with a discounted property purchase bringing in a T.J. Maxx and a new Qdoba opening as part of that chain's broader expansion. Separately, the base of the 52-story Newberry Tower Plaza residential building is also being redeveloped for retail, adding more ground-floor square footage to a stretch of State Street that brokers have described as running tighter on availability than the citywide average for years.
None of this reads as a single trend in one direction. It reads as a corridor where legacy tenants are leaving specific addresses for specific reasons, mostly tied to lease timing and ownership changes, while new retail and new construction backfill the space at a pace that's kept the street from going quiet the way empty storefronts sometimes do elsewhere. It's a different pattern than the one that played out a few blocks over on Rush and Oak this summer, where the story was legacy restaurants reopening bigger after years of construction fencing. On State Street, the story is a five-year zoning stall finally clearing, with the tenant everyone recognizes trying to find its way back in.
What the Walk Looks Like Between Now and 2028
If you live near State and Elm, the next two years come with actual milestones you can watch for rather than open-ended uncertainty. Demolition is already underway following the August permits, with foundation and caisson work expected to follow once the site is cleared. The building itself will include amenity floors at the 18th level, built around a work-from-home lounge and an exterior terrace, and at the 28th level, with a fitness center, another terrace, and a pool. Studio rents are expected to start around $2,000 a month, with one-bedrooms in the $3,000 to $4,000 range, though nothing is finalized this early in construction. Eight units will be designated affordable on-site, with Convexity paying the city roughly $4.5 million in lieu of building more.
The project is designed by Goettsch Partners, with W.E. O'Neil Construction previously announced as general contractor, and it's slated to wrap in late summer 2028, two years after the demolition crews arrived and roughly nine years after Newcastle first bought the site with a much taller building in mind.
For anyone who has watched that fence go up and wondered what was actually happening behind it, the short version is that the corner spent half a decade in zoning limbo before anyone touched a shovel, and the restaurant you're still ordering from on a Friday night is quietly negotiating to come back once the dust settles. You can read the fuller record of the sale and the revised plans through Block Club Chicago's coverage of the redevelopment and The Real Deal's reporting on the site's stalled history.
We keep a close eye on corners like this one because they tell you more about a block's next few years than any single listing does. If you're curious how State and Elm fits into the broader shape of the neighborhood, our Gold Coast guide tracks the changes worth knowing about, block by block, alongside the Rush Street dining reopenings a few streets over. For questions about what any of this means for your own corner of the neighborhood, Spradling | Roberts is always glad to talk it through.
