Have you driven past the old bowling alley on Plainfield Road lately? The fencing has been up for a while now. So has the silence. For most of the past decade, 735 Plainfield Road has been the kind of lot you stop noticing because it never changes: a flat, empty building sitting between businesses that are very much open. That's about to end, and not in the way most vacant suburban lots end, with a single tenant quietly moving in years after everyone stopped paying attention. Two different retailers are converging on this same short stretch of road at roughly the same time.
Here's the part that's easy to miss if you only glance at the headlines: two new businesses are planned for this stretch of Plainfield Road, and the former bowling alley site is being redeveloped.
A Bowling Alley and a Long-Vacant Site
Willowbrook Bowl opened in 1963, back when the land around Plainfield Road was still mostly farmland. It ran for more than fifty years, closing in 2016. What happened next at the site: nothing. For close to a decade, the building sat vacant.
In 2025, the village bought the property outright for $5.1 million, financed through a loan from Hinsdale Bank & Trust. Separately, sales tax on retail and restaurant spending is one of the ways Willowbrook funds its day-to-day operations.
Less than a year after that purchase, the village announced its tenant: Trader Joe's. Mayor Frank A. Trilla framed the announcement around the site's history rather than its economics, as quoted in NBC Chicago: "This site has a special history in our community." As of the most recent public updates, no opening date has been set. If you're driving past and the building still looks more like a construction zone than a grocery store, that tracks. Redevelopment of a fifty-year-old commercial building takes time, and neither the village nor Trader Joe's has committed to a timeline yet.
Two Doors Down, a Different Kind of Reopening
While the old bowling alley works through its second act, something faster is happening less than a block away. At 820 Plainfield Road, right next to Pete's Fresh Market, a Crunch Fitness location is in its final stretch of construction. The company behind it, JEM Wellness Brands, also operates European Wax Center and Massage Envy locations regionally, and its leadership has said this Willowbrook gym is targeting an opening around October 1, alongside a sister location in Naperville. Crunch itself has been around since 1989 and now runs more than 600 clubs nationally, with roughly ten in the Chicago area, so this isn't a startup betting blind on an unproven corridor. It's a national chain adding to a list of Chicago-area sites it already understands.
The gym is landing in the same small plaza as Ulta Beauty and Lumes Brunch Cafe, and right next to Pete's, which has anchored 840 Plainfield Road for years as a full-service grocery store known locally for its produce selection and prepared foods counter. That's the detail worth sitting with: the gym is opening next to a grocery store that has anchored this stretch for years.
Here's what that half-mile of Plainfield Road actually looks like right now, address by address:
| Address | What's There | Status as of September 2026 |
|---|---|---|
| 735 Plainfield Road | Former Willowbrook Bowl, now planned Trader Joe's | Redevelopment announced April 2026, no opening date confirmed |
| 820 Plainfield Road | Crunch Fitness | Finishing construction, targeting early October 2026 |
| 840 Plainfield Road | Pete's Fresh Market | Open and operating, longtime grocery anchor |
Read that table and the sequence makes more sense than the headlines alone suggest. The grocery store was already there. The gym is moving in next to it. The long-vacant bowling alley site was purchased by the village, and Trader Joe's was later announced as its tenant.
The Anchor That Never Needed Reviving
None of this is really about Plainfield Road becoming something new. It's about a corridor that's always had one steady thing worth knowing about, a few minutes away on the old Route 66 alignment.
Dell Rhea's Chicken Basket has been serving fried chicken at 645 Joliet Road since 1946, when the building that still stands today was constructed next door to the gas station lunch counter where the whole thing started. Dell and Grace Rhea bought the restaurant in 1963, the same year Willowbrook Bowl opened its lanes, and their family kept it running until the Lombardi family took over in 2019. The building and its neon sign have been listed on the National Register of Historic Places since May 2006. Guy Fieri has featured it on Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives twice.
Dell Rhea's has been serving the same neighborhood since before the bowling alley existed, through a rerouted interstate that once threatened to end it entirely, and it's still there. The corridor's newest additions are worth watching. Its oldest one is worth remembering.
What to Actually Watch For This Fall
If you're timing errands around this stretch of road, here's the practical read. The Crunch Fitness build-out is the one likely to finish first, with a target date around October 1 that's close enough to plan around. The Trader Joe's project is the slower story. The village has announced a tenant for a building that sat empty for a decade, but construction and permitting timelines for a full grocery build-out inside a fifty-year-old structure aren't quick, and neither Trader Joe's nor the village has put a date on it yet. Expect the fencing to stay up for a while longer.
What's changed already, even before either store opens, is what the corridor tells you about itself. The corridor now has two active construction sites alongside a grocery store that was doing fine the whole time. That's not a transformation. It's a return to something closer to full.
If you've been curious about what these changes mean for property values or timing a move near this corridor, that's a longer conversation, and one K&J Homes is always glad to have. Let's Connect.
