Village President Laurence Herman still remembers what Oakbrook Center used to be for. Long before it became the kind of mall where you can buy a Golden Goose sneaker or eat at a restaurant with a Michelin pedigree, it was where you took care of business. "I recall in the 1970s going to the mall to get a haircut, have shoes repaired, and purchase hardware," Herman has said, describing an era when the center still carried a Jewel grocery store alongside Marshall Field's and Sears. That Jewel closed in the early 1970s, and Oak Brook has not had a full-service grocery store inside the village since.
That changed, at least on paper, on August 12. The Oak Brook Village Board voted 4-0 to approve a 225,000-square-foot Amazon grocery and merchandise store at the southeast corner of Butterfield and Meyers roads. It is the first project of its kind to clear final approval anywhere near here, and it is the reason a stretch of road most residents have driven past without a second thought is about to look completely different by the end of the decade.
But the more interesting story is not that a grocery store is finally coming. It is why it took fifty years, and why the thing that broke the drought was not a change in what shoppers wanted. It was a change in what happened to seven aging office buildings nobody wanted anymore.
The Last Time Oak Brook Had a Checkout Line
Oakbrook Center opened in 1962 as a place designed to handle daily errands as much as department-store shopping. Over the following decade, as the mall's ownership leaned harder into upscale retail, the everyday tenants fell away. The grocery store went first. Once that anchor left, nothing replaced it, and the village settled into a pattern that has held for two generations: residents drive to Jewel-Osco locations in Westchester or La Grange Park, or to the ALDI in Bellwood, for the basics that most suburbs take for granted a five-minute trip away.
The Amazon project does not restore Oakbrook Center's original mix. It solves the same problem from a different address entirely, on a stretch of Butterfield Road that has nothing to do with the mall at all.
Twenty-Seven Acres, One Vote, Zero Surprises
The site is currently home to seven three-story office buildings built in the 1970s and owned by Inland. GTZ Properties of Highland Park pitched a one-story superstore to replace all seven, requiring a zoning change from office to retail on the full 27-acre parcel. The Planning and Zoning Commission recommended approval 7-1 back in May, and the Village Board's August vote made it official. Village President Herman thanked Amazon "for having been very good partners in a very lengthy process," and noted the company is covering $1 million to replace a water main near the site and contributing $125,000 toward public-safety projects as part of the deal.
What actually gets built:
- A one-story, 225,000-square-foot store combining a full grocery section with general merchandise, replacing roughly 600,000 square feet of largely vacant office space
- 871 parking spaces and nine loading docks
- Two new stormwater ponds, with the overall site increasing green space by about 25% compared to the current office park
- A 1.7-acre outlot originally slated for a 101,000-square-foot Ashley Furniture store, a plan that was withdrawn before the May zoning hearing and now sits available for future use
Demolition of the office buildings is expected to start in October. Construction runs through 2027, with the store targeted to open by the end of October 2028.
The Real Reason This Site Was Available
Here is the detail that explains the timing better than anything about Amazon's retail strategy: the village's own data shows traffic on the Oak Brook portion of Meyers Road has dropped roughly 30% since before the pandemic, from about 18,400 cars a day down to around 13,000. That stretch of Meyers was widened from two lanes to four specifically to handle office-driven traffic growth that never fully returned. The seven buildings on this site sat increasingly empty for the same reason offices emptied out everywhere. That vacancy is exactly what made a 27-acre consolidated redevelopment possible in the first place. Nobody was fighting to keep those buildings full of tenants.
Village trustees framed the numbers in economic terms as much as retail ones. Trustee Michael Manzo described the current buildings as blighted and largely vacant, and estimated the new store could generate $2 million to $4 million a year in sales tax, putting it on par with Costco as one of the village's top two producers. For a village whose sales tax base leans heavily on discretionary mall spending, a grocery store is a different kind of revenue. People buy groceries in recessions too.
Put together, this was not a case of retail demand pulling a grocery store into Oak Brook. It was a case of the office market failing badly enough, on this specific parcel, that redevelopment became the only path forward. The grocery gap and the office vacancy both trace back to the same decade of overbuilding and the same shift in how people work and shop. It just took until 2026 for those two threads to intersect on one piece of land.
The One Neighborhood That Voted No
Not every part of the village signed off easily. Residents of the nearby Ginger Creek subdivision raised concerns at village meetings about traffic and stormwater runoff, and Ginger Creek was the lone holdout when Herman met with homeowners association presidents from across Oak Brook in April. Every other HOA came out in favor. Herman later said, "seldom have I witnessed such overwhelming community support for a proposed development."
The traffic concerns got a specific answer, even if it is not a fully satisfying one for everyone on Meyers Road. Village estimates project the store will add fewer than 1,000 additional cars a day to that stretch, a roughly 5% increase over current volume, but still well below the traffic the site generated when the office buildings were fully leased before the pandemic. Amazon's traffic engineers designed the site so more than 90% of store traffic routes in from Butterfield Road rather than through the residential streets to the south, and the village has said it will work with Waze and similar apps to keep the routing that way. Oak Brook Police Chief Brian Strockis told the board he did not think traffic would be a significant issue once that routing is in place.
What Changes, and When
For anyone weighing whether this affects a Saturday morning routine anytime soon, it does not, at least not yet.
- Fall 2026: demolition of the seven office buildings begins
- 2027: construction of the new store proceeds
- Around October 2028: the store is expected to open
Until then, the closest full grocery options remain the same ones Oak Brook residents have relied on for decades. What has changed is that, for the first time since the Jewel closed inside the mall, there is an actual approved plan, a signed ordinance, and a construction timeline attached to fixing it.
It is worth sitting with the shape of that fix. Oak Brook spent fifty years as a village built around one of the country's most successful shopping centers and still had no place to buy milk. The thing that finally closed that gap was not a retailer discovering unmet demand. It was three-story 1970s office space losing its usefulness at exactly the moment a large-format retailer needed 27 contiguous acres near a tollway. The mall solved for aspiration. The office park, by failing, solved for groceries.
If you are the kind of person who tracks how a village's land actually gets reused when a market shifts underneath it, that instinct is useful well beyond grocery runs. It is the same instinct that matters when you are trying to understand what a property is really worth in a neighborhood that is changing in ways the listing photos will not show you.
That is the lens Scott Heichert brings to Oak Brook and the surrounding suburbs, backed by a certified residential appraiser's read on value and a broker's read on timing. Move Confidently — Request Your Market-Accurate Valuation.
