After years of sitting dark just off Clark Street’s busy retail strip, a long-vacant Rogers Park firehouse is now in line for a reboot as a neighborhood café and events venue. The two-story brick station at 1721–23 W. Greenleaf Ave., closed for years, is the focus of a proposal that would put a coffeehouse on the first floor and flexible event and office space upstairs.
Plan details and who filed it
Organizers submitted the concept to the city’s Department of Planning and Development in 2025, in response to an open request for proposals to put city-owned firehouses back into use. The plan outlines roughly 2,000 square feet of ground-floor coffeehouse space and about 4,000 square feet of upper-floor event and office space, with an overall budget near $3 million, according to Secret Chicago. Preservation Chicago notes that the Greenleaf property was folded into the city’s late-2025 RFP package for historic firehouses.
City planning backs preservation
In a statement to Secret Chicago, the Department of Planning and Development said the proposal would “preserve a beautiful building with new uses.” Concept renderings credited to the City of Chicago show cleaned-up brickwork and a reimagined apparatus bay that reads as a street-facing café entrance instead of a truck door. Planners say the adaptive reuse approach is meant to keep the firehouse’s historic character intact while bringing it back as an active commercial address.
A century-old structure with a long wait
The Greenleaf firehouse went up around 1915 as the original quarters of Engine Co. 102 and has sat vacant since the city relocated the company and shut the station in 2009, according to DNAinfo. The Rogers Park/West Ridge Historical Society tracks the building’s early years and later alterations on its site at RPWRHS. Despite repeated attempts to market the property over more than a decade, it has remained largely unused.
What it could mean for Clark Street
A first-floor café would inject more daily foot traffic into the block and sync neatly with neighborhood plans that push for walkable, storefront-focused retail along Clark Street. Planning materials from the Rogers Park Business Alliance call for active ground-floor uses and civic anchors on this stretch, a role a revived firehouse could easily play.
Next steps
The property was part of DPD’s late-2025 RFP round and hosted a city-organized site visit in October 2025, according to the listing on Eventbrite. Proposals that make the shortlist typically move into community outreach and detailed design review before any sale or permits advance, a process outlined by Preservation Chicago. There is no firm opening timeline yet, and backers say fundraising and construction would follow only after the city signs off.
