When partners Mike Healy, Jim Lasko and Elyse Agnello were conducting the site selection process for their member-based event venue, maker space, and commercial kitchen venture back in 2016, the team settled on a row of older industrial buildings near the Chicago River in the Avondale community. The aging structures at Rockwell and Fletcher were ripe for adaptive reuse, not just purely for the floor plan and total square footage, but because they were tucked into a residential area.
“We had really done a lot of analysis and research demographically about where there’d be a match between supply of people who would be looking to make neighbor-to-neighbor connections and building stock that would facilitate the kind of business that we wanted,” Healy says of the Guild Row development which opened last summer during the pandemic.
“Historically, this was an area where…
