Construction has stopped and will remain at a standstill at the former Dominick’s Finer Foods on North Avenue in River Forest until the village, the building’s owner and Fresh Thyme Farmers Market officials assess the entire structure, a project manager for the chain said Monday.
In particular, they want to determine why brick veneer on the east wall of the building at 7501 W. North Ave. gave way mid-day on Feb. 19, strewing debris on the sidewalk and shutting down parts of North and Monroe avenues.
Fresh Thyme has been re-tooling the site of one of the former Dominick’s grocery chain’s oldest stores since summer 2015. The project manager Jeff Sitterly believes high winds on Feb. 19 were not a factor in the collapse.
Rather, he said, over time water seeped into a three-quarter-inch space between the east wall structure and the veneer, causing the same freeze/thaw action that affects streets. While the 20-year-old roof had been replaced in 2014, the area already had been weakened. Sooner or later it would break down, he added.
A spokesman for the National Weather Service, based in Romeoville, said the general wind direction on Friday was west-southwest.
“The good news is that this is not structural. The brick veneer is cosmetic, it’s all masonry,” Sitterly told Wednesday Journal on Monday. “It is an old building. It had no attention. We [the village; Mid-America Real Estate Group, the building owner and Fresh Thyme] will walk through the entire building and come up with the best steps to take care of everything.”
Until further notice, the parking and driving lanes on eastbound North Avenue and the portion of Monroe Street that encompasses the east side of the store will remain closed until engineers say everything is OK, said John Anderson, River Forest’s director of public works.
No one was hurt when the bricks on the east façade gave way between noon and 12:30 p.m., said Village Administrator Eric Palm, who was on the scene and about to go to lunch when the collapse took place.
“It just came tumbling down,” he said. “We scraped off the bricks and dust on the sidewalk [on Monroe].”
The superintendent for Riedy Construction, the project’s general contractor, said he was eating lunch at New Star Restaurant directly across the street when he heard the bricks give way. He said he dashed across the street and got the crew of four men out of the building, secured the scene and called the village. The men inside were not even aware of what happened, he said.
The façade that gave way was not a part of the back corner of the store wall that structural engineers determined had to be rebuilt, Palm said. That problem was found as interior demolition of the building was being done. That problem set back the opening of the Fresh Thyme store until August.
Sitterly said the chain will do everything it can to keep that August date, despite this latest setback.
Build-out delays had plagued the project since fall of 2014, which was when village trustees approved a Cook County property tax exemption totaling up to $1 million to improve the building. Renovations were pegged to start in early 2015 with the opening anticipated for November 2015.
Construction didn’t start until the summer of 2015 and the opening was scheduled for February 2016. Even more delays pushed that date back to spring. Build-out problems keep coming up, with latest estimates predicting a July or August opening.
The building has been vacant since 2013 when Dominick’s parent company, Safeway, abandoned the Chicago market.