Teen club comes down for senior living in Woodridge
If the Zero Gravity era hadn't officially ended when the former teen club hosted its final party March 20, it truly came to a close Wednesday.
Crews began demolishing the structure at Route 53 and 75th Street in Woodridge on Wednesday morning so the site can be redeveloped into an assisted living and memory care facility.
Cedarhurst Living, a Missouri-based company that provides senior housing, is building a four-story, 100-unit building on the 6-acre site. The facility will include 76 independent living apartments and 24 units where nursing and health workers will provide memory care for people with Alzheimer's disease or dementia.
Once the former club building comes down, the site also will have two outlots for future retail development along Route 53.
Cedarhurst chose to build there because the Naperville area needs more senior housing as residents grow older.
"We found that this area was in need of additional senior living to support the growing aging population," Cedarhurst President Joshua Stevens said in March, when the Woodridge village board approved its plans.
The company has estimated the development could be ready to open as soon as fall 2017.
As the teen club makes way for a senior housing facility, Paul Malek of Naperville, who co-owned Zero Gravity with his brother, Mario Malek, is keeping watch over the site. He said Wednesday he passes by frequently to snap new photos for a timeline of the club stretching from before it opened in the mid-1990s to after it closed.
Malek said he plans to reopen a new teen night club under a different name, but he's in the early stages of searching for a location. The club could open sometime next year, likely between June and September.
"I still get emails, 'When are you guys going to open a place? We loved Zero Gravity,'" Malek said. "The hype is already there."