Avalon Banquets in Elk Grove Village closing to make way for warehouse
A long-standing banquet hall at a busy intersection in Elk Grove Village is set to close at the end of the year and be torn down to make way for a warehouse.
Avalon Banquets, 1905 E. Higgins Road, will be demolished and replaced with a one-story, 81,400-square-foot light industrial warehouse office building, according to plans submitted to village hall. Seefried Properties, a major national developer of industrial real estate, is purchasing the 4.5-acre site and plans to build the warehouse on spec.
The developer is petitioning the village to rezone the property from its current business classification to an industrial use that would allow construction on the warehouse to begin.
Mayor Craig Johnson said Avalon's owners told him the banquet hall will be in operation until the end of the year, and anyone who has a contract for events will be honored.
While Avalon's main entrance fronts Higgins and the parking lot faces Busse Road, it will be the opposite for the new industrial building. A series of truck docks are proposed in the rear of the building along Higgins, but they will be screened by fencing, Johnson said.
Village officials have reviewed initial building elevation plans, but those renderings haven't yet been revealed publicly, while the rezoning petition awaits a formal public hearing before the plan commission. A date for that hearing hasn't been set, but Johnson said he anticipates the matter will proceed before that panel and advance to the village board for final consideration as soon as October.
Seefried reached out to the village about its interest in the banquet hall site a year ago, Johnson said.
That was around the same time the village was trying to assemble two neighboring properties across Higgins for redevelopment: the former Phoenix/Hunters nightclub, and the shuttered Days Inn motel. Both buildings have since been demolished and grass planted.
Johnson said village officials are now in discussions with a potential developer to purchase the combined site.