On the first Saturday in April, 75th Street between the side streets flanking King Drive went quiet to cars and loud to everyone else. The block closed to traffic at 6 p.m. Friday and didn't reopen until midnight Sunday. More than 100 vendors set up tents. Kids shot hoops in the closed lane. DJ Yancy worked a house set from a folding table setup that, by the end of the day, looked a lot like a block party with a spreadsheet behind it.
This was the second annual "Spend in the Black: Resurrecting the Black Dollar," and if you live in Chatham you've probably already filed it under "the shopping thing that happens on 75th once a year." That's the read most people leave with. It's also incomplete. One of the vendors working a table that Saturday had already done something that changes what this event actually is on this corridor: she'd bought a building.
The Building That Sat Empty
At 653-657 E. 75th Street, there's a structure that had been vacant for what sounds like a long stretch of months, maybe longer, before Nikkita Randle finalized its purchase this spring. Randle runs Twisted Eggroll, and before she owned that address she was selling eggroll dinners and a side of mac and cheese out of a booth at this April's Spend in the Black. She told Block Club Chicago the business was "booming" that day. She also said she's expecting to host a grand opening at the 75th Street address before the end of 2026.
That's not a coincidence of timing. It's a pipeline. A vendor tests demand on a closed-off street with zero rent obligation, builds a following, and converts that following into the capital and confidence to buy a building that had been sitting empty. If you've walked past that stretch of 75th and wondered why that particular storefront stayed dark for so long, the answer isn't complicated. It just needed the right buyer, and the buyer needed a low-risk place to prove the concept first.
What the First Event Actually Proved
The 2025 inaugural Spend in the Black wasn't a modest experiment. Organizers reported that shoppers spent more than $1 million along the corridor in a single day, according to event co-founder Rev. Charlie E. Dates, senior pastor at Progressive Baptist Church and Salem Baptist Church of Chicago. That figure reportedly beat the organizers' own expectations by more than double. Whatever the internal projection was going in, the neighborhood outspent it.
That number is why this year's event came back bigger and with money attached. Organizers gave away ten $1,000 emergency savings accounts and one $15,000 grant to an entrepreneur at the 2026 event, Dates said. Ald. William Hall, whose 6th Ward includes the stretch, said the grant comes with coaching attached, and that the goal is for that recipient to have a permanent address somewhere in Chicago, ideally in the 6th Ward, by the time the event returns next year.
In other words, the organizers are explicitly trying to manufacture more Nikkita Randles. Randle just happened to get there first, on her own, before the grant program existed to formalize the pattern.
The Anchor That's Been There Longer Than Most of Us
A few doors down from where Twisted Eggroll is setting up shop, The Woodshop Art Gallery has been selling custom frames at 441 E. 75th Street for 52 years. It's a family business, run now by brothers Brian and Lawrence D'Antignac, and it does something a lot of newer Chatham storefronts don't: it pulls customers from well beyond the neighborhood. Lawrence D'Antignac told NBC Chicago that the gallery depends on the whole city, not just the immediate area, because of the specialized nature of what it sells: custom framing, plus a full-service art gallery with paintings and sculpture.
That citywide draw is exactly what Spend in the Black is built to amplify for everyone else on the block. Brian D'Antignac said the event brought new customers into the gallery who might not otherwise have known it was there, people who came for the festival and found a business that's been quietly anchoring the corridor since long before most of the new tenants showed up.
Here's the shape of what's happening on this half-mile of 75th Street in 2026:
- A legacy business (Woodshop, 52 years in) gets rediscovered by shoppers who came for the festival and stayed for the frames.
- A festival vendor (Twisted Eggroll) converts booth traffic into the capital to buy a long-vacant building.
- A structured grant program (the $15,000 award plus coaching) tries to formalize that same conversion for the next entrepreneur.
- The corridor's foot traffic compounds, because each new permanent tenant is also a reason to come back on a non-festival day.
That's not four unrelated updates. That's one mechanism, working in sequence.
The Corridor a Few Blocks Over Tells the Same Story Differently
Move a few blocks north and slightly west, to 8548 S. Cottage Grove Ave., and you get the same corridor logic playing out through failure and recovery instead of straight growth. Oooh Wee! IT IS! Smothered Potatoes Breakfast Bar reopened there this year, more than a year after its original Chatham location on 83rd Street closed for what the operators called "retooling" and never came back. That original building went up for sale for $1.35 million after the closure, according to Chicago Real Estate Resources Inc.
The new Cottage Grove location replaced Reggio's Pizza, which itself closed after its owners opened a second location in Bronzeville. Mark Walker, who ran the original Oooh Wee! and its attached Italian concept Maxine's, is now consulting on the relaunch for The Anderson Group, the investors who bought the Cottage Grove building specifically to bring dine-in breakfast back to a community that had gone without it, Walker said.
Two of the original Oooh Wee! locations outside Chatham didn't survive as Oooh Wee! at all. The Beverly View spot on Western Avenue is now Oh My Goodness Soul Eatery. The Burnham location on State Street is a Harold's Chicken Shack. That's not a chain contracting. That's a corridor recycling itself, the same buildings finding new operators when the old concept doesn't hold, which is a different kind of resilience than a straight-line growth story, but it's resilience all the same.
If You Live Here
None of this requires you to do anything except notice it. The next Spend in the Black won't happen until next spring, but the businesses it's already produced don't wait for the calendar. Twisted Eggroll's storefront at 653-657 E. 75th is expected to open sometime this year. The Woodshop is still at 441 E. 75th, same as it's been for over half a century, worth a stop even outside festival season. Oooh Wee!'s new Cottage Grove location is running its regular hours now, Tuesday through Sunday, closed Mondays.
The thing worth holding onto isn't any single opening. It's that the festival closing your street once a year has become the actual mechanism by which vacant buildings on this corridor get buyers. That's a different story than "there's a shopping event in Chatham." It's a story about how a one-day event with a folding table can end in a lease, a deed, and a grand opening banner, and it's playing out in real time on the same three or four blocks most of us walk past without thinking twice.
If you're weighing a move in or around Chatham and want a read on how a corridor like this behaves over time, not just what's open this month, Tina Hollins has spent years tracking exactly this kind of neighborhood detail on the south side. Schedule a consultation when you're ready to talk specifics.
