1952 N Damen Ave

6 restaurants have held a licence at this address since 2002. One is trading today. Bucktown. 60647

Every business licensed here

Oldest first, from the City of Chicago’s licence record. A closing year is the year the licence lapsed, which trails the day the door shut, often by many months. The names are the people the city lists on each licence, with the role each was filed under. A role on a filing is not a claim about who cooked, who managed, or who decided to close.

The inspections column is the City of Chicago’s food inspection file from January 2022, matched by licence number. A failed result is the city’s finding on the day of the visit and says nothing about the business since. Risk 1 to 3 is how often the city schedules inspections for a licence type, with Risk 1 the most frequent, and is not a finding about the business. A tenancy the file does not cover is shown as not covered, which is most of those that ended before 2022.

Turnover here, against the block and the zip

Counts from the licence record. A run is the years between a licence start and the end of that tenancy. The median run counts only tenancies that have ended; the longest single run is the one longest tenancy in the column, counted up to today if it is still open.

The block and zip columns count every restaurant storefront in the licence record, single-tenant ones included; buildings where several tenants trade at once, such as food halls, are left out of both. Fewer than 5 restaurant storefronts on this block are in the record, so the comparison here is against the zip alone. These are counts of what the record shows, not a verdict on the address and not a forecast: a storefront turns over for reasons the licence never states.

Watch 1952 N Damen Ave.

Everything above is the record as it stands today. Get an email when a new restaurant licence appears at this address, and nothing at all in the years when none does. It covers openings only: a closure takes about three years to surface fully in the public record, and we will not send an alert we cannot stand behind.

What this record does not tell you

5 tenancies here have ended, and that is a count rather than a verdict. A storefront turns over for reasons the licence record never states: a lease ran out, an operator retired, a concept was wrong for the street. Closures also take about three years to become fully visible in the record, so a tenant listed as open may already have gone.

Start years are licence dates the city filed. End years are ours. Where a row says Confirmed, an inspection or the operator dated the ending. Where it says Inferred, the licence lapsed and stayed lapsed, and we read that gap as the end: it is our reading of the paperwork, not a date anybody recorded, and the real ending is usually earlier than the year shown. Where nothing on the record dates an ending at all, the row says so instead of showing a year we cannot support.

The names come from the City of Chicago’s business owner register and say who was listed on a licence, nothing more. One person is often filed under several roles at once, a company can be listed where the register never names a person at all, and somebody named on a filing may never have set foot in the kitchen. Both datasets are public records the city publishes and keeps publishing.