Barnes & Noble moving into former bank-turned-Walgreens in Wicker Park

Barnes & Noble is moving into the old bank-turned-Walgreens in Wicker Park home to the so-called vitamin vault, and the major bookseller is also bringing three other locations to the area this year.

The Walgreens inside the century-old Noel State Bank closed a little over a year ago, and Barnes & Noble will be the next occupant to sit in the Milwaukee Avenue District location near the intersection of North, Damen, and Milwaukee avenues. Janine Flanigan, senior director of store planning and design for Barnes & Noble, said the store should be open by summer.

Ideas for what to make of the vitamin vault are wide-ranging, Flanigan said, from using the cast-iron safe space to house mystery and thriller novels or business and finance books to keeping it as a reading room. Flanigan said the planning team is “still about a month out” from deciding and finalizing the layout.

The company is aware of the Wicker Park store’s historical significance as a landmark location, Flanigan said, and there are “certain features that architecturally we can’t touch or change” due to city ordinance.

“We’re actually looking forward to it,” Flanigan said. “It’s beautiful, I mean really quite lovely from the inside and out. To us, it’s just a very cool feature to have the bookstore in an old bank and the architecture just lends itself to a fantastic flow and feeling.”

The other stores coming to the area around the summertime are near North Clark Street and West Diversey Parkway in the former location of Urban Outfitters, a suburban location in Village Square of Northbrook and in Prairie Market shopping center in Oswego, Flanigan said. The Oswego location is not too far from the Naperville location that closed last month.

The Barnes & Noble model varies in size, Flanigan said, so stores can be anywhere from 4,000 to 35,000 square feet. The Wicker Park location will be anywhere from 16,000 to 20,000 square feet depending on how the three floors are measured, while the Clark and Diversey store will sit at around 8,000 square feet. Northbrook and Oswego are both 16,000-square-foot stores.

“We’re flexible in what we can do, but really what we’ve found is every community needs a great book store,” Flanigan said.

Illinois already has 19 Barnes & Noble bricks-and-mortar stores, which doesn’t include college stores such as the one at DePaul University’s Loop campus.

Flanigan said there is still a “very huge interest in being in our stores” despite retail trending more and more online. Last year, the company opened 31 new stores around the country with plans to open another 50 in 2024.

“There is so much around being in a physical bookstore, having a conversation with a bookseller or even a fellow customer,” Flanigan said.

Particularly coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic, Flanigan said Barnes & Noble stores became “a big gathering place for people looking for community.”