Beverly's 103rd Street Strip Has Two Comeback Stories Running at Once, and Only One Has a Deadline

On a Wednesday afternoon this summer, the line outside Sanders BBQ Supply on 99th Street ran past the parking spots and around toward the corner, the kind of wait that used to be reserved for concert tickets. Two blocks away and a few months earlier, a different kind of crowd had gathered outside 1808 W. 103rd Street, not to eat but to help sweep glass off a sidewalk after a car jumped the curb and took out the front wall of a record store.

Both scenes happened on the same six blocks of Beverly's commercial spine. Both are still resolving. And if you walk the corridor on September 26, when the neighborhood's biggest annual event lands on the same intersection where the crash happened, you'll see how each story turned out.

A Restaurant That Outgrew the Neighborhood Without Leaving It

Sanders BBQ Supply opened at 1742 W. 99th Street in June 2024. Owner James Sanders has said plainly why he picked the spot: there was no barbecue in the neighborhood, and he felt Beverly deserved one.

I noticed there was no barbecue in the neighborhood. Beverly is a really good, diverse community.

By September 2025, the restaurant had landed on the New York Times list of the 50 best restaurants in the United States, one of only two Chicago spots to make the cut alongside Cariño in Uptown. A Jean Banchet Award nomination followed that fall. Customers now tell the staff they drove two hours to get there.

That kind of attention usually means an operator plants a flag somewhere bigger. Sanders is doing that, opening a second restaurant, Sanders BBQ Prime, in the space beneath the shuttered Promontory venue on Hyde Park's Lake Park Avenue. But the mechanics of the expansion are the part worth paying attention to if you live here: the Beverly location isn't being left behind to make room for the new one. It's becoming the prep kitchen for both. Brisket, beef ribs and pork for the Hyde Park menu get built in Beverly first. The team is also expanding the original spot itself, adding an adjacent retail store next door.

In other words, the restaurant that made Beverly a food headline isn't relocating its center of gravity. It's using Beverly as the engine for a second location six miles away.

Two Doors Down From Where the Wall Used to Be

Beverly Phono Mart opened in August 2021, started by a married couple, Chantala Kommanivanh and Mallory McClaire, as a way to keep a record shop alive on the South Side after other independent stores had folded during the pandemic. Over four and a half years it turned into the kind of place where regulars text the owners to check in, not just to ask about new releases.

Just after 2 a.m. on New Year's Day 2026, a driver traveling eastbound on the 1800 block of West 103rd Street lost control, jumped the curb, and crashed into the building at 1808 W. 103rd Street. The damage spread across several businesses on that stretch:

• Beverly Phono Mart, 1808 W. 103rd St., lost its entire front corner, according to co-owner Mallory McClaire.
• Ephemera Gallery, the Beverly Area Arts Alliance's space at 1810 W. 103rd St., which had only opened the previous September ahead of the 2025 Art Walk.
• FoundHERS Suite, a women's co-working space on the second floor at 1808 W. 103rd St., founded by LaTanya Orr in May 2024 and hosting eight member companies at the time.
• Funky Monkey Juice Bar, 1806 W. 103rd St., which took storefront window damage but stayed open.

Two doors down, Honey and Hue Bookstore at 1804 and Ohana Ice and Treats at 1800 kept normal hours through it all. The driver, a 41-year-old Blue Island man, was charged with misdemeanor counts including fleeing an officer and driving on a suspended license, along with citations for an uninsured, unregistered vehicle.

Phono Mart's owners didn't wait for the original storefront to be rebuilt. By February 6, they'd opened a pop-up called BPM Express two doors down at 1802 W. 103rd Street, open Fridays through Sundays with a curated slice of the shop's usual stock. A burst pipe in the damaged original space had set the timeline back further just days before the pop-up opened. By April 18, they were marking Record Store Day from the pop-up rather than skipping the date entirely. As of this year's February report, the owners told Block Club Chicago they hoped to be back in the original storefront by summer or fall.

Two Timelines, Same Six Blocks

The Corner Where Both Stories Meet

Here's the detail that ties this together for anyone who already lives here: the corner where the crash happened, 103rd and Wood, is the same corner where the Uprising Craft Market sets up every year as part of the Beverly Art Walk.

The 13th Annual Beverly Art Walk runs Saturday, September 26, from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., free and open across roughly 40 venues in Beverly and Morgan Park. Past years have used Beverly Phono Mart itself as a featured stop. In 2022, a show called "Summertime Magic" was curated at the shop's 1808 address, with local artists' work hung between the record bins. The Family Fun Park runs that day at Sutherland School, and the evening caps off with a free after-party at Nicky's of Beverly from 5 to 9 p.m., featuring the band Mucca Pazza.

None of the Art Walk's official materials have confirmed whether Phono Mart will be back in its original storefront in time for this year's event or still running out of the pop-up two doors down. That's not a gap in the reporting. It's an open question that the corridor itself will answer on the 26th, when thousands of people walk past 1808 W. 103rd Street to find out.

What the Block Is Actually Telling You

Neither business chose to leave. Sanders could have taken his growing reputation and planted his flagship somewhere flashier, but the brisket for the new Hyde Park menu still gets built in Beverly first. Phono Mart could have waited out a full rebuild before reopening anywhere, but chose to reopen two doors from the wreckage rather than go dark for months.

That's the pattern worth noticing if you live on or near this strip: growth here doesn't require leaving, and disaster doesn't require leaving either. The businesses that define 103rd Street right now are the ones that kept their address, or something close to it, even when they had every reason not to.

If you're already living in Beverly and wondering what your own place on this block is worth after a year like this one, or you're thinking about what it would take to plant roots here yourself, Taylor Dixon Group knows this corridor block by block. Get your free home valuation and find out where you stand.