For three years, the storefront at 16844 Kercheval has been the kind of empty that stops registering. You stop checking the windows. You stop asking friends if they've heard anything. The old City Kitchen sign came down, and after that, the space just sat there near Cadieux Road, close to Einstein Bros Bagels, with Cold Stone Creamery across the street and Village Grille a couple storefronts down, doing nothing while the rest of the block kept moving.
This September, that changes, and it changes during the one month of the year when the Village already has more foot traffic than any other four weeks on the calendar. The Art Takeover Project, now in its fourth year, opened September 1 and runs through September 30, sending residents into storefronts they don't normally enter to vote on art. Angelo's Fine Italian, the restaurant taking over that same long-dark space, is targeting a window that runs from late September into early October. The timing isn't a coincidence anyone announced. It's just what happens when a business district's slowest-turning vacancy and its biggest annual walk land on the same block in the same season.
What Three Years of a Dark Window Actually Costs a Block
A vacant storefront on a walkable commercial strip does more than sit empty. It breaks the rhythm of the block. Every business on either side of it loses a little bit of the momentum that comes from a full row of lit windows, and every resident who walks past gets a small, repeated reminder that something didn't work out there.
That's what made the City Kitchen space different from an ordinary vacancy. It sat empty for about three years in a business district small enough that everyone notices when a storefront goes dark that long. What's replacing it isn't a modest fill-in. Angelo's Fine Italian comes from Jared Gadbaw, chef and owner of Oak & Reel in Detroit, and Cory Barberio, who is leaving his post at the Shinola Hotel's San Morello to focus on this restaurant full time. The buildout calls for about 100 seats on the main floor, a 15-seat bar, and a private dining room downstairs with roughly 40 more seats. VERSA, the Royal Oak design firm behind Oak & Reel and its downstairs bar The Upright, along with the interiors at The Rind, Noori Pocha, and The Dancing Pine, is handling the space.
That's not the kind of investment a business makes into a corridor it thinks is fading. It's the kind of bet you place on a block you expect to be full again.
The Walk That Was Already Built to Fill It
The Art Takeover Project didn't start big. Its first year, in September 2023, drew about 65 artists into roughly 26 Village storefronts and common spaces, an idea from Michelle Boggess-Nunley, who had bought Posterity Art & Framing Gallery on Kercheval the year before. The concept is simple: local businesses agree to host a piece or two of original art for the month, visitors pick up a map, and a self-guided walk turns into a reason to go into stores you'd otherwise skip.
By its third year, in 2025, the event had grown into something closer to what Boggess-Nunley originally described wanting to build. That edition set a record with more than 85 artists showing roughly 250 works across 35 businesses and public spaces, running from September 11 to October 4. This year's fourth edition holds that same artist count, more than 85, but stretches into more than 38 locations, running the full month of September instead of bleeding into October. The artist roster has basically plateaued. The footprint keeps growing. That's a specific kind of momentum: the event isn't attracting more artists every year anymore, but it's convincing more of the Village's businesses to open their doors to it, which means more storefronts a walker will actually enter this year than last.
There's a changeover happening right as this year's show opens, too. Last year's winning artist, Tim Burke, had his solo exhibition "Art Through Preservation" on display at Posterity through August 31, the day before this year's Takeover began. One winner's month-long show closed the exact week the next competition opened.
"You can just feel it in the air," Boggess-Nunley said of this year's edition.
Two Storylines, One Block, Same Four Weeks
Here's where the two threads actually meet. Art Takeover runs September 1 through September 30. Angelo's is targeting an opening somewhere between late September and early October. If that timeline holds, anyone walking the art trail in its final week or two isn't just going to pass a dark storefront with construction paper in the windows the way they have for three Septembers running. They're going to pass a restaurant in its final stretch before opening, maybe already seating early guests, on the same walk they're already taking to vote on a painting three doors down.
Compare that to how the last three Septembers actually looked at that address. 2023's Art Takeover walked past a dark City Kitchen space. So did 2024's. So did 2025's, the record year with 35 participating storefronts. This is the first September the event has run with visible movement, not vacancy, at the block's most watched address.
It also means Angelo's isn't opening into a quiet block hoping to build its own audience from scratch. Boggess-Nunley has said the event pulls in visitors well beyond the Pointes.
"We get thousands of visitors just for Art Takeover," she said last year. "It has brought a lot of new visitors to the Village."
A restaurant that opens into that kind of month inherits foot traffic it didn't have to generate on its own.
How to Actually Walk It This Month
If you haven't picked up a map yet, here's what the month looks like in practice:
- Maps are available at participating Village businesses and printed in the Grosse Pointe Times, with no ticket or registration required.
- The exhibition is self-guided and runs the entire month of September, so there's no single night you have to show up.
- Voting for the winning artist happens in person only, a rule organizers have kept every year because, as Boggess-Nunley put it, "it's hard to appreciate art when you're not standing in front of it."
- The former City Kitchen space at 16844 Kercheval, near Cadieux Road, is worth checking on each pass. Multiple outlets have Angelo's targeting a late September or early October opening, which puts it on track to land somewhere inside or just after this year's Takeover window.
Walk it once in the first week and the block still looks like it has for three years, an art piece in a familiar window and a construction crew working behind glass a few doors down. Walk it again in the last week of September and you may be looking at a different block entirely.
The Part Worth Sitting With
None of this required an announcement or a plan from the city. An art gallery owner built a walking exhibition that grew from about 26 stops in its first year to more than 38 in its fourth. A chef team spent years assembling a partnership to fill the block's most stubborn vacancy. Neither project was built around the other. They just happen to be finishing at the same time, on the same street, in the same four weeks.
That's usually how a business district actually turns a corner. Not with one headline announcement, but with two separate things that had nothing to do with each other landing close enough together that residents start to feel the difference on a Tuesday walk.
If you're watching this stretch of Kercheval because you're curious about where the Village is headed, or you're thinking about what a corridor like this means for property values nearby, that's a conversation worth having with someone who tracks these blocks for a living. Megan Ford works Grosse Pointe and the surrounding communities daily and can talk through what shifts like this one actually mean for buyers, sellers, and long-time residents alike. Let's Connect.
