Crystal Lake Business Community Healthy Despite Closings

Editor’s Note: A Pulitzer Prize Winning Journalist once told me that it is not a journalist’s job to know all the answers, but rather that it was a journalist’s job to find out the answers. Sometimes the questions come from our own ideas. Other times, it is you, the readers, who come to us with questions that we must turn to the experts to answer. A reader in Crystal Lake was concerned about the health of business within the city. So Patch asked the questions and got the answers. We’re calling this occasional series Assignment Patch. Do you have a question you are burning to ask?

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The business community in Crystal Lake is alive and well, according to two sources within the city.

“We are a billion dollars per year in taxable sales,” James Richter, Crystal Lake Planning and Economic Development Manager said. “Our community is very healthy.”

That health remains even though Crystal Lake was among the communities effected by corporate decisions to close area stores.

Along the Route 14 corridor, Dominick’s and Toys R Us were closed as well as Kmart.

“With Dominick’s it was certainly not limited to Crystal Lake,” Richter said. “Toys R Us had made a decision five or eight years ago to close the stores that were Toys R Us only.”

And while it may seem that Toys R Us left Crystal Lake just to go to neighboring Algonquin, that doesn’t tell the whole story.

“They are making a corporate decision going forward that their stores are Toys R Us and Babies R Us together,” Mary Maule, President of the Crystal Lake Chamber of Commerce said. “The idea is to change with meeting their needs as a corporation.

“They didn’t leave us and go somewhere else because they are unhappy.”

In Algonquin, Richter added, the Toys R Us had a brand new building that they could make accommodate their needs. And in Crystal Lake, the building left vacant by the Toys R Us closing will not be vacant for long.

“The announcement of the Toys R Us location leaving came at the exact same time that the news of Burlington Coat Factory was taking the expanding storefront of Marshall’s and Toys R Us,” Maule said.

The store will be expanding in the Crystal Lake Shopping Center.

In addition, the space vacated by the Dominick’s will also be backfilled.

“The Dominick’s location on Route 14 will be a Fresh Thyme gourmet grocery store,” Maule said.

In addition to being concerned about Toys R Us, Dominick’s and K-Mart leaving Crystal Lake, the Crystal Lake-Cary Patch reader wondered about what was described as a “refusal to allow White Castle to build in the town.” Richter said that was never the case.

“The White Castle has never tried to come to Crystal Lake,” he said. “I keep in touch with representative who says (White Castle is) in Lake in the Hills and it is too close to open one in Crystal Lake.”