McDonald’s will open a restaurant and drive-thru at 1606 N. Mobile Ave., the site of the long-vacant Walgreens in Galewood. While the project has been contested since McDonald’s started eyeing the site in May 2023, according to one neighbor, McDonald’s paid a couple of residents as compensation for the drive-thru.
The Walgreens was closed in the summer of 2015 and ended up in foreclosure in 2022. It served as a COVID-19 testing site at the height of the pandemic but has remained vacant besides that.
When developers unveiled the idea to turn the vacant building into a McDonald’s, many neighbors express concerned over the traffic implications…