Kenilworth Beach Reopened Five Weeks Late. Here's What You're Actually Getting.
August 27, 2026
August 27, 2026
Walk down to the beach gate on Sheridan Road this month and you will hand over your phone instead of a card, step past construction fencing that has been up since the beach reopened in July, and find a stretch of new concrete that ends abruptly where the old ramp used to be. None of this is a mistake. It is what the better part of a decade, roughly $8.7 million so far, and one very patient village board actually bought Kenilworth this summer, and it is worth understanding before Labor Day closes the window on the questions residents keep asking at the gate.
Kenilworth Beach normally opens on Memorial Day weekend. This year it opened July 1, more than five weeks behind schedule, because the beach has been mid-construction since the fall. The delay traces back to the second phase of the village's Beach Improvement Project, which broke ground on September 17, 2025, with Village President Cecily Kaz telling the crowd the project had been "discussed for as long as I've been on the board (8-plus years), definitely as long as I've lived in Kenilworth."
The first phase, completed in May 2025, dealt with the unglamorous but necessary work of shoreline protection: armor stone reinforcing a north groin that had failed after nearly 50 years, at a cost of $992,893. Phase two is the visible part, the bathroom building, the plaza, the pedestrian ramp, and it was originally bid at $6.98 million before the village board raised the authorized ceiling to roughly $7.68 million to cover higher-than-expected trade bids. Some of that money comes from a $2.5 million bond referendum voters approved in spring 2024. The rest is a mix of village budget and more than $500,000 raised directly from the community.
That is a lot of money and a lot of years for a beach Village Manager Kathy Thake herself describes as "smaller compared to some of the other ones on the North Shore." The scale of the investment relative to the size of the beach is exactly why residents should understand what they're getting for it, and what they're still not.
As of the July 1 reopening, pass holders have full access to the swim beach, the new bathroom building, and the upper plaza. The village also quietly retired the physical beach card this year. Membership passes now arrive as a PDF sent straight to your inbox, pulled up on a phone or printed at home, though a physical card is still available if you ask for one.
A few other changes are worth noting before your next visit. Seating and shade structures are available for free daily rental, first come first served, though the village lets you reserve ahead through the beach website if you'd rather not gamble on availability on a busy Saturday. Lifeguards staff the beach from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., and the gate itself opens earlier, at 7 a.m., for residents who want the sand before the crowds.
Three pieces of the project are not open yet: the pedestrian ramp connecting street level to the sand, the new beach plaza, and the Devonshire Lane entry point, where the village also relocated ComEd electrical equipment as part of the work. All three are fenced off from the open beach area and are expected to be finished by the end of summer, which puts the real deadline somewhere around Labor Day, just over two weeks from now.
Until then, the beach functions with a workaround rather than its finished form. If you've noticed the layout feels temporary, that's because it is. The permanent circulation path from Kenilworth Avenue down to the water is still under construction, and the village has asked residents parking or working near that stretch to coordinate with contractors rather than block the site.
Here is the part that doesn't show up in the ribbon-cutting version of the story. The interior of the old water treatment plant building, the structure the beach improvements are built around, is not part of what reopened. The plan for that building includes a lifeguard room, first aid station, lockers, and classrooms on the first floor, plus a flexible year-round event space and a catering kitchen on the second. None of that is funded. The village's own project page puts the additional cost at $8 million, on top of everything already spent or committed, and notes plainly that current funding "is insufficient to complete the indoor spaces or upgrade outdoor areas beyond the swimming beach."
That gap between what the beach visually promises and what is financially secured is not new information to everyone on the board. Former Trustee Alison Winslow, who served on the village's lakefront committee, put it directly when trustees approved the scaled-back phase two bids in August 2025:
"It was a much, much smaller project than I had internalized. I'm not sure the community has internalized what they think they were getting and what we have."
That is a useful sentence to carry with you the next time someone describes the finished beach as a done deal. What reopened this month is the outdoor, accessible, safety-focused layer of the project. The indoor, year-round, community-space layer is still a fundraising campaign away, one the village has said would rely partly on private donations, with any single gift over $100,000 routed directly through village staff.
The beach's design changes came with a matching set of behavior rules, and a few are easy to miss if you haven't read the signage closely:
None of these are dramatic on their own, but together they describe a beach the village is actively trying to make safer and more accessible while still finishing the job. It's less a finished amenity and more a beach in the process of becoming one, which is a fair description of the whole project's decade-long arc.
Kathy Thake called the finished beach "something that's a gem for the community" and predicted it "will definitely attract a lot of residents." She's probably right, eventually. But right now the more useful frame for anyone living here, or thinking about it, is the one Winslow offered: know the difference between what was promised and what has actually been delivered. This summer, that difference is the fence line between the open swim beach and the Devonshire Lane entry, and the $8 million gap between the plaza that reopened and the building that hasn't been touched yet.
Winslow herself reminded the board that community feedback on this project goes back to at least 2017, long before the first shovel went into the sand. That kind of patience is part of what living in a village this small and this deliberate actually looks like. Kenilworth doesn't move fast on shared spaces, but it tends to get the engineering right before it opens the gate, which says something about how the village handles capital projects generally, lakefront or otherwise.
If you're weighing what daily life along this stretch of the North Shore actually feels like, beyond the beach calendar, our neighborhood guide to Kenilworth is a good next stop, and our post on what life in Kenilworth's park-like enclave feels like goes deeper into the village's day-to-day rhythm.
And if the idea of owning a piece of that rhythm, beach fence and all, has crossed your mind, Jena Radnay knows this market block by block. Request a Private Consultation whenever you're ready to talk specifics.
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