The Humboldt Park Boathouse Has Its Boats Back. The Kitchen Is Still Dark.

Walk the lagoon path this week and you will see swan boats moving across the water for the first time since they sat out all of last summer, plus a new punch card that gets you a third rental free if you come back twice this season. Walk inside the boathouse itself and the kitchen that once fed people on that same veranda is still empty. It has been since 2020.

That gap between what moved and what did not is the actual story in Humboldt Park this August. The lagoon got its water traffic back before it got its food back, and elsewhere in the neighborhood on Augusta, a private restaurant did in a matter of weeks what the park has been working on for the better part of a year and still has not finished.

The lagoon's slow half

Wheel Fun Rentals ran the boat and bike concession at the boathouse from 2018 until business slowed enough after the pandemic that the franchise owners closed it before the 2025 season. This spring they came back, and the pricing tells you it is the same modest neighborhood amenity it always was: $30 an hour for a swan boat, $29 for a four-wheel Surrey bike, $39 for a double Surrey. The new touch is a punch card that rewards a second visit with a free third rental, which only makes sense if the operator expects people to keep showing up rather than treat it as a one-time novelty. Franchise co-owner Rodney Knight put it plainly when he brought the boats back: bringing a restaurant into the picture is part of the calculation, since a kitchen next door means more reason for people to linger at the lagoon rather than pedal past it.

That restaurant is still a proposal. Last October, the team behind North Pond, the well-regarded restaurant on Park District land in Lincoln Park, pitched an all-day cafe called Valera to the Humboldt Park Advisory Council at a community meeting inside the fieldhouse. Chef César Murillo and operations manager Alexander Gonzalez described a grab-and-go menu of pastries, empanadas, Cubano sliders, wings and hot dogs, with a beer garden pending a liquor license and a kitchen renovation to replace flooring and equipment that has not been touched in six years. Park district representatives said that if the plan cleared community feedback, the concession could realistically be signed, permitted and ready to go by May.

May came and went. The most recent public reporting on the project, from April, still describes Cafe Valera as prospective rather than open, which means the summer timeline the park district itself floated has already come and gone with no announced opening date since. Gonzalez, who grew up walking past the boathouse on his commute, told the advisory council he wanted the cafe to stay flexible enough to evolve with what the neighborhood actually asks for, even if some seasons it ends up being little more than a grab-and-go window rather than a full restaurant. That is a reasonable way to plan a concession. It is also a long way from a kitchen that is actually cooking.

Augusta is not waiting on anyone

While the boathouse works through leases and liquor licenses, chef Chanita Chayaluk opened her own restaurant on her own clock. Chayaluk left a career in education, trained at Le Cordon Bleu in Thailand, and is opening TAAN at 2759 W Augusta Blvd, with a friends-and-family preview on August 17 and full public service starting August 20. She is dropping into a stretch of Augusta that already does the work of a dining destination without needing anyone's permission: Rootstock Wine & Beer Bar sits at the corner of Augusta and California with a wine list built around bottles under $100 and a kitchen that runs until 1 a.m., Spinning J Bakery and Soda Fountain is a short walk away for pie and housemade soda, Cannaelado's ice cream is next door, and Segnatore's Italian menu is directly across the street.

None of that corridor needed a community advisory vote or a multi-year concession lease. It needed a liquor license application and a buildout, and it moved on a commercial timeline measured in weeks rather than the boathouse's timeline measured in missed seasons. That is the mechanism worth naming plainly: the park's own amenities move at the pace of public process, while the blocks that ring the park move at the pace of a private lease. Residents feel that difference directly, because the lagoon looks almost identical to how it looked last August except for the boats, while Augusta has a genuinely new restaurant on it every few months.

What's actually on the calendar this month

The Sangria Festival is worth knowing about even if sangria is not your drink, since it is one of the few events that pulls the park's public side and its surrounding business district into the same weekend. The festival pairs pitchers of sangria with bites from local restaurants and benefits two neighborhood organizations directly, which is a more useful thing to know than the fact that it exists at all.

Where that leaves you this month

If you live near the lagoon, the practical read is simple. Go to the Sangria Festival weekend for the one event where the park itself is the draw, then plan your actual dinner over on Augusta, because the boathouse kitchen still is not a dinner option this year no matter how good the boat traffic looks from the shore. The swan boats returning is a genuine sign of life at the lagoon. It is not the same sign as a working kitchen, and conflating the two is how a person ends up disappointed on a Tuesday night expecting a meal that Humboldt Park's own park district has not delivered yet.

The neighborhood is not stalled. It is running on two different clocks at once, and knowing which clock applies to which block is the difference between a good August and a confusing one.

If tracking which corner of Humboldt Park is actually open this month makes you curious about what a property here would cost or what it takes to buy into a block like Augusta before the next restaurant lands, that is a conversation Antonio Sarmiento has with residents and prospective buyers regularly. Let's Connect.