Stand at the intersection of St. Johns Avenue and Lake Cook Road on a Wednesday morning in August. The 7:37 inbound pulls into the Braeside platform. A knot of commuters crosses the street to a coffee counter that did not exist eighteen months ago. A cyclist coasts north on the Robert McClory trail toward a botanic garden that owns 385 acres a mile up the road. Three separate pieces of infrastructure, three different institutions, one intersection.
That corner is the reason a Braeside resident can run a full week without ever pointing the car toward Downtown Highland Park. This is a post about how to actually do that, and about why the pieces started fitting together in 2025.
The corner that changed the arithmetic
Braeside Market opened at 55 St. Johns Avenue in early 2025, directly across from the train platform. It is created and operated by Infuse Hospitality and owned by local Highland Park resident Michael Weiss, and it is open daily 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. The menu leans café standards, breakfast burritos, tartines, salads, grab-and-go, plus a small pantry-and-retail wall.
Two things about the market matter more than the food.
The first is location. Braeside Market is positioned as a spot to dine before a concert at Ravinia Festival, refuel while on the Robert McClory bike trail, or enjoy a quick bite in a welcoming setting. That is not marketing copy so much as a description of who walks in the door: commuters catching the UP-N, cyclists on the McClory, and the small army of Ravinia patrons who use the Braeside platform as a Ravinia overflow entrance. One café now serves all three flows at the same address.
The second is the signal the city sent. On April 28, 2025, Highland Park's City Council approved a grant agreement with Braeside Market that will award the new local spot $20,000, as part of Highland Park's Exterior Improvement Program Grant, and the awarded $20,000 is the maximum amount available for a business through this initiative. The city was not funding a coffee shop. It was funding the visible face of the station corner. When municipalities put their maximum grant against a single storefront, the storefront is doing civic work.
One mile north, and why fall changes the math
The Chicago Botanic Garden is a mile from the Braeside platform. Cook County Forest Preserves' Turnbull Woods and William N. Erickson Preserve are adjacent to the station, and the Chicago Botanic Garden is a mile away. For most of the summer that proximity is pleasant but crowded, the parking lots full by 10 a.m. In late August and September the calculus flips. Traffic thins, the light softens, and the Garden's programming schedule tilts toward events that reward a short bike ride over a highway drive.
The dates worth putting on the refrigerator:
- Fall Bulb Festival, September 19–20, 2026. Close out the season with an Oktoberfest-style family event.
- Night of 1,000 Jack-o'-Lanterns. October 8–12, 15–19, 22–26. More than 1,000 hand-carved, real pumpkins lit with LED lights line the family-friendly outdoor paved path in a fall setting.
- America Grows: 250 Years of Garden Stories, running June 8, 2026 through September 25, 2026, timed to the semiquincentennial.
There is also new leadership to watch. The Board of Directors of the Chicago Botanic Garden named Gretchen E. Baker as its next President and CEO, effective March 16, 2026. A new CEO in her first fall usually means a programming season that is watched more closely than most. If you have lived in Braeside for a decade and default to a spring visit, this is the year to check on what September looks like.
The two preserves nobody puts on a list
Turnbull Woods and Erickson Preserve share a border with the Metra parking lot. Together they act as the buffer that keeps the eastern edge of Braeside quiet, and they are the reason a resident here can walk a dog on unpaved trail without loading it into a car. They rarely appear on North Shore roundups because they are administered by Cook County, not the Park District of Highland Park, and county-run preserves get less local press.
Use them as the shoulder-season counterweight to the Botanic Garden. When the Garden is running an evening event and its lot is full, Turnbull is empty. The McClory trail runs right past both, which means the standard Braeside Saturday looks less like "pick one destination" and more like "loop the woods, cross to the market, catch the 11:07 south to Ravinia if there is a matinee."
What happens when you walk south
Braeside sits at Highland Park's southern edge, which means the Ravinia District, not the Central Business District, is the closer commercial anchor. The 2026 calendar down Green Bay Road is unusually dense.
| Date | Event | Location |
|---|---|---|
| Wednesdays, June 3–Oct. 28 | Ravinia Farmers Market | Jens Jensen Park, 540 Roger Williams Ave. |
| Thursdays from June 4 | Food Truck Thursdays | Ravinia District |
| Sept. 26, 4–8 p.m. | Oktoberfest | Dean Avenue and Jens Jensen Park |
| Oct. 30, 3:30–5 p.m. | Ravinia District Candy Stroll | Neighborhood businesses |
| Dec. 5, 11:30 a.m.–1 p.m. | Cookie & Cocoa Crawl | Jens Jensen Park and participating businesses |
Two of those deserve annotation for a Braeside reader.
The Ravinia Farmers Market is scheduled for Wednesdays from June 3 through Oct. 28, 7 a.m. to 1 p.m. at Jens Jensen Park, 540 Roger Williams Ave. The market is entering its 48th season and features produce, organic goods, baked items, plants, flowers and specialty foods from local farms and makers focused on sustainable practices. A 48th season is not a pop-up. Wednesday morning grocery-runs from Braeside to Ravinia and back through the market are the kind of routine that outlasts owners.
Oktoberfest is the more interesting change. The district's fall schedule includes Oktoberfest on Sept. 26 from 4 to 8 p.m. The event is moving to a new location in the Ravinia District along Dean Avenue and in Jens Jensen Park. For anyone in Braeside who has skipped Oktoberfest because the old footprint felt awkward, 2026 is worth a look. Dean Avenue puts the event within a comfortable walk of the Ravinia Metra platform, which is one stop south of Braeside.
The building most residents drive past without noticing
The neighborhood is named after a school, and the school is a piece of architectural history hiding in plain sight. Braeside School is a historic school at 124 Pierce Road in Highland Park. Built in 1928, the Prairie School style school was designed by architect John S. Van Bergen. Van Bergen had worked for Frank Lloyd Wright and mainly designed Prairie School houses, including his own Highland Park home. His plan for the school focused on creating a home-like setting for students, which included large classrooms, natural lighting, and fireplaces. The school has a low, horizontally oriented shape with a hip roof, a characteristic Prairie School form. The school was added to the National Register of Historic Places on September 29, 1982.
Two takeaways for a resident. First, if you host out-of-town guests who are architecture-minded, the walk from the market past Braeside School into Turnbull Woods is a fifteen-minute loop that punches well above its weight. Second, the Van Bergen provenance is one of the quiet reasons Braeside's older housing stock reads the way it does. Prairie School restraint set a tone that later builders on the surrounding blocks tended to respect.
The through-line
Braeside is often described, when it is described at all, as the piece of Highland Park closest to Glencoe. That framing gets the geography right and the character wrong. The neighborhood functions as a self-contained pocket. Its train, its café, its bike trail, its two forest preserves, its botanic garden, and its Ravinia programming all sit inside a radius most residents can cover on foot or by bike. The 2025 arrival of Braeside Market did not create that radius. It just added the missing piece, a place to stop between the platform and the trail.
The practical effect for anyone who lives here is that "going into town" starts to mean something other than driving up to Central Avenue. A Braeside week can run through the market on Monday, the McClory on Tuesday, the Ravinia Farmers Market on Wednesday, Food Truck Thursday one stop south, and a Saturday at the Botanic Garden without the car leaving the driveway. That is not a lifestyle pitch. It is what the current calendar allows.
When you're ready to talk about the block
If this reads like your week and you have started wondering what the house down the street sold for, that is a separate conversation. When you want a data-driven read on what Braeside inventory is actually doing, and what a home on your block would command in the current window, LWG Real Estate is built for exactly that call. Request a Home Valuation & Market Plan and we will put together a specific answer for your address, not a generic North Shore summary.
