"I call it the mini miracle." That's Lynn Sapp, third-generation owner of the Original Rainbow Cone, talking about the ice cream shop her grandparents opened on a dirt road across from a cemetery in 1926. A hundred years, a Depression, and several wars later, it's still slicing five flavors on Western Avenue.
If you live in Beverly, you already know the shop turned 100 this summer. You probably know the Ridge Historic District turned 50 the same year, because you drove past the commemorative banners on Longwood Drive back in April. What you might not have clocked yet is that neither anniversary was really the finale. Both were the opening act for a fall calendar that's busier, and more specific, than almost any comparable neighborhood on the South Side gets to claim.
Two Birthdays, One Summer
Joe and Katherine Sapp built their first Rainbow Cone stand at 92nd and Western in August 1926, when the strip was still farmland and the neighborhood's biggest weekly draw was Sunday visits to the cemetery across the street. Four years in, they saved enough to build across the road at what's now 9233 S. Western Ave., and that's still where the shop stands. Lynn Sapp took over from her parents in 1987, and in 2018 the family partnered with the Buona Companies, growing the brand from two locations, Beverly and Navy Pier, to roughly 30 today, including outposts inside Buona Beef restaurants and locations outside Illinois entirely.
The centennial closed with a birthday bash on August 9 at the original Beverly shop, cake cutting included, plus a prize wheel that could land a customer a private Rainbow Cone truck party worth $1,000.
The Ridge Historic District's milestone runs on a slower clock but the same kind of math. The district earned its spot on the National Register of Historic Places on May 28, 1976, and today covers more than 3,000 buildings spanning Italianate, Gothic, Queen Anne, Prairie School, and Renaissance Revival homes, some designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, Walter Burley Griffin, and Daniel Burnham. BAPA marked the 50th with commemorative banners along Longwood Drive in April, a Home Tour built around the anniversary in May, and a Ridge Historical Society exhibit of architectural photography by Mati Maldre.
Two institutions. Two round numbers. Both landing in the same calendar year is either a coincidence worth noting once and forgetting, or it's a clue about how this neighborhood actually works.
The Engine Behind the Anniversaries
Here's the part that doesn't show up in a single headline about ice cream or architecture: the same organization that stages the Home Tour also runs Beverly's entire event calendar, and has since before either anniversary began accumulating years. The Beverly Area Planning Association was founded in 1947, and its fingerprints are on nearly everything that gets residents out of the house between March and December. BAPA runs the Home Tour, which started in 1971. It runs the Ridge Run, Chicago's oldest neighborhood 10K, which draws roughly 3,000 runners every Memorial Day and finishes into the Memorial Day Parade, itself marking its 100th year in 2026. It runs the summer Porch Concert Series, the Garden Walk, and Sip & Shop, the ticketed fall shopping night along 99th and 103rd Streets that pulls in more than 20 small businesses for one evening of sales, tastings, and after-party.
That's not a loose collection of neighborhood happenings that all coincidentally exist. It's one 79-year-old civic organization running the same infrastructure year after year, which is a large part of why Beverly's calendar doesn't feel like it's improvising. A neighborhood without that kind of standing organization tends to have sporadic pop-up events that fade after a founder moves or a sponsor drops out. Beverly's have compounded for decades instead.
The fall lineup on the ground right now:
- Sip & Shop, the annual evening retail crawl along 99th and 103rd, tickets go on sale in August each year for the fall date.
- Open House Chicago, the citywide architecture tour, returns to Beverly and Morgan Park on October 19 and 20, the neighborhood's second year as a partner site after last fall's debut brought several thousand visitors through.
- The Tombstone 5K, a pre-Halloween costume run through the historic Mount Greenwood Cemetery, is set for October 17.
- Margarita Mile, now in its sixth year, turns Western Avenue and a handful of side streets into a craft cocktail crawl each fall.
None of these are generic "fall festival" filler. Each one is tied to a specific address, a specific business district, or in the Tombstone 5K's case, a specific cemetery that's been part of the neighborhood's identity since before most of the housing stock went up.
What's Actually Opening Along Western and 103rd
The anniversary framing makes for good headlines, but the more useful signal for anyone who actually lives here is what's opening while the milestone events get the attention. On 103rd Street, an indie bookstore is set to open November 1 at 1804 W. 103rd St., built around speakeasy-style literary programming: book swap parties, midnight releases, silent reading sessions, and writing workshops, alongside a curated selection for younger readers. A few doors down at 1808 W. 103rd, Beverly Phono Mart has been building a new and used vinyl selection under owners with deep roots in Chicago's music scene, which puts two record shops within walking distance of each other once you count Beverly Records, the Western Avenue institution that's been selling out-of-print LPs since 1967 and still anchors Record Store Day every spring.
That's the texture that doesn't make it into a "100 years!" news cycle. Beverly's commercial strips keep adding small, specific, ownership-driven businesses at a pace that outlasts any single anniversary. A neighborhood that only had one big thing going for it would run out of things to write about once the birthday cake got cut. Beverly keeps generating new addresses to walk to.
The One That Left
Not every local success story stays local, and the clearest example this year cuts against the celebratory mood. Sanders BBQ Supply, the counter-service barbecue spot at 1742 W. 99th St. that built its name in Beverly, landed a spot on the New York Times' list of America's 50 best restaurants in September 2025, won Best Counter Service at Chicago's Banchet Awards in January, and picked up a James Beard Award semifinalist nod for owner James Sanders and pitmaster Nick Kleutsch in the Best Chef: Great Lakes category. That kind of track record usually means an expansion, and it happened this year. But the sit-down version, Sanders BBQ Prime, opened in July in the ground-floor space beneath the now-shuttered Promontory music venue at 5311 S. Lake Park Ave., which puts it in Hyde Park, not Beverly. Chef Sanders has called it his "signature restaurant."
It's worth sitting with that for a second, because it complicates the tidy version of this story. Beverly incubates the kind of small business that earns national attention, but when that business is ready to scale into something bigger, the next chapter doesn't automatically happen on Western Avenue. The neighborhood's counter-service reputation is intact. The full sit-down experience built on that reputation is a Metra ride away.
Where This Leaves Anyone Who Already Lives Here
If you've lived in Beverly long enough to take Rainbow Cone and the Ridge Historic District for granted, this year is a decent reminder that the neighborhood's continuity isn't automatic. It's maintained, actively, by a family that's kept a 100-year-old ice cream recipe consistent through a corporate partnership, and by a civic association old enough to have organized the district's original historic designation and still running the calendar that celebrates it. The fall lineup, Sip & Shop, Open House Chicago, the Tombstone 5K, Margarita Mile, isn't a consolation prize after the big anniversaries wrapped. It's the same machinery that made those anniversaries mean something in the first place, doing what it does every year.
Whether you're weighing an Open House Chicago stop against a Sip & Shop crawl, or just deciding whether a new bookstore on 103rd is worth adding to your Saturday rotation, the calendar isn't slowing down because summer ended. If you're the kind of person who tracks a neighborhood this closely, whether out of curiosity or because you're weighing what a home here is actually worth, Christina Horne has spent two decades watching Beverly's blocks change one storefront at a time. A conversation costs nothing and a free home valuation takes a few minutes if you're curious where your own address stands in a neighborhood this active.
