Oak Lawn is laying the groundwork for redevelopment of a shopping center at 95th Street and Pulaski Road following the recent announcement that anchor tenant Kmart would close before year’s end.

Officials met this week with executives from Kimco Realty, which owns the shopping center, to discuss Oak Lawn’s master plan and overall vision for the site, Village Manager Larry Deetjen said.

“It is a great location and I think its future ... can be very, very strong, and so does the owner of the property,” he said of Kimco, which on Tuesday sent its regional president and a vice president to meet with him, Mayor Sandra Bury and Trustee Terry Vorderer.

“They were prompt to come down here with the decision-makers that are in this company to talk about the bigger picture,” Deetjen said. “I think we’ve got outstanding communication.”

Both parties agree the shopping center, located on the community’s eastern border with Evergreen Park and in proximity to large employers such as Advocate Christ Medical Center and growing public transportation options, is a prime piece of real estate in need of full redevelopment, he said.

The village has long seen potential in the Oak Lawn Shopping Center, identified in a 2014 planning study as one of two spots along 95th Street ripe for redevelopment, but had been unable to enact its vision for the site while Kmart remained in business.

When Sears Holdings announced Aug. 24 that it would be closing its Oak Lawn Kmart store, along with 27 others nationwide, village officials sprang into action.

“We’re hitting the ground running with plans and with ideas,” said Bury, lamenting the loss of a longtime Oak Lawn shopping staple, but adding she was excited about the opportunity to reinvent the 95th Street corridor.

“All of us are fired up to view this opportunity for greater development,” she said.

Village officials have thus far declined to divulge specifics about their intentions for the site, but have shared with Kimco a list of potential retailers that residents have expressed an interest in bringing to Oak Lawn, Deetjen said.

He and Vorderer said they were open to mixed-use developments, which could mean a combination of retail, office and residential use, including senior housing.

“We’re open to high density,” Deetjen said of building up rather than out. “We’ll support higher density in development of the site in order to accrue green space.”

In addition to the Kmart, which is slated to close by mid-November, the shopping center contains a Payless ShoeSource, a Pep Boys and a soon-to-be-shuttered Chuck E. Cheese’s.

Its outlots, which house a Chase Bank, First Midwest Bank and LongHorn Steakhouse, are not included in the proposed redevelopment, Deetjen said.

“All three out parcels are quite successful,” he said. “We’d like to see them consider more out parcels ... our master plan calls for that.”

The 95th Street Corridor Plan, a village-commissioned study of Oak Lawn’s main commercial drag completed in early 2014, envisions two potential uses for the shopping center: institutional — i.e., medical or educational facilities — or large-format retail-center, like the development across 95th Street, where a Target, Portillo’s, Home Depot and Jewel-Osco are thriving.

In both scenarios, the planners allotted more room for green space, plazas with outdoor seating and even landscaped ponds to enhance the aesthetic qualities of what village officials view as a “gateway development” into the community.

It’s too early to say how long any proposed redevelopment of the site might take, but it’s “not going to happen with a snap of the finger,” Deetjen said.

“It’s a multiyear process.”

In the meantime, Kimco and the village must decide what to do with the retail space Kmart and Chuck E. Cheese’s are vacating.

“Do you leave a property dark or do an interim development?” Deetjen said. “That’s also part of the discussion.”

Over the coming months, he said the village would share any leads on prospective tenants with Kimco and that in turn Kimco would keep the village looped in to any engineering, planning and market studies it conducts on the site.

Kimco did not respond to a request for comment.

zkoeske@tribpub.com

Twitter @ZakKoeske