Walking into Kalina Pain Institute, a 650-square-foot brick building at 334 Circle Avenue, one will see a small waiting room with a check-in desk, behind which is the bathroom. To the right is a storage room and a single examination room.
Here, Jared Kalina has worked as a private solo practitioner for more than seven years with his wife, Linda Lee, who’s the office manager.
Although the medical office has served as a pillar in the community for decades, Forest Park’s zoning ordinance makes it difficult for Kalina to expand. And he’s looking to double the building’s footprint.
“We love our office space, but it is quite tight,” Kalina told the Review. “We are excited to possibly provide more space for our patients and to provide them additional care.”
He’s on his way to doing just that after the planning and zoning commission unanimously approved a conditional use permit for the addition at its meeting last week.
Kalina Pain Institute offers comprehensive pain medicine care and minimally invasive spine care. Services include trigger point injections, plus those for knee pain and spinal pain relief, as well as Botox and CBD medications. The office’s patients experience ailments such as chronic back pain, headaches, herniated discs, sciatica, and arthritis.
Some of Kalina Pain Institute’s services require X-rays, mainly those involving injections around the spine, which make up about 80% of Kalina’s injections. For these procedures, Kalina sees his patients at the Advanced Ambulatory Surgical Center in Galewood every week on Wednesdays.
With a conditional use permit, Kalina said he is hoping to add onto the back of the building, where there is a grassy yard and single-car parking pad. He wants to construct a second bathroom and a surgical suite, where he can perform injections himself.
“I would love it,” Kalina said, “but the patients would love it, to do the procedure the same day,” rather than scheduling them on Wednesdays.
“The priority here is to give Dr. Kalina a little bit more room in an updated space to treat his patients,” said Director of the Department of Public Health and Safety Steve Glinke, who’s one of Kalina’s patients, at the last planning and zoning commission meeting.
Although the proposed 500-square-foot addition is only slightly larger than a two-car garage, “it does double the doctor’s workable area and adds an examination room,” Glinke said.
“I won’t have a bunch more patients coming, and there won’t be a lot more traffic,” Kalina said at last week’s commission meeting. “It’s just to create space within the building for the patients.”
Glinke said no residents dissented the proposal.
The vote will next go to the village council. Kalina needs the permit because his property doesn’t currently conform to residential zoning codes in that area.
“In the non-conforming use section of the code, which is one of the sections that we’re looking to amend, there’s a hard ‘no’ on putting an addition on a non-conforming use,” Glinke said.
This means that for Kalina to build an addition, either the non-conforming use section of the code must be rewritten – which the village is working toward in updating portions of its zoning code – or Kalina needs a conditional use permit for his office. The latter is a much more straightforward route, according to Glinke, and permits Kalina to evolve and improve his property.
“A hard ‘no’ on alteration of non-conforming uses, it really limits personal investment,” Glinke said. “You’re buying something that you just can’t do anything to.”
As it stands, Kalina Pain Institute is non-conforming on the north lot line. Glinke said the addition must be built to the bulk standards of the code, honoring the required setback distance from the lot line.
Kimberlee Smith, owner of Smith Architecture in Oak Park and the architect for Kalina Pain Institute’s potential expansion, assured the commission that the addition would meet lot line requirements.
‘Like family’
Kalina’s wife, Linda Lee, works as the office manager. She’s also the daughter of Geung Goo (Michael) Lee, who died in July and was honored with a street naming in November for his legacy as a Forest Park businessman and community leader.
Lee said her dad used to come to their office twice a day, just to say “hi” or water the plants out front. She said there was one day they caught him on a ladder, painting the side of the building silver, though they didn’t ask him to. And because Geung Goo Lee was such a pillar in the community, he knew many of the patients at Kalina Pain Institute, and Kalina and Lee regularly heard from locals how he touched their lives.
“We feel super rich, not only in memories, but what the town has given my family,” Lee said.
One of Kalina and Lee’s favorite parts about their private practice is getting to connect on a personal level with patients, in a way that larger medical offices often don’t have the capacity for.
Kalina Pain Institute visitors “start off as patients and become friends,” Lee said. “We’ve gone to [patients’] 90th birthday parties. They become like family.”
One of these relationships developed with the previous owners of the building.
Before Kalina Pain Institute opened, the building housed Dr. Arnold Clevs’ dentist practice, which he ran with his wife and office manager, Batia, for more than 50 years.
Both of Lee’s parents were Clevs’ patients. When Clevs shuttered his business in 2017, Lee’s mother suggested they meet with him to look into buying the property.
The proposal seemed like it was meant to be, according to Kalina and Lee, who made a quick connection with the Clevs.
Clevs is a Holocaust survivor, and Kalina is Jewish. Both have family from the same small town in Latvia.
“After meeting him, he’s like, ‘I want this place to be yours. Just give me a price,’” Kalina said. “It was more than just a property. It was like ‘we need to be here.’”
