It's Finally Happening! Massive, Long-Empty Mag Mile Space Finds its Mate

 For 28 years, it was La Strada, at Michigan and Randolph, an upscale, below-grade restaurant with its own outside (stopped) clock.  Then, in 2007, it closed to make way for a tiny-footprint, 40-story apartment tower that never came to pass.

It took another 15 years for La Strada to finally get ground into dust . . .

...but this time it was for a 74-foot-tall, 15,000 square-foot black box from the Lamar Johnson Collaborative that seemed to have taken its design cues from the now long-closed Verizon Death Star about a mile up the street.

Completed in 2023 at what you'd think was a prime location across from the Wrigley Peristyle and Millennium Park...

Michigan and Randolph, 2023

... it also stood empty and raw, a massive, unfinished interior for which I had a particular fondness - I'd loved to have seen it kept in perpetuity as a pop-home for flower markets, art faires, and UFC cage matches.

The owners, alas, having sunk untold millions into building the thing, had other ambitions.  It was marketing as a restaurant space, but I noticed in April that the bottomless pit had grown a floor at street level.  I went to the internet to find out what was going on - nada, but the space started filling up with various retail-looking furnishings.

Then, about a week ago, the smoking gun appeared.  A sales counter with an unmistakable logo: ByeBye Chicago.  Yes!  We're getting a souvenir superstore!  Des Plaines-based Chipman Design Architecture describes their inspiration:

We're excited to share a sneak peak of our latest project for Chicago's newest retail souvenir destination, Bye Bye Brands.

Image courtesy Chipman Design Architecture

Inspired by the L trains that connect Chicago's neighborhoods, the design reflects how the city moves, carrying people from every corner into the center where tourism, culture, and city life converge.  Ground in Chicago's industrial roots, the space layers bricks, bold graphics, and iconic Chicago language into a vibrant tribute to the city.

ByeBye already has several, much small locations up and down Michigan Avenue, and I don't know if the massive (5,000+ square-foot) outlet will replace any of them, but on Wednesday, I caught employees busily stocking merchandise and putting on the finishig touches.  I still haven't seen an opening date - or any outside signage - but it's got to be soon.

No comment yet from the street vendors who have traditionally set up their own souvenir carts on Michigan just outside the building.

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Michigan and Randolph, 1871

Michigan and Randolph, 1959

La Strada's stopped clock

151 North Michigan under construction

...some months later

Another look at the great space lost

The Chicago Cultural Center reflected in the large windows of 151 North Michigan

Bye Bye Chicago store, 320 North Michigan

Construction plans for Bye Bye Chicago superstore

The aforementioned Verizon Store Death Star, long closed,
but still a plague on its corner across from Water Tower Place

The Chicago That Never Was: The Bulletin Board Building

click images for larger view

 There were a lot of plans for the former Pine Street when it was widened and expanded with the construction of the Michigan Avenue Bridge, effectively letting Chicago's commercial district to jump the river and extended its reach.

In 1918, the North Central Association, representing principle property owners, along with the Chicago Plan Commission, commissioned several leading architects to imagine what the new district should look like, and the results were published in The American Architect that year. 

Holabird and Roche came up with a monumental entryway on the northern side of the bridge.

Andrew Rebori, the Architects' Committee's Managing Architect, came up with something even grander.

The North Central Association recommended uniform height limits of 140 feet and a continuous balcony projection nearly three feet wide, 36 feet up from the sidewalk above two floors of shop windows, as illustrated in the above drawing by Rebori.

The view south from the Water Tower was denser that much of what actually exists to this day.  The southwest block, for example, is in today's actuality a sequence of two-story storefronts from Ralph Lauren to Tiffany's, far shorter than this rendering of a continuous sequence of ten-story buildings that look like those aerial views of of the Burnham Plan's anonymous, uniform blocks made flesh.

Of course, reality intervened, beginning with the completely individualistic Wrigley Building arriving in 1920, as illustrated in Rebori's drawing at the top of this post.  .  That same year, Holabird and Roche's 16-story John Crerar Library, which can be seen to the far left of Rebori's drawing. was also completed at the northwest corner of State and Randolph.  (It was demolished in 1981 for the sloping-roof 151 North Michigan.)  In 1924, the Wrigley Building Annex was built about where the "Bulletin Board" building appears in the drawing, and with the completion of Tribune Tower in 1925, the new North Michigan gateway was set, asymmetrically.

Which best represented the “City Beautiful”?  The standardized ideal? . . .

Or the messier real? . . .