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Showing posts with label Fulton Cold Storage Warehouse. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Fulton Cold Storage Warehouse. Show all posts
No city in the world, not even New York, has found such general use for common brick as we have found here on Lake Michigan. Chicago brick, in addition to being used in business blocks, factories, residences and other buildings is widely used in building sewers and other construction work. The outside demand for Chicago brick has been beyond the ability of the local plants to supply with their present equipment. Millions of brick are shipped to every surrounding state, as many as thirteen states being served with Chicago brick.
Chicago is fortunate in possessing a supply of what is known as “surface” clay. This clay is the result of the glacial drift and is entirely suitable for the manufacture of what is known as common building brick. In fact, it is superior to many other clays for this purpose, because of the ease with which is is prepared and the rapidity with which it can be fired and burned. It is of a quality that can be manufactured into brick by what is known as the stiff-mud process, the most rapid method for making brick, and Chicago is now consuming brick at the rate of over a billion brick annually.
- Chicago The Greatest Brick Center,
the Chicago Examiner, 1910
As with so many other things that were once the city's pride, Chicago stopped making brick a long time ago. And yet the demand remains for what has come to be known as Chicago brick. Not the high-toned glazed or polished brick with which buildings prepare the face to meet the faces of the other buildings it meets along the street, but the homely, rock-solid, non-face brick for secondary elevations along the side or alley, There's still a strong demand for that unpretentious work-a-day brick retaining an abject beauty all its own.
And so when we knock down buildings, as we're wont to do, the crews move in to sort through the rubble for the bricks not ruptured in the wrecking, to chip them clean to be neatly stacked and strapped and recycled.
As we've written previously, the Sterling Bay Companies is slowly becoming Lord-of-the-Manor to Chicago's historic Fulton Market District, transforming it from its century-plus role as home to the city's meatpackers and food and dairy resellers to a high-tech district replete with health clubs, art galleries, fashion boutiques and trendy restaurants . Sterling Bay's first assault was its most audacious - taking over the massive, windowless fortress of 1920's 12-story, nearly four million cubic foot Fulton Market Cold Storage building, melting decades' buildup of ice, stripping off the old facades down to the bare concrete bones, and converting the structure into office space where Google will consolidate its Chicago operations.
Last week, Fulton Market Cold Storage, now renamed 1K Fulton, was well on its way, with a new annex rising just to the west and retro-styled piers - of newly manufactured brick - being put in place on the spare concrete frame for the building's redesigned windowed facades.
Now Sterling Bay is mopping up the scraps. Among other Fulton Market acquisitions, last fall they snapped up a series of properties along Lake Street west of Morgen, old one-story buildings of no particular aesthetic merit but that had served a succession of business well for nearly a century.
No more. Those buildings are dust. With some surviving bricks left behind. Good Chicago bricks, finding a new home at a place where their character - if not their provenance - still finds respect.
update July 3, 2013: Crain's Chicago Business is reporting the London Guarantee is being purchased by the developer of the new Langham Hotel in Mies van der Rohe's IBM Building.
click images for larger view
No, the tenants of gently-curving, 1923 Alfred Alschuler London Guarantee Building at Wacker and Michigan haven't turned into recluses. They've simply disappeared. The small samples of lit windows in the facades are the offices of the last hold-outs. As reported by Crain's Chicago Business, the building's New York owner Joseph Chetrit has been emptying out London Guarantee as leases expire, for some sort of retrofit - perhaps a hotel. With its Corinthian columns at the door and ornate rotunda, it's already has a stage-set Grand Hotel entrance.
Maybe they should get John David Mooney to use all those window shades for a lighting event to keep awareness of the building alive while Chetrit decides what to do with it.
Hotels seem to be the answer of the moment to an increasing number of development questions. A new hotel in Mies van der Rohe's 330 North Wabash/IBM Building is moving towards completion, while Richard Branson continues his conversion of Rapp and Rapp's slightly delirious 203 North Wabash into a Virgin Hotel.
Here's hoping Branson's marketing people have enough savvy to deploy those huge, angry birds at the top as a branding device.
The latest news concerns the Marshall and Fox designed Atlantic Bank (Federal Life) Building, constructed in 1912.
Crain's is reporting it's about to be converted into a 145-room boutique Hotel Indigo.
It's only about 74,000 square feet, but was constructed to accommodate an additional four floors, which the new owner is planning to add. Here's hoping they keep the distinctive current roofline, which includes an ornate cornice, but only only on the western facade.
It's a remnant from the time when the Garland Court was a functional street rather than a dumpster-appointed alley.
Our last metamorphosis is probably the most pronounced. Since 1920, the 5,000,000 cubic foot Fulton Cold Storage Warehouse was the architectural marker for its food market neighborhood. The area began to gentrify, slowly at first, with galleries, restaurants and condos, but the process reached a tipping point, encased in steel, with the opening of Carol Ross Barney's spectacular Morgan Street Green Line station last fall. [Read: Instant Landmark]
Last year, Amit Hasak, the long-time owner-operator of the warehouse, saw the writing on the wall, moving to Lyons and selling off the massive structure to Sterling Bay, which is converting it to offices, with retail and/or restaurants on the first floor.
The video above shows the defrosting of the old building. It's as if 90+ years of life, in this case contained not in blood, but ice, being drained away before the corpse is re-animated. The Perkins + Will blog has some extraordinary photographs of ice formations within the building, here.
This conversion will ramp up the Fulton Market District's escape from its grungy commercial origins, even as it effaces its character. Office tenants, reasonably, like windows, and soon Fulton Cold Storage will look a lot like any other large loft office building in the West Loop. The totemic quality of this unique structure, this steep architectural mesa omnipresent on the horizon, impermeable and rock solid, 10 tall floors rising to the sky with shear walls of brick, both finished and raw, will disappear into the generic.
No room for cheap nostalgia: it must be so. But it was a hell of a thing.
