The End of Saks

We like to surround ourselves with intimations of luxury.  Whether that fills you with anxiety or a sense of security is a matter of the moment and personal status.  But when it all goes away, when all you see is the skeleton beneath, what do you feel?

Saks Fifth Avenue, Chicago:
1929 at Michigan and Chestnut (left); 1935-1990, 669 North Michigan (right)
(images courtesy Nena's Notes)

Saks Fifth Avenue came to Chicago almost a century ago, in 1929.  It moved to what is now Niketown six years later, and, half a century on, to it's long-time, final home at 700 North Michigan.  It was anchor to a massive 1990 development, Chicago Place, a 42-story tower with 233 apartments above a 320,000 square-foot vertical shopping mall, to which Saks, with about a quarter of the space, was the department store anchor.  Emulating Marshall Fields, that still wasn't enough; their men's store was across the street.

Although there was still a lot of empty space at the time of opening, developers were optimistic of a quick fill-out, maybe even a Barney's to be added to the mix.  And while Chicago Place did fill out, it never met that initial promise, a third wheel to the majors Water Tower Place and 900 North Michigan just blocks up the street.  Like the joke of how you go bankrupt - slowly, and then all at once - Chicago Place went into painful decline.  The wonderful, upscale Bockwinkel's grocery in the basement folded early on, and more empty storefronts, dead behind the eyes, followed.  

[Read: Dead Mall Walking]

Then, in 2009, the mall was acquired for a bargain-basement $39,000,000, and the new owners pulled the plug for conversion into office space.  Saks, the anchor, was now sole survivor, having already pulled back the men's store into the mothership.

And there matters stood, as department stores fell out of fashion and bricks-and-mortar retail shriveled under the onslaught of Amazon and buying stuff on the internet. Water Tower Place shed anchors Macy's and Lord & Taylor, closed its food court, and now is about to shrink under a major rehab.  Somehow 900 North Michigan - and maybe the far newer Shops at North Bridge, anchored by Nordstrom's - seem to be doing fine.

Saks was not immune.  Owned by former Canadian department store powerhouse Hudson's Bay, in December of 2024 it spent $2.7 billion acquiring troubled luxury rival Neiman Marcus.  Little more than a year later, in January of this year, like two drowning swimmers dragging each other under the waves, the combined retailer filed for bankruptcy, announcing a wave of closings, including the Saks in Chicago Place, which happens to be right across the street from Chicago's Neiman Marcus which, for the moment, is last man standing.

Saks has only days to live, but it's already a corpse waiting to get itself buried.  The sparse selection of actual merchandise is overwhelmed by a closeout of art, furniture, fixtures and extension cords.  The medium of photography has allowed us to witness with dread the dance macabre of how even the greatest beauties wrinkle, age and die.  The current state of Saks infers something similar, although in reality it was always less a matchless beauty than a carefully appointed machine for selling expensive goods through the allure of luxury.  In department store years, Saks has had a long life, and now, in the final stretch, you can see how much it was held together at the end by botched surgeries and too much make-up.

"Going to the mall" used to be our solace, our safe place when the outside world turned anxious. Rem Koolhass famously wrote an entire spectacular, brilliant book about it, just before the phenomenon was about to begin its decline. In the present unstable moment, our psyches under constant assault from the capricious, destructive actions of madmen, we've strangely decided to continue weaning ourselves from the social consolation of shopping malls, our drug of choice, for the isolating, impersonal world of the on-line, the algorithms of AI feeding both our desires and their assuagement.   

For me, a simple lower-middle-class peasant, Saks Fifth Avenue was never my world, but walking this Die tote Stadt, stripped to its remnants like the twigs of Lavinia's hands, I feel both afraid and queasily at home.

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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

Under the Skin, or, How We Had to Destroy History to Replicate It

 Often, a building is most interesting, reveals its truest self, not when it's completed, but when it's under construction.

Such is the case with The Lake, at Wells and Superior, a private club that Crain's Chicago Business's John Schroyer reports is scheduled to open this fall.

It's the site of two historic Chicago buildings, constructed just after the Great Fire of 1871, that the Landmarks Commission deigned not to protect, ostensibly because they had been substantially altered from their initial design. 720 North Wells was built in 1872 by German immigrant and brewer Conrad Seipp, a saloon on the ground floor, offices on the second, a Swedish social hall on the third. A cast iron arcade graced the Wells Street side.  (Siepp died in 1890, the Depression killed off the brewery, and a third-generation offspring has now bought back the name and restarted the brewery.)

photo courtesy Jordan Mozer

As Wells evolved into a trendy street of art galleries and restaurants that came to known as River North, 720 opened as the nightclub Cairo in 1988, to a glam redesign by Jordan Mozer that included a zigzag bar, gold walls and coal shafts converted into intimate two-person nooks. Chicago writer Achy Obeys wrote how "Snakes of sweaty people crawled up and down the labyrinth stairs; the elevator was a hot box of bodies."  Including mine, when I was under the influence of a free spirit who set me bar-hopping just for privilege of tagging along.

Cairo was hot, hot, hot, and then, in the way of all things, not.  It became, for a time, Club 720.  Eventually, Chicago sommelier Alpana Singh and her partners took over it in 2012 and remade it into The Boarding House, a restaurant Chicago Magazine's Jeff Ruby labeled a "glitz-o-rama" as he drooled over the dishes offered up by Quebec chef Christian Gosselin.  The place had "the unmistakable sparkle and swagger of an eventual Chicago classic."  And then, not.  In 2018, months after Singh had sold off her stake, The Boarding House closed, owing their landlord $117,000 in back rent.

And there 720 stood, empty and decaying for the next seven years, the 9,000 wineglasses that made up the chandelier over the bar still glinting faintly through the darkened windows, right up until the building was smashed to dust the summer of 2024.

720, and its companion 1870's building on Superior that was home to a Jets Pizza, were acquired in 2019 for $4,300,000.  Despite the efforts of Preservation Chicago, a demolition permit was issued.

The late classicist architect Robert A.M. Stern was enlisted to design, with GREC architects, a new building to house The Lake, an exclusive social club that's the creation of Krehbiel family heir Liam Krehbiel, head of Topograhy, described as "an early-stage hospitality company developing and operating a collection of luxurious hotels and clubs."

Topography was founded in Chicago in 2021.  It began when Liam's billionaire dad Fred Krehbiel of Molex fame bought a historic Irish estate with a 19th century manor house and, over a decade, restored and expanded it into the luxury Ballyfin resort, which opened in 2011 and later served as a honeymoon outpost for Kim Kardashian and Kanye West.  Molex was sold to the infamous Koch Brothers in 2015.  After Fred died in 2021, Liam took over Ballyfin and founded Topography.  Shortly after, Topography acquired the 137 acre Wisconsin campus of the former George Williams College, near the Yerkes Observatory, and is in the process of transforming it into The Preserve at Williams Bay, a 68-key ultra-luxury resort with a 90-acre conservation easement on a portion of the golf course, hotel rooms in the lodge plus free-standing cottages.

For something claiming to be opening in September, there's little information out there on the The Lake.  If you have to ask, you're not in their target group?  Nuveen Green Capital talks about a "$27,500,000 financing package" for an upscale yet unpretentious members only destination." 

Just last month, The Lake, which describes itself on Linkedin as "For the discerningly fun" began posting for positions such as Executive Chef and Director of Food and Beverages.  Three days ago, they added Restaurant Manager and Sous Chef. "The club will offer three distinct restaurants, including a French-inspired brasserie, a British American restaurant, and an Italian trattoria... two cocktail bars, a members' wine cellar, a roof terrace, three guest rooms, and a small spa."

There's no small irony in Nuveen describing The Lake as designed to "foster community while preserving the neighborhood's rich architectural history" where "preserving" meant destroying actual historic buildings for a Disneyfied replica.  And that's why the current state is no fascinating.  You should take a look, although since I took these pictures over a week ago, and the applique facade may already be going up.

Right now, The Lake has the look of a medieval battlement, heavy walls of concrete block, opaque embrasure-like windows with plastic fill and blue-tape outlines.  Still awaiting its fancy, civilizing cover, it can be seen for what it really is under the skin.  Not a fair analogy, to be sure - the current incarnation is domestic, polite, and welcoming to all those with the cash - but I realized what it reminds me of is those hulking armories 19th century millionaires built to protect themselves from the feared, if imaginary, attacks of the lower classes.  Subtext.

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