Four Buildings and a Funeral - Wrigley: The Architecture that Remains after a Great Company Dies

'The Chicago Sun-Times David Roeder is reporting today that the long abandoned William Wrigley manufacturing complex at 35th and Ashland, after being on the market since 2009, is finally being sold at a bargain basement price.

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William Wrigley, Jr. came to Chicago from his native Philadelphia to sell the soap manufactured by his father's company.   The young Wrigley was a born salesman, but his job was made difficult by the fact that the nickel price for a box of soap left retailers little profit.  So Wrigley convinced Dad to double the price of the soap to give stores a heftier share of the take.  Wrigley Jr's sales mantra was "Everybody likes something extra, for nothing."  And so he purchased 65,000 cheap red umbrellas as a free incentive for buying a box of soap.  When the umbrellas ran out, Wrigley turned to baking powder as the premium.  When he found people liked the baking powder better the soap, he dumped the soap, and looked for a premium to help sell the baking powder.

He hit upon the idea of chewing gum, produced from spruce bark and originally used by Native Americans to freshen their breath.  The problem was, however, that the taste evaporated after a couple of minutes of chewing, so Wrigley did some research and hit upon the idea of substituting chicle, from sapodilla trees, up until them used primarily in making rubber.

And again, "chewing candy" soon proved more popular than baking powder.  In 1893, as people from all the world flocked to Chicago's World Columbian Exposition, Wrigley came out with both the Wrigley's Spearmint and Juicy Fruit brands.  To get his display cases into retailers, he gave away knives, lamps, scales, coffee grinders and even cash registers.  In 1909, Wrigley bought out the company that supplied him his gum, and began manufacturing it himself as the Wm. Wrigley Jr. Company.

When a financial panic swept the country in 1907, and his competitors were slashing their marketing budgets, Wrigley took out a $250,000 loan to buy an advertising schedule that in more prosperous times would have cost $1.5 million. "Dull times are the very times when you need advertising most." By 1910, $170,000 in annual sales had skyrocketed to $3 million.  By the time Wrigley died in 1932, he had spent $100 million in advertising his products.

In 1912, Wrigley bought 4-and-a-half acres of land at 35th and Ashland, part of a revolutionary new 400 acre Central Manufacturing District, formed to provide business for the Chicago Junction Railway, which had added capacity far beyond the needs of its original client, Chicago's Union Stockyards.  By 1915, according to a Chicago Landmarks Commission report, over 200 companies had joined Wrigley in the CMD.  Wrigley took up a large part of the 250,000 square-foot building on Ashland designed in 1911 by architect A.S. Alschuler.

Behind it, in 1913, he erected his own six-story, 175,000 square-foot factory, designed by the firm of Postle and Fisher.  In a book promoting the CMD, among the numerous other testimonials, there's a letter from Wrigley's Industrial Agent H.E. Poronto:

During the first year in our new location, we have found it even better than originally represented.  The service which has been rendered us by the Chicago Junction Railway Company in daily handling our ten to twelve incoming cars has been of the very best . . . We have affected a saving of $35,000 in the one item of cartage alone . . . The district is easily accessible from all parts of Chicago, as it indicated by the fact that of the 450 odd employees which we had at the we moved here from West Van Buren & Halsted Streets, fully 98% remained with us.

 

 At that time, 48% the city's population lived within a four-mile radius of the CMD.

Down through the decades, Wrigley became a global force in gum,.  Employment at the factory peaked at 1,700 in the 1960's, but even as late as 2001, the CMD plant was still the company's largest, with a thousand employees working in three shifts turning out 30,000 cases of gum a day.  Reported the Sun-Times' Sandra Guy:

The lumps of gooey stuff drop onto conveyor belts that seem to endlessly move the gum through the stainless steel and white lab-like environment inside the six-story plant. The all-synthetic gum base is heated, matched with the appropriate flavor, spiked with a high-intensity sweetener, pushed onto a palleted merry-go-round and cooled to 72 degrees Fahrenheit.

 By that time, the company was being run by the 37-year-old great-grandson of William Wrigley, Jr, strangely enough, also named William Wrigley, Jr.  Wrigley had lost big with $17 million investment in Flip Flipkowski's high-tech incubator company Divine, Inc, which burned through a billion dollars in cash by the time the dot.com bubble burst.  Flipkowski has lined up $14 million in city subsidies for a corporate headquarters at the Northwest corner of Goose Island.  He never collected, but the city then offered a $15 million tax subsidy for Wrigley to take over and develop the site.

The result was Wrigley's Global Innovation Center, a 193,000 square-foot, $45,000,000 facility designed by Gyo Obata leading a team from HOK.  The complex, which was certified LEEDgold in 2009,  including a 40,000 square foot pilot plant for testing manufacturing processes, and a main building centered by a winter garden covered by a glass tension cabled ceiling with 540 individual panels, and 25 different species of plants from four continents, a representation of Wrigley's global reach. "This building," said Wrigley,  "is a physical representation of our aspirations."

But not for long.

When the new Innovation Center and its $14 million in city subsidies were announced in 2002, then Mayor Richard M. Daley stressed that Wrigley had assured him the 35th street plant and its jobs would not be threatened by the new facility, and he was going to get it in writing.  "We're still working on all of that," his then Planning and Development Commissioner Alica Berg told the Sun-Times, " but it's my understanding that it's their intention to expand their manufacturing into the space that their innovations center would be vacating."

Daley never got that promise in writing, and one month after the opening of the Global Innovation Center, Wrigley announced they were closing the south side plant in December of that year.  225 employees moved over to the Goose Island facility; the rest lost their jobs.  "While this is a difficult decision for me personally, we would not be making this choice if we did not believe that this change was absolutely necessary for the long-term vitality of our company," said Bill Wrigley Jr.  "We value our deep roots in the city of Chicago, even as our business and our workforce continue to change," he said in a statement.

The remaining 600 workers were shifted, offered early retirement , or laid off.   In 2002,  the same year the Goose Island facility was announced, Wrigley failed in a takeover of Hershey Foods, in what turned out to be its last chance to keep large enough to compete globally.  In 2008, the Wrigley Company was acquired by international behemoth Mars.  In January, 2010, William Wrigley, Jr., himself, was gone. For the first time in its century-long history, a Wrigley was no longer running the company  In 2011, Mars dumped another 100 workers and announced its intentions to sell off the Michigan Avenue headquarters, shifting the last employees to the Goose Island facility, now the last remnant of a company that once helped define Chicago.

In 2009, Wrigley hired CB Richard Ellis to sell off the 1.3 million square-foot, 30 acre complex. For nearly three years, there were no takers, until this week.  David Roeder is reporting in the Sun-Times that the original asking price was about $19 million, but the actual sale price wound up being closer to 5. What was once one of the manufacturing powerhouses of Chicago is essentially being sold for scrap.