Overbite: Is Chicago's Art Deco Post Office Too Big Not to Choke?

(Update: February 20, 2016 ) Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel is moving to use eminent domain to seize control of the Post Office Building from Bill Davies, who is resisting.

Is there no end to the plagues bequeathed to Chicago by Richard M. Daley in his final terms?

click images for larger view

The city should have kicked Bill Davies to the curb back in 2009, when the British "developer" won an auction to the acquire the massive, two-block square former U.S. Post Office with a winning bid of $40 million.  Instead, the Daley administration watch him immediately default on that bid and then, rather than going back to the second highest bidder, eventually let him pick up the property at a 40% discount.

"Let me assure you that like Daniel Burnham, we shall make no small plans," proclaims the website for Davies' company,  International Property Developers North America.  Left unstated is the fact that Bill "Flipper" Davies is best known as the developer who builds nothing, who holds onto signature properties until his inaction becomes such a nuisance that he's paid a big premium to be bought out.  He's a stubborn old coot.  If history is any indication, he'll prove more than a match for Emanuel and his plan, whose outcome is far from certain, if for no other reason than its success simply brings us back to the beginning, with a white elephant building that's now suffered another 7 years bad luck.

Most firms considering taking on the Post Office were giving pause by its sheer scale: a 2.7 million square-foot building straddling the Congress Expressway, completed in 1932 to a design by Graham, Anderson, Probst and White, and vacated by the U.S. Postal Service in 1995.  Davies response was that it wasn't big enough, announcing in 2013 a plan that would almost double the complex's size with new construction.

image courtesy The Chuckman Collection

rendering Antunovich Associates

As reported by David Roeder of the Sun-Times, Phase I would have involved 4,500,000 square feet, including a new 1,000-foot-high tower and parking structure to the west of the current building.  Estimated cost: $1.5 billion.  A vote to approve the concept by the Chicago Plan Commission was seen as a casting of bait to attract potential investors to foot the bill for the plan of Bill Davies, a man who began his career at 15 as a construction worker and by the time he was 24 was running his own real estate company.

How serious was Davies and his vision? As detailed in a 2007 profile profile by Tony McDonough of the Liverpool Daily Post, Davies' track record was not exactly encouraging . . .

• In 1972, he paid £3 miilion to buy Liverpool's Aintree Racecourse, best known for the annual Grand National Steeplechase, with a promise of building one of the Europe's largest shopping malls.  It never happened, and Davies sold out in 1982.
• In 1986, Davies acquired the site of Liverpool's old Post Office.  Work on a planned £100 million shopping mall started in 1999, and then stopped.  Davies eventually sold off the site for £17 million to the Duke of Westminster.
• Also in the 1980's, Davies bought the Exchange Flags site for another grand plan and, much to the dismay of Liverpool Officials, and let it remain vacant for nearly 20 years, even after receiving £4.5 million in government subsidies.  Davies sold the site off in pieces in 2006 and 2007.
• In 1996, Davies paid £25,000 for the right to turn Liverpool's Chavasse Park into a £480,000,000 shopping center with a million-square-feet of leisure space in a single, wave-shaped building.  After British Secretary of State called the proposal “significantly harmful” to Liverpool's city center,  Davies sold back his option for £2 million in 2008.

Davies' Chicago timeline follows the same M.O:

• In August of 2009, he  won control of the post office with a winning bid of $40,000,000, and ignored two deadlines for closing the deal before negotiating the purchase price down to $24,000,000.  
•  In 2012, he was taken to court over the deteriorating state of the Post Office, the same year the city filed suit to force Davies to repair and reactivate the ventilating fans whose malfunctioning was allowing flammable creosote to build up in the Union Station track areas below the Post Office, resulting in several fires.
•  In April of 2013, a Federal Court ordered Davies to keep the fans running 24 hours a day to keep noxious diesel fumes from building up in Union Station.
• In April of 2013, Davies announced his plan to encase the building in an overscaled wrapper of new development, showcasing renderings by the architectural firm of Antunovich Associates, which included, in their second phase, a 2,000 foot-high skyscraper.

rendering Antunovich Associates

The structures depicted in the renderings were striking, and Antunovich was careful to integrate into the design the Post Office's one signature interior, the double-height, block long lobby along Van Buren.

rendering Antunovich Associates

The new design would have been a welcome upgrade from the Post Office building's current kludgy infill  along its eastern facade, and includes, for first time, a riverfront esplanade.

rendering Antunovich Associates

At the time, I speculated whether the build-out could leave space for a  potential future high-speed rail terminal, as proposed by Helmut Jahn in 2010?

image: Jahn

The larger questions, which the Plan Commission didn't touch, is whether the plan was actually a good - or even viable - idea.  When the 275,000 square-foot Block 37 mall, across from Macy's, is still largely empty, coul the Post Office's West Loop neighborhood really support a mall that's even bigger (and escalates to 800,000 square-feet of retail by the final phase)?  Who would be the tenants?  Is it possible that the Post Office could become a vertical strip mall to end all strip malls, attracting big-box retailers like Walmart and Home Depot with the prospect of opening outlets as large as their suburban counterparts?  Can this area really support 300+ hotel rooms and another 1,000 rental apartments (just to start)?  If you had $1.5 billion - or a good chunk of it - is this where you'd want to be investing?

Those speculating that a casino could be part of the mix at the old Post Office could take a breather.  It was already there, as the succession of losing bets would continue . . .

• In May of 2014, U.S. Senator Dick Durbin called on Amtrak to fight a motion filed in federal court by Davies to overturn the court order to keep the Post Office's ventilation system running.
• In July of 2014, little more than a year afters its grand unveiling, it was if the Antunovich plan had never existed.  It was announced that developer Sterling Bay, which has just finished the massive redeveopment of the former Fulton Market Cold Storage building into 1K Fulton, the new Chicago headquarters for Google, had entered into an agreement with Davies to co-redevelop the old Post Office.
• In October of 2014, after working with Davies for just four months, Sterling Bay announced they were running away from him and his deal as fast as their caisson-like legs could carry them. 
• In October of 2015, after a prominent alderman impatient with six years of inaction threatened to strip Davies of the mixed-using zoning his proposals required, Davies responded by announcing plans to demolish Sugar House, a structure next to the Post Office, to create a riverfront staging area for his big, really big development.
• In late January of 2016, Davies announced his latest scheme: using part of the building to construct 300 "micro-apartments" of 280 to 600 square feet that would rent for up to $2,400 a month.
• On February 20th, Mayor Emanuel declares his intention to seize the property through eminent domain.
• On February 23rd, the Tribune's editorial board, in what is promised to be just the beginning of its invaluable guidance, seeks to take ownership of plotting the Old Post Office's future.  McCormick Place Really West anyone?

Read More:

International Property Developers North America website 

 from 2005:  Monument Mori - Post Office of the Dead

Frontier Outpost: The Roosevelt Collection and the Future of the Viaduct District

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Other than a couple of former sandbars, Chicago is flat, flat, flat.  Even when we raised the city out of the muck in the 19th century, it was basically just to a higher level of flat. 

The Roosevelt Road viaduct is another example of Chicago's man-made levels.  It goes on for blocks, towering above Dearborn Park, over once endless strands of railroad tracks now mostly gone, and on to the approach to the bridge over the Chicago River.

In the middle of that viaduct is The Roosevelt Collection, a mixed use development with 342 residential units and nearly 400,000 square feet of retail space, A. Epstein, RTKL and Hirsch Associates, architects.  While it has a new Target to the east, the complex, whose site plan looks like an oversized clothespin, otherwise lies within a moat of some of Chicago's largest tracts of undeveloped land.

The project, conceived by Centrum Properties, broke ground in 2007, the tail end of the condo bubble.  By the time things came on line after the crash, there was so little interest in the condos that existing contracts were torn up and the units converted to rental.  And while those apartments are reportedly now fully leased, the retail component, tther than a huge Icon movie multiplex, remains uncontaminated by tenants to this day.  In 2010, Centrum put the whole thing up for sale, and last year it was acquired by a joint ventured headed by McCaffery Interests for less than half the $350 million it cost to build. 

Since then, McCaffery has moved quickly,  with a new marketing campaign for what is now named The Lofts at Roosevelt Collection.  McCaffrey turned to Antunovich Associates to restart the design.
A series of clunky, never-occupied retail buildings in the center were demolished to create a more open plaza, now nearing completion, with dramatically lit fountains dedicated earlier this month.  

Construction has been going on so long,  it's been memorialized by a couple of J. Seward Johnson sculptures of construction workers installed on the plaza.

Even after all this effort, however, the retail plaza is still eerily quiet.  When I was there last Friday, the only sound was the music from a workman's radio.  Despite of flurry of speculation this past spring over prospective tenants - including everything from Lulelemon to Ulta to an Apple Store - the shopping center remains, as of today, a festival of emptiness.

The area around the Roosevelt Collection has always been a Bermuda Triangle of lost opportunity, centered around the massive corporeal ghost of former railyards that once served Chicago's great depots.  When Mayor J. Daley initially wanted to build a new campus for the University of Illinois there, he wanted it here, but was stymied by the prices the railroads, spinning towards bankruptcy, demanded for the land.  He wound up demolishing a large part of Chicago's Little Italy instead, for the UIC Circle campus.  It's taken nearly half a century for Little Italy to recover from the damage, and still the former railyards are empty.

The Roosevelt Collection is built on land that once held tracks leading into the old LaSalle Street Station.  The two blocks to the north remain vacant.

To the west, along Wells Street, the Roosevelt Collection shears off to another empty void, formerly holding the tracks leading to Solon Beman's masterful Grand Central Station, demolished in 1971.  In the center of this site, Bertrand Goldberg's River City was erected in the 1980s.  River City was originally to have been the capstone of Goldberg's career, a massively ambitious project on 230 acres with nine 72-story-high triad towers.  In terms of civic support, however, River City lost out to an alternate project, Dearborn Park, built beginning in the 1970's on 51 acres of formerly railyards formerly serving the decommissioned Dearborn Station.  The only part of the River City to be realized was the mid-rise element we see today.

The area along the river south of River City and next to the Roosevelt Collection remains vacant, as does the 11 acres north of River City, on the site of Grand Central Station.  In 2007, it was finally sold off by CSX - the successor corporation to the B&O Railroad - to a Skokie capital firm, but its highest use remains as an impromptu dog park.

The real prize, however, is to the south of Roosevelt  Road, 62 acres of former railyards that have reverted to a wonderous, semi-wilderness.

Rezmar Development had  big plans for the site - 4,600 residential units and 670,000 square feet of retail, centered on the first Ikea in the city's borders, but they were done in by the twin curses of the economic crash and the conviction and imprisonment of Rezmar's boodler/CEO Tony Rezko.  The site was put up for sale in 2010.  2nd ward alderman Robert Fioretti has suggested it as a location for the up-to-now mythical Chicago casino.  In 2010, the winning proposal in the Network Reset design competition co-sponsored by MAS Studio and the Chicago Architectural Club called for turning the 62 acres into parkland. Right now, however, it's just the land that time forgot.

As you can see, all of these parcels around the Roosevelt Viaduct  are below it.  McCaffery seems to sense the need for patching it all together, and has taken the unprecedented step of constructing a stair at the back of the Roosevelt Collection linking down to the lower level, although the only thing  there right now is a new dog park.

A multiple-level city is something Chicago encounters so infrequently that we don't do a very good job of it.  In terms of developing a visually compelling urban landscape, nothing beats breaking the flatness, whether it be the hills of San Francisco or the Spanish Steps in Rome.  The vistas created, and the contrasts they provide, can make a city both more comprehensible and more compelling.  You no longer seem lost in a grid that seems to just repeat, unto infinity.  You can see edges and borders, with well-designed stairways or inclines the markers of transition.  It brings a dense city back to human scale.

Right now, the Roosevelt viaduct is an anti-urban disconnect from the fabric of the city, just as the retail to the west of the river veers towards an anti-urban, shopping-within-a-sea-of-parking vibe.  Assuming all those vacant tracts around the Roosevelt viaduct eventually begin to fill up, the city needs something more than a development-by-development improvisation, lest the district become just a series of insular, self-contained mega-projects, existing in near-perfect isolation one to another. That's the profile of a second-rate suburb, not a great city.  All the parcels will be developed separately, but continuity counts.  Chicago needs a plan and a set of guidelines to stitch this tabula rasa together if the Roosevelt Viaduct District is to realize its potential as one the city's great neighborhoods