Update: Side Lot Windfall lastest twist in the epic Wrigley Building Chronicles

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Since William Wrigley first started his empire using chewing gum to sell baking powder, the story of the William Wrigley Company, and its role in defining Chicago architecture has been an epic one, and now there's a new O-Henry-like twist.

The ornate cream terra-cotta towers of the Wrigley Building, with its gleaming floodlit night time presence (although a bit dimmer of late) anchoring the foot of Michigan Avenue, have been among the most iconic structures in Chicago for almost a century.  After the huge Mars Candy corporation dumped the building after it acquired the William Wrigley Company and moved out all the employees to Goose Island, however, it didn't have much commercial value.  Shorn of its anchor tenant, with a derelict plaza between the towers and interiors often lightly maintained down through the decades, the nearly half-million square foot property sold for a bargain basement $33 million back in 2011.

Since then, the owners have done a gut rehab of the interior . . .

. . .  and hired Goettsch Partners to do a bang-up restoration of the plaza between the Wrigley Building and the Wrigley Annex . . .

And just months ago, a shiny new, two-story Walgreen's opened in the Wrigley Building Annex.

Almost an afterthought, the original 2011 deal included a site a block to the north that the Wrigley Company also owned and had leased to the Downtown Court Club to construct a massive new sports facility. Now that seemingly sideshow property is about to provide a windfall that will exceed that $33 million purchase price for the both the Wrigley buildings and the athletic club location.  Ryan Ori of Crain's Chicago Business is reporting that the owners, BDT Capital Partners LLC, in the process of demolishing what became the Lake Shore Athletic Club building for a surface parking lot, are about to sell the site for an estimated $40 million, more than it cost them to purchase both the Wrigley Building and Annex and the athletic club property only three years ago.

At that price, the property would appear be primed for a huge high-rise development that would justify the purchase price of the lot it's built on.  A location a block off Michigan Avenue would appear to be a limiting factor, but by extending the Plaza of Americas, by replacing the current narrow walkway with a full street decking, would eliminate that isolation and make the new skyscraper appear to be an extension of the Mag Mile.

It's a hell of a  story, and you can read how it's evolved over the last few years in the articles below . . .

The Wrigley Building Chronicles

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

Plaza of the Americas to get renovation: Wrigley next, please, please.

Plaza of the Americas rehab:  zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Wrigley Building Plaza:  Where Perfect People meet the Rest of Us

 The $2 Million bargain: The Grandeur of the Wrigley Building Plaza restored

The Realtors Dream - Does the Plaza of the Americas Have a Future?

An Affectionate Last Look at a Building Not Worth Saving: Wreckers descend on the Downtown Court Club

An Affectionate Last Look at a Building Not Worth Saving: Wreckers descend on the Downtown Court Club

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Looking at it from Wabash Avenue last Saturday, the looming presence of the former Lake Shore Athletic Club building at 441 North Wabash appeared almost normal.  It's only when you walked down the block to view it from the east that you got a true picture of what's going on.

What's in store for this prime square-block site is still a closely-guarded secret - until the first dispiriting renderings are released, we can always imagine it will be something fresh and wonderful - but what's totally clear is that the former Lake Shore Athletic Club is on the road to nowhere. 

The six-story building was originally constructed in 1978 - to a design by Solomon, Cordwell, Buenz - as the Downtown Court Club.  According to our indefatigable correspondent Bob Johnson, who was working at engineering firm Benesch at the time, the site was originally intended for a 20-story Howard Johnson's Motor Hotel, 95% designed by time a major recession finished it off. 

 At 60,000 square feet and a cost of $3.5 million, the Downtown Court Club was created as a state-of-the-art facility, with four tennis courts, four racquetball courts, two squash courts, a swimming pool, exercise room, saunas, whirlpools.  Two levels of parking were stuffed beneath the entrance level at upper Wabash, with cars entering and exiting at the lower service street level along Hubbard.   Furniture was upholstered in beige with “Gucci strips.” The lounge was decorated with the large ferns that were hallmarks of the age, as was the emerging racquetball craze that saw one add proclaim “Try Racquetball. It's Fun.  It's Easy.  It's Great Exercise.” When an indoor running track was added the next year, ads proclaimed the facility “the most complete Racquet Sports-Physical Fitness Center in Chicago.”  The club hoped to draw upon the nearby population in nearby residential highrises, and both secretaries and the executives of the district's office towers.

A elevated walkway over Hubbard Street ran by the side of the building to suck in patrons from  Michigan Avenue.  Memberships started at $55.00 a month.

The Downtown Court Club building and the square-block, 1.5 acre site it partially occupied at its southwest corner were owned by the William Wrigley Company, whose clock-towered, cream-colored terra cotta Michigan Avenue headquarters was less than a block away.

In 1992, operation of the sports facility was taken over by the parent firm of the Lake Shore Athletic Club.  A major renovation followed, but the company allowed its lease to expire in 2007.  The building has been vacant ever since.   In 2009, Wrigley hired a real estate heavyweight  to try to find a new tenant, without success.  By 2011, Wrigley, itself,  had been swallowed up by candy-maker Mars, Incorporated, which promptly began moving all of the Wrigley employees out of the namesake Michigan Avenue landmark that had been both the company's home and a gleaming trademark ever since its construction in 1921.  Finally, as reported byAlby Gallun in Crain's Chicago Business, both the Lake Shore Athletic Club structure and the its larger, full-block site were thrown in as sweetener to a $33 million deal that saw BDT Capital Partners LLC acquiring the historic but emptying Wrigley Building.  With the right development, that sweetener could prove more valuable than the Wrigley Building itself.

While there's still some of it left to see, let's take a moment to appreciate the qualities the Downtown Court Club building brought to the urban fabric.  Brawny and overbearing at the same time, its scored facades, framed within borders that clearly expressed the structure within, were like a Claes Oldenberg-scaled homage to aluminum siding. 

The largest strip of windows was placed at the base of the building, next to a skeletal steel stair painted bright blue, set in a open bay which was the only significant inset from the bunker-like shear walls.

 All at once, it's a visual joke on the order of the metal-clad base beneath two floors of heavy rusticated stone at William Le Baron Jenney's Manhattan Building; it's a bit of early Post Modernist mannerism devoid of the usual neo-classical confusion; and it's an effective anchoring of the building's corner in a way that both clearly demarcates the entrance and provides a mitigating counterpoint to the crushing monotony all around it.

No preservationist's picket lines were thrown up at 441 North Wabash when the bulldozers arrived. The Downtown Court Club may not be a building for the ages, but it's a child of its time.  And that's what architecture should be - a snapshot of an era's attitudes and concerns, priorities and fashions.  I probably won't often think of it when it's gone, but when I do, it will be with a fond smile.

Gummy Passage: Why Landmarking the Wrigley needs to consider its elegant plaza

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This Thursday, the Commission on Chicago Landmarks will consider bestowing official landmark status on the Wrigley Building, the gleaming cream terra cotta pair of towers that are one of the crown jewels of Chicago architecture.  Designed by Graham, Anderson, Probst and White, the two linked buildings - the main structure completed in 1921, the annex in 1924 - ended nearly a century serving as the high-profile headquarters of the Chicago gum maker last summer when the company, now a subsidiary of global candy behemoth Mars, announced it was dumping 100 Chicago area employees, and pulling out of the Wrigley Building, shifting the last 250 workers to its research center in the ritzy confines of Goose Island.

In September, a deal was finalized to sell the structure for $33 million to an investor group led by BDT Capital Partners.  Earlier this month, the new owners announced their intentions to redevelop the buildings, and now the first new business on Thursday's Landmarks agenda is preliminary landmark designation for the Wrigley.  The second agenda item is a recommendation to the City Council to approve a Class L Property Tax Incentive that would substantially reduce taxes on the building for the next 12 years, in exchange for renovations that would equal at least 50% of the complex's value.

While the actual terms of the ordinance had not been posted on the Commission's website as this is being written, it's reasonable to suppose that it will protect all exteriors facing Michigan, the river, and on the west facades.  What is not clear is how the ordinance will address - if it all - the exterior of the two buildings facing the wide plaza between them.

As we wrote about in this photo essay, in August of 2010, the Mars subsidiary undertook a bargain-basement renovation of the plaza that saw, on the plus side, the removal of a dilapidated fountain and planters, versus, on the minus side, leaving behind an ugly motley of paving, and the installation of new generic and cheap-looking storefronts on the annex side of the plaza that gashed an ugly scar across the elegant terra cotta ornament of the historic facades.

For decades, the Wrigley Building restaurant, which had, itself, grafted a modernist entrance onto the annex's plaza facade, was a prime lunchtime destination.  Now, according to a report in Crain's Chicago Business, the new owners are planning to bring a restaurant of the same quality back to the plaza, along with additional retail.  The way Crain's describes it - "The shops will be built out into the plaza with entrances from the outside" - is fairly ambiguous.  Does it mean new storefronts and entrances will be added to the current facades, or that there will be new construction extending behind the current exterior walls?

In either case, the landmarks ordinance for the building needs to be written to protect the Wrigley Building plaza from further insensitive assaults on its distinctive architecture.  We've already seen, in the Mars renovation, how not to do it, but there are any number of ways to do it correctly, and the ordinance should make sure the new owners, whose hearts seem to be in the right place, are encouraged to adopt one of them in meeting their own needs.

The quality of the plaza has become even more important as it is now the Michigan avenue gateway to River North, leading in to the broad expanse of the Trump Tower promenade, which terminates visually in the shimmering short-and-tall backdrop of the illuminated Trump Tower parking ramp and Goettsch Partners elegant 353 North Clark office tower, disgorging pedestrians into two different pathways leading to either to Marina City or the IBM Building at 330 North Wabash.  Right now, the shopworn Wrigley Plaza is clearly the poor sister to the newer Trump promenade, even after Trump Management trashed Hoerr Schaudt's distinctive landscaping for a cheaper and more generic alternative.

Outside of the landmarking process, there needs to be more planning between Trump and Wrigley management in helping the plaza and promenade realize its full potential as a vibrant civic amenity.  In this case, the Wrigley could actually take the lead.  Imagine, on a warm summer day, people taking a break from their workday or shopping watching the world go by as they sit at a Wrigley Plaza table enjoying a leisurely meal or sipping coffee.  It's a large space, and a lot can be done with it, both with permanent retail installations, and with event programming throughout the year.

The spectacular Trump Riverwalk offers up an even larger space, but a lot more disappointment.  In the over two years since its opening, none of the retail on its terraces has been leased, so on most days, even in great weather, the huge complex can seem almost depopulated.  No one's suggesting turning it into a carnival (the way that huge O'Briens restaurant on the opposite side of the river sucks up all but the perimeter of the riverwalk is another example not to be emulated), but maybe Trump should explore some loss-leader incentives to get the momentum going.  The Wrigley landmarking and plaza development, done right, could be the spark that leads the Wrigley-Trump promenade and riverwalk to overcome its current, largely unrealized status to attain its full potential as one of Chicago's great urban treasures.

The monthly meeting of the Commission on Chicago Landmarks takes place Thursday, February 2, in City Hall chambers, room 201-A, 121 North LaSalle, at 12:45 p.m.  It is open to the public.