Flip City: Dead Meat at the Fulton Market

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Just months ago, the Fulton Street Market district was declared an official Chicago architectural landmark, protecting contributing structures spread out on over two dozen city blocks.  Above is the front of one of the newly protected buildings.

And this is what's behind.  Could there be any more accurate symbol of the current transitioning of one of Chicago's most historic districts?

This was one of what could be argued to be the two most important buildings in the district, each facing the other down a 252-foot length of the 800 block of west Fulton Street.  In some ways, they were the real beginning of the district.  They were constructed in 1887 by the Fulton Street Wholesale Market Company, a co-operative of 22 small meatpacking firms.

Architect William Strippelman designed them in the Romanesque Revival style he had studied at the University of Marburg, before he emigrated from Germany to the United States to serve as a draftsman in the Union army.  In 1868, he settled in Chicago, where he would spend the balance of his life and career. 

As recounted in the Landmark Commission's indispensable history of the district in the official Landmark Designation Report, Strippelman added a third story to both buildings in 1903.  By then, they housed not just the independents, but the branches offices of of "Philip Armour, Gustavus Swift, and Nelson Morris, the nation's 'big three' packer and global brand names in the early twentieth century,"

A mid-1960's fire consumed a large chunk of the twin on the north side of the street, with the damaged section replaced by a featureless two-story structure listed as "non-contributing" in the designation ordinance.

Fulton Market continued to be a going concern for over a century and a quarter, even as the centrifugal force of the Loop dissolved under the dual crushing forces of white flight and suburban sprawl, with neighborhoods immediately adjacent to the west and south spending the 60's and 70's becoming "problematic."  In the 21st century however, the central city is again compacting.  While troubled outlying neighborhoods like Englewood continue to depopulate, a massive gentrification continues in and around the Loop.  The near west and near south sides are headlong into the process of being re-secured as safe, upper middle-class territory.

With nearby west Randolph Street transforming into an avenue of upscale restaurants, Fulton Market's comparably cheap land and rents made it a magnet for galleries, shops and still more restaurants.  Initially, the new imports and the meatpackers and poultry, fish, eggs and butter merchants lived in an uneasy equilibrium.

1K Fulton (Former Fulton Market Cold Storage)

Then the dam broke.  The owners of the massive, 12-story tall Fulton Market Cold Storage building, the district's visual marker since the 1920's, sold out to developer Sterling Bay, which begin stripping the structure's facade to create a massive new office building where Google is consolidating over 500 Chicago workers currently dispersed among multiple locations.  Fulton Market is now a hotbed of development activity.  Hotels and club and residential developments join the mix of newcomers.

When many Fulton Market businesses fought the creation of the landmark district, they cited the added costs of complying with its provisions when they needed to modify their buildings, but left largely unsaid was the elephant on the forklift:  everyone could see big money was coming into Fulton Market.  Not unreasonably, they wanted their fare share when it came time to move on.

That time is now.  It was a shock to come upon the 1887 North Fulton Street building this past Sunday and see it demolished down to a taxidermy remnant.  A shock, but not a surprise.  Although actual meatpackers may be a vanishing presence, developers, in the words of the late deal-maker/shoebox collector Paul Powell, can "smell the meat a'cookin."  Money is the river that levels all obstacles in its path.

Behind that forlorn Fulton Street facadectomy is both a $20 million, 60,000-square-foot project and the story of the origins of money and power in the early 21st century.  The project is the Chicago outpost of Brooklyn Bowl, which began in 2009 inside a former 1880's ironworks foundry in the borough's Williamsburg neighborhood.  Claiming to be a the world's first LEED-certified bowling alley, the complex also includes a bar and a music venue that attracts such top acts as The Roots and Elvis Costello.  After branching out first to London and Las Vegas, Chicago is the next link in their chain.

The story of money and power is that of local powerhouse Don Wilson, who began as a eurodollar options trader at the Chicago Mercantile exchange, and within seven years built up his own firm, DRW Holdings LLC, into a company with 500 employees.  Becoming fabulously wealth, he  branched off into real estate, with impressive results.  In January of this year he sold for $14.1 million a building at 1003 North Rush that he had bought for $12.4 two years before.  In February, DRW sold the former 1938 Esquire Theater, which it had gutted and transformed into a high-end retail building, for $176 million.  DRW had bought the property in 2010 from the Anglo Irish Bank, which had acquired it by foreclosing on a $33.2 million loan. 

Originally the Fulton Market project had included a 17-story, 200 room hotel, but now Brooklyn Bowl is the primary tenant, fitting its 24 lanes and 600-person concert stage into a three-story structure designed by local firm OKW Architects that will also feature 18,000 square feet of retail.

In Williamsburg, Brooklyn Bowl kept what seems to have been a fairly unremarkable foundry building and gutted it for their build-out, drawing heavily on recycled materials.  In Chicago, DRW has traded off demolishing a newly designated landmark building by agreeing to keep its facade.  Undoubtedly, that process is not inexpensive, but it's pretty clear it's looked on as little more than a sop to landmarks in order to get the desired tabula rasa on the remainder of the site.  In the only rendering for the new building I've been able to find, the historic facade is basically an afterthought, shunted off to the side in favor of an emphasis on the cheerful mediocrity of the new building's faux industrial facades.

rendering: OKW Architects

Within two years, I would expect that nearly all of the businesses that gave Fulton Market District life for over a century and a quarter will have relocated.  Corfu Foods is now in Bensenville, Fulton Market Cold Storage relocated as Hasak Cold Storage in Lyons.  Barring an economic crash halting development in its tracks, the neighborhood will become one of the most vibrant in the city, but the "market" in Fulton Market will be long departed, gone the way of Cap Streeter's steamboat, a visceral reality reduced to the abstraction of a branding device.  The lovely restaurants will remain and multiple, the sourcing of the food they serve now another abstraction, the physical reality of the process banished safely out of sight.

Like a blue-legged centipede, the supports of the salvaged facade put Fulton Street's last survivors on notice: the tentacles of a very hungry progress will soon be reaching their way.

Flip City: Stories of Fulton Market:

Strippers Attack, Heat up Fulton Market

Googleplex comes to Fulton Market

Instant Landmark: Carol Ross Barney's Morgan Street Station at Fulton Market

The Brick Stackers 

Marina City Closer to Landmark Status? Public Hearing Friday Morning

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[update: 1:00 p.m., October 16][ No formal objections were filed during the public hearing on landmarking Marina City.  Speaking on behalf of LaSalle Hotel Properties, Mariah DiGrino of the law firm DLA Piper declared her client's - at least momentary - neutrality:

We are among the owners that have not provided a consent to the designation. At this time, ownership is not prepared to consent or object, but continues to evaluate the effect of the designation on its hotel and commercial operations. Obviously, we’re not here to challenge Marina City’s place in the city’s visual landscape or its place in the city’s history. We have met with [Landmarks] Commissioner [Eleanor] Gorski, who has been very informative and helpful to us understanding the effect of the designation and we look forward to continuing to work with the Landmarks Division on future requests for approvals for the hotel and commercial spaces as they arise.

Landmarks Illinois President Bonnie McDonald expressed her organization's support for the landmarking . . .

Marina City is a critical part of the city’s mid-century architectural heritage and is considered one of the city’s most photographed buildings . . . We know from a 2008 survey that a majority of Marina City’s residents are in favor of landmark designation, which will also provide helpful financial incentives for future capital improvements. 

Two of these incentives are the property tax assessment freeze, and, due to the building’s location, the opportunity to receive capital improvement funds through the city’s Adopt-A-Landmark program. Both of these incentives demonstrate that in addition to protecting one of the city’s most distinctive buildings, landmark designation can result in financial assistance for its owners.

The State of Illinois Property Tax Assessment Freeze program makes unit owners eligible for freezing the assessments on their units for 8 years, while the City of Chicago's Adopt-A-Landmark program allows developers to increase their allowable built density by financing improvements to a nearby designated landmark.

Preservation Chicago President Ward Miller stressed both Marina City's revolutionary design, and its path-breaking motor boat docks and river edge dining rooms that jump-started the transformation of the Chicago river from an "industrial canal" to the civic amenity of a recreational riverfront proposed by Daniel Burnham in his 1909 Plan of Chicago a half century before.

It's was all over in a little more than 40 minutes.  You can listen to the entire session, courtesy of Steven Dahlman, here.

Friday, October 16 at 9:30 a.m., in Room 1103 of City Hall, 121 N. LaSalle, the Commission on Chicago Landmarks will be holding a hearing for the public, owners, and any "unknown owners" to present comment on the proposal to make Bertrand Goldberg's Marina City complex an official Chicago landmark.

A week or so ago, I had heard no objections had been filed to the action, although Trib architecture critic Blair Kamin tweeted yesterday that there was still one owner who had yet to declare their consent.  In an article posted last evening, Kamin reported that the party not heard from was LaSalle Hotel Properties, which in 2006 acquired what was then the House of Blues Hotel - built in what had originally been the Marina City office building - and parking floors of the two residential towers for $114.5 million.  After rehabbing the facility as the Sax Hotel, it was rehabbed again recently and is now known as the Hotel Chicago. LaSalle's silence has been aggressive and complete, with Ald. Brendan Reilly saying nothing had been heard from the company and Kamin's phone calls going unreturned.

Although most people make thinkg of Marina City as just the twin cylindrical 60-story residential towers, with parking on the first twenty floors, it's actually perhaps the first, true multi-use complex, also including an office building, a theater, a marina, and public plazas.

The landmarks resolution protects  the exteriors of the complex's original buildings, as well as the "driveways and open plaza areas between the buildings."  The jarringly out-of-place Smith and Wollensky restaurant structure, constructed in 1998 where the original skating rink had been, is not protected, nor is the skylighted entrance pavilion next to it.

Although the Commission has now apparently largely outsourcing the work of writing the "Summary of Information" reports on the history and importance of proposed landmarks, the 54 page report on Marina City - a product of experts from Bauer Latoza, Ramsey Historic Consultants and Granacki Historic Consultants -  maintains the highs standards established in reports written by in-house scholars such as Terry Tatum.   The report includes a history of the building and its architect, Bertrand Goldberg, and of William McFetridge and the Chicago Labor movement that made the project possible, an account of the construction, financing and marketing, and a placement of Marina City's importantance within the larger context of Expressionist Modern Architecture.  Richly illustrated, it's a must-read.  (As is Steven Dahlman's on-line City Within a City: The Biography of Marina City.)

Last November, Marina City had its global moment in the sun moon when daredevil Nick Wallenda walked on a tightrope across the Chicago River from the top of Marina City's 60-story west tower, and then for an encore crossed from the West Tower to its twin to the east.   There's no mystery as to why he chose Marina City for his stunt.  Chicago has no more iconic building than Marina City.  With the Picasso and Cloud Gate, it's the most globally recognized symbol of the city.  Making it an designated landmark simply makes it official - and offers some needed protection.  If Marina City isn't a Chicago landmark, then there is none.

Read More:

Night Magic: Wallenda Walk Lights Up Chicago's River Skyline

 Up on the Rooftop: Night and Luftwerk's Art at Marina City

At Marina City: Bertrand Goldberg - Screwed Again? 

Door to the Heart: Bertrand Goldberg's Reflections - the things he made, the things he kept

Two Tales of the City: Chicago - History to Rubble, Ice to Glass

One day, we will probably get around to writing a major post.  This is not that day.  Instead, a couple of updates . . .

158 years of Chicago History, Quick Reduction.

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Above is a photograph of the 1855 John Russell house at the time we wrote it about it this past May.  Below is what it looked like last Saturday.

Eric Nordstrom of Urban Remains obtained the salvage rights to the property, and spent many hours exhaustively exploring and documenting the historic structure, even discovering the original western gable all but perfectly preserved in the attic after an addition extended the house. 

photograph courtesy Eric Nordstrom

Eric wrote more on his discoveries here, here and here, and he has a photo gallery on the house's erasure from Chicago's built fabric here.

Skin Transplant at Fulton Market Nears Completion

For a very different trajectory than that of the Russell House, we give you 1K Fulton.  It began as this . . . .

The massive Fulton Cold Storage building, which dominated the Fulton Market food processing district since its construction in 1920.  Things began to change, subtly at first, as Randolph Street west of the Loop began evolving as a strip of trendy restaurants, and residential, art galleries and boutiques began to infiltrate the rough, working-day environment of the Fulton Market District.  Then the dam broke when the owners of Fulton Cold Storage saw the writing on the wall, moved their operations to the suburbs and sold their massive building to Sterling Bay, the developer that is acquiring more and more property in the district.  In a bold stroke, Sterling Bay announced the rebirth of the building as 1K Fulton to design by architects Hartshorne Plunkard Architecture.

rendering: Hartshorne Plunkard

After defrosting decades of accumulated ice within the cold storage warehouse's interior, the original facades were demolished as the building was stripped to its concrete skeleton . . . 

 . . . and a completely new annex builing was constructed to the south.  Last Saturday, the new facade was almost completely on the original Fulton Cold Storage, looking not dissimilar to the old, except that the original brick was now half-brick fused into a precast-panels.

The old terra-cotta ornament was replicated in a special concrete mix molded into the new panels.

The south wall of the old building has no middle piers, but is instead a continuous glass curtain wall, giving a clear view into the interior and the columns of the original structure, and mirroring the glass walls of the new annex building just to the south.  (Inexplicably terminated on the ground floor with incongruous, Prairie-style brick piers.)

When over 500 Google employees will move to 1K Fulton next year, it will mark a tipping point of what is now a booming and rapidly changing Fulton Market District.  In June, the Commission on Chicago Landmarks passed a proposal to make many of the approximately 125 buildings in the area a protected historic district, a move that is being fought by the district's long-term landowners, who appear torn between seeking to continue their businesses amidst a district in which they are increasingly outliers, and wanting to make sure no landmark restrictions lower the price they will get if a developer wants to knock down their building for another high-rise.

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In July, the Chicago Plan Commission approved the Fulton Market Innovation District plan, designed to provide guidelines for ongoing development that preserves the area's historic elements within the high-tech Boom Town that is also “the city's last remaining market district.”

 

Read More:

Preservation Scorecard: Wreckers 2, Violinists 0

Strippers Attack, Heat Up Fulton Market

A Kinder Future for Jenney's New York Life?

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In the current edition of Crain's Chicago Business, Alby Gallun is reporting that Kimpton Hotels intends to turn William LeBaron Jenney's landmark New York Life Building, at LaSalle and Monroe, into a 200+ room hotel.  Just to the east, 100 West Monroe is already in process of being turned into a Hyatt.

Reliance Building/Hotel Burnham

Kimpton is no stranger to landmark buildings, being the current manager of Hotel Burnham, a/k/a Burnham and Atwood's 1894 Reliance Building, as well as the Hotel Allegro, long known as Eitel's Bismarck.   Their other local properties include the Hotel Monaco and the new Hotel Palomar.

If the New York Life plan goes through, it means that the building will have evaded a poison pill that the ever compliant Commission on Chicago Landmarks pushed through as part of its 2006 designation.  It would have allowed much of the landmark to be gutted for a 51 story office building next door at 29 South LaSalle to be  constructed partially within its footprint.  This was amended in 2009 with a revised proposal that would have infringed on only about a third of the landmarked site.  Thankfully, neither of those plans came to pass, and the Kimpton proposal appears far less intrusive.

The Commission's reliably comprehensive and informative report on New York Life details why multiple additions made the top of the building seem to stutter, saying essentially the same thing three times.  Originally completed as a 12-story structure in 1894 at a cost of $800,000, just five years later a thirteen-floor addition was built just to the east, with the 13th floor extended over the original building to help tie them together.  Just another five years down the road, in 1903, a 14th floor was added, and there things have stood down to today, except for the original cornice bring replaced with the usual brutal blank brick wall long ago.

from the Landmarks Commission designation report

Beginning to affix the curtain to a building under construction long before it's even topped out is common practice today.  When Jenney did it at New York Life he was a pioneer in realizing how skeleton construction differed from buildings with bearing walls, mounting the terra cotta on the upper floors even as the lower remained open steel frame awaiting the arrival of granite facing.

New York Life's monumental lobby remains remarkably close to the original . . .

from the Landmarks Commission designation report

Note to Kimpton:  If you really want to make your hotel stand out among the competition, take the money to replicate those original electroliers (and call Gunny Harboe to restore the cornice.)