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

Butchered Burnham Monday - Will New Owners at the Bankers and Edison Buildings Rescue Massively Botched Facade Repairs?

The short answer would be appear to be “No”, but there's always room for hope.

Two vintage office buildings sit kitty-corner to each other at Clark and Adams.  Both began as elegant, upper-end structures, but neither has been treated kindly by time.

The Edison Building

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On the northeast corner, right across from the Post Office of Mies van der Rohe's Federal Center, is Daniel Burnham's Edison Building.  Completed in 1907 in Burnham's best late classical pompous style, it's anchored along both Clark and Adams by arcades of three-story high Corinthian columns. 

Above the base, the facade becomes very, very busy.  (Think Peoples Gas.) No surface remains unornamented.  It's all a bit over the top, but the Edison still has a kind of grandeur that you don't see much anymore, offering a nice counterpoint both to Mies' austerity and to its more restrained Chicago School neighbor, Holabird and Roche's 1895 Marquette Building, right next door.

The Edison tops out with another three story arcade, this one with arches sitting atop rectangular columns.  Just beneath, there's a base of inset windows set between ornament that alternates between the company logo and the lion heads that D.H. Burnham became so found of.   Lions were an extremely popular motif on Chicago buildings, a clear symbol of power.

In our own time, of course, lions are less a symbol of power than a lesson on how we're killing the animals we prize to the point of extinction.  The Edison Building is not about to become extinct, but it's certainly been battered.  In 1977, former Chicago Public Schools head Paul Vallas announced with great fanfare how much money the CPS was going to save by abandoning their offices in one of the great  Central Manufacturing District warehouses on Pershing Road and purchasing the 20-story building from Commonwealth Edison to serve as their new headquarters.  The purchase price was $8.2 million, with another $20 million was budgeted for renovations.

Little of that renovation budget seems to have been spent on the building's facade,  If the contract didn't actually go to someone's connected brother-in-law, it certainly looks like it did.  The exterior renovations read as shockingly cheap, with damaged textured terra cotta replaced with bare slabs that make the facade look like a fool's motley.

Late last month, Crain's Chicago Business's Ryan Ori reported that the CPS has sold the Edison to Blue Star Properties, for far less than the CPS had wanted.  (CPS will now be renting space in the former Boston Store building at State and Madison recently vacated by Sears.)  Ori says that Blue Star claim to be investing more than $30 million making the interiors more contemporary loft office space, removing drop ceilings to restore the original 11-foot floor heights.  No word if the facade is in line for much-needed TLC.

The Bankers Building - 105 West Adams

As with new residential structures, many developers seem to have taken the tack that people don't really care what their building looks like on the outside, as along as they have good light, a view, and the kind of interior amenities they've come to expect. 

That same principle may be at play at the building across the street from the Edison, which we wrote about last year.  By the time the 476-foot-high Bankers Building - now known by its address, 105 West Adams - was constructed in 1927, Daniel Burnham was long gone, and the design was done by the firm of his sons, Burnham Brothers.  At 41 stories, it was one of Chicago's proudest skyscrapers. Emporis cites it as the tallest Chicago building clad entirely in brick.  In retrospect, that may not have been a great idea, as over time that brick suffered the same fate as the Edison's terra cotta, but at an even greater scale.  On the inside, 105 West Adams remain a highly viable building, said to be 85% leased.  On the outside, it's become a massive billboard of visual blight, a mosaic of filthy original brick and lighter slapdash repairs stippling the facade like cheap makeup applied with a trowel.

Last week, Ryan Ori in Crain's reported that 105 West Adams is being purchased by developer John Murphy, who is also transforming nearby 100 West Monroe into a Hyatt Hotel.  On Sunday, the Trib's Blair Kamin had an article (behind the Digital Plus wall, unfortunately) on how Murphy is also planning to make the long-vacant Art Deco Chicago Motor Club Building into a hotel.  Ori says that at 105 West, Murphy's upgrades will include a new fitness center, and other renovations targeted to mid-size tenants who have seen their rental options shrinking.

It's probably too much to ask to expect something to be done about the facade, but in its present state, the exterior of 105 West Adams is a depressing presence.  Set within the landmark architecture of the South Loop, it's a civic embarrassment of major proportions.

Read More:

Image courtesy the Chuckman Collection

The Bankers Building: Improv of Decrepitude

Inside the Art Deco Chicago Motor Club: Has it Finally Found a Future?

Tarot to Tacos - Upscaling of State north of Viagra starts small, with velvet

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It was back in January that we wrote about the big changes coming to Rush and State Streets just north of Viagra Triangle.  So far, though, it's pretty much been the sound of crickets, as a number of ambitious projects seem to be going nowhere.

At the start of the year, bulldozers made quick work of the 1919 Regina Court apartments at Elm and State, to make way for Solomon Cordwell Buenz's 4 East Elm, a 25-story, 335-foot-high tower to hold all of 40 units.  Are we running out of rich people?  Regina Court was nothing but remnant debris all the way back in March, but three months later, the site remains strangely somnolent, clean as a whistle but with no signs of life . . .

Other nearby projects, lingering for years, remain unrealized.  Despite announcements of everything from tearing it down for a new Hotel Mondrian to other upscale rehabs, the Cedar Hotel, with its rich terra cotta ornament, remains empty, the only occupant the seasonal open air bar, formerly best known as Man vs. Margarita, which has survived as an popular and often packed singles hangout for still one more summer.

Just a block to the south, the site where the Hunt Club once stood also appears to continue, despite a succession of development proposals, to be uncontaminated by any signs of life.  (Although the townhouse next store that once was home to the Waterfront restaurant either has or is about to be demolished.)

Surprisingly, it's what's in between the Hunt Club and Cedar Hotel that's winning the first-to-the-finish-line sweepstakes, in a modest (and much to be modest about) structure that had been the only Subway sandwich shop with its own astrologer, Mrs. Devon.

Within the last couple weeks, workers have been assiduously scraping all signs of Subway's identify from the building.

According to a story by Micah Maidenberg in today's Crain's Chicago Business, the structure is to rehabbed into the two-story Chicago outpost of Velvet Taco, the Texas-based chain that serves up 21 different kinds of tacos with distinctive fillings such as calamari, kimchi, and farm-raised mammoth meat.  No word yet as to whether tufted fabric will be available either as an ingredient or wrapper.

Read More About the Changing Face of Rush (and State) Streets . . . 

Bertrand Goldberg's Walton Gardens: The History of Rush Street through the Eyes of a Single Building.

Preckwinckle calls (another) Code Blue at Historic Cook County Hospital

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Will it be a successful intervention or just another “DNR”?

Five months ago, we wrote about how, despite a series of reprieves since it closed after the 2002 opening of the new Stroger Hospital next door,  the specter of the wrecking ball has never left the sky above the Beaux Arts facades of the historic 1912 Cook County Hospital building

In 1999, the Cook County Board's then President John Stroger announced the structure's impending demise. In 2004, a move by Stroger's forces to get the Board to approve the demolition failed.  In 2007, Stroger's son Todd, having inherited the Board Presidency, announced a $140 million reuse plan. In 2009, another report from Jones Lang LaSalle.  In 2010, the Cook County Board approved a $108 million plan.  In 2011, new Board President Toni Preckwinkle made renovation of the old building a central part of her own $126 million hospital redevelopment plan.

The one constant binding all these plans together is (a) a lot of consultants have made a lot of money, which really would have come in handy in covering the project's cost, and (b) nothing ever happens.  Through it all, the majestic structure stands, empty, decaying, and untouched.

Well, once more into the breach, my friends.     Kristen Schorsch of Crain's Chicago Business is reporting that Toni Preckwinkle is planning “to hire a manager to guide the redevelopment effort of about 10 acres on the Near West Side campus . . .  with an eye toward preserving the historic public hospital building . . . ”  And this fall?   Back by popular demand! Before the Cook County Board for approval - still another plan.

Will the nth time be the charm? Someone's always “saving” old Cook County Hospital, but until that day when construction crews arrive on-site and renovation begins, they will persist in seeming less like saviors, than the cat that absent-mindedly toys with a mouse until it finally gets bored and swallows it whole.

Read the Full Story and see the photo gallery:

Historic Cook County Hospital soon turns 100 - will it be around to see it?

The Prudential Rediscovers its Shine

photograph: Bob Johnson (click images for larger view)

In Chicago's skyscape, the Prudential Building was once cock of the walk.  Today, it's a background building.  But if you happen to be walking by, look up.  The limestone facade of the Prudential has taken on a creeping two-tone, a kind of ghostly striping, and we're about to tell you why.

The Prudential has a storied history.  For two decades, from 1934 onward, through Depression and War, construction in Chicago had ground to a half.  The skyline whose towers had popped up like weeds in the 1920's became frozen in time. 

With an easement to build a trestle and breakwater a short distance from shore, the Illinois Central Railroad had controlled Chicago's lakefront since the 1850's.  From the bank of the river southward, the IC had created a massive railyard, dominated by a huge sign for Pabst beer as it met Michigan Avenue to the east was the most ambitious bit of construction on the site.

photograph:  Library of Congress

The Prudential Building would change all of that,  When it was announced in 1951, it became the first structure to be built over Illinois Central air rights, and the opening shot in the revival of major new office construction. It included new viaducts along its perimeter, and a completely new street, the one-block Stetson Avenue, named after Edward Stetson, an I.C. board president.  According to a post on the Connecting the Windy City blog, the air rights deed was 85 pages long and identified 500 small, individual pieces of property.

At 42 stories and 601 feet, the Prudential would fall just four feet short of overtaking the Board of Trade as Chicago's tallest building.  Designed by Naess and Murphy, it broke ground on August 12, 1952.  At nearly 22 million cubic feet, it was the fifth larger building in the city.  Each of its 2,617 windows were double-glazed, and designed to allow both sides to be washed from the inside. 

The Prudential was a compendium of superlatives.  At 1,400 feet-per-minute, it's elevators  were the world's fastest, and popping ears became standard elevator car conversation for first-time visitors.   The Prudential had the biggest floor-to-floor heights.  It's air conditioning capacity -  3,150 tons- also set a record.  Elevator service stopped at the 40th floor, and the world's tallest escalators carried visitors to the 41st floor and its observatory, which actually bested the one at the Board of Trade to become the tallest in Chicago.  The panoramic views from Stouffer's Top of the Rock restaurant immediately made it a destination dining location for tourists and locals alike.

A 73-foot-tall antenna for WGN was assembled on the 41st floor and welded in place into a nearly 12-foot-deep socket at the top of a 311-foot-tall tubular steel mast mounted on the roof.

According to David Jameson's essential new book on the noted Chicago artist and sculptor, Alfonso Iannelli: Modern by Design, Prudential and their architects were determined to incorporate the company's Rock of Gibraltar logo in the design.  They considered making it a plaza-level fountain, or depicting it in a stained glass window above the entrance.  “In the end, the client and architects decided on a thirty-foot-high bas relief eight stories up the blank west-facing wall of the Randolph Street section.”  Iannelli received $14,120 for the commission.  It would be his last major work.

The Prudential had its own branch post office, with nearly 100 workers.   Overall, the building had a workday population of over 8,000 people.  It immediately became Chicago's prestige office address, with tenants including blue chip advertising firms Needham, Louis and Brorby and, from 1956 to 1989, Leo Burnett.  Prudential Insurance took up the first eight floors of offices, launching “Operation Crosstown” - 6 large vans, 30 movers and 80 trips - to transport its 1,500 employees from their temporary quarters at the Butler Brothers warehouse at 165 North Canal.

When the $40,000,000 building was dedicated on December 8th, 1955, newspapers and other memorabilia were placed in a time capsule to be opened in the year 2000.  Has it ever been uncovered?  There's no doubt it would have been a snapshot from a very different time.  Two of the four newspaper that existed in 1955 disappeared long ago, and the two survivors don't look too healthy now, either.

image courtesy The Chuckman Collection

More importantly, at the time of its opening, the Prudential, in its pristine, splendid isolation, immediately became a visual anchor terminating the view north from Grant Park.  It was an urban signpost of the fading power of the railroads. First with the Prudential, then Illinois Center, Lake Shore East and Millennium Park, those massive, once vital railyards were the grimy industrial soil out of which an entirely new sector of the city took root.

Originally the dominant alpha building of a new Chicago, the Prudential is now overshadowed by the newer, taller structures of a filled-out east Randolph streetwall.

Two Prudential Plaza

As the new towers rose, Prudential's status declined.  The Top of the Rock and observatory closed long ago.  In 1990, the Prudential became almost a subsidiary adjunct to the new Two Prudential Plaza, by Loebl, Schlossman and Hackl.  At 1.4 million square feet, it's larger than the original, and it's 995 height eclipses both the original Prudential and its tall mast.   The rings of lighting at its top set Postmodernist bling against 1 Pru's solid, sober massing.  The one shiny aspect of Prudential One - it's shimmering aluminum spandrels - became so worn and dull I had convinced myself that they had been removed sometime in the 1990's and that I was now looking at the concrete under the panels.

According to a report by Ryan Ori in Crain's Chicago Business, the two Prudential buildings have only recently emerged from being “zombie” buildings.  The owners had so highly leveraged the two towers that after the 2008 crash, and the loss of some key tenants, there was no longer enough cash flow to finance the basic maintenance and improvements needed to attract replacement tenants for the nearly 40% of the space - mostly in the original Prudential - now or soon-to-be vacant.

In June of this year, a NewYork-based consortium restructured the debt and gained control of the two Prudentials.  They've committed $100 million to upgrading the complex.  The most visible component of that process is the current bit of street theater, as workers on scaffolds at vertigo-inducing heights are restoring the facade of the Prudential to its original luster.

In the restoration by Alumitec, “each window frame and spandrel panel will be detailed by hand utilizing abrasive cleaning methods to restore the aluminum to its intended  appearance, then sealed with the Alumitec wipe-on sealer to protect the finish and restore its metallic sheen.”  South and west elevations are scheduled to completed this year, north and east in 2014.  It won't set back the clock to Prudential's original pioneering status, but when those panels catch the sun, they'll flash a moment of   architectural history, the mid-20th century set off against the free-form shimmer of Frank Gehry's 21st.

Read More:

Does This Make My Butt Look Fat?

Inside the Art Deco Chicago Motor Club: Has it finally Found a Future?

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 Crain's Alby Gallun is reporting this afternoon that the long-empty 1928 Chicago Motor Club Building, designed by Holabird and Root, has been sold to MB Real Estate Services for about $9.5 million.  That's what the previous owner, Aries Capital LLC, paid for the property in a 2011 auction, but they had already made an additional $4.5 million selling off a 4,700 square-foot parcel next to the building.  Read more and see our photo essay after the break . . .

Saturday News: What Would You put under Block 37? Crain's opens up the Hole, and Wants to Know

photograph courtesy Crain's Chicago Business

          My money lies under pedway

       My money lies under the mall

      My money lies under the pedway

     Please bring back my money to me

The bad news: the millions the city dumped into a hole below Block 37 isn't coming back.  That's how much was spent on a "superstation" for a $1 billion express service to O'Hare that didn't exist and had no plan for existing, and a crossover to a Red Line that doesn't serve any airport, in probably the most expensive place in Chicago to do it.   After dumping $218 million into the project, the city decided cost overruns were so out of control the only thing to do was just abandon construction and seal up the whole thing. 

The good news:  thanks to Crain's Chicago Business, we now know what our money pit monument looks like.  On Wednesday, Greg Hinz and photographer Stephen Serio (no just handing the reporter an iPhone here) were given the first public access to Mayor Daley's batcave - 472 feet long, 68 feet wide, and an average of 28 feet high.  See all the photo's here.

Block 37 groundbreaking ceremony, 2005

The fun news: as Mel Brooks will tell you, ridicule is often the best revenge for pain, and Crain's is now offering you the chance to put your best sarcasm to good use  . . . 

Calling all architects, designers, urban planners, visionaries! What do you see in that space? Tell us in a paragraph or two, and, because we all know a picture is worth a thousand words, send a rendering, too. 

Best of all, there are no prizes and no money, just a promise that the best ideas will be featured in a subsequent article.   Of course, you could play it straight and come up with useful concepts, but why limit yourself?  Submit your most warped concepts to Crain's via email by next Friday, June 21.

Let me get you started . . .

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photo courtesy Crain's Chicago Business; sheep, not

Block 37 Sheep Monument to Chicago Taxpayers and Voters:  The space will be fitted out to house a large herd of sheep that will save money by replacing the current expense of mowing with grazing at Millennium and other nearby parks.  The sheep's passivity will commemorate the passivity of Chicago voters in electing and re-electing hacks, autocrats and actual criminals.  Waste from the animals, to be sent to the city's urban farms, will represent the oratory of elected officials, while ceremonial shearings will symbolize what gets done to taxpayers.  The resulting wool will be pulled over our eyes.

Update [6/28/13]: Here's Greg Hinz's follow-up with the proposals he got from local architects, including shown below, Grant Gibson's Embrance the Hubris, keeping the space useless but giving it patterned gilded interior . . .

More here.

. . . and talking about big abandoned holes and ideas about what to do with them  . . .

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Mine the Gap at the Chicago Spire Hole

More reading on Block 37:

Tales from the Crypt: City to Bury $300 Million Mistake under Block 37
Can Signage Save Block 37?
Block 37 - The Curse Lives!
The Entombment of the Plug Bug
Planning and its Disconnects: The Cautionary Tale of Block 37