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?

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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

Chicago Streetscenes: Green Hyatt, Valets, City Doves, Cranes and Curlicued Louis

We've haven't done any streetscenes for a while, so let's go to the cupboard . . .

Hyatt has taken over the former Wyndham Hotel on St. Clair, with the usual shiny anonymity.  Catch the sign on its Erie Street entrance when it catches the reflection of the trees across the street, however, and it's a pretty cool green composition.

 The servants align at the groundbreaking of the new Rehabilitation Institute.

 

  City Dove with Flowers

 Rooftops with red crane

 Louis with curlicue.

In Chicago today, It's So Hot . . .

Whalenado! Float streams Fruit of the Sea past Architecture of Chicago

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It's an aquatic invasion.  The Chicago Loop Alliance turned to St. Louis-based illustrator Noah MacMillan to create Float, a 2,500-square-foot mural wrapping around the corner of Holabird and Roche's 1915 Century Building at State and Adams.  It's one of a number of major summer-time projects from the Alliance that includes The Gateway, a colorful seating area in the median of State Street between Wacker and Lake, and Block Thirty Seven, a Pop- Up Art Gallery in a never-occupied space in the lightly inhabited Block 37 shopping mall across from Macy's.

Float, which officially went on display earlier this week, depicts, in the words of the artist, “aquatic animals floating through a coral reef of Chicago” in a “surreal parade” that sees a great whale sliding past Alexander Calder's Flamingo, and an octopus stretching out its tentacles to the City/County Building.  Do the clown fish and jelly fish represent the City Council? 

We first wrote about the Century back in 2008, when it was an eyesore of dilapidated scaffolding.  The year after, the General Services Administration, which owns the building, took measures to ameliorate the squalor and has worked with the Loop Alliance to make it one of their Pop-Up galleries on a continuing basis.  Last year at this time, the Century's mural space and first floor windows were a solid, bright red as part of the Alliance's Color Jam project, in which artist Jessica Stockholder turned the corners of the intersection, and even the street itself, red, green, orange and blue.

The basic problem remains, however.  The GSA hasn't really decided - at least publicly - what to do with the Century and another terra cotta skyscraper,  Mundie and Jensen's 1913 Consumers Building, a few doors south on State, which were acquired after 9-11 to provide a security moat to the adjacent, half-block long Dirksen courthouse building, from 1964, the first structure to be completed in Mies van der Rohe's Federal Center complex. The feds now own the entire block, save Berghoff's.

South of Quincy, which has been transformed from a street to pedestrian court along State, the GSA turned to 4240 Architecture to rehab and retrofit three buildings on the block.  The low structure at 18 West Jackson was rescued from its status of having one of ugliest facades in city.  The former Bond's store on State also received a new, more open facade.  Along the south side of Quincy Court, there's Alfred Alschuler's 1937 Benson Rixon store building at 230 South State, which, when new, was the epitome of style and elegance before a long descent that found McDonald's becoming the long-term anchor tenant. 

Photograph: Chicago History Museum

Back in 2009, the GSA had published a Building Preservation Plan from Johnson Lasky Architect.

Unfortunately, few of the report's recommendations, such as restoring the original ground floor windows, appear to have been followed.

Instead, 4240 was called upon to clean up and update the building, complete with a new, modern in a completely newer style entrance along Quincy.

The GSA appears to have pretty much emptied out the office floors of the Consumers and the Century.  The Consumers' terra cotta still gleams, but over at the Century, even the vivid colors of Float can't fully distract from the begrimed, long-crumbling Manueline Gothic-styled terra cotta or all the dead-behind-the-eyes windows.  

In the past, the options studied by the GSA range from placing a new fill structure between the Consumers and the Century, to replacing everything on the half-block with a huge new mega-structure.  To be fair, the small floorplates of these early skyscrapers present a signficant challenge to creating the kind of office spaces that are today's standard.

While the GSA's actions to “de-slum” the ground level spaces of the buildings north of Quincy is commendable, Chicago deserves better than having to endure the derelict state of the Century's facade year after year, with no resolution in sight.

Giant Punch Stamp on the River? First Renderings for 150 North Riverside office tower and park - Revealed and Considered

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150 North Riverside and date stamp - separated at birth?

Is a new real estate bubble rising around the Chicago River?  Long dormant land in and around Wolf Point is already under construction with two major skyscrapers, and this morning, in an email to his constituents, 42nd Ward Alderman Brendan Reilly unveiled the first renderings I've seen of the proposed office tower for 150 North Riverside, to be built on air rights over tracks leading into Union Station . . .

. . . just east of Graham Anderson, Probst and White's 1922 Butler Brothers warehouse II.

I actually worked for 6 years on its top floor before it was converted by Hartshorne Plunkard into the Randolph Place Lofts.  Unlike its twin building to the south, which was made into - and remains - offices - it's now housing, and the residential nature of Randolph Place may be a key reason while 150 North Riverside is placed in the middle of the site.  The Trib's Blair Kamin is tweeting Goettsch Partners is responsible for the design.

Unusual proposed office tower for Chicago riverfront, by Goettsch Partners, flares out from base to upper floors. pic.twitter.com/DV9Uv43Eih
— Blair Kamin (@BlairKamin) July 17, 2013

The 1.2 million square foot building is being pushed by long-time John Buck veteran John O'Donnell, now of the Chicago operations of Colliers International.  An April article by Ryan Ori in Crain's Chicago Business reported O'Donnell had given up a request for $20 million in TIF funding to get approval for the project moving forward.  River Point, currently under construction along the river across the street, got $29.5 million in TIF money to cover over the Metra tracks and create a riverfront park.  Instead, O'Donnell wants the city to give him a slice of land worth $4-5 million the city controls to make his site complete.  The rest of it was purchased for $12.5 million in 2011.

According to Crain's, Reilly had been fighting an earlier proposal because the park component wasn't at ground level.  In the rendering released in his email, the park remains entirely at the elevated street level, with no riverbank component

Boeing riverwalk

Across Randolph Street to the south, at the Boeing World Headquarters (originally designed by Perkins+Will in 1990 for Morton Salt), the riverside esplanade is split into two, relatively narrow parts, one above-grade, at the level of Randolph and Lake streets, with another narrow strip descending all the way down to the river. In the 150 Riverside rendering, the plaza space is all at street level, with a larger portion south of Lake tucked beneath the angled cantilevers of the building.

park at River Point

Across the street to the north, on the other side of Lake Street, renderings of the park building built along the river as part of the River Point shows, as at Boeing, a park split between ground and street level.  The ground level links to a riverside esplanade at the River Bend residential tower to the north. The difference is the River Point site is actually set back to the west, parallel to where the Butler Brothers building is sited to the south.  The park itself is to be a built over what looks to be pretty much the whole expanse of the Metra tracks, making the acre-and-a-half park much larger than what's possible at 150 North Riverside.  (Don't be fooled by the rendering, which is drawn from an exaggerated wide-angle perspective that makes the park look only slightly smaller than Yellowstone.)

150 North Riverside

I get what Ald. Reilly is looking for, a continuous riverwalk from River Point to the elevated plaza of the old Daily News Building.  It would require the addition of under-the-bridge linking components, but it would offer up something similar to continuous Riverwalk now under development for the south bank of the river from Lake to Wabash.   The problem, of course, is that it could only go to the old Daily News Building (now Riverside Plaza), at Madison, where the riverwalk south to Jackson is all elevated at street level.  (And let's hope 150 North doesn't give Sam Zell ideas about resurrecting his old plan to build over the Daily News Plaza.  Surprise, surprise, the Commission on Chicago Landmarks has never gotten around to landmarking this essential Chicago building.)

Daily News Building (Riverside Plaza) meets the river

So for continuity, you want a large part of the park at 150 North Riverside to be at an elevated level so it will link it to the existing river walkways north and south.  If you want to split off a walkway along the river, it would have to be somewhat narrow, and, as at Boeing, it's hard to find a graceful way to get people to the lower level without a vertiginous shotgun stairway.  In addition, the 150 North Riverside rendering also shows the space along the river beneath the plaza to be inhabited with some function not clearly apparent.

As for the building itself, if it weren't for the angled cantilever at the bottom, it really doesn't have much to distinguish itself visually at all and, at first glance, I'm not even sure the cantilever works.  There seems to be a lot of tall, tall concrete at the base.  Dear readers, what's your take?

In any event, more should learned from the public hearing.  Welcome to the arena, Mr. O'Donnell.

42nd ward alderman Brendan Reilly is sponsoring a public meeting for his constituents on 150 North Riverside, 6:00 p.m., July 31st in Walnut Ballroom of the Hotel Allegro, 171 West Randolph.

Read More:

Hour of the Wolf:  The Transformation of the Pivot Point of Chicago

The Daily News Building Plaza: Endgame for one of Chicago's Great Public Spaces?

The first of Chicago's Four New Boathouses strikes a Civic Balance at Ping Tom Park

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It's a major initiative of the Emanuel administration - making the river Chicago's “second shoreline”.  The latest fruit of that effort hit the “ripe” moment on June 9th, with the Sunday afternoon dedication of the new boathouse at Ping Tom Park, designed by Johnson and Lee Architects.

It's part of the long-term transformation that began with the the eminent domain acquisition by the Chicago Park District of a 12-acre riverfront site south of 18th street that had held a Chicago and Western Indiana rail yard.  Under the direction of Ernest Wong's Site Design Group the site became Ping Tom Memorial Park, named after the Chicago businessman and developer who hired Harry Weese to design the nearby Chinatown Square shopping center.

The Armour Square neighborhood has been Chicago's Chinatown ever since the first business moved there in 1911 from a two-block stretch of South Clark Street in the Loop.  The community's only two parks were demolished in the 1960's to make way for the construction of Dan Ryan expressway, and so it remained until Ping Tom, with it's traditionally-styled pagoda pavilion and quartet of twenty-feet-high columns opened in October of 1999.

A few years later, north of 18th street, the Park District combined five newly acquired acres with six more already owned to form Ping Tom Phase 2, united through an under-the-bridge passage with the original portion of the park to the south.

TIF money was used to build a retaining wall and natural features along the riverbank, and Phase 2 opened in 2011, the same year new mayor Rahm Emanuel announced the construction of four new boathouses along the river, including one at Ping Tom, part of an initiative to transform the park's status from neighborhood to regional.

The new Ping Tom boathouse is much less ambitious than the 20,000 square-foot Clark Park boathouse, designed by Studio/Gang, being constructed along the Chicago River north of Belmont, heading towards an August 3rd dedication.  I'm still not quite sure why the Johnson and Lee boathouse didn't wind up on the much narrower site at Clark Park, and the larger Studio/Gang facility, which is to be home to rowing clubs and regattas, situated on the far wider river at Ping Tom.  I'm sure they had their reasons.

Johnson and Lee may not have Studio/Gang's cachet - or daring - but their Ping Tom boathouse is an attractive, colorful work.  There are three basic parts.  The storage pavilion for kayaks and canoes, open and airy, is contained within metal screens painted the requisite red.

The service portion of building joined to it, housing restrooms and office space, is dark and solid.  Uniting both sections is a tall free-standing canopy, painted a neutral, mediating white, facing out to a walkway that descends to the river and a floating dock.

Less attractive is the $13 million, 28,0000-square-foot field house,.  It won't be finished until later this year, but judging from its current appearance, it looks to be just as anonymous as its Prototype-A design designation would suggest.

The field house was originally slated to be placed along the 18th Street bridge, but when buried track from the former railyard and concrete remnants of a roundhouse were discovered 5 to 12 feet underground, along with a lot of unwanted groundwater, the site was moved to a placement along the St. Charles Airway rail line.  The upside is that this resulted in several million dollars in savings, making possible an indoor pool that Park District Director of Planning Gia Biaggi told the Chicago Journal was the first built by the CPD in her more than 12 years with the agency.

The distinctive character of Ping Tom Park derives from the confluence of three strong facets of Chicago.  First of course, as an extension of the city's increasingly vibrant Chinese-American community.  Then the geography of the river.  And lastly, the one most likely to be overlooked, or even seen as an impediment - the park's immersion within Chicago's historic industrial presence.

Beyond the occasional train chugging along to the east, Ping Tom sits between two historic bridges.  To the north, there's the 1919 (relocated) St. Charles Air Line bascule bridge.  To the south, another great landmarks (they're both official): the 1914 Canal Street (now Amtrak) bridge, with its spectacular twin 195-foot-high towers and the tiny, bridge-tender house perched atop the central span.  (Control facilities were moved to a side structure long ago, but the grunge-dollhouse endures.)

Between St. Charles and Amtrak, the bridgehouse of the 1967 18th Street bridge, city-designed, strikes a handsome, more contemporary note.

18th Street Bridge House, Schoenhofen Brewery in background to right

Along the bank of the river opposite Ping Tom, there's the massive, 1910 10-story former Carson Pirie Scott warehouse, complete with graffiti at the water line, and further north, the old Continental Paper warehouse.

The first roadway west of the river?  Lumber Street, of course.

The new boathouse was dedicated with a mini extravaganza, with traditional Chinese dancers, communal fishing, and the Chicago Symphony brass section floating down the river (in a boat) with Music Director Riccardo Muti, who came ashore to conduct a performance - complete with repeat -  of the Josephine Lee's Chicago Children's Choir singing Verdi's Va Pensiero.  Between the obligatory press statement and heading out to meet Muti's boat, Mayor Rahm Emanuel could be found listening to the Civic Orchestra's brass players, looking a relaxed and happy man.

And well he should.  It's a very positive sign to see the big marque projects most often crammed into the center of the city moving out into Chicago's working class neighborhoods.

It's all a matter of balances.  Between a comfortable neighborhood park, and a buzzing but more impersonal regional one.  Between the city as it was - and is - and the city as it's becoming.  Between revitalization and gentrification. Right now, Ping Tom Park and its handsome new boathouse is at the sweet spot. 

Read More:

Studio/Gang's Clark Park Boathouse: A Century of Transformation flowing down Chicago's River