Overbite: Will New Plan for Old Post Office Amount to Anything?

image courtesy The Chuckman Collection

Yesterday the Chicago Plan Commission voted to approve a development plan for Chicago's old Post Office, the massive, two block 1932, Graham, Anderson, Probst and White structure that spans the Congress Expressway just west of the river. 

rendering Antunovich Associates

As reported by David Roeder of the Sun-Times, Phase I would involve 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 is $1.5 billion.  The Plan Commission vote can be seen as a casting of bait to attract potential investors to foot the bill for the plan of the Post Office's current owner, International Property Developers and its secretive CEO, British developer Bill Davies, who began his career at 15 as a construction worker and by the time he was 24 was running his own real estate company.

Will they bite? As detailed in a 2007 profile profile by Tony McDonough of the Liverpool Daily Post, Davies' track record is 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.

In Chicago, Davies won control of the post office in August of 2009 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.

rendering Antunovich Associates

Davies may be a visionary, as the renderings for the Post Office, the second phase of which includes a 2,000-foot-tower, would attest.  He's known to be a tough negotiator.  Yet his most consistent credential is the inability to actually build anything, and to holding onto properties for so long that increasingly frustrated civic officials pay him, sometimes handsomely, just for going away.

The structures depicted in the renderings from project architect Antonovich Associates are striking, and Antunovich is carefully integrating 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 be 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

Should the build-out 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 is actually a good - or even viable - idea.  When the 275,000 square-foot Block 37 mall, across from Macy's, is still largely empty, can 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 should take a breather.  It's already here.

Read More:

International Property Developers North America website 

 from 2005:  Monument Mori - Post Office of the Dead