Four Chicago Rooftop Scenes

Cuppola with birds griffins (click images for larger view)

bottle in mesh carry

Renaissance Scrabble

Activated Virgin

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For a time, rumors circulated that it had all fallen through, the plan to convert the Art Deco Old Dearborn Bank Building at Wabash and Lake into a hotel.  It was all the way back in 2011 when Richard Branson had announced that the 27-story property would become a 250 room flagship in his Virgin Hotel chain, a $89.7 million project aided by $6.5 in property tax breaks from the building's designation as a national landmark.  Then - nothing.  Even after street scaffolding sealed off the building at beginning of this year, one hospitality website described the status as �crickets, not construction.�

Then, late last month, beams started to poke out from the windows six floors below the roof . . .

. . . and now, the entire top has blossomed into scaffolding, shrouded in red like a raw spring blossom . . .

photograph: Bob Johnson

As seen in photographs from our indefatigable correspondent Bob Johnson, crews of workman can now be seen on moveable platforms clinging to the facades, stripping away brick from the corners . . .

photograph: Bob Johnson

According to the Landmark Commission's usual superb report, Old Dearborn is one of only two office buildings - the other being the Paramount Building in New York City - designed by the architectural firm of Rapp and Rapp, best known for ornate movie palaces like the Chicago and the Oriental.

The Old Dearborn Bank followed novelist Raymond Motley's famous line, �Live fast, die young, and have a good-looking corpse.�  The bank was founded in 1919 by the founder of Kraft cheese, boomed during the Roaring 20's, bought the lot at Wabash and Lake in 1925, spent $1.5 million on the new building, opened it in 1928, and was liquidated four years later.  The bank space became retail, while the office floors continued to cater to medical professionals and small businesses.

Flash forward to 2001, when an investor group paid $$9.5 million for the 186,000-square-foot building, and over the next decade let multiple deals worth as much as $22 million slip through their fingers.  Two separate hotel companies were interested at different times, and a third investor proposed converting the building to student housing.  In 2009, Old Dearborn, a/k/a/ 203 North Wabash went into foreclosure, and in 2010 the loan - and the property - was taken over Urban Street Group LLC.  By that time, as a result of the declining economy and non-renewal of leases to clear out tenants to make way for the anticipated residential conversion, occupancy had fallen to 38%.  Urban Street announced its attention to convert Old Dearborn to apartments, but just a year later, it sold the building to Virgin.

A super-slim 48 by 140 feet, Old Dearborn is today actually better suited to a hotel than to office tenants requiring larger floorplates.  The steel frame is expressed in piers of handsome brick that rise without horizontal interruption, emphasizing verticality in classic Chicago skyscraper style.

The facades are as restrained as a bank - until the animals get loose.  They're all over the place - massive strange birds, lions, griffins, human grotesques, dragons and . . . squirrels.  Lots of squirrels.

(As AIA/Chicago's Laurie Peterson has pointed out to me, squirrels - always burying their assets for later access - are a well-known symbol for banks.  They also figure prominently on such buildings as Halsey, McCormack and Helmer's Williamsburg Savings Bank Tower in Brooklyn.  Since the end of World War II a squirrel has featured prominently -if with increasing abstraction - in the logo of France's second largest bank, Groupe Caisse d'�pargne.)

You can admire Old Dearborn's clean lines, but, ultimately, it's the over-the-top ornament that is the building's glory.

. . . did we mention ducks? . . .

The cast bronze spandrel panels appear to be in good shape . . .

. . . but no small number of the terra cotta spandrel panels were apparently damaged, and are now being removed . . .

The Landmarks Commission Permit Review specifications from April of 2012 dictate that replacement masonry �match the size, color, profile, finish and texture of the historic masonry . . . The terra cotta base of the building shall be cleaned with the gentlest means possible.�  There is no reference to preserving the original coffered ceiling, complete with still more plaster animals.  Described in the designation report as �severely damaged�, it was  hidden from view by a  drop ceiling long ago.

Lobby Stair, from the Landmarks Commission Designation Report

When Virgin announced it was getting into the hotel business via a new website back in 2010, its stated ambition was to acquire half a billion dollars in properties over the following three years. Chicago was somehow missing from the published list of �major urban markets� targeted for hotels serving travelers in the �creative class,� yet its opening, now scheduled for the first quarter of 2014,  will be the new hotel chain's first. A second property in California remains an unconfirmed rumor.

Richard Branson was in Chicago this past January, touring the building and hitting the major sights - Rahm, the Pritzkers - while raising $800,000 for Branson's Virgin Unite foundation.  In a blog post, Branson wrote about talking to Emanuel on the importance of green energy.  There's also been discussion about making the hotel a high-tech mecca, but so far, few details. The original announcement in 2011 named John Buck as co-developer, but I could find nothing more than the original press release on Buck's website.

There's none of the usual promotional signage at the site with renderings and credits.  Who's doing the preservation work on the terra cotta?  Booth/Hansen has issued press releases announcing they are the architects for the project, but there doesn't appear to be any other mention of the project on their website.  Branson directed readers to watch Twitter under the #virginrumors hashtag for updates, but the latest Tweet, from February 1st, directs readers to a �Sneak Peak� post on the Hotels of the Rich and Famous website that's mistakenly illustrated with photos from the lobby of a completely different property, the Jewelers Building on Wacker.

There's an Apple-like aura of mystery about what's actually going on with at 203 North.  For a project scheduled to come on line in less than a year, a promotional campaign - no matter how spare and controlled - is past due.  If you've got any good info, please pass it on.  We're just hoping Branson lights up the angry birds along the roof line.  All those great, weird animal ornaments are ready-made branding devices.

Things Change: The pulled window shades of London Guarantee; the vanishing mesa of Fulton Market

update July 3, 2013:  Crain's Chicago Business is reporting the London Guarantee is being purchased by the developer of the new Langham Hotel in Mies van der Rohe's IBM Building.

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No, the tenants of gently-curving, 1923 Alfred Alschuler London Guarantee Building at Wacker and Michigan haven't turned into recluses.   They've simply disappeared.  The small samples of lit windows in the facades are the offices of the last hold-outs.  As reported by Crain's Chicago Business, the building's New York owner Joseph Chetrit has been emptying out London Guarantee as leases expire, for some sort of retrofit - perhaps a hotel.  With its Corinthian columns at the door and ornate rotunda, it's already has a stage-set Grand Hotel entrance.

Maybe they should get John David Mooney to use all those window shades for a lighting event to keep awareness of the building alive while Chetrit decides what to do with it.

Hotels seem to be the answer of the moment to an increasing number of development questions.  A new hotel in Mies van der Rohe's 330 North Wabash/IBM Building is moving towards completion, while Richard Branson continues his conversion of Rapp and Rapp's slightly delirious 203 North Wabash into a Virgin Hotel.

Here's hoping Branson's marketing people have enough savvy to deploy those huge, angry birds at the top as a branding device.

The latest news concerns the Marshall and Fox designed Atlantic Bank (Federal Life) Building, constructed in 1912.

 Crain's is reporting it's about to be converted into a 145-room boutique Hotel Indigo.

 It's only about 74,000 square feet, but was constructed to accommodate an additional four floors, which the new owner is planning to add.  Here's hoping they keep the distinctive current roofline, which includes an ornate cornice, but only only on the western facade.

It's a remnant from the time when the Garland Court was a functional street rather than a dumpster-appointed alley.

Our last metamorphosis is probably the most pronounced.  Since 1920, the 5,000,000 cubic foot Fulton Cold Storage Warehouse was the architectural marker for its food market neighborhood.  The area began to gentrify, slowly at first, with galleries, restaurants and condos, but the process reached a tipping point, encased in steel, with the opening of Carol Ross Barney's spectacular Morgan Street Green Line station last fall. [Read: Instant Landmark]

Last year, Amit Hasak, the long-time owner-operator of the warehouse, saw the writing on the wall, moving to Lyons and selling off the massive structure to Sterling Bay, which is converting it to offices, with retail and/or restaurants on the first floor.
The video above shows the defrosting of the old building.  It's as if 90+ years of life, in this case contained not in blood, but ice, being drained away before the corpse is re-animated. The Perkins + Will blog has some extraordinary photographs of ice formations within the building, here.

This conversion will ramp up the Fulton Market District's escape from its grungy commercial origins, even as it effaces its character.  Office tenants, reasonably, like windows, and soon Fulton Cold Storage will look a lot like any other large loft office building in the West Loop.  The totemic quality of this unique structure, this steep architectural mesa omnipresent on the horizon, impermeable and rock solid, 10 tall floors rising to the sky with shear walls of brick, both finished and raw, will disappear into the generic.

No room for cheap nostalgia: it must be so. But it was a hell of a thing.

The Heretofore Unmentioned: MDA City Apartments

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I came to the MDA City Apartments, at the southeast corner of Lake and Wabash, during Open House Chicago last year, mostly as an opportunity to get on their roof and take pictures of the grotesques atop 203 North Wabash.  As I learned then, and again this year, the MDA is one of those buildings few have heard of but that has its own interesting history.

Designed by Daniel Burnham, Jr.  and completed in 1927, it's 24 floors, 290-feet high.  Originally known as the Medical and Dental Arts Building, it was home to both the Chicago Dental Society and the Chicago Medical Society, as well as a larger roster of doctors and dentists.  In October of 1939, it was the site of the first meeting of the Chicago chapter of Alcoholics Anonymous.  Their 1940 New Year's Eve party was noted as featuring a "large assortment of sobered up piano players."  The Chicago Literary Club, founded in 1874, moved to the 22nd floor as a cheaper alternative to their previous lodgings in the Fine Arts Building, and the same floor was the site of 10 cent lectures sponsored by the Marxist publication The New Masses in the 1930's.  In 1929, the Tribune reported that Mrs. Benjamin Baskin gave birth to a baby boy in one of the elevators.  I'd like to think the building's large population of doctors included least one obstetrician.

Over time, the structure evolved into a more traditional office building, and was known for the rather ugly paint job on its top floor facades.  In 2003, the building, renamed MDA City Apartments, underwent a $45 million upgrade by Hartshorne Plunkard Architecture that saw the offices converted to 190 luxury rental units, with an outlet of the Elephant and Castle restaurant chain on the first floor of the limestone clad base, which also includes an Artisan Pastoral Cheese Shop.

During Open House Chicago, I got a highly informative tour of the building from Lauren of the Management Office, which included the handsome "Sky Park" at the top, with both a club room . . .

and an outside deck offering striking views of the Loop L going both south and west . . .

the Chicago skyline . . .

 and Millennium Park . .  .

From the 1950's until it moved into it's own building at the base of MOMO at State and Randolph, the Booth/Hansen building now known as the Joffrey Ballet tower, and was one of the locations used by Robert Altman for his film, The Company.  This barre is the last visible artifact of the Joffrey's tenancy.

The space on 8th floor was once a medical amphitheater for observing operations, complete with skylight.  Today, it's split into two segments - the exercise room, and a film theater.

The blank-walled east side of the building featured a large mural, Loop Tattoo by Johanna Poethig (thanks to the Chicago Architecture Blog for the info) . . .

 . . . which is due to be covered up by 73 East Lake, a 42-story tall apartment tower now rising, that will wrap around MDA, facing both Lake and Wabash.

And, of course, there's the great view of its neighbors to the north, on the building now becoming a Virgin International hotel (can you tell it was designed by Rapp and Rapp?) . . .