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

The Brick Stackers

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No city in the world, not even New York, has found such general use for common brick as we have found here on Lake Michigan.  Chicago brick, in addition to being used in business blocks, factories, residences and other buildings is widely used in building sewers and other construction work.  The outside demand for Chicago brick has been beyond the ability of the local plants to supply with their present equipment.  Millions of brick are  shipped to every surrounding state, as many as thirteen states being served with Chicago brick.

Chicago is fortunate in possessing a supply of what is known as �surface� clay.  This clay is the result of the glacial drift and is entirely suitable for the manufacture of what is known as common building brick.  In fact, it is superior to many other clays for this purpose, because of the ease with which is is prepared and the rapidity with which it can be fired and burned.  It is of a quality that can be manufactured into brick by what is known as the stiff-mud process, the most rapid method for making brick, and Chicago is now consuming brick at the rate of over a billion brick annually.

             - Chicago The Greatest Brick Center,
                   the Chicago Examiner, 1910

As with so many other things that were once the city's pride, Chicago stopped making brick a long time ago.  And yet the demand remains for what has come to be known as Chicago brick.  Not the high-toned glazed or polished brick with which buildings prepare the face to meet the faces of the other buildings it meets along the street, but the homely, rock-solid, non-face brick for secondary elevations along the side or alley,  There's still a strong demand for that unpretentious work-a-day brick retaining an abject beauty all its own.

And so when we knock down buildings, as we're wont to do, the crews move in to sort through the rubble for the bricks not ruptured in the wrecking, to chip them clean to be neatly stacked and strapped and recycled.

As we've written previously, the Sterling Bay Companies is slowly becoming Lord-of-the-Manor to Chicago's historic Fulton Market District, transforming it from its century-plus role as home to the city's meatpackers and food and dairy resellers to a high-tech district replete with health clubs, art galleries, fashion boutiques and trendy restaurants .  Sterling Bay's first assault was its most audacious - taking over the massive, windowless fortress of 1920's 12-story, nearly four million cubic foot Fulton Market Cold Storage building, melting decades' buildup of ice, stripping off the old facades down to the bare concrete bones, and converting the structure into office space where Google will consolidate its Chicago operations.

Last week, Fulton Market Cold Storage, now renamed 1K Fulton, was well on its way, with a new annex rising just to the west and retro-styled piers - of newly manufactured brick - being put in place on the spare concrete frame for the building's redesigned windowed facades.

Now Sterling Bay is mopping up the scraps. Among other Fulton Market acquisitions, last fall they snapped up a series of properties along Lake Street west of Morgen, old one-story buildings of no particular aesthetic merit but that had served a succession of business well for nearly a century.

No more.   Those buildings are dust.  With some surviving bricks left behind.  Good Chicago bricks, finding a new home at a place where their character -  if not their provenance - still finds respect.

Gustave Courbet, The Stonebreakers (destroyed)

Googleplex comes to Fulton Market

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This how functioning cities evolve.

rendering courtesy Sterling Bay

Crain's Real Estate Daily reported last week that Google is consolidating its Chicago office space, much of it at a Perkins+Will building at 20 West Kinzie, into 1KFulton (will the move come with renaming rights?), the former Fulton Cold Storage warehouse that has been stripped down to its bare bones awaiting the new facades of a Hartshorne Plunkard-designed retrofit.  The developer, Sterling Bay, is proving itself one of the most adapt practitioners in Chicago right now, with the Google catch coming off Sterling Bay doubling its investment in little more than a year at 400 South Jefferson, the former lithographers loft building in the West Loop that, like Fulton Cold Storage, was stripped to its concrete frame and given new, more open facades as the headquarters of Hillshire Brands, the Sara Lee spin-off that returned to Chicago after a decades-long sojourn in the suburbs.

1K Fulton (Work. Eat. Chill. says their website)  is the centerpiece of a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood marked by former lofts converted to residential and boutique hotels, and former industrial buildings to upscale restaurants, shops, and art galleries.  Which, in turn, will eventually be replaced by Gap stores and Starbucks when the transition fully matures.

The sea change already has its own lighthouse in the stunning new Ross Barney-designed Green Line station at Morgan Street.

As you can see in the photos at the top of this post, the last vestige of 1KFulton's historic identity - the huge sign on the tower - has now been stripped away along with the brick on which it was painted.  The Google move could be a game-changer, making Fulton Market a high-tech hub.  Is it only a matter of time before the last meat packing, fish mongering and food processing businesses are completely crowded out and effaced from the district that they gave its name?  In an increasingly virtual world, the actual retreats.

Read More:

• Crain's Real Estate Daily:  Google to move to West Loop(with pictures)
• Strippers Attack, Heat Up Fulton Market(more pictures)
• Instant Landmark:  TranSystems and Ross Barney's Morgan Street Station
• One Tower for the Meatpackers; One for the Fashionistas - Ross Barney's new Morgan Street Station bridges old and new Fulton Market. (again, pictures)