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)

Strippers Attack, Heat Up Fulton Market

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Is this the tipping point? Will its name soon be the only thing left of the blood and grit of an historic bare-knuckles district of the kind that cities once depended upon to sustain their more elegant veneers?

As far back as 2006, the New York Times travel section was touting Chicago's Fulton Market district for its side-by-side clash of meat packers and butter and egg firms that had been there for years with newcomer art galleries and trendy restaurants.  For as long as anyone could remember - since 1920, to be exact - the neighborhood's iconic visual marker was the 12-story tall Fulton Market Cold Storage Warehouse.

The massive building was created by three owners of the 757-room Sherman House Hotel of 1911, which long dominated the block at Clark and Randolph that's now the site of the Thompson Center.  On a full-block site in the Fulton Market district, architect/engineers Gardner and Lindberg designed a $1,250,000 reinforced-concrete structure with soaring, windowless walls trimmed with terra-cotta ornament.  Three different rail lines passed just a block away, with one rail running directly to the warehouse's receiving area.  The facility . . .

was opened in a most auspicious manner Tuesday, October 19.  A large representation of the trade with numerous other friends of the company attended and were hospitably entertained at a buffet lunch following which parties were made up and conducted by officials through the spacious building.

It was originally intended to be just the first part of a $4,500,000 project that would ultimately encompass 10.5 million cubic feet and 888 tons of refrigerating capacity.  That never happened.  A lower, smaller building was eventually constructed to fill out the block, but Fulton Cold Storage's status as the center of the neighborhood remained unchallenged.  According to historian Emily Lambert, �Almost everyone on the street brought product there and stored it when their coolers were full.�

And so, the great behemoth, with its name visible for blocks from the two-story tower at the top, stared down impassive and unmoved as one successive generation after another came, and then went.  Until 2011.  It was then that the building's owner Amit Hasak saw the writing on the refrigerated wall, and moved his cold storage operations to a more efficient single-story facility in Lyons, selling the Fulton Warehouse to Sterling Bay, a company that was then  making a name for itself by stripping off the facades of  the streamlined former lithography company building at 400 South Jefferson, down to the bare concrete skeleton, and rehabbing and reclading the structure as a new home for Hillshire Brands, the company split off from Sara Lee that was relocating from the suburbs to downtown.

400 South Jefferson

It was a critical and financial triumph for Sterling Bay, which bought 400 South Jefferson for $10 million, spent $50 million on the rehab, and then put it on the market for $100 million - all within little more than a year.  Now Sterling Bay is repeating the process at a far bigger scale, converting Fulton Market Cold Storage to 1K Fulton (a play on the 1000 West Fulton address), �a state-of-the-art LEED certified office and retail building . . . The 10-story building will be annexed by a new six-story structure, creating flexible floor plates ranging from 38,500 to 71,000 square feet.� Column centers are 21 feet, with 12-foot-high ceilings on the top eight floors, and 14 feet on the first and second. Hartshorne Plunkard Architecture are the designers.   Delivery date: 2Q2014.
To start, great timeless cocoons of ice had to be melted down and drained away.  (You can see more remarkable photos of the process on the Perkins+Will blog here.)   Then the crews from Heneghen (We Make Space) Wrecking rolled in to smash away those long-serving battlement-like walls, stripping the building, at least temporarily, down to pure structure.

It's an incredible sight.  I'd strongly recommend you get down there to see it before it's covered up again, because, at least on two sides, the new facades, although practical, appear, at least at first glance, not especially inspired.

rendering: Sterling Bay Company

If you look at the rendering above, the two-story tower has completely disappeared.  On the 1K Fulton website, however, there's a page promoting �signage opportunities� on a rather pathetic, generic-looking stub perched on the roofline.  A bit more exciting is this rendering of the west side of the old warehouse . . .

rendering: Sterling Bay Company

. . .  encased entirely in glass, linked to the new annex building on what is now the undeveloped half of the block.  If the execution follows the rendering, this transparent wall takes on the appearance of a reliquary putting the whole of the concrete skeleton's perfect geometry on permanent public display. What was once a hidden-away workflow of frozen carcasses in temporary repose dissolves into an epic street theater canvass of warm restless bodies, swaddled in the cells of a seemingly infinite grid of open loft space, bees within a high-tech honeycomb.