Football is a game of inches, as the commentators say when all other cliches fail. So, clearly, is big-time development.
A few inches in the hotel rooms of the new 67-story Park Hyatt Hotel and Park Tower condominium spire in Chicago’s Water Tower Park have resulted in a few months of delay in starting the building.
The project was announced with great fanfare more than 18 months ago as a replacement for the unlovely old Park Hyatt. At the time, it set out to be on the leading edge of the new wave of hotel construction, well positioned to take advantage of the growing hotel boom.
LR Realty and Hyatt Development Corp. quickly shut down the old hotel and demolished it last spring, but there has been a hiatus between teardown and construction.
LR President Bruce Abrams said the group wanted to get the old hotel down as soon as possible once it was vacated. “Nobody wanted to insure a vacant building,” he said.
But the detailed architectural drawings took a year to complete, and they couldn’t begin until after the original announcement, because the builders didn’t want to pay for the drawings until they knew what community reaction would be–an essential point at such a focal site.
Then a few months ago, the designers at Lucien Lagrange and Associates Ltd. and another Dallas architectural firm planning the building decided they were short a few inches of space in the hotel rooms.
To solve the problem, the developers acquired the three-story Wally Findlay Galleries building next door and reconfigured the hotel to wrap around that historic edifice, which will be preserved for retail use. (The venerable gallery actually moved a few blocks away last October.)
Moving some hotel functions into the new seven-story structure embracing the old gallery building on the west side will deliver the needed inches–which make a world of difference in the rooms, Abrams said.
Now, the developers plan a ceremonial groundbreaking sometime in the next few weeks at the site, which will be a welcome sign of movement at one of Chicago’s most prominent locations.
A journey of 67 stories begins with a few inches, to paraphrase the ancient Chinese sage.
Where the money is: Lucien Lagrange, meanwhile, will be able to keep a closer watch on those inches mounting up, having relocated recently from One Financial Place in the South Loop to 605 N. Michigan Ave., a 1922-vintage four-story building with a classical facade occupied most prominently now by Bigsby & Kruthers.
The move underlines the point that North Michigan Avenue is where the big development action is in Chicago, from the new Park Hyatt to the John Buck/Morgan Stanley project called Bridge North, a hotel/retail complex anchored by a Nordstrom store.
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LL&A has done other jobs on the Mag Mile for U.S. Equities Realty in recent years–revamping the John Hancock Center and designing the 840 N. Michigan Ave. retail complex, home to Escada and FAO Schwarz.
Presumably they like the neighborhood–and why not? It’s just a case of following the money trail.
The rent money: The money trail also leads to and from information technology these days, and area high-tech firms may get soaked for higher and higher rents as they expand in coming years, according to a survey by the Chicago Software Association and real estate advisory firm Julien J. Studley Inc.
The survey of the software association’s 500 members identified a lack of flexibility in the firms’ leases, with only 49 percent having termination options and only 15 percent having expansion options.
“As time goes by, it will become more difficult for high-technology companies to identify appropriate space for their operations without incurring higher rent expenses,” said Studley senior managing director David Gelfand, co-author of the study.
Another significant finding: More than 69 percent of respondents say they would like the software group to back a technology center in the Chicago area, with 44 percent saying they’d lease space in such a facility.
That’s an idea that’s been kicking around for years, and both the city and state have expressed interest in the project, but so far it’s been gathering moss.
New York business and political leaders, in contrast, got an information technology center going three years ago, creating a Silicon Alley in the Wall Street area that is a major job-creating engine.
Our leaders appear to be low-energy when it comes to high-tech.
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Editor’s note: Inside the Workplace, which had been a regular Wednesday feature, is moving to a soon-to-be expanded Sunday Jobs section. It will debut in its new home on Feb. 1. Inside Commercial Real Estate will appear every Wednesday in its place.