It’s lucky there’s a Club Macanudo opening up next week at 60 E. Walton St.
After all, the players flocking to all the plush hotels that will be rubbing shoulders on the Gold Coast end of North Michigan Avenue are going to need somewhere to celebrate their deals.
So many plans have been announced for high-end hotels in the area that the scene is beginning to resemble the crush of pampered, polished debutantes at an old-fashioned cotillion.
The Ritz Carlton and Four Seasons, of course, are already there, standing around like the deans of society snorting into their champagne glasses, while new buds flaunt their charms.
Planning debuts in the next few years are a 400-room Sofitel at Chestnut Street and Wabash Avenue (not as rich as some others but very French); a 396-room residential hotel being done by developer Richard Stein at Wabash Avenue and Huron Street (a gracious stay-at-home); and a 192-room hotel that Hyatt Corp. will operate in the Park Tower condominium high-rise under construction at Chicago and Michigan Avenues (a hybrid blossom on a well-rooted stem).
A new applicant to the social register is the Hotel Peninsula, a 340-room deb hoping to rise 12 stories from the four-story retail complex developed by Thomas J. Klutznick & Co. at 730 N. Michigan Ave.
She comes from an exclusive family, the Hong Kong-based Peninsula Group, which has reached an agreement in principle with the Klutznick firm. Developer Tom Klutznick has been trying to woo a high-class hotel lovely for the site for several years.
Peninsula has only two hotels in the United States, one in New York that is closed and under renovation and one in Beverly Hills, according to Karen Klutznick, vice president of the Klutznick firm.
Klutznick described the Beverly Hills hotel, where rooms cost about $350 a night, as “low key” with “exceptional service,” and added that the Chicago Peninsula would compete with the Ritz and the Four Seasons.
“There’s still room in the market, especially at the higher end,” Klutznick said.
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Rival developer Stein welcomed the new entrant, which he called “first class,” saying that having a cluster of top hotels would be good for all of them.
He added he had been expecting a hotel all along on the site, and indeed Klutznick had sunk foundations for a hotel when he was building the retail complex on Michigan between Superior Street and Chicago Avenue that includes Tiffany & Co. and Pottery Barn stores.
Cost estimates for the Peninsula project, for which final plans are expected to be ready in a few months, run in the $100 million area.
Bring on the cigars and champagne, and let the cotillion begin.
Big-box bingo: What happens to old Builders Square stores when they die? They are reborn as palaces of pleasure and sport.
Bally Total Fitness Holdings Corp., a Chicago-based chain of health and fitness centers, recently leased almost a third of the space in an 80,000-square-foot store formerly occupied by a Builders Square at Scharrington Square Shopping Center in Schaumburg.
And in January, a 58,000-square-foot former Builders Square in Melrose Park was leased by Cinemark USA Inc. for redevelopment into a 10-screen movie complex.
Jim Sakanich, a vice president with CB Commercial Real Estate Group, which was involved in both deals, said empty “big-box” spaces have been left littering the landscape in the last few years due to consolidation and resizing among hardware, electronics, food and clothing retailers.
A CB survey last fall said there were 113 vacant “big-box” properties over 25,000 square feet in the Chicago area, down slightly from 118 the previous January.
The largest concentrations were in the western suburbs from Oak Brook to Naperville, with 22 vacant sites, and the greater Schaumburg area, 21 sites.
Entertainment-type operations are among the few businesses that can use substantial portions of the cavernous spaces, he said, adding that they like the ample parking and the traffic-heavy locations.
Other users are medical groups and big call centers for telemarketing and customer-service operations, where hundreds of people sit around on the phone, he added.
All of which goes to show that services such as movies, fitness centers, medicine and phone-answering can move in when goods move out. And that services can be supplied on a massive scale.
What other needs can be met in big boxes? How about bingo parlors?
“It wouldn’t surprise me,” Sakanich said.