Developer Scott Toberman, reportedly planning the world’s tallest office building at the corner of Dearborn and Madison Streets in the Loop, may be seeking some kind of city subsidy or city-brokered financial help for the deal.
Toberman, president of Chicago-based European American Realty Co., won’t confirm word he’s planning a 2,000-foot spire that will outshoot all other buildings, but he does acknowledge he’s negotiating with the city on changes to his previously announced plan for a 1,220-foot building at that site.
He said he’ll make an announcement in a couple of weeks when he expects to conclude negotiations with the city that will include financing details for the $300 million project.
He wouldn’t say the city would be involved in the financing, but City Hall does have a strong interest in a broadcast antenna for TV stations that need a new, 2,000-foot facility to transmit high-definition TV signals.
Major local stations are reportedly ready to help finance a new antenna tower.
Further, the site is located in the Loop tax increment financing district, which could provide a way for the city to help out with a broadcast tower project.
Chicago Planning Department spokeswoman Becky Carroll said Planning Commissioner Christopher Hill hasn’t seen detailed plans yet, so it’s too early to discuss the project’s financing. But Carroll acknowledged it’s “not impossible” the tower could get some city assistance.
Toberman, who two months ago said he was negotiating for financing, now sounds very confident. “This project will happen. There is no question,” he said.
Doctor in the house: Workers in the Loop who visit the doctor or dentist during weekdays know there are a handful of downtown buildings that despite their antiquity, poky dimensions and unfashionable addresses will always have tenants.
The key cluster of these aged aristocrats is around Wabash Avenue and Washington Street in the East Loop–the Pittsfield Building at 55 E. Washington (built in 1927), the Garland Building at 111 N. Wabash (1914), 25 E. Washington (1914), and 30 N. Michigan Ave. (1914).
(Clearly, 1914 was a banner year for doctors, dentists and developers, even if World War I was breaking out in Europe.)
Whoever the tenants were back then, the offices are now home to hundreds of practitioners who tend the bodies, teeth and psyches (therapists congregate there as well) of people who work in all the other buildings downtown.
Patrick Caruso, president of L.J. Sheridan & Co., which manages the Garland Building and recently brokered its $11 million sale, said it is different from other old, small, “Class C” buildings, many of which are half-empty or being converted to other uses.
“This is a niche building, not like a lot of other `C’ buildings,” he said. “It has a very good quality, stable tenancy.”
The 260,000-square-foot Garland Building was foreclosed on by a Japanese bank in 1991, and the bank spent about $5 million updating the roof, lobby, and fire and safety systems, Caruso said.
The new owners, a group of Chicago-area real estate investors, are planning further renovations to the air circulation system, elevators, corridors and bathrooms, he added.
The building has about 260 medical professionals and about 25 other assorted tenants, Caruso said. That reflects the fact that medical types like to congregate–it makes referrals more convenient–and also the fact that other tenants tend to shun such neighborhoods.
“A lot of tenants don’t want to be around medical,” he said. “They don’t want to be with patients, bandaged and limping.”
Medical tenants are also demanding, requiring extra water and special cleaning crew procedures to handle medical waste. So such buildings get rents about 15 percent higher than comparable non-medical buildings–another reason that non-medical tenants don’t flock to them.
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But the buildings have a very stable income. “There’s not much turnover in physician groups if they are good and well established, although we have some who have retired and moved to Arizona or died,” Caruso said.
The previous owner lost the building to foreclosure not because of a lack of tenants but because he paid too much for it during the go-go 1980s, Caruso noted.
There are many such classic medical buildings in central cities around the country, and even some in the neighborhoods and older suburbs–the handsome old Hyde Park Bank Building and the Carlson Building in Evanston come to mind.
So, downtown workers, the next time you get a cavity filled, remember your dentist is keeping a fine old building intact as well as your mouth.