The long-delayed Gateway Plaza to transform the area around the Howard Street “L” station will finally manifest some clear signs of development over the next few weeks.
The project has been discussed for more than 10 years and construction in the project’s present version was scheduled to start in September 1997.
Since then a variety of matters have caused delays, including site preparation, obtaining permits and vacating streets, according to Rudy Mulder, chairman of Urban Investment Trust, developer of the $60 million shopping and entertainment center.
Mulder said the first structure, a Dominick’s supermarket, will start to rise from the ground in the next couple of weeks. Dominick’s itself is doing the development of the building and expects to open the store in April, he added.
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Foundation work also has been started for a 14-screen Cineplex Odeon and a parking garage, and construction should get under way just after New Year’s Day, Mulder said.
Nearby, developer Jay Johnson has sewed up a $2.8 million package with LaSalle National Bank to go ahead with the redevelopment of the Howard Street Theater into 40 low-income apartments and more than 15,000 square feet of retail space, which will be managed by Hispanic Housing Community Development Corp.
Both projects are in a tax increment financing district approved by the Chicago City Council this year.
What’s brewing: If the stock market didn’t tell you that high-tech was hot, Gyo Obata could.
He’s co-chairman and director of design of St. Louis-based
Hellmuth, Obata & Kassabaum, which claims to be the largest architectural firm in the country.
Obata–in town recently as a host for a preview media peek at Northwestern Memorial Hospital’s new $580 million, Near North Side academic medical center, of which he was principal architect–said high-tech firms have been HOK’s best corporate customers recently.
“From projects we get in the corporate world, the most building is coming from high-tech and computer people . . . Microsoft, Adobe, Sun Microsystems and Compaq,” he said.
The high-tech companies–not surprisingly, since their own products tend to change completely every year or so–are somewhat impatient, he noted.
“They want a million-square-foot campus designed and built in a year,” he said. But the problem is that the construction industry “is still pretty old-fashioned,” he added.
Institutional work–such as museums and, of course, hospitals–and sports arenas also are strong. “Corporate office is pretty slow. Everybody is overbuilt,” he added.
Globally, HOK’s Hong Kong office is dragging, and Tokyo isn’t much better. Things in London, on the other hand, are clipping along, and Europe is binging on art museums.
“There’s a real cultural resurgence,” he said. “I don’t know where they all get their paintings.”
Prisons and courthouses also are bringing HOK a lot of design work, including the biggest federal courthouse in the country, in St. Louis.
“I guess that says something about society,” said Obata, whose firm this year expanded its Chicago office, moving into the landmark Inland Steel Building at 30 W. Monroe St.
What it says, apparently, is that people, at least in the Western world, are expecting to have a lot of leisure time, which they will spend buying computers or in sports arenas and art museums, from which they will proceed either to jail or the hospital.
Office spaces: More signs of a strong off-Loop market for small office tenants come from GK Development, which recently purchased a seven-story, 70,000-square-foot factory building at 947 W. Van Buren St. that it intends to turn not into loft condos but into offices.
GK President Garo Kholamian said he intends to renovate the building, previously used by a manufacturer and distributor of foam products, to accommodate smaller professional users, such as graphic arts, public relations and law firms.
Kholamian said all the recent West Loop residential conversion (and there’s a lot more coming) is softening residential demand, while, on the other hand, office tenants are being priced out of the tight Loop market.
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