The 75 E. Wacker Drive building, which has been caged like a wild beast since city inspectors found unstable terra cotta on its facade last fall, may eventually become a home sweet home.
A real estate source said an offer has been made on the property from someone interested in turning the 37-story building into condominiums.
A spokeswoman for Jones Lang LaSalle, which manages the building for owner Grand Canyon Corp., an investment group backed by Greek money, said “several offers have been extended” for the building. She declined to say who was making the offers.
She said the repairs to the building will continue until the end of 2001, meaning the scaffolding around it could be there another 2 1/2 years.
The distinctive design and slender figure of the 120,000-square-foot building, Chicago’s tallest when it was built in 1928, could make it an attractive possibility for residential conversion.
And it might make sense to convert it while it’s still caged up.
Squeaky clean? There’s clean, there’s really clean and then there’s bottom-line clean–which may be only adequately clean.
More Top Picks Best Color Changing Smart Bulbs For Kids Rooms
These distinctions are contemplated daily by David Tarson, president of Norridge-based Kimco Corp., one of a few big contract building maintenance companies that provide janitorial service for Chicago office buildings.
Kimco said the quest for bottom-line results by property management firms is making his business tougher and forcing him to cut down occasionally on the level of service he can supply.
All of the top building owners and property managers say they want top quality, but they’re not always willing to pay for it, Tarson said.
Janitors are also expected to clean more space per hour than they used to, though the technology hasn’t changed much. “We’re using the same vacuum cleaners we’ve always used,” he said.
On the other hand, rules barring smoking, which filmed everything with grime, have made cleaning easier, he said. So have carpeted floors, which don’t get a thorough going-over every day the way bare floors did.
None of the top buildings are dirty, he added. But clean to one building manager or tenant may mean that every hair on a carpet is brushed up, quivering at attention, and to another may mean simply that there aren’t any scraps of paper on the floor.
The biggest contract squeezes come from the City of Chicago, which has outsourced a lot of its janitorial work, Tarson said. The city takes the lowest bidder, which can lead to “skip-cleaning”–meaning that some area simply isn’t cleaned every day, he added. Tarson noted Kimco doesn’t have any city contracts.
Skip-cleaning. Now there’s a business concept that sounds familiar from the home front.
Family planning: A 50-story rental tower in the planning for Illinois Center will have some 3-bedroom units to accommodate families among its 475 or so apartments, says one of the developers.
Architect James Loewenberg said that after talking with city planners, the development group decided to go along with Mayor Richard Daley’s desire to get middle-class families with children into the downtown area.
“We’ll see what the response is going to be. We’ll have a limited number,” said Loewenberg, adding that the 3-bedroom units will be put next to one-bedroom units so that both can be converted to two-bedroom units should the market be unresponsive to the larger apartments.
The development group is made up of Charles E. Smith Residential Realty, a Virginia-based real estate investment trust; Near North Properties Inc., which is headed by Loewenberg; and Magellan Development Group Ltd. The same group is nearing completion of another apartment tower at 1 W. Superior St.
———-
MORE ON THE INTERNET: Read previous “Inside Commercial Real Estate” columns at chicagotribune.com/go/insider