Winnetka’s landmarks preservation commission will take one more look next month at the history and architectural impact of the Fell building, the former Lincoln Avenue clothing store targeted for demolition as part of the One Winnetka project.
After that, commission chair Louise Holland said, the commission will have little choice but to approve the request to demolish the building, which has been empty since Fell Clothing closed in 2007.
Commission members who met May 1 agreed with Holland and directed Lara Ramsey, the historic preservation consultant hired by One Winnetka developer David Trandel, to create a historic and architectural impact study, to expand the study and bring it back to them in June.
Specifically, Holland said, Ramsey should revise her analysis of how the store’s demolition could negatively affect the surrounding neighborhood by adding four nearby residences into the analysis.
Ramsey said she had limited her initial analysis to commercial buildings near the Fell Clothing structure, which stands at 511-513 Lincoln Avenue but also includes 718-732 Elm Street; commission members wanted the homes included.
The commission also directed Ramsey to attach letters and emails about the building and about architect Walter Sobel to her analysis, from groups such as Landmarks Illinois and other interested parties. She said some of those would come from Walter Sobel’s son Richard Sobel, who attended the meeting in his continuing effort to save the building his father designed.
Sobel, like Holland, said Ramsey’s report should include more analysis of the possible negative impact of demolishing the former clothing store. He said its loss would affect not only the neighborhood, but Winnetka, and he asked that the commission delay its decision.
But Holland told Sobel that the commission has no power to keep the structure from being demolished.
The commission’s sole interest, she said, was in ensuring that the commission has a full history of the building: “We just want to know what’s being taken down.”
“We have no agenda to delay the project,” Holland told Winnetka resident Rob Neumann, a One Winnetka supporter who worried at the meeting about what he called “a slow arduous process” to permit the demolition.
“We have to do what the ordinance of the village tells us we can. That is to accept the report, period … what we’re saying is this building can be torn down, but we need a history of what was there,” Holland said.
Mike D’Onofrio, Winnetka’s community development director, told commission members that once they get the revised study, they would have two options: either accepting the report and approving the demolition request, or issuing a 60-day delay to explore alternatives to total demolition.
Trandel, a Winnetka resident whose retail-residential project was granted preliminary approval from the village council in January after more than a year of hearings, repeated comments he made in March, when the commission first considered his demolition request. He rejected Sobel’s suggestion that the Fell building, a low-slung modernist-style commercial building built in 1968, according to the preservation group Landmarks Illinois, could be assimilated into his project.
“My objective is not just to knock stuff down,” Trandel said, saying he has previously re-purposed older buildings as part of other Chicago area projects. “But the reality is, the building itself is not commercially viable … in today’s world, you never would have designed something like this for commercial use.”
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