Chicago Sun-Times: All posts by Lee Bey

Google’s new renderings of planned Thompson Center makeover in Chicago

2023-12-13T08:00:00-06:00

The Thompson Center would feature a new transparent, energy-efficient glass facade as part of Google’s $280 million renovation of the building.

Google

The Thompson Center would get a new, virtually see-through glass facade while retaining its signature 17-story atrium under the latest renovation plans revealed Wednesday by tech giant Google.

According to renderings and a statement released by the company, the building’s newfound sheerness — achieved through the use of triple-pane, energy-efficient glass — would let more natural light into the building, while allowing increased outward views for workers.

In addition, the building’s exterior colonnade and plaza would be reworked “to allow for an enhanced ground floor experience, including opportunities for more food and beverage retail and seasonal activations of the plaza,” Karen Sauder, head of Google’s Chicago operations, said in a statement.

The building’s exterior appears to lose much of its current blue, white and salmon color scheme in the redo, according to the renderings.

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But the renderings also show the building’s soaring atrium — the structure’s best feature — will be renovated and kept, rather than, say, entirely filled-in for added floor space.

Google officials offered no details on what changes in color or material might be made to the atrium.

The Sun-Times reported in October that Google had received city permits to remove the atrium’s current metal and glass skin.

Demolition of Thompson Center facade, atrium for Google makeover approved by city

The new glass exterior facade would also allow the atrium to be visible from inside outside of the building.

Google bought the Thompson Center, 100 W. Randolph St., in 2022 with the intent of turning the 38-year-old state government building into its Chicago headquarters.

The planned $280 million renovation represented a change in fortune for the eye-catching, postmodern — and unofficial landmark — building designed by the late Chicago architectural superstar Helmut Jahn.

Three previous Illinois governors wanted the building demolished, citing its age, wear and inefficiencies. But Gov. J.B. Pritzker and developer Michael Reschke engineered a rescue plan that resulted in Google buying the building for $105 million.

The Thompson would receive a new, green plaza as part of Google’s renovation plan for the building.

Google

“I couldn’t be more excited to see Google’s transformation and rejuvenation of the James R. Thompson Center as we continue to show global companies that Illinois is the place to be,” Pritzker said in a statement Tuesday.

Google said the renovated structure will be an energy-saving, all-electric building. Jahn’s firm, now called Jahn, is handling the redesign.

Google’s plan is “light-years from the demolition discussions of the past,” Preservation Chicago executive director Ward Miller said.

“In general, it’s wonderful to see the Thompson Center’s overall form, its 17-story atrium and plaza concept all retained, so that’s all very good,” Miller said.

Said Landmarks Illinois President and CEO Bonnie McDonald: “Overall, we see the reuse of this once-endangered building as a preservation success and a win for the Loop.”

The new renderings are an improvement over previous ones that had preservationists and fans of the building concerned that the iconic structure would get a bland and rather beige makeover.

But we need to see more.

Google promises to share more details of the renovation. With construction scheduled to begin next year, here’s hoping the company is forthcoming sooner rather than later.

For instance, the “new and improved” experience Google promises passengers on the six CTA L lines that stop at the building is worth a closer look.

And so are the covered, three-level green-space terraces planned for the building’s southeast side.

“We believe this is heading in a good direction, but hoping there are many refinements to come,” Miller said.

Lee Bey is the Chicago Sun-Times architecture critic and a member of the Editorial Board.

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Gutted by fire, the fate of Bronzeville’s Swift Mansion is in limbo

2023-12-04T22:13:13.451-06:00

The former Swift Mansion, 4500 S. Michigan Ave., on Monday, a day after it was substantially damaged by an extra-alarm fire. The blaze is being investigated as an arson.

Lee Bey/Sun-Times

One by one, sheets of plywood were pulled from the back of the dark-colored van that sat Monday outside the Swift Mansion, a rambling 19th century stone manse at 45th Street and South Michigan Avenue.

This is a normal occurrence in Bronzeville, where owners both new and old frequently snap up the community’s landmark-quality homes and apartment buildings and hire workers to renovate them.

But the crew at 4500 S. Michigan Ave. was not there to fix up the 131-year-old Swift Mansion. Instead, they were there to board it up, a day after the historic structure was ravaged by a fire stubborn enough to rekindle itself twice before firefighters were able to finally fully knock out the blaze.

The fire is under investigation. But the building’s fate could rest with the results of a structural report now being prepared by inspectors with the city Department of Buildings.

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The city could order the home demolished if it’s determined the fire rendered the building structurally unsound and unsafe.

The building was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1978. Its unfortunate loss — if it happens — would spell the end of one of the city’s remaining grand old Gilded Age mansions, a class that includes the Glessner House, 1800 S. Prairie Ave., from 1887, and the Nickerson Mansion, built in 1883 at 40 E. Erie St.

Tenants say they were illegally evicted days before Swift Mansion fire

And it would also be a huge blow to the architectural heritage of Chicago and Bronzeville — a neighborhood rich with buildings that speak to the community’s early history as the city’s first Gold Coast, followed by its remarkable second life as a national birthplace of Black culture, history, music, commerce, literature and politics.

Built as a wedding present

Built in 1892, the three-story stone mansion was a wedding gift from meatpacker Gustavus Swift — who made a vast fortune at Chicago’s massive old Union Stockyards a few miles west of the home — to his daughter Helen and her new husband, Edward Morris.

South Michigan Avenue — as well as King Drive and South Drexel Boulevard — were lined with residences built by the city’s monied class. But there were few like this one.

The home’s Richardson Romanesque exterior boasts a three-story turret on its northeast corner and a carriage port on its 45th Street side that features six marble columns.

The interior — most of which was still intact until the fire — was a treasure of oak paneling, wood-beamed ceilings, fireplaces and a main stairway of intricately carved details.

“The gorgeous wood,” said Ald. Pat Dowell (3rd), a former urban planner and preservationist whose ward contains the house.

“The wood staircase, the bookshelves — these are things you can’t replace,” she said.

A 1997 Sun-Times photo showcases the grand interior and detailed main staircase and bannister of the Swift Mansion, 4500 S. Michigan Ave.

Bob Black/Sun-Times

When the neighborhood became predominantly Black starting in the 1920s, the swank home was converted into an upscale funeral parlor catering to the community’s new population.

The building later became the Chicago Urban League’s longtime home until the civil rights group built its new modern headquarters in 1982 next door at 4510 S. Michigan Ave. The mansion was most recently home to the Inner City Youth and Adult Foundation.

An important icon in a historic neighborhood

Sunday’s fire tore extensively through the home’s roof, exposing the attic and upper floor to daylight.

The second- and third-story windows were broken out to fight the blaze, soaking the building’s detailed original oak-paneled interiors in water.

If wrecked, the mansion would suffer the same untimely end as Antioch Missionary Baptist Church, 6248 S. Stewart Ave. The city ordered the razing of the 140-year-old church after a 2022 fire left the stone building in ruins.

Fire debris could be seen Monday on the grounds of the Swift Mansion, 4500 S. Michigan Ave.

Lee Bey/Sun Times

Workers on Monday also readied for the task of removing fire debris from the property. A large fire-engine red dumpster sat near the entrance to the carriage port.

“No matter where you go in Chicago, somebody has a connection to that building,” Dowell said.

“Any time you have an important icon in a historic community like Bronzeville — that you could potentially lose — it shakes up the memory banks a bit,” she said. “And pulls at the heart strings.”

Lee Bey is the Chicago Sun-Times architecture critic and a member of the Editorial Board. He is the author of “Southern Exposure: The Overlooked Architecture of Chicago’s South Side.”

Chicago architecture: South Loop had a hybrid car dealership — a century ago. Now it’s headed toward demolition.

2023-12-01T12:38:24.057-06:00

Slated for demolition, this 1891 building at 1130 S. Wabash Ave., once housed the Woods Motor Vehicle Company, a short-lived company that made hybrid cars more than a century ago.Anthony Vazquez/Sun-Times

Anthony Vazquez/Sun-Times

A late 19th century South Loop building that represents an important but relatively unsung chapter of Chicago’s architectural, automotive and technological history is set for demolition.

Built in 1891, the five-story commercial loft structure at 1130 S. Wabash Ave. was the headquarters and showroom for the Woods Motor Vehicle Co.

And from 1899 to 1918, the half-forgotten but revolutionary company made one of the world’s first cars powered by gasoline or electricity.

A hybrid car, in other words. A Prius for the gaslight and cobblestone era.

The property’s owner, SBY Wabash LLC, was issued a permit on Nov. 24 to “wreck and remove” the structure, according to the city’s department of buildings.

The owners haven’t submitted any redevelopment plans to the city, according to the Chicago Department of Planning. So it’s unknown what might immediately replace the structure — other than a vacant lot.

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In addition to its remarkable car-making history, the former Woods Motor Vehicle building is also a pretty nice example of early Chicago School architecture with its minimalist, grid-like face adorned with three bays of large windows designed to bring in natural light.

It would be a mark against the city’s architectural heritage to lose a building of this character and pedigree.

“This [building] would be a great candidate for landmark designation,” said Preservation Chicago Executive Director Ward Miller. “We’re encouraging the city to reevaluate the demolition permit and to make some determinations if the building can be saved.”

A hybrid 82 years before Honda and Toyota?

The Massachusetts-born Clifton Edgar Woods was an inventor and engineer, and — however briefly — part of the turn-of-the-century constellation of tinkerers, businessmen and madmen who hoped to make it big as automakers.

A 1916 ad for an early hybrid car made in Chicago by the Woods Motor Vehicle Co.

The Woods Motor Vehicle Co. made gas-powered cars and electric ones. Both were displayed in the company’s showroom at 1130 S. Wabash.

But in 1916, the carmaker made space in the South Loop building for his Big Idea: The Woods Dual-Power, an auto that could run on either gas or a bank of batteries.

The incredible logo for the Woods Dual-Power hybrid automobile.

“The Woods car was a complete hybrid, 82 years before Honda and Toyota got into the business,” engineering professor emeritus John H. Lienhard said last April on the University of Houston’s The Engines of Our Ingenuity podcast.

“Both the engine and brakes drove an electric generator that charged batteries,” he said. “The batteries could either supplement the modest 12-horsepower engine at higher speeds, or they could power the car by themselves.”

But the car flopped, as did all early electric-powered vehicles. Gasoline was cheap, and electrical charge times were too long.

And the prices of the cars were quite steep. According to the Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation, the 1916 Dual-Power coupe was $2,650, while a new 1916 Ford Model T Touring Car could be had for just $360.

Woods Motor Vehicle went belly up in 1918, two years after the Dual-Power hit the streets.

Save the Woods — and South Wabash, too

The former Woods Motor Vehicle building is not a protected landmark.

And despite being an intact and functioning example of Chicago School architecture, the structure isn’t even listed in the city’s Chicago Historic Resources Survey, a quarter-century old document that’s hurting for an update.

If the building were included in the survey and rated “orange” or higher — and it no doubt would have been — the listing would have triggered a 90-day delay in approving the demolition permit, allowing the city to investigate if the structure is worthy of landmark status.

Here’s where the Department of Planning and its Landmarks Division should step in, albeit carefully.

The city must weigh the cost of revoking a legally-obtained city permit against the greater wrong of letting yet another historic Chicago building get wiped away and replaced by who knows what?

Besides, Chicago knows how to stand up for buildings that represent this town’s automotive history.

By coincidence, 23 years ago this month, the city designated the Motor Row Landmark District, saving 28-acres of early car-related buildings and showrooms south of Cermak Road from getting steamrolled by the westward expansion of McCormick Place.

Saving the Woods Motor Vehicle building could also strike a blow against the architectural mishmash developing along Wabash Avenue, where fine low-rise historic structures are getting the elbow from over-scaled and mediocre newer residential high rises between Balbo Drive and Roosevelt Road.

Either way, the Woods Motor Vehicle building shouldn’t be demolished. And it certainly shouldn’t go down without a fight.

A building that so accurately beckoned the future is too important to be consigned to the past.

Lee Bey is the Chicago Sun-Times architecture critic and a member of the Editorial Board.

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Curving canopy on suburban Caputo’s grocery store offers a special on good design

2023-11-04T05:00:00-05:00

The newest Angelo Caputo’s Fresh Markets store, 4410 N. Harlem Ave., in Norridge features a freeform parametric canopy at its entrance.

Camburas Theodore

The Angelo Caputo’s Fresh Markets store in Norridge was under construction last winter when the company’s CEO, Robertino Presta, got a phone call after a snowstorm.

“Hey,” the caller said, “I think your roof collapsed.”

It hadn’t. What the caller thought was a fallen roof was the actual shape of a curving, freeform parametric canopy at the store’s entrance.

Part of the canopy — still being built then — dipped low enough to almost touch the ground.

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“We had to explain to him that it’s part of the design,” Presta recalled. “[The roof] looked like it had dropped, but that’s the way it was built.”

The canopy was designed to catch the eye, and apparently it did — even while it was being constructed.

The Caputo’s design is most welcome, with its bright, visually-exciting canopy providing a counterpoint to the drab, by-the-numbers store frontages most shoppers encounter.

“The feedback has been extremely rewarding,” said the store’s architect, Peter Theodore, an owner of the Des Plaines design firm Camburas Theodore.

“I mean, the biggest criticism has been [from people who] have that mentality of, ‘It looks like a great skateboard park.’ But I’ll take that over. ‘I don’t like it’ or ‘I don’t understand it.’”

Said Presta: “Customers look at it. And a lot of people take pictures of it.”

‘Design inspired by Southern Italy’

Opening last August at 4410 N. Harlem Ave., the store is the 10th Angelo Caputo’s Fresh Markets, a family-owned suburban Chicago chain founded in Elmwood Park by Angelo Caputo in 1958.

Caputo and his wife Romana were natives of Mola Di Bari, a settlement Italian town on the Adriatic Sea. Theodore said the store canopy’s shape is inspired by the waves of the Adriatic and the mountains of Italy.

“While [Caputo] was still alive, [his family was] considering doing kind of a tribute to their heritage, the store and their lineage back to Italy,” Theodore said. “And I took a chance, and it sounded so exciting that they wanted to have this building that would serve as a metaphor for the family, that I actually designed the whole building without a contract — without anything in place — just to see if we could get traction and do something truly unique.”

“It’s a great design and a great tribute,” said Presta, who operates the stores with his wife Antonella Caputo-Presta, who is the founder’s daughter.

Angelo Caputo died in 2021 at age 89. Romana Caputo died in 2004.

The canopy, which cantilevers from the store’s front exterior wall, is composed of tightly-laid, light-colored aluminum shingles covering a steel skeleton. Computer modeling was used to give the canopy its seamless-looking form — and to make sure it would all hold together.

The Angelo Caputo’s Fresh Markets store canopy under construction.

Camburas Theodore

The canopy’s lowest dip sends rainwater into a garden in front of the store. And the garden is fenced in to keep adventurous souls from climbing on the roof, Theodore said.

“I was warned somebody was going to try to climb it — and they literally did climb it,” Theodore said. “We were afraid somebody with a skateboard [would try].”

A blast from the past?

Even though the Caputo’s is only three months old, the design is a partial flashback to those great midcentury supermarkets which used all the tricks of modernist design — glass curtain walls, curved elevations, barrel-vaulted roofs, exuberantly mod signage and lighting — to beckon customers into the store from their wood-paneled Mercury Colony Park station wagons parked outside.

Penn Fruit Supermarket, 1955, Audubon NJ.

Pleasant Family Shopping

Theodore agreed the design is a bit of a bow to the past.

“Maybe unconsciously I’m influenced by those things,” he said.

David Aldrich runs Pleasant Family Shopping, a nostalgia-themed blog and Facebook page that examines the nation’s postwar stores, malls and shopping centers.

“The store itself was almost used as kind of a billboard — a dramatic treatment just to attract people and just to make an exciting environment,” Aldrich said of the midcentury supermarkets.

“And that really continued into around the mid-sixties, and then a more natural, kind of a more austere look started to take over where you’d see a lot of mansard roofs and things like that.”

Aldrich said the new Caputo’s “really harkens back to that really kind of exciting era,” in store design.

“And it’s neat to see,” he said.

Lee Bey is the Chicago Sun-Times architecture critic and a member of the Editorial Board.

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Architect Daniel P. Coffey, whose work helped revive the Loop and reshaped the UIC campus, dies at 69

2023-10-25T14:00:00-05:00

Architect Daniel P. Coffey oversaw a dramatic remake in the 1990s of the University of Illinois Chicago campus.

Sun-Times file photo

Architect Daniel P. Coffey, a South Side bricklayer’s son who oversaw the restoration of the Chicago Theatre and other venues that formed the core of the downtown theater district, has died.

He was 69.

Raised in the Gage Park neighborhood and later in the south suburb of Matteson, Mr. Coffey founded his architecture firm, Daniel P. Coffey & Associates, in 1984.

Over 20 years after the firm’s founding, Mr. Coffey led many of the restoration projects that contributed to the Loop’s revival in the 1990s and early 2000s.

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While his firm was in its infancy, Mr. Coffey in 1985 took on the $10 million restoration of the Chicago Theatre, at 175 N. State St., helping rescue the then-faded movie house from the brink of demolition.

He worked with the edifice’s new owners, the Chicago Theatre Preservation Group, and oversaw the restoration of the building’s brick and terra cotta exterior, its ornate interior and its 3,600-seat auditorium.

The job turned the dilapidated old film palace into a city landmark worthy enough for Frank Sinatra to perform live on the restored theater’s opening night in September 1986.

Mr. Coffey’s downtown theater work includes the restoration of the Nederlander Theatre, at 24 W. Randolph St., in 1996, and the Cadillac Palace Theatre, at 151 W. Randolph St., in 1999.

“He loved this city,” said Mr. Coffey’s wife, Robin.

He struck up an interest in architecture as a child, when his father moved their family to Arizona for six months to find work, his wife said.

“They saw a couple of Frank Lloyd Wright properties out in Arizona … and his mother [later] said the minute he saw this, [Coffey] said, ‘This is what I’m going to do.’”

Mr. Coffey also handled the 1993 renovation that turned the vacated and decaying 11-story Goldblatt’s department store at State and Jackson streets into an academic and administrative center for DePaul University’s Loop campus.

Coffey also handled the $11 million renovation of the landmark Biograph Theatre, at 2433 N. Lincoln Ave., in 2006.

Rich Hein/Sun-Times

The building, reborn as DePaul Center, “would result in the creation of a new civic institution that could dramatically change the previously blighted and depressed south Loop area of State Street,” Mr. Coffey wrote in a 1995 essay for Construction Dimensions magazine.

“He’s rational but also quite creative,” the late preservationist and architecture maven Seymour Persky said of Mr. Coffey in a 1993 Chicago Reader article. “He’s got this marvelous ability to take beautiful old wine and put it in new retrofitting bottles.”

Mr. Coffey’s wealth of other work included a 1996 dramatic remake of the University of Illinois Chicago campus core that removed the institution’s outdoor amphitheater and the concrete walkways that led to it.

He died Oct. 12 in his Naperville home, his wife said. A 2022 stroke led to a decline in his health. His final completed project was the restoration of the historic Warner Theater in Erie, Pennsylvania. The venue reopened in January 2022.

“We’ll miss him,” said attorney Greg Hummel, board chairman of the Chicago Central Area Committee, the civic group of which Mr. Coffey was once a member. “He had an instinct and cared a lot for the places he worked. He was taken from us much too soon.”

He is also survived by his daughters, Emily and Sarah. A memorial service at his Naperville home and studio has been planned for Nov. 4.

Lee Bey is the Chicago Sun-Times architecture critic and a member of the Editorial Board. He is the author of “Southern Exposure: The Overlooked Architecture of Chicago’s South Side” and is working on a book about West Side architecture.

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Demolition of Thompson Center facade, atrium for Google makeover approved by city

2023-10-17T17:04:33.897-05:00

The metal and glass exterior and interior atrium of the Thompson Center will be demolished as a prelude to Google’s $280 million rehab of the building.

Anthony Vazquez/Sun-Times

The city has granted permits to demolish the exterior and atrium of the Thompson Center — a critical early step in Google’s $280 million efforts to remake the former state government building into the company’s Chicago headquarters.

Under permits issued Oct. 13 by the Department of Buildings, Google will — at minimum — remove the metal and glass skin on the 17-story structure at 100 W. Randolph St. and on its soaring, trademark atrium as well.

The demolition project is expected to cost $6 million, according to the permit.

The move isn’t a complete surprise. Renderings released after the tech giant’s takeover of the building last year show prospective views of the renovated edifice with new exterior and interior glazing that either abandoned or muted the building’s current blue, salmon and white color scheme — one of its signature features — and other architectural details.

But Google securing the permits is a key indicator that the renovation project soon will be underway.

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A Google spokesperson had no comment Tuesday on the project, other than to say a formal announcement could be made within weeks.

Completed in 1985 and designed by architect Helmut Jahn, the zoomy, spaceshiplike building received mixed reactions from Chicagoans from the start.

On the one hand, it was praised for its forward-looking architecture and the generous atrium space that acted as an enclosed public square.

But the building was plagued by construction cost cutbacks that resulted in the use of cheap-looking materials, window leaks, and an initial heating and lighting air conditioning system that failed to work properly.

The original, colorful cladding and detailing of the Thompson Center atrium will be removed as part of a makeover by Google, which bought the building last year.

Anthony Vazquez/Sun-Times

Years of deferred maintenance only worsened the problems and made the building more expensive to operate. Previous Illinois governors Rod Blagojevich and Bruce Rauner unsuccessfully tried to sell the building to any developer willing to wreck the structure in favor of a new privately owned office tower.

But current Gov. J.B. Pritzker in 2022 managed to preserve the building — or perhaps most of it — by selling it to Google for $105 million. The company would then convert the building into a headquarters for 2,000 of its employees.

Jahn died in a 2021 bicycle accident. Neither Google nor representatives of Jahn — which is now the name of the architecture firm leading the renovation — would provide any details of the planned work. But the task will likely include replacing the building’s single-paned glass facades with ones that are more energy-efficient.

A 2022 rendering showing how a renovated Thompson Center might look.

Jahn Architecture

Landmarks Illinois CEO Bonnie McDonald, whose organization helped lead efforts to preserve the Thompson Center, said she has not seen the demolition permit, but allowed there are “known concerns about the energy efficiency of the building’s current non-insulated windows.”

Added McDonald: “While we realize losing the existing windows would change the character of the building and add to the waste stream, we also recognize the need and opportunity to make historic buildings more energy efficient — something Landmarks Illinois supports. We take in the big picture that the building is being reused, and that is a win.”

But Preservation Chicago said it wants Google and the city to protect the Thompson Center by granting the building landmark status.

“It’s time to recognize the significance of the work of Helmut Jahn, and this building that placed him on the world’s stage,” said Preservation Chicago Executive Director Ward Miller.

“To further ignore this situation and risk the loss of the design concept and significant features, would once again be an embarrassment to the city of Chicago and its architecture legacy,” Miller said.

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Historic Sears garden in North Lawndale will get revival help from $1 million Driehaus grant

2023-10-07T05:00:00-05:00

A 100-foot-long pergola would be restored under a $1 million grant by the Richard H. Driehaus Foundation as part of efforts to revive a North Lawndale garden built more than a century ago by Sears.

Ashlee Rezin/Sun-Times

Demetrius Barbee and her husband Douglas moved to North Lawndale nearly 30 years ago, beckoned there in part by the West Side neighborhood’s architecture.

But the public sunken garden on the north side of Arthington Street just east of Homan Avenue helped cinch the deal.

“It was breathtaking,” Demetrius Barbee said. “It felt like I could have been by Buckingham Fountain. It was serenity. It was peaceful.”

The garden was built in 1907 by Sears & Roebuck and was a centerpiece of the then-mighty retailer’s expansive campus headquarters.

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Sears famously abandoned the campus for the Sears Tower in the 1970s. But most of the original Sears buildings are still there, as is the pretty fancy, nearly block-long sunken garden the company created for its employees, complete with a Greek Revival pergola.

Though still handsome, the garden has seen better days after 116 years.

Fortunately, there’s a $5 million plan to revive the garden and turn it back into the showplace its original designers intended. And the Richard H. Driehaus Foundation is announcing this weekend that it’s contributing $1 million toward the effort.

Barbee, a member of the non-profit Friends of Sears Sunken Garden, said of plans to revive the historic North Lawndale feature: “I think it is one of most significant things to happen on the West Side in a long time.”

Revived garden to be ‘contemporary, naturalistic’

Chicago’s parks — the big, beautiful historic places like Grant Park, Lincoln Park, Douglass Park — are pretty well-documented.

But the city is dotted with some very fine smaller green spaces that were privately built in the late 19th or early 20th centuries, such as the South Side’s now-public Auburn Park from the 1880s and the Sears Sunken Garden.

A stereograph image showing the Sears garden shortly after its construction

Library of Congress

These parks and gardens were planned as pleasant little spots where residents — or workers, in the case of Sears — could step away from the bustle and enjoy a moment of quiet and beauty.

The Sears garden originally featured pools, fountains and colorful plantings. If that wasn’t enough, workers could go there and catch a performance from the 60-piece Sears, Roebuck & Company band.

The idea of renewing the garden was started two years ago by the North Lawndale Community Coordinating Council’s Greening, Open Space, Water, Soil, and Sustainability committee.

“People would say, ‘Oh, I had my prom picture taken here,’” said committee member Annamaria Leon, an edible landscapes designer who lives in North Lawndale with her husband, garden designer Roy Diblik.

“You can see the former beauty of it,” she said.

Leon and Diblik invited noted Dutch garden designer Piet Oudolf — one of the creators of Millennium Park’s Laurie Garden — to help remake the Sears spot.

Working with Chicago landscape architect Chris Gent, the redesign will include new plantings, accessible paths, a reflecting pool and the restoration of the garden’s signature piece: a 100-foot-long concrete and wood pergola flanked on each end by Doric columned porticos.

A reflecting pool is planned for the revamped garden.

Friends of Sears Sunken Garden

Oudolf said the revived garden would be “contemporary, naturalistic — less decorative than in the past.”

The redesign concepts were shaped by a series of design workshops during which North Lawndale voiced what they wanted for the new park.

“People were asked, ‘What would you like to see?’” Barbee said. “Nobody wants to be told what to do. You want to have a stake in it.”

“The most important part for me is that it’s [a project] outside of the central part of the city,” Oudolf said. “We do so many spaces in areas in the middle of the town, it’s exciting to see something happen in a neighborhood that needed it most. It’ll really be a community project.”

‘It’ll be beautiful’

The Richard H. Driehaus Foundation is announcing its $1 million grant Sunday at a fundraiser in Lake Forest for the sunken garden project.

The Driehaus funding will go to the restoration of the pergola and to develop working plans for the garden.

“We’ve done a number of legacy grants this year in honor of Richard,” the Chicago philanthropist and businessman who died in 2021, said Driehaus Foundation executive director Anne Lazar. “And this project — it just supports two of his priority passions: Chicago neighborhoods and historic preservation.”

And what a great call by the foundation — the kind of thing resource-starved North Lawndale and the West Side richly deserve.

“It’ll raise people’s curiosity [about the West Side],” Barbee said of the reimagined garden. “It’ll be beautiful.”

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Former city transportation chief Gia Biagi takes job at architect Jeanne Gang’s firm

2023-08-23T18:30:00-05:00

Former Chicago Dept. of Transportation Commissioner Gia Biagi starts a new role in charge of planning and urban design efforts at the renown Chicago architecture firm Studio Gang.

Pat Nabong/Sun-Times

While the city’s top transportation post remains vacant, the department’s respected former commissioner has landed a leadership post at the award-winning Chicago architecture firm Studio Gang.

Gia Biagi will join Studio Gang as Principal of Urbanism, the firm announced Thursday.

Biagi told the Sun-Times that under the newly-created role, she’ll lead Studio Gang’s planning and urban design work nationally.

The firm will merge “how we think about cities, how we revitalize them, and how that connects to other important systems, whether that’s emphasizing ecology or looking at the important public policy questions on the ground,” Biagi said.

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The result of the new focus would be to “try to put our tools in service of helping communities solve problems,” she said.

Biagi worked for Studio Gang from 2015 to 2019, when she was hired as transportation commissioner by former Mayor Lori Lightfoot.

But she stepped down from the post on August 11 under freshman Mayor Brandon Johnson. The spot is one of at least five key commissionerships — including the departments of planning, housing and public health — that Johnson has yet to fill.

Counted among Biagi’s achievements as commissioner are kicking off Lightfoot’s $3.7 billion capital improvements plan, building an additional 30 miles of streetscape improvements, and improving an outdoor dining program to help restaurants during the pandemic.

In a news release issued when Biagi resigned, Johnson said she was “instrumental in implementing transportation systems and critical public infrastructure that improves neighborhoods, connects residents and promotes safe and sustainable mobility.”

Led by 2011 MacArthur fellow Jeanne Gang, Studio Gang has won acclaim for a number of its projects, including Chicago skyscrapers Aqua Tower and St. Regis.

Gang told the Sun-Times that the firm’s urban planning studio was designed 12 years ago “with this idea of getting things done, not just making plans … but to really see change. And that’s what motivates Gia, that’s what motivates us.”

One such Studio Gang project is Tom Lee Park, a 30-acre expanse along the Mississippi River in Memphis that is a significant improvement over the relatively meager and flood-prone greenspace it replaces.

Former CDOT Commissioner Gia Biagi worked on Tom Lee Park in Memphis before joining city government. Biagi said she wants to continue this type of work now that she’s returned to Studio Gang.

Ty Cole and SCAPE

The park formally opens on Labor Day. And Biagi, who worked on the project before joining CDOT in 2019, said Chicago must work to leverage federal infrastructure funds to bring about more transformative efforts here as well.

“If you look at something like the North DuSable Lake Shore Drive project — that is utterly transformative,” Biagi, who helmed the project as CDOT commissioner, said.

“We’re going from Ohio Street [north] to the city limits, and it’s not simply a transportation project,” she said. “It’s a fundamental rethinking of parkland of that entire edge of the city.”

She also said the planned redo of the Eisenhower Expressway holds the possibility of knitting together the West Side communities that were separated when the sunken roadway was built.

“We have to think about it in a bigger way,” Biagi said. “So there’s a lot on the table for the city ahead. Those are just two examples of so many things that are on the table.”

Lee Bey is the Chicago Sun-Times architecture critic and a member of the Editorial Board.

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Saving Chicago’s vintage business signs was the right step by City Council

2023-08-04T11:00:00-05:00

Grace’s Furniture is gone, but the vintage sign remains on the building in Logan Square.

Ashlee Rezin/Sun-Times

One of Chicago’s best commercial signs — certainly the most unusual — once adorned the former Rosario’s Italian deli in the Ashburn neighborhood.

Anyone who saw it never forgot the sign’s animated neon pigs happily leaping into a moving meat grinder, then coming out on the other side as sausage links spelling out the business’s name.

Rosario’s, at 8611 S. Pulaski Rd., closed in 2016. The sign vanished shortly after.

That’s life in the big city when it comes to retail business signage. Wear, tear, age, or a business closing and — poof — a sign disappears.

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Yet, the best of these signs did more than just tout businesses. They were part of a neighborhood’s identity.

So kudos to the City Council for passing an ordinance last month aimed at protecting some of Chicago’s vintage retail signs.

Under the old law, a new property owner had to rip down old signs if the building’s previous owner let the city-issued sign permit expire.

But the new ordinance lets commercial signs that are at least 30 years old and have some proven “degree of character and nostalgia” remain in place, subject to city review and a renewable five-year permit.

“Our communities are home to so many beautiful, historic signs that new business owners would like to incorporate into their small businesses,” Ald. Carlos Ramirez-Rosa (35th), a prime backer of the ordinance, said when the measure was proposed in June before the City Council.

Keeping vintage signs

Efforts to save the Grace’s Furniture building sign, located in Ramirez-Rosa’s ward at 2616-2618 N. Milwaukee Ave., led to the new law.

Developers want to turn the former store into a mixed-use building anchored by the Logan Square Athletic Club.

But the new owners weren’t allowed to keep the vintage three-story vertical sign because the building’s previous owners let the permit lapse.

And it’s a fine sign too: a once-electrified ribbon of red, white, gold and teal that carried the store’s name and the appliances, carpeting and easy credit offered there.

“This ordinance would allow businesses like that to keep the historic sign,” Ramirez-Rosa said.

New law a sign of progress?

The city’s business districts were once filled with signs like the one in Logan Square.

A personal favorite was the dark brown-and-white Jansen’s Furniture sign near 111th Street and Michigan Avenue.

Jansen’s Furniture sign, near 111th Street and Michigan Avenue.

Lee Bey

Even the smaller ones could be standouts, such as the former Newmann & Associates Real Estate’s sign at 79th Street and Cottage Grove Avenue.

Sign on a former real estate office at 79th Street and Cottage Grove Avenue, 2006.

Lee Bey

The Jansen’s and Newmann & Associates signs are both gone now, right along with the giant red-lipped neon Magikist rug cleaning signs that flashed kisses at motorists on the Dan Ryan, Eisenhower, Edens and Kennedy expressways. Or the countless others that have been sent to oblivion.

Would the new sign ordinance —introduced by Mayor Brandon Johnson — have saved many of these iconic signs, had it been law then?

Likely not. The ordinance doesn’t grant protected landmark status for the signs. Nor does it require a business owner to keep a historic sign.

But it does change a law that required the wreckage of historic signs. And it should encourage the city to now examine more ways to preserve old signs.

“The intention to make sure our signs are safe and strong and sound cannot come at the expense removing the unique character that makes us the remarkable, world-class city that we are,” Johnson said when the ordinance was introduced.

The law might not yet be full-on preservation. But it’s a sign of progress.

Lee Bey is the Chicago Sun-Times architecture critic and a member of the Editorial Board.

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St. Ignatius acquires architecturally significant Lakeside Bank branch building

2023-07-28T18:13:42.354-05:00

The former Lakeside Bank at Roosevelt Road and Blue Island on the Near West Side has been bought by St. Ignatius College Prep.

Anthony Vazquez/Sun-Times

The former Lakeside Bank branch that was originally an architecturally innovative library for blind and disabled people has been bought by its across-the-street neighbor, St. Ignatius College Prep, the school announced Friday.

“St. Ignatius has acquired and taken possession of the former Lakeside Bank building on the southeast corner of Roosevelt and Blue Island,” the college preparatory school at 1076 W. Roosevelt Road said in a written statement to faculty, parents and students.

“This 2-acre parcel will allow us to continue to enhance our athletic programs at Rice Park,” a St. Ignatius athletic space just east of the bank. “In the short term, the building will provide washrooms, storage space and expansion for our strength and conditioning programs.”

St. Ignatius officials were unable to be reached for comment.

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As the Sun-Times first reported Thursday, Lakeside Bank closed the branch at 1055 W. Roosevelt Road on July 1 and announced the building was up for sale.

The 32,000-square-foot, blue-and-white building was built in 1978 as the Illinois Library for the Blind and Physically Handicapped, designed by Chicago architectural icon Stanley Tigerman.

Tigerman died in 2019 at age 88.

The rounded, postmodern facility — striking when the library’s steel-clad exterior was painted in original bright primary colors — received global acclaim as a successful early building designed specifically for blind and disabled people.

Architect Stanley Tigerman.

Lee Bey

Both inside and out, Tigerman used color, form and design to create a welcoming and functional space for the library’s clientele.

The building was completed 12 years before the Americans With Disabilities Act made fully accessible buildings more commonplace. The ADA was signed into law 33 years ago last Thursday.

But the state library closed in 1999, and its books, tapes and other materials were relocated. The building sat vacant and rusting — with its vibrant exterior colors fading — while the city helped find it a new suitor.

Lakeside Bank bought the building and operated a branch and operations center from 2005 until this month.

“As Lakeside has grown tremendously since 2005, we needed additional space for our Operations personnel,” the bank said in a statement earlier this month. “We’ve now relocated them and made the decision to sell the Roosevelt branch.”

The conversion to a bank removed the building’s original color scheme and much of Tigerman’s innovative interior design.

But the sale to St. Ignatius retains a still-important building, at least for now.

Lee Bey is the Chicago Sun-Times architecture critic and a member of the Editorial Board.

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