![]() ![]() ![]() What is planned is a $40 million, 35-story residential tower to replace the worn out Jewel-Osco supermarket across the street from the CTA’s Red Line Division Station. Although the developer, Fifield Companies, did meet with a selection of neighborhood groups in the weeks beforehand, it was the first chance for Joe Lunchbucket and Jane Pantsuit to get a glimpse of what is planned. It was just 44 hours and 18 minutes earlier that a packed crowd of neighbors gathered at the Thompson Hotel to see pictures of the proposed development at 1200 North Clark Street for the first time. Just hours after the general public was given its first taste of the proposed new skyscraper and supermarket planned for the Gold Coast, the Chicago Plan Commission scanned it, threw it in a plastic bag and sent it off to the full city council for its rubber stamp of approval. Translation: That high-rise may have to be shortened. “There's a lot of issues to deal with, from traffic to density.” The developer “has a long way to go” to make his project acceptable, even after a year and a half of chatting with one division of City Hall or the other, Mr. Fioretti is being quite deliberate in reacting to Mr. Fioretti doesn't know the Sandburg people, and they don't know him. Bob Fioretti's 2nd Ward, which (under the previous map) covered portions of the South and West Loop and now (under the new map) snakes across the North Side. And that meant that this parcel no longer resides in Mr. Effective immediately, on all rezoning matters, the new ward boundaries in the decennial remap of the City Council would apply. Danny Solis of the 25th Ward, chairman of the Committee on Zoning, made an announcement. 5 (see the PDF), reminding them: “Your air rights are a valuable asset that warrants compensation should you consent to allowing their use for the Jewel project.”īut then Ald. He wrote two letters to neighborhood residents, one as recent as Oct. Fifield says he had made a fair amount of progress, winning permission from homeowners associations representing the townhouses to file his planned-unit-development application and holding a series of meetings with local Ald. He proposed to do so not by buying them up one by one but by promising to spend $1 million on landscaping, sidewalks and other spiffy stuff at Clark and Division for the community's benefit.ĭealing with public officials can be like herding cats. Fifield would have to “acquire” air rights belonging to owners of 101 nearby townhouses and transfer them to his land. On top of that was a special complication: Since building heights are limited by law in that part of town, Mr. Now, this being not only Chicago but the always-contentious North Side, no one expected things would move quickly. Since they'd no longer need the surface lot next door, they proposed erecting a 42-story residential building at the other end of the block, at LaSalle Boulevard, matching the height of the 42-floor James House at the north end of nearby Sandburg Village, Mr. They called for rebuilding and almost doubling the size of the store, with parking upstairs. Fifield and the folks who then owned the Jewel store decided to partner up on a redevelopment of the site, which, despite its underuse, is one of the most desirable corners of the city. Welcome to the wonderful world of complex air-rights transfers, Sandburg Village politics and City Council remap shenanigans, all of which play a role in this tale. has discovered, remaking the corner of Clark and Division streets-right over the Red Line subway station-isn't as easy as he'd like. Why Fifield's Gold Coast high-rise project is nowhereĪs developer Steve Fifield of Fifield Cos.
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