The whole area needs some dramatic changes.

Close off Canal to vehicles at the rail crossing and divert northbound traffic to Clinton via the one-block segment of Milwaukee.

Signalize all intersections along Kinzie (Clinton, Canal, Kingsbury, Orleans).

Extend Clinton north to Grand through the Blommer Chocolate property.

Pedestrian bridge from Wolf Point across the river to Fulton Street.

^ So true. Improved infrastructure needed. Good suggestions.

I wouldn't close off Canal to vehicles, but perhaps it could be one-way north all the way to Kinzie.

There's not going to be any pedestrian bridge across the river there, so stop dreaming.

from the river point thread:


interesting!

site looks fairly prepped and never made a move back toward being a parking area

So what my brain is interpreting is '70 story office and residential' = >1,100', and '64 story residential' = >800' (based on the RAMSA tower currently under construction). Excellent.

Cool!

Think it's supposed to be 750' unless something changed.
http://chicago.curbed.com/2016/4/20/...oint-east-news

A (min) 50' difference is sorta like splitting hairs for a development site like this, but whatever - and who knows, maybe I'm wrong and it is below 800', but it doesn't hurt to dream 😄

I hope they don't stick with those rent-a-designs.......

Canal has one and Kingsbury is getting one as we speak. The Kingsbury signal should help a lot since the three way stop is almost totally gummed up by pedestrian traffic at peak hours.

Depends on the floor-to-ceiling.

RAMSA tower will be rental and condo. The condo floors will have a higher floor-to-ceiling than the rental portion.

Wolf Point East will be rental.

Does this sound like the case? To me it sounds like the south tower had shrunk? I hope not I really like to see a supertall there. I don't know much about this kind of stuff but how tall how each floor have to be at 70 stories to get to 1000' ft? I guess I'm confused the difference in floors between the East and South towers is only 6 floors?

Office floors are much taller than residential floors, plus vaulted lobbies.

Ah ok of course that makes alot of sense thanks

Some Further explanation, if interested...

Office tower floor structure in Chicago tend to be Composite Steel Framed floors (steel beams holding up concrete slab on a metal deck). This allows for for more open floor plans and more flexibility for future tenants to re-configure the entire floor plates. It is much easier move walls around, cut new stair openings...etc...in a steel construction than a concrete structure. The "drawback" from a developer side, is that the structural sandwich (from ceiling up through the slab of the floor above) is much thicker with steel beams, since you need a Slab (~6") and steel beams and girders (24" to 36") plus some space between the beams and the ceiling for MEP. This leads to maybe an extra 4 to 5 feet per floor, which adds height that leads to more curtain wall cost, more cost in the vertically running MEP (pipes an wire) and more cost in the building lateral system due to the extra height. This extra cost is worth it to get the open and flexible floor plans for office tenants.

Residential towers are usually flat plate concrete with or without post-tensioning. Long open spans are less important in residential floor plans, and residential towers, especially rentals, are designed to have the same floor plan for most of the life of the building. This means it is less likely that new holes will be cut or that there are needs to move lots of walls...etc. The flat plate can be 8" to 12" thick and that's it, especially if the developer goes for the "loft look" so they don't need a ceiling to hide ducts and other MEP. However the spans are less, and while you can kinda cut through regular flat plate concrete, its really tough to cut through post tensioned concrete. Obviously, with a smaller structural sandwich the towers are shorter and you save of everything else at the detriment of being locked into the designed use/configuration.

Thank you for the thorough explanation! Good stuff looking forward to see new renders

;)

When was the last time Chicago built an Office + Residential building? I can really only think of the John Hancock