The city would be wise not to stop the eminent domain process until the ink is dry on on the closing papers. This could just be another ploy by Davies

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Agree completely. The city should absolutely proceed as if no deal is in the works (I believe this is what they'll in fact do).....can't really say either way if it is or not, but it should surprise precisely no one if this did turn out to be just another ploy.......

just saw this:
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/britis...lans-1.3484648

I think that a similar approach could be done for the Chicago Post Office, leave the big floor plates for office/retail, and put residential on top, almost like a city within a city

^^^Nope, residential makes absolutely no sense in any capacity in this building. I don't know why anyone would think otherwise, it's already been discussed ad nauseum that office is the only logical use for floorplates this large. This is a merch mart clone, would you suggest they should kick Motorola out and fill the upper floors with residential there?

But there's just not that much demand for that kind of office space. Even the Mart is no more than 15 percent tech offices, and none of those are in windowless spaces.

Setting aside the Van Buren building, you can really only use the first 30 feet of the perimeter for residential—and only the first 80 feet of the perimeter for office. The workroom building is 344 by 652 feet! You could put colocation rack space in the center, but I don't know if there's that much server space required in the entire state of Illinois.

That's why I feel like you'd have to demolish the center of the top 8-10 floors and create some kind of atrium, winter garden, or light court. It could be large enough and amenity-filled enough to have residential units face it, or a little less generous and faced with office windows. Probably a combination.

Did you even look at the link?! or read my post? They constructed several residential towers (and one office tower) of a large abandoned post office using the post office itself for retail

I placed a link for people to look at. I was referring to building residential towers on TOP of the post office, leaving the actual post office to retail/stores and offices

With the 80ft setback you mentioned, 9 floors (with the top 4 a bit narrower) works out to about the same 1.1M sqft as 350E Cermak, so it'd be a big bite for the market to absorb all at once, but not unprecedented. And I doubt you'd use all the floors that way anyway.

And even 15% of the Merchandise Mart is 600K sqft; given that it's only been converting to tech tenants for a few years, it seems like there is significant demand (especially given the success of other large-floorplate office conversions like 600W Chicago, 1000W Fulton, and the River Center).

I'm not saying it'd be easy or necessarily the fastest to lease up, but it doesn't seem implausible that the building could be reused without cutting huge light wells into it.

I think it will be interesting to see how that proposal proceeds, but the existing Vancouver building is a lot smaller (20% of the size) and less complex of a site than Chicago's. The city has basically already given the developers the zoning to do whatever ambitious project they'd like (within the Post Office itself and the nearby parcels). I'm not sure how adding more volume on top of the existing Post Office is going to help matters...and an urban mall the size of Woodfield sounds like a nonstarter.

Not very practical.

Even if they were really conservative in calculating the foundations for the post office, you probably could only support 4-5 additional stories. To go higher than that, you'd have to put down new piers and caissons, which means not only going down through the old building but also avoiding the highway and railroad tracks underneath.

Casinos and outlet malls don't need windows.

Except the mart is not only attracting tech offices, but multiple office user types and has virtually identically large floorplates as the Post Office. With today's open layouts you don't need to worry about depth at all really and they usually cram all partitioned spaces into the center of the floor. Also, no, this building is not that large of a block of space that the market will not be able to absorb it. The market absorbs 1,000,000 every time a new office building is built. This has roughly the same SF as river point a d Riverside combined.

Additionally, they don't have to lease out the entire building at once since the structure already exists. It's not like new construction where you need to justify construction of the superstructure, you can lease it out and do TI as you find the tenants.

I love how you clearly didn't even read the article proposal :tup:. If you are gonna disagree with someone at least take the time to respect the person's post and opinion

Why not tear out the guts of some of the building and just do what they did on the Michigan, Monroe, Wabash block for the Legacy and build a tower or two on the inside? Seems like that could work just as well as trying to do some hamfisted/forced attempt to shove offices into an industrial sized floor plate.

Someday I hope they push the Metra Rock Island terminus a little farther south and demolish the Chicago Stock exchange viaduct over Congress. It would open up the Congres Blvd Vista and allow a new tower to be built over the new Metra terminus on Congress.

Demolish the eastern side of the post office and just leave the larger annex portion of the building to renovate.

Nah, just renovate the trading floor. The CSE just got bought by the Chinese anyway, it's only a matter of time until CSE goes the way of the dodo.

When that happens, Metra should buy the trading floor and turn it into a ticket hall, maybe with a new glassy facade like the tollway oases.

http://i68.tinypic.com/2qxrdz4.jpg

The building is too large it will stay around in the planning stages for a while.

It's been in the planning stages for decades now. The whole topic of discussion here and the potential use of eminent domain by the city is to move this project beyond just the planning stages.

This is for premium viewers, but here is an article in today's edition of Crains about the New York firm that is under contract to buy the Old Post Office.

They seem like the right kind of firm to do this deal, if they can close on it as planned.