In the future, could you please not hold this kind of juicy secret hostage? The entire purpose of this website is to anonymously share development information amongst each other! Draw it on a napkin for all we care!

Great news though I always wanted the South Tower to be built first as originally planned because if the East Tower (phase 3) happened to get cancelled then a park or river plaza at that east end of lot would look fine, but if the South Tower gets axed thats a terrible gap in the middle of that prestigious lot. Not that they wouldn't get it developed eventually...

No, you make your profit selling every single unit, one at a time.

I don't think they're doing this looking to make a crazy profit by flipping the building. The downtown rental market is getting very saturated with new construction and rent growth will slow down or even reverse. That doesn't do much for your valuation.

The only reason they're doing rental is so that they don't create a whole new nest of NIMBYs before the South Tower is approved. After that, look for them to do a condo conversion on East Tower and/or West Tower.

^ Agreed. Building more rental to convert later.

I hope that WPE turns out to be as pretty as WPW.

Building WPE before building WPS will probably create construction problems for WPS. Nothing insurmountable. But accessfor construction and space to store building materials might be tight.

As someone with little knowledge on the construction process, can you explain why building the east building first will lead to problems for the south tower?

So, a little birdie told me this evening that the developers/architects are looking to go taller and thinner for the east tower :cheers:

I don't have any specific height, but like I've mentioned before, there will more than likely be another community meeting and they'll have to go back before the plan commission.

Seeing as they're looking at residential, they don't need the bulky floor plates depicted in previous placeholder iterations.

So we are looking at something in the 800 foot range? Also how would this effect the south tower? Thanks for the news Victor. :cheers:

As mentioned, I have no idea of the 'new' height. The bulk/square footage might me the same as before, just thinned and stretched.

^ intriguing. Thinner & taller sounds good to me.

Going thinner and taller obviously could also be a benefit in for units in the eventual South Tower that face east. The original East Tower did look a little hefty. Sounds like a win-win all around. Hopefully we can maybe get this baby up to between 850-900 feet.

In an ideal world, I imagine Wolf Point East will be around 925 feet tall, and Wolf Point South will be around 1,100 feet tall. Which would suit anyone just fine.

No!!! Goddamn it NO!!! Stop the speculation at once! Not even 12 hours has passed and already three people are throwing numbers around. Bvic's post clearly stated that no height figure was yet available.

I renew my call for a speculation thread to be opened so the mods can throw all speculative posts into a circle jerk of supertall fanboys.

calm down.

if people want to speculate about what "taller & thinner" might mean for the east tower, then that's perfectly acceptable discussion for this thread.

:sly: maybe you should continue to lurk..... geez

Ok point taken. But its also possible that the developers intend to build taller and thinner than the west tower and not necessarily taller than the current place holder.

^huh, lurker... interesting speculation... :P

I doubt that because the East tower was always intended to be taller then the west tower so they have to be talking about the current East tower as proposed. Furthermore, when they said thinner again this must be in reference to the massive East tower. I mean otherwise it wouldn't make sense how much more thinner can you get than the west tower.

I was waiting for this to become a sarcastic comment and it never came. I hope the buildings both end up being over 20 miles tall :)

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/c...06-column.html

Apartment tower is a promising start for Wolf Point development

Blair Kamin
Contact Reporter
Cityscapes

That might end up being a monumental cluster**** seeing how the intersection of Kinzie and Lower Orleans is already a congestion point even with very little traffic crossing N/S. If the City had shown some foresight, there would be a bridge extending the Mart Drive (or whatever it's called) west to Halsted over the Metra tracks before there were a bunch of condos along that route that would scream bloody murder if such a thing were proposed today. I also think that a long-term plan would have included extending the upper/lower portion of Canal all the way north to Kinzie, but the ship for that sailed at least 30 years ago I think (and probably more like 45 years ago).

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

the most recent significant office/res. mixed-use skyscraper in chicago that i can think of is 900 N michigan, completed in 1989.


____________________________________________________________________________________________________________



this is old info, and may be very out of date, but if we apply it to the 70 floor and 64 floor counts, we can make some educated guesses as to the potential height ranges.

WOLF POINT SOUTH & EAST
Chicago, IL
2,000,000 sq. ft. mixed-use development that will
include:
Wolf Point South - a 1,270,000 sq. ft. office tower that
includes 270,000 sq. ft. of residential space in 150
condos and parking for 280 cars
Wolf Point East - a 600,000 sq. ft. residential tower that
will contain 700 units and parking for 170 cars
Part of Wolf Point development




so according to that, wolf point south is approximately 20% residential/80% office. applying that ratio to the floor count: 14 floors residential/56 floors office.

14 residential floors x 10'-12' per floor = 140' - 168'

56 office floors x 13'-16' per floor = 728' - 986'

so that's a total of 868' - 1,154''.

let's throw in an extra 20' for that really tall and dramatic lobby level and we get:

888' - 1,174'.




as for the east tower, 64 residential floors x 10'-12' per floor = 640' - 768'

let's throw in an extra 20' for that really tall and dramatic lobby level and we get:

660' - 788'.



the 950' and 750' ballpark figures we've heard for these two from the very beginning very safely fall in those ranges.

and with a spire, who knows how high the south tower could go?

Edit:my memory is bad today apparently

Based on 340 On The Park, also 64 floors and by the same developer, I SPECULATE that the East tower will be 672'

I further SPECULATE that the south tower will be 645 feet, like the 70 story Lake Point Tower. :tup:

I'll riot if they were to do something as goofy as that

Apparently we're a bunch of cheeto-stained mouth-breathers overreacting to old, probably bogus news...

At least according to this world-class, gem of a blog post :uhh:
http://www.chicagoarchitecture.org/2...eeding-frenzy/

^ dear god. holy overreaction, batman! :haha:

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com...6c4e42b143.jpg
source: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/467107792575699435/

That whole post was incredibly hostile. What gives?

a desperate cry for attention?

traffic to his blog has probably quintupled in the past hour. :D

cheetos are just ok

Good to know! Kinzie's been ripped up for months, I'm glad there is some upside to all the construction work.

Re: my earlier comment, the Kinzie/Clinton intersection is a tricky one with that forest of columns. They can't close off Canal (like they should) until they sort out the issues at Clinton, otherwise even small delivery trucks won't be able to turn south without detouring to Desplaines.

Fortunately the Alta building included a setback from Clinton, so they could realign the intersection if needed...