Quote:
Originally Posted by Kngkyle
Yea... at 135k sqft the current building seems much too small. This does seem more like a redevelopment play. Does anyone know how much space they currently have leased at Merchandise Mart and 444 W Lake? The $232M they're getting for their Northbrook campus is probably enough to buy this site plus provide the equity to build a standard ~800ft office tower.
Edit: on second look, the site might be too small to support an office of that height, it's only about 1/8th of a block
|
Well, the calculus is different sometimes when you're a Fortune 500 company constructing your own building. HQ projects don't need to demand the same efficient floorplates that a developer would. A lot of the Loop's iconic office towers were built this way (Sears, Inland Steel, BCBS, Standard Oil, etc) because they didn't have to be bloated, stumpy boxes.
It is certainly a shallow site, but it has a half-block frontage on North Wacker which is the best corporate address in Chicago, and it's spitting distance to Ogilvie. 130 N Franklin could certainly support a bigger tower, but you lose the Wacker address.
I could even imagine Allstate working something out with AT&T to buy air rights over their building on Washington (since that's never going anywhere) to allow larger floorplates with a cantilever above the 20th floor or whatever. This is common in NYC now but I can't think of any similar project in Chicago.