When Burger King Distribution Services moved from west suburban Franklin Park early in 1991, it chose Internationale Centre in southwest suburban Woodridge over competing locations in the north and northwest suburbs.
“When we asked them how they made their decision, they said they asked their traffic experts,” said J. Todd Bender, vice president/development for Catellus Development Corp., developer of the 729-acre business park at Interstate Highways 55 and 355. “We asked who the experts were and expected to hear the name of a consultant. But they told us they asked their truckers where they’d prefer to be.”
Bender said the truckers’ preference for the metropolitan area’s newest superhighway intersection is not unusual.
Location is a prime reason that Internationale Centre leases 889,000 square feet of warehouse and distribution space to such firms as SportMart Inc., TennOhio Transportation Co., Graham Packaging Co., U.S. Wire-Tele Systems of Illinois Tool Works, and Vending Services of America (VAS Inc.), a subsidiary of International Multifoods.
Argonne National Laboratory, headquartered in nearby Darien, became the park’s first tenant when, in 1990, it leased a 100,000-square-foot research and development building for its environmental assessment and information sciences division as well as its Technology Transfer Center.
Internationale Centre thus far is the most successful of the business and industrial park developments launched in response to the opening early in 1991 of I-355 (the North-South Tollway), whose current southern terminus is at I-55 in the Bolingbrook/Woodridge area.
When the $1 billion project is completed, Bender expects Internationale Centre to be one of the largest business parks in the seven-county metropolitan area (including Lake County, Indiana), with 10 million to 14 million square feet of facilities employing up to 20,000 people.
The giant Catellus complex and other new business parks now under development just west of the North-South Tollway mark the beginning of what one planning consultant predicts will be a sudden increase of residential and light industrial expansion.
“This whole area has been a geographical bite out of the Chicago area,” said Leslie Pollock, principal in the planning firm of Camiros Ltd. “Historically, the region’s industrial function, its distance from O’Hare Airport to the north and the Des Plaines River and nearby canals to the south made it unattractive for the kind of development that took place elsewhere in the suburban area.”
The tollway changed both the perception and reality, however, and Pollock said an even bigger boost to the area will take place when I-355 is extended south to I-80 near New Lenox, which is scheduled to take place in the next three to five years.
“This north-south linkage will cross the natural river and preserve barriers and have major impact, especially along the I-55 corridor west to Plainfield,” he said.
“Wherever two major highways intersect, you have very powerful real estate markets,” said Steven Schau, executive director of Bolingbrook Development Corp., a cooperative private-public agency housed in the village hall. “There’s a saying that our national flower should be a cloverleaf.”
Since work on the tollway began in 1987, Schau said Bolingbrook’s industrial base has grown 2,200 percent to 2.6 million square feet. The village recently approved construction of a 325,000-square-foot distribution center, the largest speculative building in the Chicago area, for Industrial Development International (IDI) at I-55 and Illinois Highway 53.
Residential growth in Woodridge and Bolingbrook has been especially strong along I-355 north of I-55, and such development is likely to continue.
Nearly 450 acres along the tollway between Boughton and Joliet Roads is controlled by Gallagher & Henry, a Countryside-based home builder currently developing Farmingdale Village on a portion of the site.
“Most of this land is designated for residential,” said Terry Woolum, Gallagher & Henry’s vice president of finance. “Woodridge has a land plan for extension of Woodward Avenue south through the property to the Murphy Road bridge and some of the land is earmarked for office/research development. But if there is no demand, it will revert to residential.”
Although optimism abounds for future development in the I-55 and I-355 corridors, activity in the past year has been stalled because of the soft economy.
“Because the market has been so slow, we’re talking to several companies interested in buying a site and owning their building,” Bender said. “For the long term, however, we’ll be leasing buildings at Internationale Centre.”
“We’re starting to see more activity as the economy improves and we will continue to see that in the next six months,” Bender said. “There is pentup demand from the recession because companies had put their plans on hold until now.”
Bordering the Catellus property on the west is Corporate Crossing Business Park, a 170-acre development in Bolingbrook where work recently was completed on roads, sewers and underground utilities. The acreage was acquired in 1990 by Prudential Realty Group.
Although no sites have yet been sold, three or four sales of 10 to 30 acres are anticipated in the near future, according to Richard Levy, senior vice president and partner of Podolsky and Associates, which is handling land sales for the site.
Also in Bolingbrook, at Illinois 53 and Joliet Road, is the 243-acre Crossroads Business Park that Trammel Crow began developing in 1989. It currently has three warehouse/distribution buildings housing six tenants in a total of 650,000 square feet.
