It’s Sunday, just before 11 on a sunny but chilly winter morning in Chicago, and the stoplight on Michigan Avenue at Chestnut Street is running through its 1-minute 25-second cycle, including left-turn arrow, like clockwork.
About 50 cars are chugging through this intersection every time the light changes-not a bad pace for the time of day, even if some are just circling the block looking for parking or fares.
Anywhere from 20 to 30 pedestrians are scampering through the crosswalks during each rotation as well, off rather early, for a weekend, to any of a number of destinations along the Magnificent Mile.
There’s nothing particularly magical about this corner, nothing arresting to its look, no historical marker to signify any noteworthiness. Yet the intersection of Michigan and Chestnut is positively like no other in Chicago, maybe like no other in the country.
For on each of the four corners where these two streets meet, there sits the edge of a building that in one way or another symbolizes the life and soul of the city.
On the northeast, the John Hancock Center towers over everything else on the street, a 100-story mixed-use project that, when it opened in 1970, forever changed the way people lived and worked along Michigan Avenue.
On the southeast, Water Tower Place attracts as many visits as any other location in the metropolis, its groundbreaking vertical retail mall proving that the center city did not have to surrender commerce to the suburbs.
On the southwest is the newcomer on the block, 840 North Michigan Avenue, a retail project that is in many ways a throwback to the Michigan Avenue of old with its low-rise, street-friendly appearance.
And on the northwest corner, the venerable and architecturally alluring Fourth Presbyterian Church is a testament to the area’s residential importance, its ministry a reminder of a longtime neighborhood social fabric.
At 11 a.m. on a Sunday, with pedestrians and cars buzzing about, the intersection where these four real estate developments merge becomes one of the most fascinating in the world.
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The observatory on the 94th floor of the Hancock has been open two hours already and it will stay open another 13 hours, until midnight, as it does every day. In a year, more than 500,000 people will visit the observatory.
But the real buzz of activity in the Hancock is three floors up, on the 97th, a floor seldom seen by guests. There-high above the retail concourse, the office floors and the condominiums of the Hancock-electronic transmitters hum for 8 television stations, 13 FM radio outlets, Federal Express and UPS dispatch operations and more than 100 mobile radio users, 24 hours a day.
“Communications-wise, there are only four or five other buildings like this in the world,” said Mead Elliot, who is employed in the Hancock to oversee the electronics apparatus.
The signals generated on 97 are transferred to the antennas atop the Hancock’s roof, then broadcast across the metropolitan area. This time of year, ice is a big problem; de-icing compounds are used on the antennas, but they still sometimes must be freed of ice by hand.
Snow is not a concern on the roof, Elliot said, because it blows off in the high winds. However, painting the red-and-white towers, as was done last summer, can be a “big job,” he said. “There is so much wind, you’ve got to try not to paint half the North Side of Chicago.”
While the workers on such projects may enjoy the view, the observatory provides a lot more comfort. This day, the visibility is a mere 25 miles; but there are days when it is possible to peer 80 miles into the distance, to see Michigan, Indiana, Wisconsin and, of course, a good deal of Illinois from this aerie.
Back down at the bottom of the tower, tucked into the corner of the Hancock’s sunken plaza that is closest to Michigan and Chestnut, is a store that may rank as one of the lowest-located businesses on the avenue: Jonathan’s barber shop. But on Sundays, Jonathan’s is deserted; it’s strictly a Monday-Friday operation.
The plaza and Jonathan’s space, however, may not be around in their current form much longer. Owner Hancock Realty Investors Inc. has announced that the plaza and retail space within the tower will be reconfigured in the final $18 million phase of an ongoing $60 million renovation.
“This is a plan that will bring a lot more activity to the plaza area. We hope the new design will draw considerable foot traffic,” said Kevin McGuire, managing director of Hancock Realty Investors Inc. in Boston.
Earlier phases of the renovation helped upgrade many of the building’s office floors. Yet the 800,000 square feet of office space is about 50 percent vacant.
But a new leasing and management company, U.S. Equities Realty Inc., which won the Hancock assignment in a heated competition last fall, is promising to remedy that.
“We only want an assignment where we can have an impact,” said U.S. Equities chairman Robert Wislow, whose firm also developed 840 N. Michigan. “We know Michigan Avenue. We know that corner. And nothing that we could build, I don’t care how nice we could make it, could compete with the Hancock.”
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From the cosmetics counters in the front corner of Lord & Taylor’s Water Tower store, it is easy to keep an eye on the Michigan-Chestnut intersection through the plate-glass windows. But it’s hard not to look around at the plethora of goods devoted to keeping one’s good looks.
The doors to Lord & Taylor swing open at 11 a.m. on Sundays, but this is the post-holiday period and there are no mad waves of shoppers clawing to get in, just the usual steady stream for Water Tower, a landmark in the annals of retailing.
The eight-level, 726,000-square-foot vertical mall produces one of the highest sales volumes-$600 per square foot-of any retail property in the country. For comparison, a well-performing suburban mall might show sales of $450 per square foot; most storekeepers would be ecstatic with $300 a square foot.
“You can make the case that it’s the best mall in the country,” said Gordon Keiser, a vice president with JMB Realty Corp., Water Tower’s co-owner and manager.
It certainly is one of the most popular. Last year, an estimated 20 million shoppers visited. The project also includes the 430-room Ritz-Carlton Hotel, about 100,000 square feet of offices and 260 condominiums.
Just how strong a performer Water Tower is was underscored last year when the project was refinanced in a $170 million bond issue, an issue rated AA at a time when most real estate projects couldn’t even make it to the table with Wall Street brokerage firms.
“The market analysis is simple,” said Lisa Aukamp, a vice president with Goldman Sachs, the investment house that aided JMB and co-owner Heitman Financial in the bond sale. “It’s pretty clear that Water Tower dominates the market. There is not a lot of potential competition for it coming along.”
When it opened in 1976, nobody envisioned that Water Tower Place would become this spending mecca. No one had any idea whether time-starved shoppers, used to hustling along Michigan Avenue and just glancing in store windows, could be lured off the street and up into a mall.
It is hard to believe today, when Water Tower is stop No. 1 or 2 on every tour bus agenda, but the first years were slow. Urban Investment Development Corp., later to merge with JMB, saw a high level of initial turnover in the stores, especially at the upper reaches of the atrium.
But after the initial shakeout, things settled into their current pattern, a high-traffic one.
“There is no mathematical certainty to any of them,” said Urban founder Philip Klutznick, also the developer of the Park Forest Plaza, Old Orchard in Skokie and Oakbrook Center.
“You have to approach each shopping center creatively, like a painting,” he said. “There is a little art in all of them.”
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The $99 stuffed pandas are sitting up alertly, the motorized dogs begin their yipping and flipping, and the rolling balls of The Giant Swoop Gravity Loop start down their four-story slalom as FAO Schwarz opens its giant Michigan Avenue toy store for another day of child-delighting business.
A 2-year-old blond girl stares enrapt at the playful pups that populate the front of the 33,000-square-foot store. A handful of grade school-age girls are fast making their way up to the second floor, where Barbie has her own wing.
This FAO Schwarz is one of the new breed of stores on Michigan Avenue, stores that are attractions not just for the merchandise on their shelves but for the experience, in and of itself, of visiting the emporium.
“It’s incredible that there is this kind of market on Michigan Avenue. It’s special,” said U.S. Equities’ Wislow. “Even as the street has changed in complexion and tenant mix, the image of the small, awninged shops has remained in everyone’s mind, the image of the carriage trade.”
The doors to another 840 tenant, European fashion retailer Escada, are aimed right at the corner, but are still closed. The retailer, which is said to be building an unusual store configuration that will include several of its product lines normally sold in individual outlets, is set to open later this spring.
Waterstone’s Booksellers (USA), a subsidiary of Britain’s largest bookseller, is a third tenant in the 840 project. A fourth store may yet sublease space from Escada, which initially took more space than it needed because it had not yet completed its Plaza Escada concept.
The 840 North Michigan project might have been another Water Tower, and was planned, in fact, as another mixed-use high-rise for the street. It originally was to have included a vertical mall like Water Tower, topped by a luxury hotel.
“We felt we had the prime site on the avenue, one of the best pieces of land in the city,” Wislow said.
But the fast-sinking commercial real estate market of the 1990s put the kibosh on any gargantuan deal. Hotels and offices are unneeded products today, along Michigan Avenue and just about everywhere else.
But Michigan Avenue has proven that it can still handle more retail, especially stores that are bigger, better, newer and more intriguing than anything that has come before.
Crate & Barrel, which through its decision to move to stand-alone quarters farther south made it possible to redevelop the 840 site, was the first to show that a pure retailing development could still make a go on the street and not have to be skyscraper high.
Then Sony and Nike, which along with Cole-Haan Shoes occupy a rehabbed building south on the avenue, bolstered the concept. Sony, which operates a high-tech showroom of its wizardry, and Nike, whose NikeTown is indeed a land unto itself, have become more like tourist attractions than sales halls.
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The pipe organ is pumping out a choral interlude by J.S. Bach, welcoming worshipers into the 78-year-old, gable-roofed sanctuary of the Fourth Presbyterian Church.
Although the church entrance is actually at Delaware Place and Michigan, the Gothic Revival structure stretches the length of the block, with an ivy-trimmed courtyard, or garth, in the middle offering a pastoral hideaway from the bustle of the avenue.
Listed on the National Register of Historic Places, the church buildings, including a minister’s residence and parish house, were designed by Ralph Adams Cram, a New York City architect responsible for the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in that city and the Princeton University Chapel, in association with Howard Van Doren Shaw of Chicago.
“The Fourth Presbyterian Church holds its place with dignity among the towering contemporary giants around it,” says the National Register citation, noting the structure is a “human-scaled alternative to the megalomaniac scale of giants such as the John Hancock Center across the street.”
Although there has been talk over the years that the church might be sold or razed for redevelopment, church officials have denied any such intentions. And that possibility seems far remote today, given the slumping commercial real estate market.
Instead, the church, which has always counted a number of the city’s oldest and wealthiest in its membership since its founding in 1871, is poised to continue its numerous ministries in the neighborhood.
In addition to Sunday services, the church offers a multidimensional counseling center, a tutoring program for children, activities both for older adults and youth, and volunteer help for the homeless that includes cooking and serving of food in local shelters on Sundays.
In fact, the church has launched a major rehabilitation program of its own, designed to make its existing buildings more efficient and accessible. Among the renovations being planned: Addition of a day-care center to serve about 65 children, a doubling of Sunday School space, a new 6,000-square-foot playground and landscaped park, an enlarged dining room, redesign of recreation space that also will add new showers and lockers, and a reconfiguration of education and tutoring centers.
The sermon on this Sunday, by associate pastor Nancy Hutchison, is “What Are We Looking For?” It is a theme that would be appropriate on any day along a street that is also a world-renowned shopping district.
“Even in the midst of such a smorgasbord of sights and sounds and sensations, we still feel the need for something real,” Hutchison said. “The challenge is to look for God without being distracted by our glittering malls and glitzy culture.
“We think that what we seek is always just around the next corner, yet when we reach that corner, it has just ducked out of sight around the block ahead,” she said. “If for 1,000 times we miss it going around the corner, on the 1,001st time we still believe we will catch it.”
