In coming weeks, a crew will ride to the top floor of the McGraw-Hill Building on North Michigan Avenue to begin an unprecedented surgical procedure: skinning a 16-story building.
Through summer and into fall, workers will peel the limestone facade from the landmark Art Deco building and cart it off to a storage yard miles away.
A year later, if all goes as planned, the 2,200 stones that once clad a somewhat dowdy office interior will be trucked back to 520 N. Michigan Ave. and rehung on the new, airy steel superstructure of a luxury hotel and shopping mall.
Nobody has ever tried this operation, which preservationists derisively call a “facadectomy,” on a building of this size. Few are calling this “preservation,” reaching instead for words like rehabilitation and reuse.
“It’s an epic clash of interests, and there are many things about it that make it desirable that it never be repeated,” said Doug Farr, a consultant hired by the city to oversee the process.
The building is not necessarily an architectural masterpiece. But the project to save the facade of this “Greco-deco” landmark could result either in a beautiful addition to the Magnificent Mile or a 16-story mockery of preservation. It all turns on the execution.
From an engineer’s point of view, the project is as seductive as it is tricky, peppered with variables and ruled by the vagaries of old rock. The face of this building has weathered 70 Chicago summers and winters. “It’s a unique project, unlike anything done before,” said Anthony Belluschi, the architect on the job.
The developer, John Buck, didn’t much want to save the old building that occupied the spot where he envisioned a shining Nordstrom-anchored shopping mall. When the city protected the facade as a landmark, though, the developer and city’s Commission on Landmarks began working out a plan to incorporate it into the new building, which will actually be a complex of three attached structures.
Now, the John Buck Co. is working to turn the McGraw-Hill facade into an asset, promising that it will be closer to the original when they are finished cleaning it up and re-installing it without the storefronts that were added later.
“We are confident that the end result will look better than it does today,” said Michael Moravek, a Buck vice president.
But unknowns lurk inside those stones.
Until each 1,400-pound slab of rock is resting on a pallet on the ground, no one will know the true condition of the Indiana limestone, cut from the same storied quarries as the Empire State Building and, for that matter, the Tribune Tower.
An initial examination of the 40-by-40-inch stones has shown that weather and 1920s building techniques have conspired to crack, chip and spall some of the limestone.
The building was made to be as rigid and unyielding as possible. But no amount of iron and concrete could stop it from settling over the years, and because no “give” was built in, the stones have been put under more pressure than the engineers’ slide rules calculated in the 1920s.
Also, steel expands as it rusts, and the pins stuck in the back of the limestone have corroded, exerting tremendous pressure–up to 10,000 pounds per square inch–on the rock.
“From a preservationist’s point of view, it makes sense to take the facade off and repair it, anyway,” said James Peters, deputy commissioner for the city’s Landmarks Department.
But there is more than one way to skin a building.
In 1980, the Boston Landmarks Commission approved a plan that saved the stone facade of the 11-story Boston Stock Exchange. Rather than pull off the facade of the 1890s-vintage structure, demolition crews more or less hollowed it out, demolishing the interior and leaving three exterior walls standing. Behind this empty, antique shell the developers erected a mirror-glass tower–a project that preservationists there still loathe.
The Buck Co. engineers decided that the hollowing-out method wouldn’t work here, though, because they don’t believe they could have braced the 17-story facade as it stood alone.
“The taller you go, the bigger the footprint for the bracing, and everyone said, `You can’t shut down Michigan Avenue for a year,’ ” said Belluschi.
Ultimately, they decided the only way to save the facade was to take it down and put it back up.
But how to get the stones off? They were, of course, never intended to be removed, and the rusty old pins anchoring them to the building are embedded in brick and mortar behind the stones, inaccessible from the front.
The only way to take off the stones on the outside is from inside the building.
As soon as National Wrecking Co. gets the appropriate permits–perhaps by month’s end–workers will begin removing the roof.
Then, using muscles and crowbars, they will break through the painted plaster walls that until recently lined offices to get at bricks behind the limestone.
“It all has to be done with hand tools so you don’t damage the stones,” said Sheldon Mandell of National Wrecking Co.
One by one, the bricks will be chipped away to reveal the broad backs of the 6-inch-thick limestone panels. This will also free the rusty anchors set into the mortar.
Once each massive stone has been exposed, tipping it a few degrees toward the street (a scaffold will stop it from going any farther) should break the old, brittle mortar holding it in place. Then, workers will be able to wrap each rock in a nylon–never scratchy metal–harness.
Eventually, the top story will have vanished, as if chewed away from the inside by termites, and workers will move down to the next floor, and then to the next below that.
About five months into the project, the demolition crew should reach the fifth and fourth floors, which have the most treasured stones on the building.
Husband and wife sculptors Eugene Van Breeman Lux and Gwen Lux carved mythical and zodiacal figures into the Indiana limestone panels–Atlas, Diana and Helios stand almost one story tall, rendered in “modern-classical” relief.
These “Lux panels” are not only the most precious, but they are also the largest and heaviest.
“You will have learned from 10 stories of removal when you get to them,” said Peters.
When the stones reach the ground, the restorationists will get their first best look at them.
“The reality is, some could crumble and they could end up being carried out of there in a bag,” said Buck’s Moravek.
All the contracts for the work contain incentives and disincentives designed to encourage saving as much of the original limestone as possible. If Buck Co. falls below 75 percent, it has to begin paying what is essentially a fine, which ultimately could amount to enough to rebuild the McGraw-Hill Building from scratch.
As each stone comes off, it will be marked and inventoried, then shipped to a storage yard. The developer is still searching for the site, which will have to be at least two football fields in size to accommodate all the rows of pallets.
At the yard, each stone will be examined and repaired.
Those damaged beyond repair will be replaced with stone from the same quarries in Bedford, Ind., where the original panels were cut seven decades ago.
Eventually, the stones will have to be put back up.
A subcontractor will decide exactly how this will be done, but it likely won’t be the way they were put up in the 1920s–one at a time.
Instead, the job will likely be more like putting a pre-fab house together, with large, pre-assembled components trucked in and tacked together.
Several stones can be mounted on a colossal slab of concrete, or a steel frame, then hoisted into place. That method was used to build the limestone-clad NBC Tower, on Columbus Avenue at the Chicago River.
Buck Co. hopes that by Christmas 2000, the facade will cover a building filled with shoppers.
The fact that the 1920s facade will be held up by 1990s engineering won’t damage its authenticity, in the city’s eyes.
“We don’t care what is happening behind it,” said Eleanor Esser, a preservation architect with the city, “as long as the correct appearance is there on the facade.”
