The numbing sameness of new American hotels ought to bother more than business travelers and tourists. Why? Because cookie-cutter hotels, like the relentlessly similar Courtyards-by-Marriott, destroy that priceless thing called urban character faster than you can spit out the word “concierge.”
It is a pleasure to report, then, that Chicago is bucking the national trend of look-alike lodgings. With the blessing of Mayor Richard M. Daley, the city is helping developers to renovate inns whose beauty has been ravaged by changing times and tastes. Developers also are being encouraged to make boutique hotels out of fine old buildings that, without hefty property tax breaks, might have fallen victim to the wrecking ball or simply fallen apart.
As a string of recent projects attests, this policy is paying dividends for the cityscape.
Along Randolph Street’s still-emerging theater district, bright red neon smartly outlines the sidewalk canopy of the Hotel Allegro Chicago, the former Bismarck Hotel. On State Street, there’s the superbly restored Hotel Burnham, with its glistening white terra-cotta facade; just a few years ago, it was the crumbling Reliance Building.
Go over to the Jeweler’s Row district of Wabash Avenue, and you’ll find the beautifully renovated brick and terra-cotta facade of the Silversmith Hotel, which, true to its name, used to be home to silversmiths. And on North Michigan Avenue, in the largest of the rehabs completed so far, the Allerton Hotel and its whimsical Tip-Top-Tap sign are back in tip-top shape.
Driving the trend are the booming economy and travelers’ weariness of hotels that make Minneapolis indistinguishable from Indianapolis. Today, says Peter Steketee, the Allerton’s general manager, “you could wake up in a hotel and not know what city you’re in.”
The projects are part of a pro-preservation movement that got rolling in 1996, when Daley forced the City Council to grant complete or partial protection to 29 of 30 threatened landmarks. That action brought a halt to decades of tear-downs — some of them, like the loss of Adler & Sullivan’s Chicago Stock Exchange Building in 1972, carried out under his father, the late Mayor Richard J. Daley.
Now, in effect, the city has institutionalized that revolution. Aided by a 3-year-old Cook County law that eases the property-tax burden on the developers of landmark properties, the mayor can dangle carrots as well as brandishing sticks. And those incentives can be combined with others that aid the cause of preserving the past.
Tax increment financing (TIF) districts, which earmark increases in property taxes generated by rising property values to pay for public works, have helped pay for projects like the Hotel Burnham. Meanwhile, federal tax breaks for buildings on the National Register of Historic Places, the government’s list of American’s most revered structures, were instrumental in making the Silversmith and Hotel Burnham projects a reality.
“The city has heavily invested in making this a more beautiful place and a more livable place,” says David Bahlman, executive director of Landmarks Preservation Council of Illinois, a non-profit advocacy group.
There are, to be sure, engineering challenges and economic risks in breathing new life into dowager buildings. To hoist steel beams from street level to the top of the Allerton, for example, construction managers had to bring a helicopter into the skyscraper canyon of North Michigan Avenue on several Sunday mornings in 1998. Its whirring blades did not strike any buildings, though they did awaken startled high-rise condominium dwellers. In any event, the crash developers really worry about is financial — too many hotel rooms and too little demand.
“There’s always a concern we can get overbuilt, but there’s only one Michigan Avenue — and we’re on it,” says John McDonald, president of the Mark IV Realty Group, which wants to turn the landmarked, Art Deco Carbide and Carbon Building into a 386-room hotel.
The Allerton also occupies prime Michigan Avenue frontage, though the once-swank shopping district north of the Chicago River has taken a visual pounding of late. Just when you thought things couldn’t get any worse for Boul Mich, they do; look (if you can) at the hideous new Disney Store, with its grotesque imitation of Louis Sullivan’s organic ornament.
But the restored Allerton, certainly no visual cartoon, is almost enough to make you forget the Michigan Avenue outpost of Mickey Mouse.
Gone are the window-unit air-conditioners — 480 of them, enough to fill a couple of semi-trucks — that looked like pimples on the building’s richly textured brick skin. Gone, too, are the marble, aluminum and other inappropriate cladding materials that blighted the building’s proud limestone base. Ditto the modernist metal canopy that was jammed through the three grand arches that mark the hotel’s main entrance on Huron Street and the rectangular picture window that wrecked another trio of arches in one of the Allerton’s picturesque corner towers.
Now, on its exterior, the Allerton exudes the old Michigan Avenue elegance. And for that, we can thank Chicago architects Eckenhoff Saunders and the owner, Bristol Hotels & Resorts of suburban Dallas. Both acknowledge that they got an assist from the county’s real estate tax break program.
Adopted by the Cook County Board in 1997 with strong support from Daley, the program created a new tax classification called “Class L” that provides 12 years of property tax reductions if the owner invests at least half of the property’s value in significant rehabilitation. For the Allerton, Class L will mean an estimated property tax savings of $8 to $10 million, a major boon for the $60 million project.
As a result, there was money to refurbish the Allerton’s Tip Top Tap sign, with its white letters and reddish-pink neon. (The sign was put in place in the 1940s to advertise a popular 23rd-floor cocktail lounge that offered extraordinary skyline views.) Funds also were available to restore the Allerton’s limestone base and to put back such fetching details as pointed Gothic arches and carved likenesses of griffins. A new steel and glass canopy is far more sympathetic to the Allerton’s entrance than the old one.
In addition to making the right cosmetic moves, the Eckenhoff Saunders team, led by principal W. Stephen Saunders and project architect Steve Grassi, did crucial behind-the-scenes work.
To get rid of the offensive window-unit air-conditioners, for example, the architects deftly tucked cooling towers behind the cupolas on the building’s east side. Happily, the towers are invisible from the street. (It was the need to build them, incidentally, that made those steel-hoisting helicopters necessary.)
The outcome is a visual feast for passersby, reinforcing the positive urban impact of the other renovated hotels and reminding us that great cities consist of more than individual masterpieces. They depend upon urbane background buildings that play supporting roles to the architectural stars. Even background signs matter. The Allegro’s sidewalk canopy, outlined by red neon, is a superb complement to the blazing marquee of the Cadillac Palace Theatre, just east of the hotel on Randolph.
But the wonderful thing about hotels is that their public space extends within the buildings — to lobbies, ballrooms and other spaces that make them feel like a city under a single roof.
The interiors of the rehabs vary widely, especially when measured by the yardstick of the Hotel Burnham, where the soaring lobby and its materials — a beguiling combination of colorful, polished marbles — are as dazzling as the brilliant white facade.
The Allegro wins the prize for theatricality, with a colorful mural behind the hotel’s dramatic staircase that portrays dancers, musicians and other entertainers. It’s a nice nod to the theater district and certainly cuts against the grain of anonymous architecture. Still, the hotel’s playful, retro George Jetson look already feels a bit dated. This is design as fashion and therefore bound to go out of style.
The Silversmith’s lobbies are more reverent, mixing classical and Art and Crafts details in spaces that are tasteful and well-proportioned but unremarkable.
Much the same can be said of the Allerton’s interior, where the great flourishes of the past — a superbly proportioned, ground-floor lobby off Huron and grand public rooms with beautifully plastered ceilings — were lost in the postwar era and proved too expensive to re-create, even with the tax breaks.
But the architects and the project’s interior designers, the Atlanta firm Designers II, have recaptured some of the old glory.
Building a new roof above a former outdoor light court, Eckenhoff Saunders created a two-story lobby on the Allerton’s third floor that showcases exterior limestone columns behind a recessed glass wall. Other than that, there’s nothing particularly memorable about this room, but its dark woods and classical details make it warm and welcoming. Certainly, it helps make up for the hotel’s cramped, ground-level “motor lobby,” a big disappointment after the hotel’s grand entrance arches.
To make the interior more lively, the architects designed the Allerton’s second, third and fourth floors as a single zone linked by an internal staircase and cutouts in the floors. They create the impression that the hotel’s public areas aren’t a series of dull, isolated rooms but rather a bustling urban crossroads. Adding to the sense of vitality is a restaurant-bar called Taps on Two in honor of the Tip Top Tap. The former cocktail lounge, by the way, now holds hotel ballrooms.
Upstairs, there are more than 200 different room configurations and furnishings that work well with the hotel’s historic character.
“It was a pain for us” to figure out all the room plans, says Saunders, “but it makes it more of a unique hotel, a boutique hotel.”
In the Allerton and the other projects, architects have faced the challenge of retrofitting buildings, both hotels and those that served other uses. At the Silversmith, for example, two layers of glass and drapes were installed behind the building’s original single-glazed windows to soundproof the building from roaring elevated trains.
While the Allerton, the Silversmith and the Allegro can’t match the overall quality of the Hotel Burnham restoration, they nevertheless join the former Reliance Building in making a significant stand against the bland, boring designs fed to undemanding consumers by the lodging industry.
In the past, Chicago led the nation with architectural advances as the birth of the skyscraper pointed the way to the future. Now, the city is assuming a different kind of leadership role, supporting hotels that make the past a part of that future. It matters just as much that they enable travelers — and the rest of us — to know we’re not in Anytown, U.S.A.
