Making his first public appearance, the developer of a proposed 2,000-foot tower for Chicago’s lakefront said Monday night that he is so confident the project will succeed that he is ready to order foundations, even though the skyscraper has yet to receive city approval.
“This is getting built,” said the developer, Garrett Kelleher of Dublin, Ireland, answering skeptics of the twisting condominium tower designed by Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava.
Taking a swipe at developer Donald Trump, who has called Calatrava’s tower “financial suicide,” Kelleher said of Trump’s 92-story hotel-condominium skyscraper on the former Chicago Sun-Times site: “In my view, the Sun-Times site is neither residential nor office.”
Kelleher spoke before more than 100 people at a meeting of the Grant Park Advisory Council, a citizens group. He did not show Calatrava’s latest version of the design, but he addressed a broad range of issues, from parking to open spaces.
The skyscraper, called the Chicago Spire, would be located west of Lake Shore Drive across from Navy Pier. It would be the nation’s tallest building.
Those in attendance lauded Kelleher’s project, and his talk drew several rounds of applause. “These are very great strides forward,” said Ward Miller, a Chicago preservationist.
The project would be 150 stories tall, not 160, as his team previously disclosed, Kelleher said. It would have anywhere from 1,000 to 1,350 units, a possible reduction from the number of units announced last month.
Kelleher added that some of the skyscraper’s seven levels of underground parking would be directly beneath the building.
Asked about the possibility of a vehicle-delivered bomb like the one that struck the public parking garage of the World Trade Center in 1993, killing six people, Kelleher said his architect is “more than capable of dealing with that.”
He offered no firm numbers on cost–previously estimated at $1.2 billion–nor would he commit to paying for two Calatrava-designed pedestrian bridges that are part of his vision for the tower’s environs.
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tmaxwell@tribune.com
