The national retailer will anchor the retail portion of 939 W. North Ave., a 200,000-square-foot building completed in 2002.
The 10-year lease will help the retail and medical office building, along with the Lincoln Park market, continue recovering from the pandemic, said Alex Katz, principal at Farpoint Development, which purchased the building at auction in early 2024.
“This building is the gateway to Lincoln Park, but during COVID many of the retailers vacated,” Katz said.
Farpoint and its partner MCZ Development first concentrated on filling the eight-story property’s office space, now 98% leased, Katz said. The partners also began modernizing the building, which includes hundreds of parking spaces on several levels. They added new amenities, a new facade and building systems, along with floor-to-ceiling windows for the ground-floor retail space.
It’s rare to see a soft goods retailer like T.J. Maxx take over such a prominent Lincoln Park location, Katz said, most likely because few can afford it. Farpoint was able to make the retail space on North Avenue affordable because it got the property at a huge discount.
“We bought it for pennies on the dollar, and that gave us a lot of flexibility to lease up the property,” he said. “Soft goods retailers are not paying $50 to $60 per square foot in rent.”
The previous owner paid $89 million for the building in 2004, and the present owners paid almost $21 million, according to Costar. Other tenants include Fitness Formula Clubs, Iteld Plastic Surgery, and Urban Oasis, a massage spa.
Katz said the foot traffic brought in by a T.J. Maxx will likely attract other new tenants, and the owners have letters of intent from several totaling another 10,000 square feet on the first floor and 35,000 square feet on the second.
“Some tenants can be the trigger for other leases and I think that’s what’s going on here,” he said.
