Chicago art gallery gets some loft units upstairs

The terracotta tailor at West Loop's White Tower BuildingHow would you like to come home to this guy every night (see right)? He’s the inspiration for a new loft condo/art gallery project in the West Loop.

The White Tower Building at 847 W Jackson Boulevard, once owned by The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, is being converted into a loft condo development called The Tailor at Jackson, and its exhibition space, Gallery 2 (G2), will remain downstairs.

The building, which dates back to 1922, takes its name from the figures of the two wizened little bespectacled tailors who sit cross-legged tending to their craft on the white terracotta facade of the building at its entrance on South Peoria Avenue. No-one seems to know just how they came to adorn the building, which the art institute acquired in 1994.

“They sort of look like Benjamin Franklin; it’s pretty neat,” says Malissa Welke of Rubloff Residential, which is marketing the property for The Tenley Group, a newly formed company who come from a background in loft conversions in New York City and Washington D.C.

The steel-reinforced concrete building is currently home to the art institute’s G2, and the school has signed a 10-year tenancy to continue using several floors of the 10-story building as an exhibition space, Welke tells YoChicago. The sales office opens in early March.

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