Coliseum Park Condominiums, a 39-unit development scheduled to break ground in about a month at 1440 S Wabash in the South Loop, doesn’t bear much resemblance to the historic Chicago Coliseum, which stood on Wabash near 16th Street from 1897 to 1983. The Coliseum’s facade was constructed from parts of a Confederate Civil War prison shipped to Chicago from Virginia. Before it was demolished, the Coliseum was home to Blackhawks games, numerous political conventions and, according to a Wikipedia entry, a gathering of Students for a Democratic Society, the anti-war organization that hit its heyday in the 60s.
Coliseum Park Condominiums, by Deva Development, will be a red-brick building with an elevator, heated parking and ground-floor commercial space that will probably house a “coffee-and-bagel-type place,” according to Deva president Andy Stump. The times they are a-changing.
The four-story brick structure will be a relative rarity in the South Loop, where modern high-rises abound. “It adds a little bit of variety to the neighborhood,” Stump says. “In the South Loop there’s a lot of big buildings going up, so it provides some options for people.” Chicago architecture firm Axios Consultants designed the building to match a 16-townhouse development at 26th Street and East 14th Place that Deva took over from another developer, Stump says.
At this stage, 17 units have sold, Stump says. One-, two- and three-bedroom units are still available, with prices ranging from the $260s to the $470s (several 4,000- to 5,000-square-foot end-units sold for more than $1 million, he adds). Parking spaces (which run from $30,000 to $35,000) are included in listed prices. Deliveries are planned in the spring of 2008.
