One South Halsted was just one of several big proposals announced for the West Loop in 2009 and 2010. Another, The Gateway, surfaced early last year, just long enough to rile up West Loopers who seemed dead-set against any more towers along Halsted Street. (They still do, given some of the reactions we’ve seen to the latest One South Halsted designs.)
Chicago Journal described the original Gateway proposal from the Taxman Corporation and Antunovich Associates as being “a busy complex mixing shops, hotels and a rental tower” standing 312 feet and comprising 228 apartments, designed to wrap around the old Mid-City Bank Building at the southwest corner of Halsted and Madison, just west of the One South Halsted development.
We shouldn’t see much snow until late tonight, which means the curious and concerned should be able to squeeze in a look at revised plans for The Gateway at a community meeting scheduled for 7 p.m. at the Merit School of Music, 38 S Peoria St, just a couple blocks west of the development site. (Big ups to Curbed for finding this info.) The meeting will be hosted by Alderman Walter Burnett Jr. and the West Loop Community Organization.
Antunovich’s current description of The Gateway says it’s a 300,000 square-foot project featuring “a 16-story 200 room hotel tower rising from a landscaped pool deck, multiple parking levels and ground floor retail space…Adjacent to the hotel tower parcel is the proposed retail block fronting on Halsted Street and wrapping the corners at Monroe and Green Streets. The retail block consists of multiple tenant spaces on the ground floor with a half city block space on the second floor suitable for a major grocery store or other large tenants with additional support parking for the retail tenants on the first floor and landscaped roof deck.”
There’s no sign whether this writeup describes the revised plan, but the renderings accompanying it (including the one seen above) are different from what were featured on the architect’s website a year ago.