Here’s the lede to a TimeOut Chicago piece on 1325 W Wilson, an Uptown building that began its life as the the Norman Hotel in 1929, was rehabbed by Peter Holsten in the late 80s, and has had a spotty history since then:
The hallways of Wilson Tower, a 12-story midrise at 1325 West Wilson Avenue, are dank and narrow. The stucco walls haven’t been repainted since the building was erected in 1931, and the carpets smell like mothballs.
The article is amusing in more ways than I have time to recount, so I’ll focus on the quote that you’ve come to expect in decade after decade of reading about Uptown. In this iteration it comes from developers Jay Michael and Tom Kim:
“I think the minute you walk into our building you know you’ve arrived at someplace very different from what you’ve been told has been Uptown all these years,” Michael says. “Uptown is an up-and-coming area,” Kim adds. “You have development pressure between Lakeview and Andersonville, and the floodgates are opening.”
Joseph,
you’re slipping more than the Romney campaign. That TimeOut Chicago piece is three weeks old.
The PR campaign for the whole “Flats Chicago” concept is a bit over the top. Michael’s company bought the old Salvation Army building directly across Broadway from the Wilson Yard Target entrance with plans on turning it into their North Side corporate HQ. Which hopefully will work out well for the company and the neighborhood.
They held a soiree there a few weeks back, party does not do it justice, with what looked to be a gaggle of good looking young rental agents and PR types hanging out. I’m not young, good looking, a rental agent or a PR type so they neglected to invite me. I’m not in their target market.
As for the floodgates opening to development in Uptown I would describe it as more like a garden hose than flood. It will happen one building at a time just as it mostly did in the largely gentrified sections of Uptown like Buena Park or the blocks around the NW corner of the neighborhood.
Of course developing a building of that size will have a disparate impact on that section of the hood.
I wish Michael and his company well. I suspect that their concept of renting not only the apartment space, but the lifestyle will be successful. Time will tell.
Uptown… up and coming for the past 50 years.