Last January I asked a representative of the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat why The Legacy at Millennium Park, 60 E Monroe St, didn’t join high-rises like the Trump Tower, Aqua, One Museum Park, and The Elysian, on the Council’s 2009 list of the world’s tallest new towers. The answer I got — or at least the answer as I interpreted it — was, “Oops.” After all, The Legacy already had residents in 2009, and its construction schedule was similar to The Elysian’s, and that building made the ’09 list.
So it’s no great surprise that The Legacy is on the Council’s 2010 list of new high-rises; in fact, it’s the sole North American building among the 20 tallest towers. “At 72 stories and 818 feet, it’s less than a third as high as the tallest, the Burj Khalifa, designed by Adrian Smith, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, and its engineer extraordinaire William Baker,” writes Lynn Becker. “Even Ho Chi Minh had a skyscraper that beat Chicago for height, with 9 of the top 20 in Asia, 6 Dubai, 1 in Abu Dhabi, and 3 in Europe.”
There are only four homes listed at The Legacy right now: two one-bedrooms priced in the $370s and $430s, and two two-bedrooms priced in the $700s and $720s.
In April 2009, Joe Zekas, Mark Boyer, and I took a construction elevator ride up The Legacy with developer Jim Hanson and took in the views from the 71st floor, which was little more than a concrete slab ringed by 2×4 rails at the time. The video above features some of those views; below, Jim and Joe talk about the building.