What:

The Wrigley Building exterior lights will be off for one night on Saturday, March 16, 2013, due to electrical service upgrades to the property.

 The Wrigley Building is regularly illuminated by thousands of LED lights every night during the year to highlight one of Chicago’s landmarks for both residents and visitors.

 The electrical service upgrade is scheduled for only one night and the building will light the Chicago sky again Sunday, March 17, 2013.

When: Evening of Saturday, March 16, 2013

Where: The Wrigley Building, 400-410 North Michigan Avenue, Chicago, IL

Media Contacts

DickinsonGroup: Amy Bacon Volpe, 312.504.5589, avolpe@dickinsongroup.com

Colleen Scrivner, 312.239.1102; cscrivner@dickinsongroup.com

Chicago’s Wrigley Building has reached landmark status.

The Chicago City Council on Wednesday unanimously approved a recommendation to award the official designation to the iconic Michigan Avenue building.

“The Wrigley Building has long been considered one of our great architectural gems,” said Ald. Brendan Reilly in a statement.  “I look forward to working with the new owners to assist in the renovation and repositioning of this iconic structure.”

The 460,000 square-foot building was recently sold to a group of investors that includes Zeller Realty Group and Groupon co-founders Eric Lefkofsky and Brad Keywell.

Zeller Reality Group is leading renovations, currently awaiting approval by the city, including extensive improvements to the building infrastructure, plaza gateway, vacant 410 Club and ground-floor retail in both buildings.

Construction is expected to begin in late June and continue into the summer of 2014, Senior Vice President with Zeller Realty Group Ari Glass said in a statement.

“We are excited to begin welcoming tenants as early as this fall to renovated space in this internationally renowned destination,” Glass said.

The Wrigley Company is set to move into a newer building on Goose Island, leaving one of Chicago’s most recognized buildings with more than 250,000 square feet up for lease.

A DAILY CHICAGO JOURNAL ABOUT THE BUILDINGS AND URBAN SPACES THAT SHAPE OUR LIVES
BY BLAIR KAMIN

June 06, 2012

City Council approves landmark status for Wrigley Building

Chicago’s City Council on Wednesday approved official landmark status for the Wrigley Building, granting protection to a treasured civic icon as new owners prepare to renovate it.
The Council’s vote approves a recommendation, made in February by the Commission on Chicago Landmarks, to grant landmark status to the building, which consists of adjoining towers at 400 and 410 North Michigan Ave.

The vote, which historic preservationists regarded as long overdue, also makes the Wrigley Building eligible for Cook County historic preservation tax breaks.

In a news release following the vote, a spokeswoman for the Wrigley Building’s owners announced that the building would be bathed in blue light Wendesday night and throughout the summer to celebrate its landmark status.

The new owners are a consortium of investors led by BDT Capital Partners, along with Groupon co-founders Brad Keywell and Eric Lefkofsky, and the Zeller Realty Group.
For details about the upcoming renovation, click here.

March 24, 2012

Bringing the Wrigley Building into the 21st Century; as city weighs landmark status for iconic skyscraper, new owners propose changes

Like me, you may have wondered: What’s in those mysterious aeries atop the Wrigley Building?
Last week, I found out.
Inside the tiny, round room near the top of the southern tower of the festive white skyscraper, you spy something you can’t see from street level—winged lions carved into the columns that surround the room. Reached by a spiral staircase, the room was once the top tier of an observatory, I learned. Visitors got drop-dead views of the skyline and the Chicago River, plus, legend has it, a pack of chewing gum.

In the other Wrigley Building aerie (below)—this one atop the northernmost of the adjoining towers at 400 and 410 N. Michigan Ave.–faint blue and white clouds adorn the walls of the “Cloud Room.” This soaring, light-washed space (below) served as a fabulous break room for employees of the building’s former owner, the Wm. Wrigley Jr. Co.

With a long-overdue ordinance to make the Wrigley Building an official Chicago landmark expected to be introduced to the City Council next month, I figured the time finally was right to get a full-fledged tour of the famous skyscraper across Michigan Avenue from the Tribune Tower.

The new owners were only too happy to oblige, and it was easy to understand why. About 65 percent of the building’s 460,000 square feet will be empty once Wrigley moves out by the end of this year. That’s a lot of space to sell, and the economic stakes are high.

The new owners—a consortium of investors led by BDT Capital Partners, along with Groupon co-founders Brad Keywell and Eric Lefkofsky, and the Zeller Realty Group—spent a modest $33 million to buy the aging building, according to Ari Glass, a Zeller senior vice president. They will spend more than double the purchase price – roughly $70 million — to renovate it, he said.

The money will pay for such mundane, low-profile upgrades as new toilets and a new sprinkler system (like many older buildings, the Wrigley Building doesn’t have sprinklers). Yet the renovation also will produce such highly-visible changes as the removal of a refrigerator-like metal and glass wall that disfigured one of the building’s ground-level facades.

“The good news is we’re doing is we’re doing very little to the outside except improving it,” said Michael Kaufman, a partner at Chicago-based Goettsch Partners, the architectural firm working on the project.
Designed by architects Graham, Anderson, Probst & White, the Wrigley Building was completed in two parts that have been compared to fraternal twins—the taller south tower, with its clock tower, in 1921; the shorter but larger north tower, which holds two-third of the building’s office space, in 1924.

An outdoor plaza was built atop a viaduct between the two towers in 1957. It provided a pedestrian link between Michigan and Wabash Avenues and covered a railroad spur on North Water Street.

For decades, the Wrigley Building was an unofficial landmark, celebrated in postcards and in songs like “My Kind of Town,” but it lacked official city landmark protection because city officials trusted the Wrigley company to treat it with the proper care. The prospect of the upcoming renovation changed that, though it not did not quell debates about the building’s architectural quality.

Shortly after the Commission on Chicago Landmarks recommended landmark status for the building in February, some commentators took aim at the building, calling it a “beloved rip-off.” But the far more common view is that the Wrigley is a graceful synthesis of diverse stylistic sources (Spanish, Renaissance, French and Chicago School), not an awkward hodgepodge.

It is that rare building which is appreciated by both the masses and the cognoscenti. And the new owners intend to treat it the right way: Respecting its architectural integrity while bringing it into the 21st Century.
Their most dramatic and welcome change will strip off the incongruous metal-and-glass façade that the Wrigley Co. glommed onto the plaza-facing wall of the north tower in 2010 (photo, above). Terra cotta, matching the rest of the building, will replace it (rendering, below).

The plaza itself, now a dreary stretch of crumbling concrete, also could get an upgrade, with new materials and seasonal seating if restaurants occupy the space around the plaza. That would make it a fitting extension of the elegant plaza at the adjoining Trump International Hotel & Tower. But the outcome will depend on negotiations between the new owners and the city, which owns the plaza and which agreed in 1956 to pay for maintaining the public space.

“Both parties are interested in working out an agreement that would facilitate a renovation of the existing plaza,” Pete Scales, a spokesman for the city’s Department of Transportation, wrote in an email.
Another high-profile change will remove most of the screen-like wall of glass and metal between North Michigan Avenue and building’s plaza (photo, at left), leaving three open arches in the building’s center (rendering, below). The current screen is not original, Kaufman said. The original screen was installed to prevent people from falling onto the railroad spur, he explained, and to prevent coal-fired train engines from spewing smoke onto elegant Boul Mich.

That change could be a mixed blessing. The screen provides a sense of human scale and skillfully ties together the lower reaches of the two towers. But getting rid of it will improve pedestrian flow and allow people to see more of the beautiful terra cotta arches. Not coincidentally, the change will improve access to the shops the new owners would like to see around the plaza.

“We want to see the plaza, in general, be more invigorated,” Glass said.

Inside, the changes will be more substantial, with an eye toward luring tenants to a location that is far from downtown’s train stations. Only the building’s exterior would be protected by the proposed landmark ordinance, according to Peter Strazzabosco, a spokesman for the city’s Department of Housing and Economic Development.

In the two lobbies, the new owners envision keeping original details, like a bronze post office box, but plan a new look that would blend modern and traditional styles. Ornate bronze chandeliers will be restored or recreated.

In the offices, where ceilings heights can be raised above the building’s current standard of just over 8 feet, the owners stress strengths that arise from a site across the Chicago River from the central business district but removed from its cheek-by-jowl office blocks: Abundant natural light, views of the river and (from higher floors) Lake Michigan, even views looking across the plaza to the wealth of terra cotta ornament in the opposite Wrigley tower (left).

Some marble walls in the hallways and mahogany door surrounds will stay. Others, in corridors which have been altered over the years, are likely to disappear.

“We’re anticipating a complete gut and rebuilding of the office space,” Glass said.

Prospective tenants include financial service firms, boutique law firms, ad agencies and public relations firms. Some existing tenants can expect rental rates to rise once the renovation is done and their leases expire, the owners say.

“The building needs rejuvenation. It needs to be brought to commercial office standards that can compete in today’s market,” said Janice Goldsmith, a Zeller senior vice president.

The owners are requesting a Class L property tax classification, which would save them $12.1 million over 12 years, city officials have said. To gain that benefit, the owners must invest 50 percent of the building’s full market value in renovations approved by the city.

That’s a trade-off well worth making. The City Council should approve landmark status for the Wrigley and the Class L change its owner seek. The saving of great buildings works best when it’s undergirded by a strong financial foundation. This is the sort of enlightened marriage of preservation and economics that will ensure the long-term survival of a treasured Chicago icon.

(Tribune photos of Wrigley Building “Cloud Room” and architectural detail by Alex Garcia; photo of Michigan Avenue screen and renderings by Goettsch Partners)