By Emily GlazerThe Daily Northwestern
A Chicago building owned by Northwestern and considered a potential historical landmark faces demolition if a contract for the building’s sale is finalized.
Fifield Companies, a Chicago real-estate firm, signed a contract to purchase the old Lakeshore Athletic Club, 850 N. Lake Shore Drive, from NU on March 16. Fifield plans to knock down the building to construct luxury condominium residences. But the city government has flagged the building, along with about 9,600 others, as an “orange-listed building,” said Alan Schachtman, senior vice president at Fifield.
Orange properties bear historical or architectural features that make them potentially significant to their surrounding communities, according to the Chicago Historic Resources Survey.
Both Schachtman and Eugene Sunshine, NU’s senior vice president for business and finance, declined to comment on the building’s sale price. However, a Chicago Sun-Times article published Thursday reported that sources said Lakeshore sold for more than $40 million.
Sunshine said the $40 million price tag was “conjecture and speculation.”
As a landmark, Lakeshore is worth less to NU because the only options are renovation or restoration, Schachtman said.
Sunshine said renovation would cost an enormous amount of money, and he described the heating, structural and electrical systems as beyond replacement.
Renovation also isn’t feasible because NU graduate students prefer suites, but Lakeshore only offered single-person units, he said. Only 25 percent of Lakeshore was occupied before NU decided to close housing in the building in 2005.
Similarly, the building has little value to Fifield.
“We won’t buy it unless we can knock it down,” said Schachtman, whose firm is trying to secure a demolition permit this week so it can begin construction.
Legalities aside, the firm faces other obstacles.
Groups such as Preservation Chicago and Streeterville Organization of Active Residents are protesting Lakeshore’s demolition.
Jonathan Fine, president of Preservation Chicago, said that Lakeshore’s historic value stems from its use by Olympic athletes, including a number of Olympic swimming medalists, for training.
But Schachtman said opposition “will have to take its course.”
Lakeshore opened in 1927 and was purchased by NU for $7.5 million in the mid-’70s, according to documents from University Archives.
Months after NU closed the building’s graduate housing, it also shuttered its fitness and recreational facilities, Sunshine said.
NU began accepting bids for Lakeshore in August and received more than a dozen bids from builders and developers “involving multiple types of propositions and multiple uses,” Sunshine said.
The money from the sale will be invested and put into NU’s endowment, where the money will be used for general university funding, he said.
Reach Emily Glazer at [email protected].
