All hail visible progress at the Banks! The excavators have departed, the remains of Riverfront have been exorcised and the ground has been neatly manicured into an attractive dirt brown rectangle with river view. Local observers were buzzing recently as a large 130 foot tall crane set up to begin installing the steel-reinforced support columns which will go as far as 75 feet into the ground to support the structure. The project will ultimately require 2,000 (!) of these columns, which are installed at the current rate of approximately 12 per day. While, admittedly, foundations, 75 foot concrete columns and steel skeletons for parking structures are not quite as sexy as, say, a downtown grocer, ESPN Zone or hotel on the site, rest assured that these are obviously the necessary first steps in the evolution of the much ballyhooed mega-project, not to mention tangible and visible signs of progress. As you may recall from a prior Soapdish, the Banks project has multiple phases, with Phase 1-A involving 300 apartments and up to 110,000 square feet of retail, 1-B being 300,000 square feet of office space and 1-C consisting of condo/town homes and a possible hotel. Given that math, and where we stand on driving the columns into the ground, let’s just dub this “Phase (-2,000) and Counting.” Start the countdown clock now!
In other news, will the last one out of the Bartlett Building please turn off the lights? Oh, wait, that’s right….looks like someone’s already got the job covered, courtesy of an involuntary bankruptcy case initiated against the building’s owner, Sterling Phoenix Development VI shortly before the Labor Day weekend. Fortunately for the tenants of this historic and classic Daniel Burnham-designed, 108 year old structure at 4th and Walnut (one of four Burnham-designed towers in the immediate vicinity), while the lights on the building appeared to be dimming (figuratively as well as literally) as August came to a close, a Trustee has since been appointed to keep those lights on and provide the necessary maintenance and upkeep (funded by current lenders) in order to bridge things to a sale. Keeping the electricity flowing is welcome news for those on the ground floor, as the retail mix of streetscape tenants at the Bartlett is comprised of a copacetic assortment of what you would like to see on any downtown block—locally owned entrepreneurs and a few national chains providing basic goods and specialty items: hip men’s clothier and haberdasher Bolero, CVS, Philip Bortz jewelers, Jimmy John’s (always a line out the door at lunch), sleek lunch space Southwest Fresh (with a new and retooled menu), and, um, Pieczionka Unlimited (“Your Golf Outing Headquarters!”).
As late as July of this year, the Bartlett owners had trotted out talk of bringing in a Marriot Renaissance to the space, which would have been a symbiotic marriage of historic architecture and utilitarian opportunity (the Renaissance segment is known for slightly more cutting edge retrofit hotels in urban locales). Another ideal hotelier marriage made in heaven would be a Hotel Monaco in that space (see, e.g. Chicago’s Hotel Monaco on Wabash as a similar makeover). Recognizing the current state of the credit markets, as well as the cost of such an extreme makeover, it is clear that, in the near term at least, nobody is going to be checking in to any hotel at the corner of 4th and Walnut. All of downtown, however, should rejoice in the fact that the ground floor retailers are remaining and thriving, as the ramifications of a “going dark” scenario on one of downtown’s quintessential street corners would be most unfortunate.
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