November 7, 2006 – The Mills Corporation of Chevy
Chase, Maryland, the group developing Block 37, agrees to sell the retail and
transit portions of the $450 million project to developer Joseph Freed and
Associates. The empty block surrounded
by State Street and Dearborn Street on the east and west and Washington
Boulevard and Randolph Street on the south and north, has stood vacant for 17
years after the city bought it for $46.5 million, sold it to the original
developer for $12.5 million and then watched various development schemes fall
apart as one of the premier blocks in the Loop sat waiting for something,
anything, to happen. The senior
vice-president for Freed, Steven Jacobsen, says of the acquisition, “We’re very
bullish on this location based on its 24-hour-a-day population base.” [Chicago
Tribune, November 8, 2006] The developer will face the same challenges the
previous developers have faced. For one
thing, the retail section of the project must be filled with “stores that have
little or no presence elsewhere in the Chicago area.” Freed’s challenges are not restricted to
Block 37. The developer is also trying
to fill a quarter of a million square feet in the former Carson, Pirie, and
Scott building just across State Street.
Martin Stern, executive vice president of U. S. Equities Realty, says of
the venture, “The most important thing for Block 37 is to get dirt moving and
see the project is for real.”
November 7, 1977 – From the “Being in the Wrong Place at the Wrong Time Department” – Ms. Raphan Boonying drives her car across the Wells Street bridge, heading north, and encounters a warning gate dropping down in front of her, prompting her to stop with the front wheels of the vehicle on the street and the rear wheels on the bridge. The bridge then begins to rise. “Suddenly I felt the rear of the car going down,” Boonying says. “I thought, ‘I am going to die’ and I screamed.” Officials describe what happens next. The car begins to slide back toward the river as the bridge opens, but before the car falls into the brink the upper section of the bridge’s double-deck truss system catches it and crushes its rear section, pinching it between the bridge and the street. The bridge-tender swears that he did not see any vehicle on the bridge when he began to raise it. Trains of the Ravenswood and Howard lines, which run atop the structure, are delayed for two hours as the wrecked car and its shaken owner are removed. The Tribune graphic, shown above, shows how close Ms. Boonying came to ending up in the river.
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