The barrel vault on the roof of the DePaul School of Music.
A couple features of the new DePaul School of Music are standing out amidst the Lincoln Park construction site. One is the red steel forming the barrel vault atop the three-story facility. The other is glass panels on the north elevation. The black-tar wall is kinda cool, too.
Streeterville has a new tower-crane stub, thanks to the lovely new seedling sprouting up at the Aloft Chicago Mag Mile at 243 East Ontario Street. Just a little more sand left to dig out of the lot, and Tishman’s 18-story hotel can start going vertical.
The tower crane at 3Eleven has been lowered below the top of the building. You know what that means.
Having served its city well, the tower crane at 3Eleven (311 West Illinois Street) is on the way down. The John Buck Company’s 25-story apartment building topped out in April, and the cladding has nearly reached the top of the tower. Now the work is done for this pretty yellow Liebherr 316 EC-H 12 Litronic tower crane.
Where will it end up next? Well, this is purely speculation, but the tower crane permit for the Nobu Hotel at 854 West Randolph Street in the West Loop calls for the exact same type of Liebherr crane. “Hmmm,” you might say.
There it is, finally! One South Halsted put up a tower crane for me.
Old Glory, and a Glorious Golden Tower Crane.
The shiny yellow tower crane stub that tantalized us for so long at One South Halsted has finally blossomed into a full-blown Liebherr 316-EC-H 12 crane, spreading joy and heavy materials throughout the Greektown neighborhood of the West Loop.
Twitter user @iYarn let us know last week while we were enjoying the Tower Cranes of London that assembly had started, and the tower crane was completed and operational upon our return. Sorry to have missed it, but the hours of entertainment it’ll provide will more than make up for that disappointment.
A street crane prepares to take down the tower crane at 171 Aberdeen in the West Loop Friday morning.
The last Friday of May was also the last day the tower crane at 171 Aberdeen stood above the West Loop. A crew started bright and early in the morning bringing the crane down, making the West Loop American Flag, Tower Crane, and Water Tank photo opp much more difficult.
171 Aberdeen (165 N Aberdeen now?) is a mixed-use building from MCZ Development, delivering 90 residential units, with 40,000 square feet of office space and 15,000 square feet of retail space, plus 130 parking spots, to the neighborhood. Novak Construction is the GC. Hartshorne Plunkard Architecture the designer.
Off in the distance stands one of Chicago’s newest tower cranes, at the Moxy Hotel site.
Tower crane parts are delivered the first week of May.
We knew there’d be a crane at the Moxy Hotel site in River North, but when the parts showed up, I asked someone on site and was told it really wasn’t a “tower crane.” But a piece of paper can make all the difference in the world, and as you can see, the City of Chicago’s building permit says it’s a tower crane:
ENGINEERED SUPPORT FOR A LEIBHERR 81 K.1 TEMPORARY SELF ERECTING TOWER CRANE SUPPORTED ON A BALLASTED BASE AND CRANE
Yeah, Liebherr is the correct spelling, but that’s not important. What matters is that this contraption with the weight stack that looks like the bench-press machine from high school goes in my official book as another tower crane for Chicago.
There were similar cranes to this one spotted during a visit to Phoenix this winter, but they were operated from the ground. Since the Moxy Hotel crane requires an operator to make the climb up to a cab, that gives it even more legitimacy. Count it.
Many thanks to Adebayo Onigbanjo (Twitter user @iyarn) for keeping me up to speed on the tower crane at One South Halsted. These photos are from Thursday; alas, the excitement of London got the better of my attention span, so by now, I presume the crane is fully assembled and lifting the heavy stuff.
A tweet from The Big Green W yesterday confirmed that the Hotel Zachary has reached a construction milestone.
https://twitter.com/thebiggreenw/status/864231518352355329
Then the Hotel Zachary Twitter account joined the fun as well, tweeting a photo of Hickory Street Capital’s Tom Ricketts (you might know him for his other gig as the guy who brought a World Series trophy to Wrigley Field) signing the final beam.
https://twitter.com/hotelzachary/status/864244896110137345
#FlyTheBigGreenW indeed. There’s still a lot of work to do to get the Hotel Zachary into full-functioning hospitality mode, so let’s not put the tower crane on the endangered list quite yet. The 175 rooms and countless eateries will open in 2018 in time for another season of Cubs baseball, plus all the concerts and entertainment Wrigley Field and the newly-opened Park At Wrigley can host.
Tuesday-morning view of the Hotel Zachary from a swift-moving L train. (I blame all my blurry photos on swift-moving L trains.)
Before we get to the many many photos, a quick recap of One Grant Park:
The address is 1200 South Indiana Avenue in the South Loop. The 76-story apartment tower will have 792 rental units, 622 parking spaces(!), and 12,000 square feet of retail.
Crescent Heights is the developer, Rafael Viñoly Architects did the design, and McHugh Construction is the general contractor. (One Grant Park is one of seven McHugh tower cranes in Chicago right now.)
https://twitter.com/SigAlfano/status/863160123841294336
Shout-out to Twitter user @sigalfano who let me know, after some guesswork, that a tower crane stub had been planted at No. 508 (508 West Diversey Parkway) on Friday. It joins One South Halsted in the stub group, with full assembly likely while I’m in England. So take pictures and videos of it going up and send them the blog’s way.
This is the only tower crane in the Chicago skies right now for Macon Construction Group, the general contractor tasked with building the 12-story, 53-apartment Pappageorge Haymes design.
