48-Story Building proposed for the West Loop

Oh joy, another skyscraper to impede our view.

Crowne Plaza at Night
[Crowne Plaza building at night]

A developer has announced plans to build the tallest building west of the Dan Ryan Expressway, a $150 million, 48-story apartment-hotel tower at West Madison and North Halsted streets. The announcement met mixed responses at an initial West Loop community meeting Tuesday night.

The development includes 48 floors of apartments atop a base with ground-level retail, six stories of parking and a ballroom that bridges to the nearby Crowne Plaza Hotel at 733 W. Madison St. David Friedman, the developer and hotel owner, has a target completion date of 2011 for the project.

Friedman, whose company FF Realty Inc. owns four luxury apartment buildings and five hotels – including the West Loop’s Crowne Plaza – will continue to hold meetings to gauge community reaction before applying for a new zoning designation that would allow the 500-foot structure. The proposed location, the Crowne Plaza parking lot, is currently zoned for buildings up to 300 feet in height.

[Click to continue reading 48-story West Loop tower pitched]

Greektown, as this part of the West Loop is often called, already suffers from traffic congestion; we shall see if the public parking proposed for this building will help.

The elliptical-shaped glass building would serve as an apartment-hotel, with amenities like room service and maid service, but unlike, for example, the Trump Tower building – a downtown condo-hotel complex completed this year – its 514 residential units, a mixture of studios and one and two bedrooms, will be leased. Typically, only half of luxury renters require parking, so some of the six-story lot’s 553 spaces would be public parking, a growing necessity in the West Loop, where expensive hourly fees in garages and meters are draining drivers’ wallets.