CTroyMathis
26 July 2005, 11:29 AM
Renderings updated early 2006.
http://img517.imageshack.us/img517/7546/f3605cs.pnghttp://img76.imageshack.us/img76/3805/fwin1po.png
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Planned tower would be tallest in U.S.
July 26, 2005
BY DAVID ROEDER AND KEVIN NANCE Staff Reporters
Chicago's lakefront would get a contender for the title of tallest building in the United States under a developer's plan devised in partnership with Santiago Calatrava, one of the world's foremost architects.
Christopher Carley, chairman of Fordham Co., has shown city officials Calatrava's plan for the Fordham Spire, a hotel/condo tower at 346 E. North Water, where the Chicago River meets Lake Michigan and across Lake Shore Drive from Navy Pier.
At 115 stories, the tower would be 1,458 feet to its roof, taller by eight feet than the roof of Sears Tower. But the Calatrava building would include a spire that, depending on structural details, would bring the building to around 2,000 feet.
FORDHAM SPIRE
Location: 346 E. North Water
Height: 1,458 feet to the roof, about 2,000 feet counting spire
Stories: 115
Square footage: 920,000
Projected cost: more than $500 million
Building use: 200-250 condos, 200-250 hotel rooms, retail and parking at the base
Possible construction start: May 2006
Possible completion: 2009
Developer: Fordham Co.
Architect: Santiago Calatrava
'Financiers are in awe of this man'
Renderings of the Fordham Spire show a tall, slender, ethereal building whose glass-and-steel surface cascades down a central concrete core. The floor slabs are cantilevered out from the core, with each rotated about two degrees from the one below. As they rise, the floors turn 270 degrees around the core, creating an undulating effect like a gown or cloak.
"I know that Chicago is an Indian name, and I can imagine in the oldest time the Native Americans arriving at the lake and making a fire, with a tiny column of smoke going up in the air," Calatrava said. "With this simple gesture of turning one floor a little past another, you achieve this form."
Carley said the task of lining up money for the possibly $500 million building "has been the easiest in my career'' because of Calatrava, best known in the U.S. for his 2001 addition to the Milwaukee Art Museum and his planned transit hub at New York's Ground Zero. "Financiers are in awe of this man."
So are many architects. "He's a fabulous architect and structural engineer," says Chicago's Adrian Smith, a partner at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. "I love the sculptural quality of his work, how he relates the shape of his buildings to the structural forces in them. His work is very beautiful -- not often steely or tough, but usually highly refined and soft and sensual. He's one of a kind."
Political, financial hurdles
The main questions for the Carley-Calatrava team are whether the structure, planned as a mix of condominiums and hotel units, can be financed and whether it is politically realistic. It falls within the Streeterville neighborhood, a concentration of well-to-do residents increasingly irritable over new high-rises in their midst.
For Carley, meanwhile, the building would be a step up in the development game. After years of putting up multifamily housing around the Midwest, he entered the downtown market in the late 1990s and completed three major condo buildings, a low-rise at 65 E. Goethe and high-rises at 21 E. Huron and 25 E. Superior.
All catered to wealthy buyers. Sales were slower than expected and Carley had to refinance his loans. He said all his lenders have been repaid and that his relationships with them are good.
His company has a contract to buy the 2.2-acre site from affiliates of Chicago-based LR Development Co. LLC.
Carley said his confidence in completing the building "is more than [for] any project I've ever done because the city administration appreciates great architecture.'' He said he courted Calatrava for three years before finding a site suitable for the architect's artistic and engineering gifts.
Will neighbors support plan?
But in the end, the partnership was forged by "personal chemistry,'' Carley said. "I think he was impressed by my dedication to the city and my desire to do something for the city.''
While his plan could stir controversy, it plays into Mayor Daley's pronounced desire to have top-flight architects leave an imprint in Chicago. Also, Carley employs the law firm of Daley & George, whose name partner is mayoral brother Michael Daley. The firm has one of the busiest zoning practices in the city.
Carley said city planners saw the project's details in May and were impressed by the curved, flowing profile of the building. A spokeswoman for the city's Planning Department said the agency would not comment on the design until developers submit a formal zoning plan.
Carley said his plan needs a zoning variance to change the height limitation on the site. And therein lies an argument he'll use against any critics.
Current zoning, he said, lets him put up two buildings on the site in the range of 35 and 50 stories. Going taller and skinnier will minimize blockage of sunlight and views, Carley said.
In addition, he said a Calatrava building will raise property values for the neighbors.
It's not known if the residents will buy that argument. Rosalie Harris, executive director of the Streeterville Organization of Active Residents, said the group has been shown only a few details of the project and not enough on which to form an opinion.
The group orchestrated a campaign against a proposed 64-story tower near the landmark Fourth Presbyterian Church at Michigan and Delaware, causing the local alderman to come out against it.
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Height of PR: Altitude brings bragging rights
July 26, 2005
BY KEVIN NANCE ARCHITECTURE CRITIC
The height of the proposed Fordham Spire -- which at 1,458 feet would be the tallest building in Chicago and the nation, not counting the spire that would top it out at about 2,000 feet -- is the least important thing about it, its architect and developer say.
"There is nothing special about being the highest, and that has never been our goal," architect Santiago Calatrava insists. "The important thing was to find the right shape. To create the slender, ethereal effect we want, it was necessary for it to be very tall. But if it were 10 feet shorter than the Sears Tower [which is 1,450 feet], it would make no difference."
Fordham Co. chairman Chris Carley adds that the attention given to the Fordham Spire's height is mostly "a distraction from the fact that it's a great building by a great architect."
'A major selling point'
But that hasn't stopped the Fordham Spire's public relations campaign from trumpeting the phrase "nation's tallest building" prominently in its press materials -- for which there's a good reason.
"There's a tremendous amount of PR value to developers and architects in going after the title of 'nation's tallest building' or 'world's tallest building,' " says Chicago architect Adrian Smith, the designer of what will be the world's new tallest building -- a mixed-use tower of "substantially more than 2,000 feet," that is scheduled for completion in 2008 in Dubai, United Arab Emirates.
"It heightens the visibility of the project and becomes a major selling point," says Smith, a partner at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. "In the case of Dubai, for example, they're trying to become a tourist destination in the Middle East and build the city into an economic center."
Besides, consumers are simply drawn by the "tallest" moniker, as evidenced by the fact that the Dubai building's apartments and condominiums were sold out within three days of the project's announcement.
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Spaniard is newest 'starchitect'
July 26, 2005
BY KEVIN NANCE Architecture Critic
Santiago Calatrava, the architect of the proposed hotel/condo tower that would be the tallest in the nation, is the world architecture scene's newest superstar -- part of a small group of "starchitects" that includes Frank Gehry, Renzo Piano and Rem Koolhaas.
A Spaniard with offices in Zurich, New York and his hometown of Valencia, Calatrava, 53, is best known in the Midwest for his striking addition to the Milwaukee Museum of Art, which Time magazine recognized as one of the best buildings of 2001.
He leapt even further into the limelight with a new transportation hub at New York's Ground Zero and several structures for the Athens Olympics sports complex. Last year, Calatrava won the American Institute of Architects' Gold Medal for his contributions to the field.
'You're adding a master'
"We sponsored a speech that Calatrava gave in Chicago a couple of years ago and it was a complete sellout," said Tom Kerwin, president of the AIA's Chicago chapter and a partner at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. "He's a wonderful architect who creates beautifully built forms that combine the two disciplines of architecture and structural engineering."
Also trained as a sculptor, Calatrava produces imaginative, sensual works of an artistic ambition and sculptural freedom perhaps matched only by Gehry. Often, Calatrava's work seems "organic" -- inspired by natural shapes such as birds or fish -- or anthropomorphic, related to the human form. This fall, New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art will present an exhibition of his sculptures, drawings and models.
"I think it's exciting that there's a Calatrava building in the city," said Lynn Osmond, president and CEO of the Chicago Architecture Foundation. "We say that our city's a museum, and anytime you add a new building like this one, you're adding to our collection. And you're adding a master, at that."
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Tower would get city in touch with its feminine side
July 26, 2005
BY KEVIN NANCE ARCHITECTURE CRITIC
The tradition of Chicago architecture is a manly one, and not only because virtually all of its best-known architects (notwithstanding current rising stars Carol Ross Barney and Jeanne Gang) have been men. From Jenney to Sullivan to Mies, the signal qualities of great buildings in the City of Big Shoulders have had masculine connotations: a pumped-up muscularity, a solidity, a broadness. We're particularly defined by our tall buildings, and can anything be more phallic than a skyscraper? Symbolically speaking, we're a metropolis of satyrs.
But if his proposed Fordham Spire manages to clear the regulatory, political and financial briar patch that now lies before it, Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava will bring something startlingly new to the Chicago skyline: a feminine mystique.
Although he tends to distance himself from interpretations of his designs as "organic" or anthropomorphic -- the evocative nature of his work, he claims, is usually a byproduct of structural considerations -- Calatrava has designed a building that looks for all the world like a tall, stately woman in a flowing, gauzy gown that swirls around her legs. It's exactly the manner of Ginger Rogers on a dance floor with Fred Astaire: the ethereal lightness, the illusion of movement. You're ready to fly down to Rio whenever she is.
You find this sensuous, even sexy quality in the unlikeliest corners of Calatrava's output. It's there in his bridges and transit stations, which are often topped with curving, undulant structures that hint at a feminine languor, of which I think the architect is at least partly aware.
The evidence is in his preparatory doodlings for projects like the Liege Railway station in Belgium, which include a watercolor sketch of a voluptuously reclining female nude; the station roof's curves echo hers. There's more of this kind of thing in his Fordham Spire sketchbook, which is full of lithe dancers straight out of Matisse.
Joining the boys club
Then there are Calatrava's interior spaces, many of which are as genital as anything in the famously humid flower paintings of Georgia O'Keefe. (The artist always denied that she intended any such imagery, and maybe she didn't, but failing to see it requires an act of willful blindness.) The exterior of Calatrava's addition to the Milwaukee Art Museum is often compared to a bird spreading its wings, but look inside at the main hall and you'll see, in its bisected ceiling and related ornaments, wings of a different sort.
It's a tricky business, politically and otherwise, to impute gender characteristics to inanimate objects, but of course we do it all the time. In our Anglo-Saxon lexicon, ships are female; so are certain countries and, in fact, the Earth. In the Romance languages, including Calatrava's native tongue, every noun is assigned a feminine or masculine article. If he thinks of bridges, airport terminals, train stations and even skyscrapers in terms of the female, why not?
And if this produces a building that adds a fresh element to the boys club of Chicago architecture, cherchez la femme.
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OFF THE GROUND
Developer stands tall in defense of work
Thomas A. Corfman
Published July 26, 2005
Christopher Carley is an unlikely candidate to develop North America's tallest building. He has a recent track record of projects that--despite their quality--have struggled to reach the financial finish line.
The chairman of Chicago-based Fordham Co. rejects such criticism, saying his projects are as profitable as those of his rivals.
"We've made money on all of our buildings," he said.
Like many developers, Carley, 62, is a relentless promoter who rarely acknowledges a project's downside. Yet unlike most of his rivals, he lacks an outsized ego.
That perspective may be due to a bout he had with intestinal cancer in 1995, seven years after starting Fordham. Since then, he has been an active fundraiser for cancer research.
Before Fordham, the Chicago native and Marquette University graduate was an executive with Dallas real estate firm Trammell Crow Co.
But his projects haven't been without challenges, including the Pinnacle, a 48-story condo tower at 21 E. Huron St., which he calls a "home run."
"Unfunded costs" to complete the high-rise forced his lenders, Chicago-based Corus Bank and pension fund National Electrical Benefit Fund, to fork over an additional $17 million as part of a June 23 refinancing, a loan document shows.
Yet other lenders competed for the refinancing, a sign of the project's ultimate success.
Slow sales have marked another project, 65 E. Goethe St., a 24-unit, eight-story building that still has one unit to sell after five years of marketing.
And in September, a lender obtained title to 18 unsold condo units, a 188-car garage and retail space in the Fordham, a 50-story tower at 25 E. Superior St. Sales of those assets will offset the balance on the loan and give the lender "a healthy, competitive return," Carley said.
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http://img517.imageshack.us/img517/7546/f3605cs.pnghttp://img76.imageshack.us/img76/3805/fwin1po.png
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Planned tower would be tallest in U.S.
July 26, 2005
BY DAVID ROEDER AND KEVIN NANCE Staff Reporters
Chicago's lakefront would get a contender for the title of tallest building in the United States under a developer's plan devised in partnership with Santiago Calatrava, one of the world's foremost architects.
Christopher Carley, chairman of Fordham Co., has shown city officials Calatrava's plan for the Fordham Spire, a hotel/condo tower at 346 E. North Water, where the Chicago River meets Lake Michigan and across Lake Shore Drive from Navy Pier.
At 115 stories, the tower would be 1,458 feet to its roof, taller by eight feet than the roof of Sears Tower. But the Calatrava building would include a spire that, depending on structural details, would bring the building to around 2,000 feet.
FORDHAM SPIRE
Location: 346 E. North Water
Height: 1,458 feet to the roof, about 2,000 feet counting spire
Stories: 115
Square footage: 920,000
Projected cost: more than $500 million
Building use: 200-250 condos, 200-250 hotel rooms, retail and parking at the base
Possible construction start: May 2006
Possible completion: 2009
Developer: Fordham Co.
Architect: Santiago Calatrava
'Financiers are in awe of this man'
Renderings of the Fordham Spire show a tall, slender, ethereal building whose glass-and-steel surface cascades down a central concrete core. The floor slabs are cantilevered out from the core, with each rotated about two degrees from the one below. As they rise, the floors turn 270 degrees around the core, creating an undulating effect like a gown or cloak.
"I know that Chicago is an Indian name, and I can imagine in the oldest time the Native Americans arriving at the lake and making a fire, with a tiny column of smoke going up in the air," Calatrava said. "With this simple gesture of turning one floor a little past another, you achieve this form."
Carley said the task of lining up money for the possibly $500 million building "has been the easiest in my career'' because of Calatrava, best known in the U.S. for his 2001 addition to the Milwaukee Art Museum and his planned transit hub at New York's Ground Zero. "Financiers are in awe of this man."
So are many architects. "He's a fabulous architect and structural engineer," says Chicago's Adrian Smith, a partner at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. "I love the sculptural quality of his work, how he relates the shape of his buildings to the structural forces in them. His work is very beautiful -- not often steely or tough, but usually highly refined and soft and sensual. He's one of a kind."
Political, financial hurdles
The main questions for the Carley-Calatrava team are whether the structure, planned as a mix of condominiums and hotel units, can be financed and whether it is politically realistic. It falls within the Streeterville neighborhood, a concentration of well-to-do residents increasingly irritable over new high-rises in their midst.
For Carley, meanwhile, the building would be a step up in the development game. After years of putting up multifamily housing around the Midwest, he entered the downtown market in the late 1990s and completed three major condo buildings, a low-rise at 65 E. Goethe and high-rises at 21 E. Huron and 25 E. Superior.
All catered to wealthy buyers. Sales were slower than expected and Carley had to refinance his loans. He said all his lenders have been repaid and that his relationships with them are good.
His company has a contract to buy the 2.2-acre site from affiliates of Chicago-based LR Development Co. LLC.
Carley said his confidence in completing the building "is more than [for] any project I've ever done because the city administration appreciates great architecture.'' He said he courted Calatrava for three years before finding a site suitable for the architect's artistic and engineering gifts.
Will neighbors support plan?
But in the end, the partnership was forged by "personal chemistry,'' Carley said. "I think he was impressed by my dedication to the city and my desire to do something for the city.''
While his plan could stir controversy, it plays into Mayor Daley's pronounced desire to have top-flight architects leave an imprint in Chicago. Also, Carley employs the law firm of Daley & George, whose name partner is mayoral brother Michael Daley. The firm has one of the busiest zoning practices in the city.
Carley said city planners saw the project's details in May and were impressed by the curved, flowing profile of the building. A spokeswoman for the city's Planning Department said the agency would not comment on the design until developers submit a formal zoning plan.
Carley said his plan needs a zoning variance to change the height limitation on the site. And therein lies an argument he'll use against any critics.
Current zoning, he said, lets him put up two buildings on the site in the range of 35 and 50 stories. Going taller and skinnier will minimize blockage of sunlight and views, Carley said.
In addition, he said a Calatrava building will raise property values for the neighbors.
It's not known if the residents will buy that argument. Rosalie Harris, executive director of the Streeterville Organization of Active Residents, said the group has been shown only a few details of the project and not enough on which to form an opinion.
The group orchestrated a campaign against a proposed 64-story tower near the landmark Fourth Presbyterian Church at Michigan and Delaware, causing the local alderman to come out against it.
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Height of PR: Altitude brings bragging rights
July 26, 2005
BY KEVIN NANCE ARCHITECTURE CRITIC
The height of the proposed Fordham Spire -- which at 1,458 feet would be the tallest building in Chicago and the nation, not counting the spire that would top it out at about 2,000 feet -- is the least important thing about it, its architect and developer say.
"There is nothing special about being the highest, and that has never been our goal," architect Santiago Calatrava insists. "The important thing was to find the right shape. To create the slender, ethereal effect we want, it was necessary for it to be very tall. But if it were 10 feet shorter than the Sears Tower [which is 1,450 feet], it would make no difference."
Fordham Co. chairman Chris Carley adds that the attention given to the Fordham Spire's height is mostly "a distraction from the fact that it's a great building by a great architect."
'A major selling point'
But that hasn't stopped the Fordham Spire's public relations campaign from trumpeting the phrase "nation's tallest building" prominently in its press materials -- for which there's a good reason.
"There's a tremendous amount of PR value to developers and architects in going after the title of 'nation's tallest building' or 'world's tallest building,' " says Chicago architect Adrian Smith, the designer of what will be the world's new tallest building -- a mixed-use tower of "substantially more than 2,000 feet," that is scheduled for completion in 2008 in Dubai, United Arab Emirates.
"It heightens the visibility of the project and becomes a major selling point," says Smith, a partner at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. "In the case of Dubai, for example, they're trying to become a tourist destination in the Middle East and build the city into an economic center."
Besides, consumers are simply drawn by the "tallest" moniker, as evidenced by the fact that the Dubai building's apartments and condominiums were sold out within three days of the project's announcement.
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Spaniard is newest 'starchitect'
July 26, 2005
BY KEVIN NANCE Architecture Critic
Santiago Calatrava, the architect of the proposed hotel/condo tower that would be the tallest in the nation, is the world architecture scene's newest superstar -- part of a small group of "starchitects" that includes Frank Gehry, Renzo Piano and Rem Koolhaas.
A Spaniard with offices in Zurich, New York and his hometown of Valencia, Calatrava, 53, is best known in the Midwest for his striking addition to the Milwaukee Museum of Art, which Time magazine recognized as one of the best buildings of 2001.
He leapt even further into the limelight with a new transportation hub at New York's Ground Zero and several structures for the Athens Olympics sports complex. Last year, Calatrava won the American Institute of Architects' Gold Medal for his contributions to the field.
'You're adding a master'
"We sponsored a speech that Calatrava gave in Chicago a couple of years ago and it was a complete sellout," said Tom Kerwin, president of the AIA's Chicago chapter and a partner at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. "He's a wonderful architect who creates beautifully built forms that combine the two disciplines of architecture and structural engineering."
Also trained as a sculptor, Calatrava produces imaginative, sensual works of an artistic ambition and sculptural freedom perhaps matched only by Gehry. Often, Calatrava's work seems "organic" -- inspired by natural shapes such as birds or fish -- or anthropomorphic, related to the human form. This fall, New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art will present an exhibition of his sculptures, drawings and models.
"I think it's exciting that there's a Calatrava building in the city," said Lynn Osmond, president and CEO of the Chicago Architecture Foundation. "We say that our city's a museum, and anytime you add a new building like this one, you're adding to our collection. And you're adding a master, at that."
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Tower would get city in touch with its feminine side
July 26, 2005
BY KEVIN NANCE ARCHITECTURE CRITIC
The tradition of Chicago architecture is a manly one, and not only because virtually all of its best-known architects (notwithstanding current rising stars Carol Ross Barney and Jeanne Gang) have been men. From Jenney to Sullivan to Mies, the signal qualities of great buildings in the City of Big Shoulders have had masculine connotations: a pumped-up muscularity, a solidity, a broadness. We're particularly defined by our tall buildings, and can anything be more phallic than a skyscraper? Symbolically speaking, we're a metropolis of satyrs.
But if his proposed Fordham Spire manages to clear the regulatory, political and financial briar patch that now lies before it, Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava will bring something startlingly new to the Chicago skyline: a feminine mystique.
Although he tends to distance himself from interpretations of his designs as "organic" or anthropomorphic -- the evocative nature of his work, he claims, is usually a byproduct of structural considerations -- Calatrava has designed a building that looks for all the world like a tall, stately woman in a flowing, gauzy gown that swirls around her legs. It's exactly the manner of Ginger Rogers on a dance floor with Fred Astaire: the ethereal lightness, the illusion of movement. You're ready to fly down to Rio whenever she is.
You find this sensuous, even sexy quality in the unlikeliest corners of Calatrava's output. It's there in his bridges and transit stations, which are often topped with curving, undulant structures that hint at a feminine languor, of which I think the architect is at least partly aware.
The evidence is in his preparatory doodlings for projects like the Liege Railway station in Belgium, which include a watercolor sketch of a voluptuously reclining female nude; the station roof's curves echo hers. There's more of this kind of thing in his Fordham Spire sketchbook, which is full of lithe dancers straight out of Matisse.
Joining the boys club
Then there are Calatrava's interior spaces, many of which are as genital as anything in the famously humid flower paintings of Georgia O'Keefe. (The artist always denied that she intended any such imagery, and maybe she didn't, but failing to see it requires an act of willful blindness.) The exterior of Calatrava's addition to the Milwaukee Art Museum is often compared to a bird spreading its wings, but look inside at the main hall and you'll see, in its bisected ceiling and related ornaments, wings of a different sort.
It's a tricky business, politically and otherwise, to impute gender characteristics to inanimate objects, but of course we do it all the time. In our Anglo-Saxon lexicon, ships are female; so are certain countries and, in fact, the Earth. In the Romance languages, including Calatrava's native tongue, every noun is assigned a feminine or masculine article. If he thinks of bridges, airport terminals, train stations and even skyscrapers in terms of the female, why not?
And if this produces a building that adds a fresh element to the boys club of Chicago architecture, cherchez la femme.
----------
OFF THE GROUND
Developer stands tall in defense of work
Thomas A. Corfman
Published July 26, 2005
Christopher Carley is an unlikely candidate to develop North America's tallest building. He has a recent track record of projects that--despite their quality--have struggled to reach the financial finish line.
The chairman of Chicago-based Fordham Co. rejects such criticism, saying his projects are as profitable as those of his rivals.
"We've made money on all of our buildings," he said.
Like many developers, Carley, 62, is a relentless promoter who rarely acknowledges a project's downside. Yet unlike most of his rivals, he lacks an outsized ego.
That perspective may be due to a bout he had with intestinal cancer in 1995, seven years after starting Fordham. Since then, he has been an active fundraiser for cancer research.
Before Fordham, the Chicago native and Marquette University graduate was an executive with Dallas real estate firm Trammell Crow Co.
But his projects haven't been without challenges, including the Pinnacle, a 48-story condo tower at 21 E. Huron St., which he calls a "home run."
"Unfunded costs" to complete the high-rise forced his lenders, Chicago-based Corus Bank and pension fund National Electrical Benefit Fund, to fork over an additional $17 million as part of a June 23 refinancing, a loan document shows.
Yet other lenders competed for the refinancing, a sign of the project's ultimate success.
Slow sales have marked another project, 65 E. Goethe St., a 24-unit, eight-story building that still has one unit to sell after five years of marketing.
And in September, a lender obtained title to 18 unsold condo units, a 188-car garage and retail space in the Fordham, a 50-story tower at 25 E. Superior St. Sales of those assets will offset the balance on the loan and give the lender "a healthy, competitive return," Carley said.
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