In the wake of the bust that followed the glory days of the condo boom, a number of projects ground to a halt. One of the most striking is this unfinished structure at 2609 West Belmont Avenue, where gaping windows, rusting steel, and scattered construction materials give the impression of a six-story-tall ghost town.
In the wake of the bust that followed the glory days of the condo boom, a number of projects ground to a halt. One of the most striking is this unfinished structure at 2609 West Belmont Avenue, where gaping windows, rusting steel, and scattered construction materials give the impression of a six-story-tall ghost town.
MC Development began work on the project in 2006. The company intended to sell 46 condos ranging in price from $269,900 to $389,900. Work stopped and restarted a few times before finally halting more than a year ago. Documents on file with the Cook County Recorder of Deeds show that foreclosure proceedings against the project, which occupies seven city lots, began a year ago. “We’re trying to work with the bank to reinstate our loan and finally finish it,” says MC Development’s Virgil Tiran.
The project is “a prominent symbol of the maladies we’ve been seeing in terms of real-estate projects that are incomplete,” says Ray Valadez, the chief of staff in the city’s First Ward, where the building is situated. (The ward currently has no alderman). “In terms of magnitude, it’s about the worst we’ve seen.”
Click through the slide show below to see how a building, whose architect envisioned it as a picturesque addition to the western edge of Lake View, turned into a fragmentary relic of the real-estate market’s now-fizzled condo boom.