For Sale: A Potential Penthouse Above the Loop – Chicago Magazine

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In 2007, American Invsco bought 200 North Dearborn and began converting it from apartments to condos. The space on the 47th floor space—visible at the building’s top right—was empty. “We have no idea what the original developer was going to do with it,” says Arnold Schepel, an Invsco executive. “It was just empty space behind the [ornamental] top of the building.”
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The attic is about 3,300 square feet of unused space on the east and north sides of the building. Though heaped with boxes and other cast-offs for now, it has 11-foot ceilings and lots of windows, and the elevator opens directly into the space.
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Although partially blocked by stored items, the north-facing windows look out at Marina City (right), the new Mesirow Financial building (center), and Quaker Plaza (left).
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Behind the postmodern arches and peaks of the building’s southeast corner is an open space, about one-third of which holds a mammoth piece of air-handling equipment. Move that and you would have “a terrace like nobody else has,” Schepel says.
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Here’s the beast that you will have to move. It’s about 12 feet tall; nobody could tell me what it weighs. The developers believe there is room for it on the other half of the building’s top.
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This is what the rest of the terrace-to-be looks like. At the left edge of the photo is the wall through which you would create a doorway to the penthouse’s interior.
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The view east from the terrace area
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Here’s the southeast view.
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A second terrace area—same size as the first—is one flight up and on the southwest corner. The view here takes in City Hall’s green roof and the James R. Thompson Center. The next photo shows the view west.
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The space has been on the market since American Invsco bought the building three years ago, and Feldman says attention has been steady. He showed it to a potential buyer just last Friday. “But some people are scared off,” Feldman says. “You’re going to need vision to do this—vision, money, and time.”

For Sale: A Potential Penthouse Above the Loop

If you thought Rahm Emanuel has had a hard time getting an unwelcome tenant out of his Ravenswood house, imagine what it will take to turn the secret penthouse at the top of 200 North Dearborn into a home: to create what could be your terrace, you would first have to move an air-handling machine that weighs several tons…

By Dennis Rodkin

June 1, 2011, 10:29 am

A view from the east terrace
For a closer look at the penthouse, launch the photo gallery »

If you thought Rahm Emanuel has had a hard time getting an unwelcome tenant out of his Ravenswood house, imagine what it will take to turn the secret penthouse at the top of 200 North Dearborn into a home: to create what could be your terrace, you would first have to move an air-handling machine that weighs several tons.

But the payoff of that effort and a $2.2 million investment ($1.7 million for the space and an estimated $500,000 to make it livable) would be sweet: an 875-square-foot terrace hidden atop the 47-story tower, with views all around of some of the Loop’s greatest architecture. The terrace area, behind what look like empty window spaces at the peak of the building’s southeast corner in the photo above, would be like a walled garden in the sky. It would be the outdoor complement to an approximately 3,500-square-foot penthouse in what is now the building’s attic.

Buying this penthouse would mean taking on a substantial project, but the building’s sales manager, James Feldman, considers it a value proposition. “You’d pay many times more for this much space at Trump Tower,” he notes. At Trump, however, the downstairs neighbors aren’t condos priced as low as $126,500, as they are here.

Click through the photo tour below to learn more about this potential penthouse. Interested buyers should contact Feldman (jfeldman@americaninvsco.net).

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