University Center expected to boost local development
Students, retail necessary for area's growth

By Mark W. Anderson
Associate Editor

In many respects, the area around Columbia can be seen as a neighborhood in transition: Huge retail projects are being built on the area’s southern edge, the northern boundary is coalescing around an academic corridor, and a residential property explosion continues unabated.

In light of all this activity, what many planners and observers think is necessary now is a solid anchor to pull all of these disparate strands together into a cohesive whole.
Enter the “Superdorm.”

Otherwise known as the University Center of Chicago, the 461-unit building opening up on the corner of State Street and Congress Parkway this August means more than just a new place for nearly 1,700 students to live—it is also part and parcel of the current rebirth of Chicago’s South Loop.

Long an area that has seen its share of boom and bust cycles, the area around Columbia is currently riding a wave of construction and activity that looks to change the way the neighborhood works and the way people see it, and the superdorm itself is both a reflection and cause of that change.

“I think Superdorm is going to change the whole South Loop,” said Alicia Berg, vice president of campus environment. “For years, the area has been dominated by parking lots, and Wabash Avenue and State Street have been places where you wouldn’t necessarily walk to. So plopping down 1,700 students on that corner is going to be transformative.”

A collaboration between three separate schools—Columbia, Roosevelt and DePaul universities—the superdorm stands as a clear symbol of the role the South Loop is playing in Chicago’s continued prominence as an academic center.

With the addition of Robert Morris College, also on the corner of State Street and Congress
Parkway, the entrance to the South Loop has become in recent years an educational hub, with upward of 50,000 students in the area. As a result, the building fits right into the city’s plans for the neighborhood.

“This is part of Mayor Daley’s vision for creating an academic corridor and to bring more life to the area,” said Chicago Department of Planning and Development spokesman Peter Scales. “It will allow students to become residents of the area, and help create a greater sense of community and activity.”

“I think what will happen, and one of the reasons why the city has been excited about the project was the presence of 1,700 students living in the community,” said Bert Gall, former Columbia executive vice president and current consultant for the University Center of Chicago. “We can expect a lot of the storefronts and empty lots [in the area] will be developed in the next 10 years, and their owners will be marketing to the students.”

For some, increased activity and an influx of students are only likely to expand on an already vital and important creative community that exists in the area.

“What I hope to see is that residential life in Columbia is centered on the urban experience in the arts, and students can revel in spoken word and poetry and bands and dance and theater and all that’s immediately available to them,” said Mark Kelly, vice president of Student Affairs. “Something like this has never existed in this country. Now we can talk about the idea of creating an ‘arts corridor’ along Wabash. We want this area to stay funky, urban, lively, and centering on the arts and culture.”

One of the keys to creating a lively sense of community is the need for increased retail, a neighborhood asset that the South Loop has been lacking in the eyes of many. Outside of the perennial student complaint that there are “no good places to eat on campus,” successful neighborhoods also need other types of shopping opportunities to attract and keep residents.

On that score, the South Loop is changing as well.

Across the street from the Wabash Campus Building, 623. S. Wabash Ave., the Chicago Christian Industrial League is building an eight-story single-room-occupancy building with room for retail space on the ground floor. According to Denis O’Keefe, executive officer, almost all of the building’s available retail space will be occupied by food vendors.

“At this point, five of available seven spaces are leased to food operations,” he said. “Plus, we are in negotiation with two other food operators for the remaining spaces.”

The superdorm is expected to contain upward of 30,000 square feet of retail space, single-handedly adding a significant chunk of retail to the area.

Without citing specifics, Mark Pranaitis, associate vice president for real estate at DePaul University, said a mix of food and other types of shopping in the building is expected.

“The types of retail leases that we’re working on right now include a bookstore, a convenience store, a sandwich shop and deli, a soup and bread-type store, and full service nationwide drug store,” he said. “We still have a couple of spaces left, but I believe that three or four of the seven or eight [available] spaces will probably occupied by early September.”

Many expect such retail to be critical to the area’s success.

“Fresh retail space in the South Loop will have a huge impact,” said Eve Kronen, managing broker for Coldwell Banker’s Printers’ Row office at Dearborn Station, 47 W. Polk St. “Hopefully, it will include something other than fast food.”

Even the businesses already in the area can expect to see change when the superdorm comes online. Nick Vranas, one of the owners of the South Loop Club on the corner of Balbo Drive and State Street, believes that his business is likely to benefit. “When you’ve got 1,700 students,” he said, “if you get 5 percent of them in a place holding 76 people, that’s a lot.”

Some of the businesses currently in the area, however, are likely to be affected in different ways. Representatives from one of the longest-standing and most venerable of these, the Pacific Garden Mission, 646 S. State St., sees the chance to create greater ties between a new group of residents and the men and women the mission serves.

“We encourage students to approach us,” said Chaplain Ervin McNeil. “We’ll tell them our history and introduce ourselves. I’m certain that as students move in and we get to know them, there’ll be plenty of opportunity for getting together. We’ve been here since 1923, and we’ve seen some changes [in the area]. We look forward to getting to know these students.”

The potential for conflict among a new group of students, many of whom may not have lived in an urban environment before, and residents of neighborhood institutions such as the Pacific Garden Mission or the Chicago Christian Industrial League single-room-occupancy housing seems low on the list of expectations for many in the community.

Part of the reason, said Ed Bell, senior director for U.S. Equities Student Housing, which is managing the superdorm, is the sense of ownership that the University Center expects to foster among the students who reside there.

“We hope a number of the students end up living here 12 months of the year, so it becomes home and they develop a sense of ownership,” he said. “Hopefully, they won’t treat it like a rental car, and they’ll say ‘hey—here’s where I live, where I need to feel comfortable, and not just a place to sleep.’

“There are a lot of stakeholders involved in the process,” he continued, “and not just students and educators. Police and firefighters, for example—if they have to make less runs as the neighborhood stabilizes, they’ll feel that much better about us. Our gauge on how successful we are will be how people begin to report back about out efforts.”

As one of the three schools involved in the project, Columbia may have a special mission in helping to shape the direction the neighborhood goes in the coming years.

“There’s a growing recognition that Columbia can’t be ignored,” Kelly said. “Not just from the superdorm, but from the size and scale of everything we’re involved in. It’s sort of like a wake-up call for us, and I think we’re an emerging campus and beginning to influence the area around us.

“Here’s what I see as the potential: we can create a real campus, because all of these things feed on each other—our size, our programming, the residential student population,” he said. “We can start throwing around our weight, and we can start influencing development in this area.”

The excitement of a changing neighborhood has Kelly, thinking big.

“Sometimes I think our goal is to be like Greenwich Village [in New York] or the Left Bank [in Paris],” he said. “What we want is for this to be a place of bookstores and coffee houses and galleries and HotHouse and Buddy Guy’s and Powell’s—and instead of these things just being entities unto themselves, we can pull these things together and create something larger than its parts.”