McDonald’s planned new Chicago headquarters will bring a nine-story building, stores, green space and about 2,000 suburban office workers to the Near West Side, and not everyone is happy at the prospect.
Residents of the area known alternatively as the West Loop, Fulton Market and West Town expressed their concern at a community meeting Wednesday night as developer Sterling Bay unveiled a plan for the new headquarters, a massive two-building, 608,000-square-foot structure to be built on the site of Oprah Winfrey’s former Harpo Studios. The complex, nine stories at its tallest point, will be the most significant development to hit the rapidly gentrifying neighborhood yet. It will feature a public plaza, bike storage, first-floor retail and 300 underground parking spaces. The headquarters operation is relocating from McDonald’s longtime home in Oak Brook.
Sterling Bay Managing Principal Andy Gloor, who led the packed meeting that was also attended by Ald. Walter Burnett, 27th, said there’s a plan to build several hundred more parking spaces nearby in addition, but some worry that’s not enough.
“There’s been a bit of a parking shake-up in the community lately,” said Roger Romanelli, executive director of the Randolph/Fulton Market Association, noting that two large parking lots recently shut down, making the lack of parking for residents a bigger problem. Romanelli said the McDonald’s development seems to have a balance of transit options — with parking, bike storage and a planned CTA shuttle — but said the area is still in need of more parking and public safety improvements to prevent the flood of development from leading to more people circling blocks for hours or getting hit by cars.
“I think it’s important to have everyone in the community put their heads together as we go forward,” Romanelli said. There is an effort underway to get the city to create more diagonal parking spaces in the area, which take up less room. The association is also planning to add more green space in the areas surrounding the development on Randolph Street, Romanelli said.
“The ward is concerned about it, the neighborhood is concerned about it, the whole city is concerned about it,” said Burnett, adding that he’s working to ease issues like the lack of green space and parking in the area.
The McDonald’s complex is expected to cost about $250 million. Demolition, pending a permit from the city, is expected to start next month.
McDonald’s will occupy just under 80 percent of the complex, allowing room for other tenants that have not been identified, Gloor said.
In a nod to those future tenants, the main entrance to the complex at 1045 W. Randolph St. will be on Carpenter Street, a side street, a move that saves the more visible space along Randolph for retail use. The main entrance on Carpenter also will be closer to public transportation, Gloor said. The company will operate a shuttle bus between the complex and the nearest CTA station at Morgan Street, on the Green and Pink lines.
And in a nod to the old tenant, Winfrey and Harpo will be memorialized in some way in the new building, Gloor said, adding that his mother and brother had both worked there. He didn’t say exactly what that commemoration would be.
The building will be notably different from the suburban headquarters campus McDonald’s currently occupies in Oak Brook, which includes a hotel and an internal McDonald’s restaurant. Neither of those features will be a part of the downtown site.
The property is expected to generate approximately $4 million annually in property taxes, Gloor said, compared with current taxes of about $240,000 generated by the Harpo Studio site.
Officials representing the fast-food giant did not attend the meeting, and one neighbor questioned the lack of participation by corporations like McDonald’s in community meetings. McDonald’s said it will offer details about a neighborhood meeting at a later date.
Earlier Wednesday, an ordinance was introduced at City Council that would increase the allotted density of the Near West Side space.
If the expansion is approved by the city, developer Sterling Bay will pay more than $4 million to the city’s Neighborhoods Opportunity Fund, Adopt-A-Landmark Fund and Local Impact Fund. More than $3.2 million of it will be directed to the Neighborhoods Opportunity Fund, which aims to direct money from downtown development projects to Chicago’s depressed neighborhoods.
McDonald’s officially announced last week its intention to move to downtown Chicago. The move is part of the company’s effort to court more young, tech-savvy workers who prefer urban living. McDonald’s also has an office in River North that houses its digital staff. It’s not yet clear whether those employees will move west once the new headquarters building is completed in 2018.
Burnett said that McDonald’s officials have informed him that they expect other companies to follow them downtown, but he did not elaborate on which companies, and McDonald’s didn’t immediately respond to a query on that point Thursday. Google was the first major employer to move to the West Side when it relocated its Midwest headquarters from the Loop late last year. The Google building is about two blocks north of Harpo.
Sterling Bay bought the Harpo site in 2014 for $30.5 million. Harpo ended production at the site last year.
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Twitter @SamWillTravel
