COVER STORY, MAY 2009

FROM STEEL TO SHOPPING
McCaffery Interests’ Southworks project puts a mixed-use development in place of a former steel manufacturing site.
Brian Lee

Southworks will be developed on the South Side of Chicago along Lake Michigan. The project is planned to encompass 1.5 million square feet of commercial space, 17,000 residential units, a new 1,500-slip marina and 125 acres of parkland.

If Jim Croce were alive today, he’d soon be singing a different tune about the south side of Chicago. With its transformative vision for a 573-acre, former steel-manufacturing site along Lake Michigan, McCaffery Interests is poised to deliver major, multifaceted appeal where many Windy City residents have gone without.

Unlike Croce’s famous antisocial song character, Leroy Brown, the massive, mixed-use development will be all about community.

“It’s really a core place for people,” says Dan McCaffery, founder and president of McCaffery Interests, which has partnered with Westrum Development Company and U.S. Steel Corp. “At the present time, as far as a nice, walk-around, experiential shopping, entertainment and restaurant center on the southeast side of Chicago, there isn’t one. Despite our troubled economic times, this is a pent-up demand that hasn’t been filled for years and years and years. So I envisioned a center that encourages that pedestrian and sort of Sunday family activity. In other words, it will give you an entire sense of place that combines the entertainment and shopping experience and the ability to go to a picnic area, walk along the lakeshore and so on.”

At this pre-entitlement stage, the master plan for the urban village consists of approximately 17,000 housing units; 1.5 million square feet of commercial space; a new, 1,500-slip marina; 125 acres of parkland; an extended, if not new, elementary school; and quite likely a new high school. The Southworks parcel is Chicago’s largest open tract of land, stretching from 79th Street down to the mouth of the Calumet River.

Scheduled for completion in September 2010, Lakeshore Drive is already being extended through the site, which boasts 2 miles of lakefront.

“For people who have never seen this beautiful, big piece of land and have never been able to appreciate where it is, what it is that will go down here and to see that it’s right on the lake, I think it’ll knock their socks off,” McCaffery says.

A People Place

With Southworks, McCaffery Interests will adhere to its successful Market Common brand as demonstrated with its Myrtle Beach and Clarendon developments in South Carolina and Virginia, respectively. Restaurants and retail stores topped with residential units will be accentuated with an abundance of landscaping, water fountains, pedestrian benches and promenades.

“The Market Common — the market being a place you shop and a common being a place where people gather — is what we’re going to use as the initial characterization of this retail space. We make them very people-sensitive.”

Says Nasutsa Mabwa, McCaffery Interests’ project manager, development, “We are using some of the same successful development principles we have used in other projects such as the Market Common [series], which incorporate density with a sense of active public space — retaining the street wall, allowing vehicular traffic but not allowing it to dominate over the pedestrian and masking the parking garage structures.”

A key component of The Market Common, SouthShore, which is located in the northwest corner of the Southworks site, is the grocery anchor, and McCaffery Interests will eventually target a movie theater tenant. The basic needs addressed by the grocery tenant and the nightly entertainment offering of a cinema embody the range of appeal the developer plans for its retail centers.

“We try to get them to be a morning-to-night experience because again our push is to create a place,” says McCaffery. “We believe strongly that the more you can keep people around your establishment, the safer, the warmer, the better it is.”

The three-firm project design team responsible for the award-winning master plan is accustomed to gold-medal performances. Skidmore Owings and Merrill LLP is the master planner of the Chicago Olympic bid, and Boston-based Sasaki Associates Inc. was the master planner for the Beijing Olympics. Antunovich Associates, which has worked with McCaffery Interests for 20 years, including on the Market Common brand, will lead the retail development architecture.

“Sasaki brings an incredible open-space landscape perspective to master plans,” McCaffery says. “Antunovich does that in retail. The object is to put their combined talents to work where this becomes an incredible place, a real destination.”

The entire development, which will have a sustainable focus, will adhere to famous architect Daniel Burnham’s “Plan of Chicago” that in 1909 sought to ensure the city’s lakefront would forever be public open space.

Demand & Desert

There’s little doubt in McCaffery’s mind how the lakeside, lifestyle offerings of the urban village will be received. He projects that consumers now would have to travel all the way up to Roosevelt Road, which is located just south of Chicago’s south loop, before they would find anything even moderately comparable to The Market Common, SouthShore.

“As far as that part of town and the millions of people that are down there, it’s a relative desert compared to other areas in terms of availability of good retail,” says McCaffery. “I think we can draw those very famous concentric circles and go out quite a distance before you get to a place that will come anywhere close to rivaling this.”

As for targeting the area’s blue-collar demographic, a rose is still a rose, whether it blooms in tony Winnetka, Illinois, or on the southeast side of Chicago. McCaffery asserts that there are no statistics suggesting that blue-collar people don’t shop just as much as those in white-collar suburbs; they just shop at slightly different price points.

“We can be sensitive to price points and the demographics of the entire area, but that should not give us an excuse to compromise the appeal of the place,” he says. “You can do quality merchandising behind an awful lot of very nice mom & pop stores, but the merchandise itself may not be a Tiffany diamond ring.”

Worth Waiting For

Redevelopment-focused Lubert-Adler Real Estate Funds and Westrum Development Company had been anxious to acquire the Southworks site, according to McCaffery, who was called by the two bidders to solicit his company’s participation about 5 years ago.

“I had previously looked at the site and just determined that it was something I’d need a financial partner to go after because it was so huge,” he says. “I thought that the only missing link at that time was money for the pre-development. Lubert-Adler is just that, a money partner, so I was very happy to join them.”

In March, however, Lubert-Adler dropped out of the project plans (McCaffery plans to move forward with partners Westrum and U.S. Steel Corp.). McCaffery Interests’ challenges started long before that though.

“As chance would have it, we’ve hit the city of Chicago at a time when we are now on our fourth, I believe, commissioner of planning,” says McCaffery. “We’re on our fourth or fifth director of finance for the city, and I think we’re on our fourth or fifth chief of staff for the mayor. Each one of those people has their own way, a different way, and some influence on the speed with which the thing might or might not be approved. We’ve had to head into a pretty stiff wind when it comes to having the same guy understand our project on Friday that understood it on Thursday.”

Getting Noticed

Even with entitlements and approvals yet to be achieved, McCaffery Interests’ Southworks project is already turning heads. The U.S. Green Building Council has chosen it as a pilot project for its LEED for Neighborhood Development program. Southworks is slated to earn a LEED-Silver certification or higher.

“We are going to experiment between now and when we start building with windmill power or turbine power, geothermal exchange and maybe using the lake water for cooling,” says McCaffery. “There are a tremendous number of green initiatives to hopefully make this a model community of sustainability for everybody.”

At the end of April in San Francisco, The American Institute of Architects honored McCaffery Interests and its project partners with the Gold Honor Award for Southworks’ mixed-use master plan.

“It speaks to the quality of the master-planning team we have and the thought we’ve put into this thing,” McCaffery says. “We don’t look at it as being any small undertaking, anything less than top drawer.”

©2009 France Publications, Inc. Duplication or reproduction of this article not permitted without authorization from France Publications, Inc. For information on reprints of this article contact Barbara Sherer at (630) 554-6054.