JSM Venture, Cedar Street get $25M loan on Wicker Park storage facility

JSM Venture and Cedar Street Capital secured a $25.25 million loan on a storage facility in a Wicker Park shopping mall.

Northfield-based JSM and Chicago-based Cedar Street last year bought the 140,000-square-foot office portion of the Wicker Park Commons shopping center at 1278 North Milwaukee Avenue for $14.85 million from Chicago-based Centrum Partners. The 120-year-old building was the longtime home to a Wieboldt’s department store, DNAinfo reported last year.

The developers then converted the space into 1,300 self-storage units that operate under the Extra Space Storage brand, spending $6 million on the renovations, according to Crain’s.

Cook County records show the lender on the loan to JSM and Cedar Street as VMC Lender LLC, an entity registered in Delaware with a New York City address.

Wicker Park Commons, bordered by Ashland and Milwaukee Avenues and Blackhawk and Paulina streets, is anchored by a Jewel-Osco grocery store and a Lowe’s home-improvement store. Centrum acquired the property in 2011 from Joseph Freed & Associates for $33 million and later sold the retail portion of the property in 2015 to an affiliate of Deutsche Bank for $95 million, according to Inside Self Storage.

The storage facility developers last year said the business would cater to the continuing influx of apartment and condo dwellers into Wicker Park.

The Wicker Park mixed-use building that houses the Smoke Daddy restaurant on the first floor recently changed hands, while RDG Funds recently bought a three-story mixed-use building and adjacent one-story building 1616-1628 North Damen Avenue with plans to renovate the larger building and raze the smaller one, replacing it with a three-story structure with ground-floor retail.

In May the city issued a building permit to the developer of a 99-key Wicker Park hotel at 1555 North Ashland Avenue.