House atop 19th-century on Chicago building sells at a loss

Owners planned renovation after buying unique home in 2017

A house on a rooftop in Chicago’s Printers Row neighborhood sold at a loss (Alec Hathaway)
A house on a rooftop in Chicago’s Printers Row neighborhood sold at a loss (Alec Hathaway)

This penthouse really is a house.

A two-story home built atop an eight-story Printers Row loft building sold for $585,000, well below the $875,000 that Allison Gass and Alec Hathaway paid for it in 2017, according to Crain’s. They initially listed it for $850,000 in September of 2020.

The couple told Crain’s last fall they planned to renovate it, yet never moved in because Gass left her job at the University of Chicago’s Smart Museum of Art for a job at a museum in San Jose. The 2,500-square-foot, three-bedroom home, built on top of the Rowe Building on Dearborn Street in the 1980s, has a T-shaped layout that creates two “yards” on either side.

One down side: residents must use stairs to access the home after riding an elevator the rest of the way up.

Hathaway, an architect, designed a renovation that would have included a safety railing around the outdoor space, some of which is surrounded by shin-high walls that don’t meet safety codes. It also would have enlarged the north-facing windows for a better view of the skyline. It’s unclear if the plans were included in the sale.

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Phil Kupritz, the architect who created the house with contractor Walter Slager, told Crain’s in 2020 that in the 1970s a group of architects bought the Rowe Building and each redeveloped a floor. Kupritz and Slager took the roof, which had a mechanical shed.

Rowe is one of several buildings that made up the Midwest’s printing capital beginning in the 1880s, Crain’s reported, citing the Chicago Sun-Times. By the 1980s, many of them were run down, and architect Harry Weese led a movement to restore them.

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[Crain’s] – Harrison Connery