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Commercial
Chicago

Pizzutti snags $82M construction loan, chops 5 floors for West Loop tower

Apartments project keeps initially proposed 298 units

Joel Pizzutti with 1101 W. Van Buren Street
Joel Pizzutti with 1101 W. Van Buren Street (City of Chicago, Pizzutti, Getty)

Joel Pizzutti almost ran out of time to start building a West Loop apartment project while his firm worked on a redesign that resulted in a trim.

The Columbus, Ohio-based Pizzutti Companies, which Pizzutti serves as CEO, was granted its initial permits by Chicago officials to start construction on a new, shorter look for the long-planned and pandemic-delayed 298-unit apartment project slated for 1101 West Van Buren Street, Urbanize Chicago reported.

After first gaining city approval to build the tower back in 2015, last year Pizzutiti asked the city for an extension of the six-year deadline the developer was given to start construction on the project, citing the health crisis as part of the reason it hadn’t yet begun work on the site.

The city granted the extension to allow Pizzutti to search for project financing and obtain building permits, and it did so for a building that’s nearly 50 feet shorter than initially planned with a construction loan of more than $82 million from CIBC Bank it snagged just before last month’s later deadline, public records show. The final iteration of the proposal reaches 21 stories, or 226 feet, compared to the 26-story, 274-foot project originally proposed.

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The tower will rise along the Eisenhower Expressway, just northeast of the Illinois Medical District, where officials and other developers have been pushing for more mixed-use housing projects to give healthcare professionals of institutions such as Rush University options to live and shop closer to where they work.

Naperville-based development firm Marquette Companies, for instance, is working to finish off proposals that would give it 700 new apartments in the Illinois Medical District, including two it started planning last year next door to its newly completed 18-story residential project 1926 West Harrison Street.

Pizzutti is also a landlord of Chicago-area office and industrial assets, and in 2018 sold a $15 million seven-story office building just to the east of the apartment tower site, at 1033 West Van Buren, for more than double its 2014 acquisition of the property for $7.5 million. Under its ownership, the firm renovated the property before selling to a joint venture of New York-based Case Equity Partners and Lexington Realty International.

— Sam Lounsberry

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