Trammell Crow, Beacon Capital Start $225M Hyde Park Labs

Beacon Capital Partners has jumped into the life sciences game with Trammell Crow, joining some of Chicago’s biggest developers that have featured lab space prominently with their new area projects as of late.

The project is called Hyde Park Labs, and it will be anchored by the University of Chicago, bring a total of 302,000 square feet of new lab space to the city and cost about $225 million to build, Crain’s reported. The project near the intersection of 52nd Street and Harper Avenue will help address the need for lab space as the life sciences sector is one of the few that hasn’t been overtaken by the remote-work trend.

The property will have nine floors of labs, a roof terrace and 40,000 square feet of amenities.

“Chicago continues to be a Top 10 life-science cluster in the U.S.,” Dan Lyne of CBRE, who is marketing and leasing Hyde Park Labs, told the outlet.

Trammell Crow has built two labs in Fulton Market over the past three years and has another one underway in Evanston. Boston-based Beacon Capital has projects underway in New York, Houston, San Francisco and its hometown.

The University of Chicago has pre-leased 55,000 square feet across one and half floors of the new 14-story Hyde Park Labs building. Researchers from the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering will occupy a portion of the space and the rest will be used for incubator life sciences startups.

The building’s construction, which is set to be completed and open by late 2024, started amid a string of recent expansions of lab space leases for Chicago’s life sciences sector.

Among the latest is a deal for NanoGraf, which won a $10 million contract from the U.S. Department of Defense to supply lithium-ion components for equipment like radios and night-vision goggles, to lease a 17,000-square-foot facility at 400 North Noble Street, west of Fulton Market. And last year injectable drug maker Xeris Pharmaceuticals leased 87,000 square feet in Trammell Crow’s new lab and office building at 1375 West Fulton Street in an exit from the tenant’s Loop offices on LaSalle Street.

— Victoria Pruitt