NEIGHBORHOOD DEVELOPMENT

November 23, 2003

Chicago Tribune

127-unit Rainbo project nears final approval

Jeanette Almada, Special to the Tribune.

Plans for a $40 million mixed-use development on the 2.23-acre site of the Rainbo Gardens Building in Uptown advanced last week as the Chicago Plan Commission approved the project.

The popular Rainbo Gardens Roller Rink on the site closed in March and is being demolished.

A development team consisting of Paul Hardej, managing developer of Skokie-based DCL Development, and Darren Miller, managing partner of Chicago-based Sapphire Development, will build the project. Metropolitan Development Enterprises Inc., also based in Skokie and owned by Hardej, will act as project manager.

Rainbo Homes II LLC will build 127 residential units on the site, at 4812-36 N. Clark St., just west of St. Boniface Cemetery. Two five-story, L-shaped buildings will hold 44 condominiums each and will face Clark and flank an interior driveway and courtyard. Four six-unit, four-story buildings will be sited at the rear of the complex. Fifteen townhouse units will flank the four rear buildings, Hardej said in an interview last week.

The units' size, exact prices and other specific details are still being worked out, Hardej said.

Single-level condos will range from one-bedrooms to three-bedroom units with dens and sell from the $100,000s to the upper $300,000s, Hardej said. "Duplexed condo units on the first and second floor of the rear midrise buildings will be 1,650 square feet and will sell for prices in the very low $400,000s. Townhouse units will range from 2,300-square-foot two-bedroom units to 2,450-square-foot three-bedroom units that will sell for prices between the upper $400,000s and the low $500,000s," Hardej said.

The developer has agreed to participate in the Chicago Department of Housing's CPAN (Chicago Partners for Affordable Neighborhoods) program, and will sell 13 two-bedroom units for $140,000 each, Hardej said.

Demolition of the skating rink building, which began in early October, is nearly complete, according to according to Miller, who spoke last week before plan commissioners.

"The alderman [Helen Shiller, 46th Ward] gave us the go ahead. We could have begun that demolition as a right but waited for her blessing," Miller said in an interview last week.

"I told them that I would not object to it," Shiller said in an interview earlier this month following a community meeting at which residents heard the developer's latest proposal. "We appreciated that they gave us the window [to find a way to save the building from being razed]," she said. The developer has owned the building for more than a year, and received a demolition permit in January, but waited for community review and approval of the project.

Following a July community meeting, the Rainbo developers modified their original plans to build 131 units. They also increased the project's ground-level retail space to 15,000 square feet from 10,000. Rainbo Homes also altered access to parking spaces for residents who will live in the new units, to accommodate business and residential neighbors' concerns of traffic congestion in the alley just west of the site, according to Miller.

Preservationists had sought to save the building, but the developer argued that it was not structurally salvageable, and that it will incorporate an archway from the building's facade into a gazebo-like structure that will be located in the interior court. "Dismantling, preserving and using that archway, we believe, is a nice way of remembering the look of that facade, which was impossible to save and incorporate into our project," Miller said last week.

Pending final approval by the City Council, expected in January, Hardej hopes to begin construction in early spring.

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