About a year before the 2005 groundbreaking for Trump International Hotel & Tower, Trump Organization executive Charles Reiss met the late Chicago real estate broker Bruce Kaplan and his colleague, Leslie Karr. The Trump family, Reiss said, wanted advice on how to market the retail space that would face the Chicago River at the tower’s base.“The way it’s designed now, it’s never going to lease up,” Karr recalls telling Reiss. The roughly 70,000-square-foot deck’s 10-foot ceilings, undulating facade and sunken location would be too awkward to attract customers, she said.
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“It’s a dreadful space,” said Karr, who is now senior vice president for retail at SVN Chicago Commercial. “You could have some kind of luxury call center there, or maybe a high-end med spa, but not at the prices they were asking.”
A decade after the tower opened in 2009, it has just one retail tenant, a salon that occupies an enclosed 3,400-square-foot suite above the hotel lobby. The entire deck-level space remains empty, its blank beige walls on full display for the millions of tourists who stroll along the river each year. No part of it has ever been leased, according to Trump Organization tax appeal documents filed in Cook County and analyzed by The Real Deal.
― grawlix (unperson), Sunday, 31 March 2019 20:33 (five years ago) link