A plan to demolish a 101-acre office campus in Chicago’s northern suburbs and replace it with almost 1.3 million square feet of industrial and indoor recreational space is set for a public hearing, with some neighbors and historic preservation groups opposing the proposal in a high-profile example of tensions flaring nationally between logistics developers and communities.
Chicago-based developer Bridge Industrial is set to make its case Thursday to the plan commission in Deerfield, Illinois. It seeks to have the 101-acre Baxter International headquarters campus annexed into the North Shore suburb and gain zoning approval to demolish 10 low-rise buildings with a combined 645,688 square feet of 1970s-era office buildings on the site.
That will make way for two distribution warehouses and a sports facility that could be leased to Deerfield’s park district, according to plans submitted to the village. Pending zoning approvals, Bridge has an agreement to buy the unincorporated land, at 1 Baxter Parkway along Lake Cook Road and interstates 94 and 294, from Baxter for an undisclosed price. It is in Lake County, about 25 miles north of Chicago’s Loop central business district.
The expected showdown comes as office-to-industrial projects continue to rapidly emerge throughout the country, as two trends continue: decreased use of office space more than three years into COVID-19 and increased demand for distribution space to fill online shopping orders.
Baxter has not said where it plans to move the Fortune 500 medical products company’s headquarters, and the company did not respond for a request to comment Tuesday from CoStar News. Bridge declined to comment.
The meeting comes just over three months after Bridge’s plans to buy and redevelop the site first emerged publicly.
As of Tuesday morning, an online petition to stop the development had gathered almost 3,000 signatures. Opponents, many living in the Thorngate residential development in nearby Riverwoods, Illinois, cite concerns about truck traffic and other issues.
Neighbors and historic preservation groups, which would like to see the Skidmore, Owings & Merrill-designed buildings repurposed, are expected to speak out against Bridge’s plan Thursday.
Office Campuses Evolve
The property is just the latest of its kind to face a shift in use. In some cases, such as McDonald’s former corporate campus in Oak Brook, Illinois, decades-old office campuses have found new office tenants to move in.
Ace Hardware last year leased almost 300,000 square feet on the 80-acre campus, the largest new office lease in Chicago’s suburbs in more than a decade. Filling the largest building on the site was a big win for Paul Mitchell Systems hair care billionaire John Paul DeJoria, who bought the campus for $40 million in 2019, after McDonald’s moved its headquarters to Chicago’s Fulton Market district the previous year. The campus is now known as Oak Brook Reserve.
In another high-profile redevelopment near Chicago, New Jersey-based developer Somerset Development is years into a mixed-use project at a former AT&T office campus in Hoffman Estates, Illinois.
In many situations, though, the developer willing to pay the most for an outdated office campus is the one that wants to raze older buildings and replace them with modern last-mile distribution space.
Depending on their surroundings, some office-to-industrial projects have met relatively little opposition, such as Dermody Properties’ ongoing demolition and redevelopment of insurer Allstate’s former 232-acre campus in Glenview, Illinois.
In other recent projects in the Chicago suburbs, PCCP and Stotan Industrial plan a 100,400-square-foot industrial building on an 8-acre site in Mount Prospect, Illinois, where an obsolete office building recently was demolished, and Brennan Investment Group said it plans to eventually replace an office building in Rolling Meadows, Illinois, with a 40-acre industrial development.
As the trend grows, tensions between industrial developers and community groups have escalated in some parts of the country. That includes New Jersey, where zoning fights have been escalating over industrial “sprawl.”
Plan Includes Recreational Space
Bridge’s plan is to build warehouses of 896,700 and 228,450 square feet on speculation, or without leases signed in advance, according to documents submitted to Deerfield officials. Bridge proposes a third building with 156,600 square feet of recreational space, including indoor soccer and youth baseball fields and six outdoor pickleball courts.
Deerfield’s park district has “expressed a high level of interest in leasing the recreational facility,” according to the Bridge documents.
A traffic study submitted by Bridge estimates the new facility would create an average of 2,104 vehicle trips to the site on an average day, down from an average of 4,440 trips as an office campus.
Opponents point to the estimated 616 truck trips per day, which they say will lead to congestion of nearby roads and create safety concerns.
“Never have I seen a development of this magnitude embedded into a community with limited buffering capability to absorb the inevitable truck congestion,” Riverwoods Barbara Mooney said in a statement to CoStar News. She is described in the emailed statement as a former Kraft Foods and Dean Foods executive with more than 35 years of supply-chain and warehousing experience.
“As a supply chain professional, I am concerned about the safety of mixed car and truck traffic on the development as well as the impact of the site's design spilling onto the nearby roads,” Mooney added in the statement.
Neighborhoods in Deerfield, Riverwoods and Northbrook oppose Bridge’s plan, which could gain final village approval in May or June, the statement said.
Barbara Raff, president of the Thorngate Homeowners Association, said in the statement that she wants the plan commission to “reject the plan outright after listening to residents who pay the taxes and want to preserve the health of our communities.”
“We are strongly opposed because the property is located directly across the street from Thorngate, a 300-plus home association comprising families with children that attend Deerfield schools only a bike-ride away,” Raff added in the statement. “Nearby are a playground, daycare center, special needs community center, place of worship, center for holistic medicine, hotel and offices.”
Case for Architecture
Preservationists are expected to voice objections to tearing down the 10 buildings, which they argue have architectural significance.
They were designed by architect Bruce Graham and structural engineer Fazlur Khan, around the time the SOM colleagues also designed the 100-story John Hancock Center and 110-story Sears Tower, then the world’s tallest skyscraper, in Chicago.
The Baxter campus won the American Institute of Steel Construction’s Architectural Award of Excellence in 1975 and AIA Chicago Chapter Distinguished Building Award in 1976, before the campus was expanded in 1985, architectural historian Elizabeth Blasius wrote. Blasius, co-founder of Chicago-based Preservation Futures, published the essay on the website of nonprofit MAS Context.
Kendra Parzen, advocacy for Landmarks Illinois, said she is among multiple preservation experts expected to speak during Thursday’s meeting.
“We’re concerned about the potential for the existing buildings to be demolished if Deerfield chooses to annex and rezone the property,” Parzen told CoStar News. “We think that would be a real missed opportunity given the exceptionally high quality of the design of the buildings. It would be a missed opportunity to reimagine and reuse the existing campus.”
Preservation groups also continue to study the broader implications of the office-to-industrial trend, Parzen said.
“This is an ongoing question as the demand for office space decreases or as companies prefer to move into the city,” she said. “In general, we would like to like to see more models for how to reuse the office buildings rather than demolishing them — not only for their architectural merit but for the embodied energy that is already in those buildings and avoiding the waste that comes with demolition. That’s a huge amount of building material that winds up in a landfill. We want to avoid getting to that point, where we’re adding that much waste.”