Towering Ambition

The Chicago Spire aims to be the tallest skyscraper in North America. But will it get built? The twisting tale so far

By Jay Pridmore

(page 5 of 6)

While such rote blandishments don't exactly inspire confidence, the fact remains that Garrett Kelleher has performed real-estate magic before. Having started from scratch when he moved to Chicago in 1986, Kelleher, who says he is sole owner of Shelbourne, presumably controls a portfolio estimated to be worth more than a billion dollars.

He quit college before graduating (he attended a school in Pennsylvania on a tennis scholarship and later Trinity College Dublin) and came to Chicago, where he worked as a housepainter. He soon started his own painting company, and after six months began doing what his own clients were doing—buying old loft buildings and converting them into luxury condominiums.

"We were all highly leveraged then," said Bill Senne, owner of Property Consultants and sometime partner of Kelleher in those days. But Kelleher was as methodical as they come. On Cortland Street in Bucktown, for example, he bought the building that his painting company occupied. Later he moved to larger quarters on Elston and with Senne's help put a now fashionable restaurant called Jane's in the Cortland building. The timing was good in this renovation and a succession of others. Neighborhoods like Bucktown, the Elston corridor, and the Haymarket area on Lake Street, where he also bought and sold buildings, all went from rough to respectable in a hurry.

In 1996, Kelleher returned to Ireland, where he made a substantial fortune. Again he was methodical and discrete as he bought undervalued property and avoided publicity. When he surfaced as a major player—in 2000, the Irish newspapers reported breathlessly that he had bought a seven-bedroom house for 6.2 million euros—real-estate writers reported, presumptuously, as it turned out, that he had made his fortune in America. "The reality of the situation is that I did relatively little in Chicago compared to what I've done in Ireland," he told me. In fact, he returned to Dublin just as real-estate values there were about to shoot up. Ireland went from poor underclassman to the indispensable bridge between the United States and the resurgent European economic community. Multinationals—infotech, pharmaceuticals, financial services, and many others—took up residence there and sparked the "Celtic Tiger," as this new prosperity was called.

Kelleher told me that Irish real-estate prices still make Chicago's market look like the bargain basement. He cited his 2004 purchase of a rundown building on St. Stephen's Green—Dublin's Central Park—for 52 million euros (some $70 million at today's exchange). "It's now worth between $250 [million] and $275 million U.S.," he said. "That building in Chicago might be worth $50 million."

One deal in particular ripened Kelleher's pugnacity. On Moore Lane, a long-derelict stretch near Dublin's center, Kelleher bought a large plot in the mid-1990s. For most of the ten years that followed, his plan to build on the property faced legal obstructions, many from Treasury Holdings, one of the largest real-estate concerns in Ireland, which wanted to control all development in the area. "I was up against the local bully boys," Kelleher said of Treasury, an assessment with which others agree. "They called me 'the Yank' and said they were going to run me out of Dublin." But in 2004 he opened a 23 million-euro hotel on the land.

The lesson of Moore Lane was that Garrett Kelleher was not afraid of the big dogs as he was on the rise as a real-estate mogul. But then again, he has become a big dog himself. The London Sunday Times tagged him on its 2007 "Rich List" as the 165th wealthiest person in Ireland, with assets of 82 million euros, or about $120 million in personal wealth.

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Chicago, as he found out, is different from the old sod. And last year when Shelbourne sought approval from the plan commission and city council, Kelleher grudgingly participated in the dog-and-pony show to cultivate political favor. Of course, he also had his not-so-secret weapon, his architect, happily running interference. While Kelleher sometimes spoke, Calatrava usually headlined any event designed to explain, promote, and woo. At one session with the Tribune's Kamin, Calatrava drew pictures and colored them with watercolors as he discussed the design. The episode was enthusiastically reported in the paper and the drawings ran with the story.

As the April presentation before the Chicago Plan Commission drew closer, a series of meetings made it seem like all Calatrava all the time. At one, an overflow congregation of SOAR's general membership, he spoke eloquently and drew pictures on an overhead projector. Calatrava visually compared the Spire's form to the spiraling interior of a seashell, an image that has been used to advertise the building. It was a building for the ages, he said. "It's like writing, or a poem."

"We were mesmerized," recalls Gail Spreen.

Even practiced hands were amazed by the performances. "I freely admit that I'm as subject to the cult of personality as anyone else," said Benet Haller, the planner overseeing the project from the city's side. Over the course of several meetings, he said, he'd never witnessed such enthusiasm for a condo development. There was applause from the politicians. Members of the press were often beaming.

By the time Shelbourne's version of the building was presented to the Chicago Plan Commission, any thought of official objection had dissolved. City Hall was so happy that it made at least one major concession: to include adjacent park district land as part of the building's zoning calculations. Shelbourne agreed to contribute some $13 million for DuSable Park's construction, which includes rent and plan development bonuses. Including the park's three acres was essential for the approval of the project, according to Thomas Murphy. The plan commission passed this and the rest of the Shelbourne scheme on April 19th, with a vote of 13 to 0. The city council sent it through without dissent on May 9th.

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