8-Apr-17 – Concerned about its impact on traffic in the neighborhood, 42nd Ward Alderman Brendan Reilly has rejected a proposed 60-story hotel/condominium at Rush & Superior Streets – one block from Holy Name Cathedral. It was the third proposal for the site.

More than 300 people attended a lengthy River North Residents Association meeting on March 13, at which plans for The Carillon were presented. The project by Symmetry Property Development of New York would have added 246 condo units, 216 hotel rooms, 120 hotel timeshare units, and 30,000 square feet of retail space to River North.

Concerns expressed at the meeting included construction noise during the three years it would take to build the tower, then traffic congestion when it’s finished. Ward Miller, executive director of Preservation Chicago, said putting up the building would take away from the neighborhood’s Victorian architectural heritage.

After the meeting, Reilly re-read Symmetry’s traffic study for the project, then visited the site several times.

“The proposed parking and loading scheme that would utilize the public alley simply will not work for this proposal,” wrote Reilly (right) on Friday in his weekly newsletter. “All parking ingress and egress and all loading activities are proposed to be staged out of a public alley to the north of the development site.”

Superior Street, he says, cannot accommodate the extra traffic The Carillon would attract. Curbside activities such as taxis and deliveries “will spill over onto virtually non-functioning Superior Street and exacerbate an already untenable condition.”

Reilly says he has encouraged Symmetry to considered other options for the site, such as a single-use project, like a residence without the hotel and retail space, or to skip a planned development altogether and determine what could be built under existing zoning restrictions.