Michigan Avenue - Niche Media - Michigan Avenue magazine is a luxury lifestyle magazine centered around Chicago’s finest people, events, fashion, health & beauty, fine dining & more!
Issue link: http://digital.greengale.com/i/67043
A view of Hubbard Street today T he afternoon glow of a sinking sun peeks through Albert Friedman's office, backlighting a bookcase filled with green, blue, and caramel-colored glass bottles still frosty from the Great Chicago Fire that glazed them more than a century ago. They've been picked up at various River North buildings Friedman has acquired over the last 40 years. Holding one of the bottles, his son, Jason—the executive vice president of Property Development for Friedman Properties—recalls telling some of the neighborhood restaurateurs they should serve their drinks in this bottle. "You know why?" he asks with a laugh, showcasing the bottle's rounded bot- tom. "Because you can never put it down; you just have to keep drinking." Though Albert Friedman was the earliest proponent and a visionary of what has become one of Chicago's most thriving real estate districts—he owns some 50 properties, including the huge Bloomingdale's Home & Furniture store in the former Medinah Temple and Tree Studios building— others have joined the scene along the way, fueling explosive growth that has taken off primarily in the last decade. From trendy restaurants to soaring real estate, a pulsating late-night club scene to a bona fide tech boom, this pocket of real estate has turned into Chicago's most desirable destination. "Ten years ago there was a physical void, and no one was really going there," says Billy Dec, CEO and cofounder of Rockit Ranch Productions, a restaurant and entertainment development company that owns and operates Rockit Bar & Grill, Sunda restaurant, and The Underground. When Dec was considering the area as a site for his group's first restaurant, "It lacked customers, wasn't cool, and didn't have energy," he says, "but it had potential." The early years A t the turn of the 20th century, River North was known as Smokey Hollow for the sooty haze the myriad factories created. Rail cars transported goods in and out of the city, making it an ideal space for manufacturers that needed warehouses with large floor plates. Slowly this industrial area disappeared as companies—like the middle-class families they employed—moved to the suburbs in the 1950s in favor of single-story, modern buildings surrounded by large tracts of land. By the 1960s many businesses had vacated, leaving behind large empty warehouses and loft buildings for a "skid row that michiganavemag.com 119