The Steuben Club, Chicago: A Gothic Skyscraper Rehabilitated as Apartments

The Steuben Club's two-story dining room, the "Ballroom," preserved as the building's fitness centre. Image from the National Park Service's page.

The Steuben Club Building in Chicago is a Gothic Revival skyscraper clad in terra cotta, with pointed arches, tracery, buttresses and finials. A twenty-seven-story base carries a slender eighteen-story polygonal tower that ends 463 feet above the street. Designed by the architect Karl Vitzhum, it was the Chicago headquarters of the Steuben Society of America, a national organisation of Americans of German descent founded to teach the public about German-Americans' patriotic contributions and to encourage them to take an active part in civic life.

A clubhouse in the sky

The club occupied the upper floors, with shops and professional offices on the lower twenty-one. It had an opulent dining room, club rooms and recreation facilities including a swimming pool. In the 1950s, long after the club had left, new owners refaced the lower stories in granite and modernised many interiors, but the upper floors stayed in use as offices, and the club's fitness rooms and pool carried on as a health club.

Decline

In the 1980s the terra cotta was cleaned aggressively and nearly all the historic finishes in the lobby were removed. In 2001 pieces of terra cotta began falling from the tower; the surrounding streets and nearby Chicago Transit Authority lines were closed for a time while protective canopies went up and emergency repairs were made. The cost of the repairs eventually drove the owners into bankruptcy, and the building was sold again.

Years of deferred maintenance had damaged the terra cotta. Using the original shop drawings, the ground-floor terra cotta removed in the 1950s was accurately reproduced. Image from the National Park Service's page.

Rehabilitation

In 2005 a $146.6 million rehabilitation began, converting the office building into housing with the help of federal historic tax credits. The work included extensive repair, replacement and restoration of the terra cotta and created 312 apartments — studios, convertibles, one- and two-bedroom units and penthouses — 62 of them designated affordable, along with more than 20,000 square feet of retail, restaurant and office space.

Despite decades of change, many historic features survived on the upper floors and were kept: terrazzo floors, marble wainscoting, plaster ceilings, and doors, transoms and surrounds. The two-story "Ballroom" on the 24th and 25th floors and the natatorium on the 27th were preserved too.

Now known as the Randolph Tower City Apartments, the project met the Secretary of the Interior's Standards for Rehabilitation and became a certified rehabilitation in 2012. The owners also followed the National Green Building Standard of the National Association of Home Builders, which is equivalent to the U.S. Green Building Council's LEED certification program.

Sources

Based on "Case Study: The Steuben Club, Illinois," published by the National Park Service, Technical Preservation Services; rewritten in hubnx's own words.