Progress Report: Zara at Chicago Place

I first encountered Zara one rainy day near the opera house in Paris.  It was the only store open, and I popped in to keep from getting soaked.  It was then that my wife fell in love... with the store.

The Spanish store feating quality clothing at low low prices is making progress with its new store on the Magnificent Mile.  Construction barricades have been up for a few months, but recently a two-story screen featuring promotional photos and the ever-tempting phrase "coming soon."

Zara is gong in at the space formerly occupied by Tabott's back when Chicago Place was an actual mall and not just a hollow shell supporting a food court.

It also has an e-mail address for anyone who wants to be one of its shopgirls.  If there's an employee discount, I know some people who would be interested.

In Case You Missed It: Chicago Place mall becoming offices

We didn't mention it here, so in case you missed it: the mall portion of Chicago Place is being turned into offices .

Saks will stay, and the former Talbott's space is still becoming Zara.  And in between the two of them, 11,000 square feet of what used to be the mall lobby will become some other as-yet-unannounced store on Michigan Avenue.  But the rest of the Chicago Place mall is destined to become a cubicle farm.

It will be interesting to see how this is accomplished. The low-impact (and lower cost) way would be to leave the atrium open and have the offices ring it, like the Lloyd's of London headquarters .  But there has been talk in the past of decking over the atrium back when a hotel looked like a better way to go.  We'll see what happens.

Endgame: Talbot's Out at Chicago Place

After months of speculation and even a lawsuit, Talbot's has finally been forced out of Chicago Place.  That leaves the food court and Saks Fifth Avenue as the only operating concerns in the retail portion of what was once a vibrant vertical mall at the center of the Magnificent Mile.

Now, it's mostly abandoned.  The heat's turned off in the public areas.  The escalators have been turned off, too.  According to the Sun-Times, there's just one public elevator for accessing the food court.  The place is downright creepy.

But with the exit of Talbot's comes hope for something new.  In numerous published reports it was detailed that the owners of Chicago Place wanted to use the Talbot's space for a new Zara store.  That can happen now that the space is vacant.

But it seems strange to us that Zara would even want to be in Chicago Place.  The owner of Zara owns the block next door on Michigan Avenue -- the one with the Peninsula Hotel and the Pottery Barn that's becoming yet another Victoria's Secret.

So why would he want to pay rent to Chicago Place when there is tons of vacant retail space on the block that he owns?  Our hope is that he has a big deal in the works to fill the vacant space that was once American Girl Place and CompUSA.  We hope.

As an aside, the Zara guy took a $200 million mortgage on the Peninsula block just a couple of weeks ago, according to Crain's.  We don't know if that's significant or not.  We're not real estate "experts" and even those who claim to be don't seem to know what's going on in this economy.

Signs of Life at Chicago Place

I wouldn't believe it if I didn't see it, but we have photographic proof that something is actually happening at Chicago Place.

For those of you who don't know, the once not-all-that-bad vertical mall in a prime spot in the heart of the Michigan Avenue shopping district (heck, the food court is within wifi sniffing range of the Apple Store!) is just a husk of its former self.

Chicago's main Saks Fifth Avenue store still functions, as does Talbot's, but that's it aside from the food court way up at the top.  The ground floor is unheated.  The escalators have been turned off.  According to a Sun-Times report, there's just one working elevator to take people up to the delights of Panda Express and what may be the only McDonald's in the developed world that doesn't take credit cards.

For a  years we've heard talk about converting the dead stores into hotel space, or a big box store, but nothing has come to fruition.  Then this happened:

This is a cameraphone snap e-mailed to us by a reader.  It's clearly the former Customer Service desk from back when Chicago Place had customers.  Those appear to be blueprints spread out across the desk.  Judging from the jeans and boots, the men are architects or engineers, not real estate or developer types.

It's not much, but it's the first hint we've gotten in a long time that anything positive might come to Chicago Place.