Window sizes in the original plan allow for measures to be used to share light across rooms.
Photo by Jeff Yoders/ENR

Developers R2 Cos. and Lagfin took on the challenge of redeveloping 79 W. Monroe, a historic structure whose tenants had dwindled to a ground floor Walgreen’s drug store and the campus of a local school. The 79 W. Monroe project is converting seven floors of vacant office space into 117 mixed-income residential units, 41 of which will be affordable under Chicago’s definition, for a total of 100,000 sq ft. The developers received $28 million in TIF funding.

Floors 7 to 13 are slated to become a mix of studios and one-bedroom apartments, along with a handful of two-bedroom units. A new rooftop deck, a rooftop dog run area, a lounge, fitness room and bike storage spaces are planned as amenities designed to attract tenants.

Leopardo and construction partner GMA faced all of the challenges that are common in office-to-residential conversions such as deep floor plates and columns that don’t easily fit residential units; reconfigurations needed of existing HVAC, plumbing, electrical and fire safety systems; and surprises the contractor found during exploratory surgery.

Even with such challenges, revitalizing aging office buildings remains a priority for Chicago officials who want to turn the corridor into a bustling area.

“Chicago’s downtown has continued to recover since the pandemic. There’s still so much more work that we can do to ensure that all of our neighborhoods continue to grow through equitable economic development initiatives and more affordable housing opportunities to best ensure that we continue to see growth and development,” Chicago’s current mayor, Brandon Johnson said at a press conference during the project’s groundbreaking. “We must prioritize equitable investment across our city, and that includes our downtown.”

Old terra-cotta ceiling tiles were found beneath previous renovations.
Photo by Jeff Yoders/ENR

The Dept. of Planning and Development promises more projects, not just office to residential conversions, for the downtown corridor.

Speaking of the redevelopment of the former State of Illinois - James R. Thompson Center, now being rebuilt as the new Google headquarters by contractor Clark Construction, Commissioner Ciere Boatright of the Chicago Dept. of Planning and Development said, “You’ll see the historic facade [of the Thompson Center] from across the rebuilt Chase Plaza, down the block from the new Google headquarters below the restored Weather Bell on the corner.

The Weather Bell is a weather prediction sign dating from the 1950s on the corner of 79 W. Monroe, which was originally known as the Rector Building when it was completed in 1905.

A slurry wall under Clark Street’s vaulted sidewalk allowed shoring to be tied to it and a CMU wall.
Photo by Jeff Yoders/ENR

What Lies Beneath

79 W. Monroe was designed by Jarvis Hunt with an addition by Holabird & Root added in 1923.

“The north half of the building was built in 1904. Then they did a mirrored southward expansion 20 years later,” says Ralf Peterson, senior superintendent at Leopardo. “There are little bits of different challenges that you see based on similar materials, similar builds, structurally, but there are different elevations at some points, especially on the roof deck. Parapet details and roofing details and different materials were used 20 years later.”

Peterson says that also meant reinforcing several connections on each floor.

Originally clad in limestone panels, the two-story base of the building along the primary facades is covered with gray granite panels installed in 1951 as part of a renovation by the Bell Savings & Loan Association. Its exposed structural columns are wrapped in stainless steel and were installed in 1959 and 1960. Late 19th- and early 20th-century construction methods meant the architect for the current conversion, architect Ware Malcomb, also had to plan consider facade repair and the introduction of new lighting into the residential units by spreading light from other units via half-walls, light channels and shared windows.

In the first months of the project, the challenge that faced the construction team involved discovery and removal of asbestos fire-proofing, lead pipes and lead paint that had been sequestered by previous renovations.

“Pretty much every potential hit for asbestos on the checklist that you can get was in this building to some extent,” says Michael Fitzpatrick, project manager at Leopardo. He added that discovering the asbestos in walls and ceilings throughout the early project phase required stops and starts to allow abatement and demolition.

Creating two- and one-bedroom apartments from large office floorplates requires using shared light and high ceilings.
Photo by Jeff Yoders/ENR

Fitzpatrick and Peterson say that after the ceilings were removed, lead pipes and paint had to be replaced too.

“We found a bunch of old pipes that definitely were hot for lead,” Peterson said. “We found that most of the pipes and the paint were [found in the ceilings] were hot for lead and needed to be replaced.”

As is to be expected in buildings of 79 W. Monroe’s vintage, the Leopardo team knew there would be a lot of abatement and went into the project prepared for it.

Once the abatement was completed, the Leopardo crews poured floors an inch-and-quarter thick with heavy gypsum-concrete topping and set their control lines and layout from the newer, heavier floors that now have a smooth and strong surface.

“These floors that we demolished, these are the old wood [floors] with a plywood sub-base that we poured over with gypcrete “ Fitzpatrick says.

To enhance real-time field collaboration and streamline workflows, Leopardo used Autodesk Construction Cloud for project management and PlanGird for documents. Most superintendents could be seen using ACC on handheld tablets.

Shoring It Up

79 West Monroe is located on a vaulted sidewalk, but one of aspect of classic architecture that actually helped Leopardo was a slurry wall and a CMU wall that formed the permanent basement walls below the vaulted sidewalk along Clark Street. These structural features were able to support to the heavy construction taking place above.

Leopardo installed 200 shoring towers in the basement under the Clark Street sidewalk and the project’s skip hoist was installed on top of it, all supported by the CMU wall and slurry walls beneath.

The CMU wall acted as a stable load-bearing base, while the slurry wall tied the support system together along Clark Street, allowing equipment, construction dumpsters and material lay down to operate above a sidewalk that would otherwise be too fragile to bear such loads.

“It’s pretty rare that you have a hoist sitting on a vaulted sidewalk, but we got the CMU wall that helps and the outside slurry wall,” Peterson says.

These sections of the original decorative concrete removed to install the skip hoist will be replaced later in the project.
Photo by Jeff Yoders/ENR

Open During Construction

Another challenging aspect of the project was keeping tenants, such as a ground floor Walgreen’s pharmacy and the campus of the Intrinsic School, open during construction.

Keeping HVAC service and electricity to the floors not being worked on required coordinating with the tenants for systems improvements during installation on weekends and keeping half of the building running at all times. The heating system was beyond due for an upgrade.

“It has an existing boiler that heats floors one through six and the system was looped from the top of the building back down, “ Peterson said. “We demolished all that out and put in a new a new heating loop on the eighth floor to separate the school and us.”

When crews exposed the boiler, Leopardo discovered 12-in. steam returns, typical of office construction at the time but way too big for residential.

“That was all buried. Once we started opening up the roof, we had the engineers go back, redesign the system, put [in] a whole new loop,” Peterson says, which was more typical of residential construction with smaller return between 1 and 3 inches.

A new boiler installation revealed 12-in. returns on the existing heating system.
Photo by Jeff Yoders/ENR

Incentives Available

While 79 W. Monroe was the first project to break ground in LaSalle Street Reimagined, others are on tap including 111 West Monroe and 208 South LaSalle Street, both of which have been approved for construction.

In late 2025, 135 S. LaSalle, the largest project in the program was approved for $98 million in TIF funding. In addition, AmTrustRE, Riverside Investment and Development and DL3 Realty are the developers on the $241.5-million project to convert 624,000 sq ft of space in the 1934-era Field Building into 386 residential units, plus 92,000 sq ft of retail and other commercial space.

Other Midwestern cities are offering similar incentives.

Ware Malcomb’s plan for 79 W. Monroe involves reusing floors 7-13 for residential apartments while maintaining the remaining tenants—a Walgreen’s pharmacy and a school—on the other floors.
Massing model courtesy of City of Chicago/LaSalle Street Reimagined

Office to Residential Elsewhere

The average office vacancy rate in the U.S. was 20.7% in August, according to Moody’s. About 71,000 housing units and 149,000 sq ft of adaptive reuse are in the construction pipeline from these conversions.

New York City has a pipeline of 8,000 new units from adaptive reuse projects, potentially reaching around 17,400 units. Washington, D.C., has more than 6,500 rental units in its construction pipeline from conversions.

Cincinnati is planning to convert more than 9% of its office space to residential use. In Boston, such conversions are expected to create 1,167 apartment units by 2026.