Until last year, Cook County General Hospital sat vacant for 17 years. As redevelopment plans fizzled, graffiti from squatters began to turn up inside the 1.2-million-sq-ft building once known as Chicago’s Ellis Island.
“In the city of Detroit, there’s a lot of demand for residential. There is a shortage of residential space, [and] there are a lot of projects. They are not of the size and magnitude of the Hudson’s redevelopment [planned to be Detroit’s tallest building], but it is all significant,” Baxa says.
Craig Martin, a University of Kansas alumnus, and his wife, Diane, recently made a gift of $3.5 million to establish the Center for Construction Safety at KU’s School of Engineering.