Otis Lewis was among the first to move into the Fannie Emanuel Apartments, a shimmering mid-20th-century building on Chicago’s West Side. On a hot July day, I meet the energetic 72-year-old under a cluster of steel umbrella–shaded picnic tables outside the redevelopment formerly known as the Park View Apartments. Owned and managed by the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA), the 20-story, 124,420-square-foot tower had been vacant for nearly a decade when it reopened its doors in October 2017 following a complete renovation by the local architecture firm Holabird & Root.
Wearing a Def Jam hip-hop T-shirt and ball cap with a race car logo, Lewis beams as he speaks about the $68.7 million, 180-unit apartment building for low-income seniors. “I wouldn’t take anything for it,” he says. “You take a look at this building and it looks like downtown.”
He’s right. In pricier neighborhoods closer to Lake Michigan, such as Lakeview or the South Loop, the lean skyscraper, clad in columns of light gray and blue metal paneling intersected by rows of reflective windows, would blend right in. But in West Garfield Park, along a reviving stretch of Washington Avenue flanked by a Mobil station, shoe and sportswear stores, and squat brick mid-rises, the residential tower commands a futuristic presence, dominating the skyline.
Even to the disinterested observer, the Fannie Emanuel Apartments represents public housing at its best: a site-specific intervention with coordinated leadership and an appropriately funded, outwardly focused design approach. The reimagined building preserves the concrete bones of its past while providing low-income seniors a place to live that accommodates their needs and signals the promise of equitable community investment.
This is a story of how a successful, public redevelopment has brought hope and dignity to an underserved population—a project that stands out in today’s fast-paced, profit-driven world.
First Look
The original Park View Apartments tower was designed by Loewenberg & Loewenberg and completed in 1963, decades before the now-demolished, Chicago, high-rise projects Cabrini-Green Homes and Robert Taylor Homes had become infamous for perpetuating violence, drug trafficking, and other social ills. But if those projects closed themselves off from their surroundings, as critics have contended, Fannie Emanuel Apartments faces the community with pride, rising from a 2.5-acre extensively landscaped site that includes a series of circulating paths, abundant outdoor seating, a sensory garden, a prairie garden, and ornamental trees. The campus is accessible to residents and in view to the public through an ornamental metal fence along its southern edge.
Holabird & Root, a legacy firm whose roots in public housing stretch back to the 1937 Jane Addams Homes, wanted the redevelopment to open its arms to a community anchored by strong transit connections and green spaces, notably the 1908 Garfield Park Conservatory, a 2-acre haystack-shaped greenhouse designed by landscape architect Jens Jensen with local Prairie School architects Schmidt, Garden and Martin and New York-based engineering firm Hitchings and Co. “There hasn’t been a lot of investment in this part of the city, and we saw this as an opportunity to create an outwardly focused building that could be a beacon in the community,” says Holabird & Root associate principal Greg Marinelli, AIA.
The completion of the 22-month renovation represents a major step for the CHA, says Matt Mosher, the agency’s deputy chief of capital construction. “We needed to have a good senior residence in this community,” he says. “Without this here, the next closest senior building is the Irene McCoy Gaines Apartments [roughly 1 mile away]. Kudos to our CEO, Eugene Jones Jr., who let us make it a modern building with good amenities.”
Holabird & Root’s Greg Marinelli and Nick Barrett along with CHA’s Matt Mosher and resident Otis Lewis on the redevelopment.
On the Outside
The first thing Mosher often points out to visitors is Fannie Emanuel’s weathertight skin of color-coated galvanized steel panels finished in two tones: blue zinc with a matte finish, and an embossed chromium gray with an active patina that looks almost iridescent in the midday sun. The insulated metal panel system—Centria’s Formawall Dimension Series—orients the individual 1- to 2-foot-tall panels into vertical bands of alternating color with tongue-and-groove joints, imparting a dimensionality to the surface.
Along with adding visual interest to the façade, Mosher says, the panels provide a dual-layered water and vapor barrier. “It’s essentially creating an insulated rainscreen. [If water gets behind the system,] it’s designed to go between the panel and DensGlass behind it and wick its way out,” he says. “We think [the panels] provide an add for the R-value.”
Wally Bekta, vice president of the local development company Old Veteran Construction, says the interlocking panel system, also found in several nearby buildings such as Richard J. Daley College, is made of “expandable foam insulation sandwiched between layers of steel” and can be installed by a small team of subcontractors. Initially, the workers were attaching the 4,200 interlocking panels directly to the building’s original brick cladding, but roughly half a year after construction began, the unexpected happened: Bricks began crumbling at the lower levels of the rectangular building, particularly near the corners.
Wally Bekta and Greg Marinelli on the exterior of the Fannie Emanuel Apartments.
“When you looked at the building from the outside you’d never notice it,” Mosher says, “but once we started getting in there and demo-ing the building, we could see the brick was falling apart.”
Marinelli, speaking to me a day later in a conference room at Holabird & Root’s Chicago office, says a subsequent in-depth structural analysis confirmed the need to remove the building’s entire skin down to the concrete substructure prior to attaching the panels. He notes that this was not a catastrophic blow to the project. From the start of the renovation, the bricks were intended only as a substrate. Like many brick-skinned buildings of its era, Fannie Emanuel was built without insulation in the spandrel area between floors. “The panel system gave us not only the opportunity to change the look of the building, but to have a continuously insulated façade,” Marinelli says.
David Pellar, director of sales at Crown Corr, a Gary, Ind.–headquartered subcontractor that sells metal panel systems, says the building’s 3-inch-thick panels have an R-22 insulation rating. According to published Centria reports, they are fire-tested in accordance with the International Building Code.
Perhaps an even greater asset of the system, says Holabird & Root project architect Nick Barrett, AIA, is that it preserved interior space. “The downside of thickening the walls with a separate insulation material is you’re taking away square feet,” he says. “To make the building ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) accessible and accommodate residents, interior square footage became really precious as the design moved forward.”
Old Veteran Construction’s Wally Bekta and Holabird & Root’s Greg Marinelli on the exterior cladding of the Fannie Emanuel Apartments.
An Inside Look
If the building’s exterior presents a proud public face, the apartments’ interiors are what create a welcoming home to its residents. Fully occupied, the building’s 180 units are leased to low-income senior citizens who earn up to 60 percent of the area median income, according to CHA senior director of communications Molly Sullivan. The online real estate site Point2Homes reports the median income of West Garfield Park at $22,351. Tenants allocate up to 30 percent of their monthly income to rent, based on earnings and family size, while the balance is subsidized by rental assistance from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
That translates to $360 monthly rent plus electricity for Lewis, a Mississippi native who retired after 45 years as a laborer and janitor for the now-defunct Century Engraving & Embossing. “If you’re living somewhere else around here, you’re paying $700 to $800 a month, plus gas and light bills,” he says.
Architecturally, the flow of each 550-square-foot residential unit is intuitive and unencumbered. In a building with ceiling heights of 7 feet 10 inches and small room footprints, Barrett credits space-saving choices, such as a shared kitchen-and-living-room countertop, as among the project’s chief takeaways. “We learned from previous jobs with the CHA, there is a lot we can do on the design end that doesn’t cost more to the owner but enhances the comfort and livability of the space,” he says.
Ensuring that the units met ADA requirements or could be readily converted to do so presented an added spatial challenge, Bekta notes. For example, the bathrooms allow for a 5-foot turning radius near the sink and tub. Light switches are set at heights accessible to wheelchair users, and structural hand railings are installed in the showers and near the toilet.
The units also come equipped with contemporary kitchen cabinets, built-in shelves, a stove, a refrigerator, ceramic tile flooring in the baths, a programmable thermostat, and enough room for one’s personal belongings, such as a television and a small dresser. Space is tightly scripted. “You can put a queen size bed in [the bedroom], and you can walk around on both sides,” says Lewis, who resides in a second-floor unit.
Bekta describes the finish materials as durable and cost-effective, without appearing institutional or chintzy. The lobby floor is terrazzo while the community room is finished in vinyl tile; bathroom walls and windowsills are finished with engineered stone.
Marinelli says the 4-inch-thick concrete allowances between floors made it particularly challenging to update an antiquated and leaking radiant heating system. Ultimately, the design team selected an LG Multi V Water IV Heat Recovery variable refrigerant flow (VRF) system, which circulates R-410A refrigerant, a mixture of difluoromethane and pentafluouroethane, through the building. The system had two principal advantages over an air- or water-based system: its small pipe size fit into the tight space between floors, and the controls allowed for heat to be transferred from one unit to the next, giving residents autonomy over the temperature in their rooms.
Touches like these are a big deal to Lewis. “When we were at [the Irene McCoy Gaines Apartments], the floors were made of concrete, and the heat came out of the [radiant] floors. Here we control our own heat and air, and it’s much better than it was.”
Out on Top
“You can’t beat this,” Mosher says, as we step outside onto the tower’s raised ipe roof deck, designed jointly by Holabird & Root and local firm Site Design Group.We gaze eastward, beyond a waist-high parapet, to the baroque gold dome of the Garfield Park Fieldhouse and the Willis Tower beyond. Steeply angled benches, also ipe, show off their rich tannins under the shade of an awning. They serve as a guardrail, Marinelli says, for those ascending the low-pitched ramp leading to the deck. In 30-foot-tall planters along the deck’s sun-exposed southern edge, blooms of pixie meadow coneflowers and Oertel’s Rose yarrow rustle in the wind.
Mosher says for the first four months or so, he and Bekta were often the only two people on the roof. But that is changing, he claims, as seniors take the elevator to the building’s solarium floor to do their laundry, exercise in the fitness room, or meet in the game room, which hosts a pool table, club chairs, inlaid bookshelves, and a small collection of framed portraits, including photographer Art Kane’s Harlem 1958, depicting a group of renowned jazz musicians in front of a Harlem brownstone.
“It’s not uncommon for a building of that era to have a roof deck,” Marinelli says. “The challenge, usually, is it is hard to get the population up there; they’d rather be where people are. During the design process, we came up with strategies to encourage interaction up there.”
Siting several building amenities on the top floor was, of course, one of those strategies. Another was to perk up the existing concrete rooftop with the ipe deck, which brings warmth to the space, Marinelli says. The planters are hydrated by a hidden irrigation system and illuminated at night, and the deck meets ADA accessibility guidelines by virtue of its pedestal construction.
Holabird & Root’s Nick Barrett and OVC’s Wally Bekta on Fannie Emanuel Apartments’ construction process.
“To meet the codes required for installation, it is often hard to get the heights to work out. The way this was designed, the deck slopes up to get to a higher elevation. That makes it accessible and also gives us room to insulate underneath and provide drainage [for the roof],” Marinelli says.
On the Ground
As spectacular as the views are from the roof, the most popular space among residents—at least on the day I visit—is on grade, at the cluster of picnic tables outside the building, “Everybody here got a certain place to sit,” Lewis confides. “A bunch sit around the building, a bunch sit here.”
Abundant seating is undoubtedly an asset, but the dominant motif of the extensively landscaped site, also jointly designed by Holabird & Root and Site Design Group, is the sequence of three formal gardens and an events lawn laced together by a circulating path, says Site Design Group project manager Jennifer Draper. The path encircles the building, linking to other paths like the loops of a necklace, and aims to give seniors opportunities to stay physically active and engage with nature.
“In this neighborhood,” Mosher says, “there are not a lot of welcoming outdoor spaces; that was one of the goals of the project, to give seniors a place to walk around where they could feel safe.”
The path wends past species rich in biologic diversity and representing a mix of trees, flowering perennials, ornamental grasses, shrubs, and ground cover: paperbark maples and redbuds, forsythia and viburnum, swamp milkweed and wild ginger. Surrounded by 6-foot-tall wooden fences to the east and west and an ornamental metal fence to the north, the path leads past a rear parking lot enclosed by a security gate and offers routes to a bike storage area and a seat wall at the front entry.
Each garden, Draper says, serves a distinct function, yet all make accommodations for the age and physical abilities of residents. In the sensory garden, for instance, visually impaired residents can feel the distinct textures of ornamental grasses, such as prairie dropseed, or cross a stone-inlaid path among thyme plantings to release the herb’s scent. The vegetable garden features elevated beds to relieve the lower back strain of bending over. The beds, left as topsoil for now, appear somewhat unfinished, but are kept that way intentionally to encourage seniors to choose what they wish to plant.
Creating such a bucolic setting was not an easy undertaking, Draper notes, as the land was historically a train yard and required two years of remediation by Chicago environmental consultant Carnow Conibear to remove fuel contaminants and prepare it for new hardscape and plantings.
But in Draper’s mind, the effort has been well worth it. “There was a lot more landscape focus than we usually get on a public housing project,” she says. “Since the start of the project, we’ve heard the CHA is starting to prioritize projects like this one. They see the benefit of people wanting to move here and invest in the landscape.”
First in Class
As public housing projects go, Fannie Emanuel Apartments exists in a rarified class. According to Sullivan, the project is funded through $39 million in tax-exempt bonds ceded by the city, $27 million in loans purchased by the CHA, who served as the project’s developer, and a 4 percent city tax credit purchased by Red Stone Equity Partners. It is projected to produce $32 million in equity.
Holabird & Root’s Nick Barrett and Greg Marinelli with CHA’s Matt Mosher and OVC’s Wally Bekta on the ADA features of the Fannie Emanuel Apartments.
Though Mosher concedes that the project was expensive and required significant upfront investment, he is pleased with the results and experience: “In my opinion, this would be the Mercedes-Benz of projects. I wish we could do them all like this.”
Alongside the CHA’s continued redevelopment of Cabrini-Green and the historic Lathrop Homes, and a greater than 90 percent occupancy rate across its properties—the first time the CHA has reached this milestone in decades—the Fannie Emanuel Apartments stands as a significant benchmark of the progress the agency has made in transforming public housing.
For Lewis, it’s a place to call home: a safe, comfortable apartment where he can watch television, sit outside with friends, walk a short distance to catch the bus to Pete’s Fresh Market, and proudly invite his adult children to visit. His residency has also given him minor celebrity status among his friends. “The month before last, the Mayor [Rahm Emanuel] came and visited my apartment,” he recalls. “I was a guest of his. There were a bunch of people in the community room for a press conference, and I was in the front row. He was telling everyone how I was one of the first people to move in and how much I liked the building.”
Nearly 20 years after the CHA initiated the Plan for Transformation, a massive redevelopment effort to renovate or rehabilitate the entire stock of public housing in Chicago—nearly 25,000 units—Fannie Emanuel stands as proof that renovation can work when done in a way that places emphasis on residents’ quality of life and acknowledges the site’s context. By striving to integrate residents into the social and physical fabric of their communities, the building design sets its sights on the future and, perhaps, a new era in public housing.
Photos: © 2018 James Steinkamp Photography
Floor plans and diagrams: Courtesy Holabird & Root