Restoring Chicago's historic Drake Hotel has been a six-year, $45 million process of treading lightly and leaving no footprints.

The building's exterior was also restored under a separate contract with Morton Grove, Ill.-based Design Installation Systems Inc., but the most delicate work occurred inside.
New fire protection, mechanical and air-conditioning systems had to be installed without altering the ornate appearance of a 10-story building that first opened its doors on New Year's Eve, 1920. The job included remodeling all of the hotel's 537 guest rooms - including 74 suites.

And the hotel had to remain open to the public, providing its famously refined service throughout the project, which is slated for completion in March.

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"The project was like replacing the heart and lungs of a patient as they walked down the street," said Mike Lesinski, project executive for the general contractor, Turner Construction in Chicago, using a quote from Robert Huffer, the former Hilton North America engineer on the project.

Fritz Gale, project manager for the Chicago office of Gensler, the project architect, added: "In any building the vintage of the Drake, the biggest issue is finding out what's there and what you have to deal with. This building has had an interesting life. It was remodeled several times and it was used as a barracks in World War II. It had really been beaten up over the years."

Few original drawings existed at the project's start. In addition, many renovations had been done over the years by carpenters and craftsmen, without any formal documents.
"We had to do a lot of forensic investigation," Gale said. That included poking holes in walls to see what was behind them. The holes had to be made, patched and touched up quickly, so guests wouldn't notice them.

Gale said that during the investigation phase, which began in 1997, a set of original architectural drawings done in ink on linen was found rolled up and tucked behind a boiler in the basement.

"The hotel didn't even know they had them," he said. "Now they are in the archives of the Chicago Historical Society."

Crumbling Wiring

Despite what Gale called "continuous upgrades" to the building, its mechanical systems had never really been touched.

"That resulted in a lot of unexpected conditions that had to be dealt with on the fly," he said.

Lamar Johnson, principal in charge of the project for Gensler, said there were "little melodramas every day." When old wiring was tied to new panels, to keep the building functioning until the rest of the wiring could be replaced, some of the wiring would just crumble.

"It was like performing surgery on an 80-year-old man," Johnson said.

Along with installing the new systems and threading wiring, ducts and drainpipe through highly limited space in the old walls, a fire protection system had to be installed throughout the building.

Lesinski said that for several years, two or three floors of guest rooms were closed in mid-December for renovations. They had to be returned to service in mid-March, without exception.

When floors were closed, those above and below them were occupied and needed fire protection.

"This building is occupied by a lot of temporary residents who are not familiar with how to get in and out in an emergency," Lesinski said. "Great Lakes Fire Protection, Turner, the Drake and the Chicago Fire Prevention Bureau worked together to design a plan so that we never lost fire protection."

Once the new sprinkler systems were in place, they had to be hidden from view.

The Art of Replication

"Whatever we created had to look like it had been there forever," Gale said. "In corridors where we were putting in new sprinkler pipes, we created new soffits and moldings."

Johnson said that in order to make the plaster look like original, workers replicated the techniques that were used 80 years ago.

Lesinski said that the attention to detail paid off. "If you go into the main lobby or the Gold Coast Room today, you would never know that we had been there," he added.

Working in a functioning hotel also presented significant scheduling concerns.

The scavenger company that emptied the rooms, down to the towels, had five days to get in and out, Lesinski said. "As they would exit one end of the floor, we were right behind them," he added.

Keeping a consistent, experienced staff on the job throughout the duration of the long project was imperative to keep things moving quickly.

"If we had people who had done the first-floor renovation, we needed their expertise to stay on the job throughout the other floors so we could be efficient," Lesinski said.
Accordingly, Turner and its subs tried to keep the same group of tradesmen and supervisors working throughout the project.

Lesinski said that making molds before work began in a given area helped ease the tight schedule. The hotel staff's foresight in preordering carpeting and other essentials, and warehousing them until needed, avoided delivery delays.

Continuity of mechanical service was essential in the building.

"Fortunately for us there were two of almost everything in this building," Lesinski said.
"We could take out one chiller and depend on the other one until we had the new one in place. It probably overburdened the remaining one, but it was a short period of time and it was eventually going out anyway."

Guests' Wellbeing

Guest comfort was of paramount importance.

"Nobody wanted to know we were there," said Lesinski. "Generally we did not start noise-producing work until 8:30 a.m. and we had it completed by 5. If there was a complaint about noise during that period, the hotel would ask us to do something else."

He added that the biggest issue on the project was "maintaining the historic splendor of the building," which reached beyond the Drake's doors.

"The Fire Prevention Bureau was extremely interested in our project," Lesinski said.
"We were entering new territory together to some extent, so we learned together."

He said that after the Oct. 17 fire in the Cook County Administration Building, in which six people died, updating fire protection systems in older buildings will undoubtedly become a building code priority. At the time of the fire, Chicago code did not require buildings constructed prior to 1975 to have sprinklers above the ground floor.

Lesinski said Chicago construction firms will likely see more retrofit work in the future.