Hilliard Towers Apartments
Redo Breathes New Life into Historic Public Housing
by Craig Barner

When they opened in 1966, the Raymond Hilliard Homes were atypical for Chicago Housing Authority buildings.

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The designer was Bertrand Goldberg, the famed architect of the upscale Marina City residential towers at 300 N. State St. and the equally high-end River City residences at 800 S. Wells St. Goldberg, who had studied architecture under Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, incorporated his distinctive corncob building shape with honeycomb windows into buildings in the Hilliard complex.

Today, the facility on the city's Near South Side stand out once again.

Most of the dreary CHA high-rises are being demolished as part of a visionary $1.6 billion plan to renew public housing in Chicago. But the distinctive Hilliard high-rises, which comprise two 16-story buildings and two 22-story towers, will be saved because Goldberg designed them. The facility was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1999.

In the late 1990s, the housing authority initiated the process to end the separation between public housing residents - many concentrated in high-rise buildings - and the rest of the city. Other goals included delivering decent housing in mixed-income neighborhoods to foster community.

The Hilliard had historic status, "so the CHA was inclined to save the buildings and bring in a developer," said Andrea Klopfenstein, development coordinator with Chicago-based Holsten Real Estate Development Corp., the developer that received a 99-year ground-lease from the CHA as part of the project.

The structures are being renovated for $98 million and will offer CHA rental and affordable housing to seniors and families. As part of the complex's rebirth, the facility will be renamed Hilliard Towers Apartments.

Two Phases Needed

The large quantity of work requires four years for the renovation to be complete, and the project on the 12.5-acre site was phased to accommodate the activity.

The first phase is complete except for some landscaping, said Victor Shaw, Holsten development manager.

The 16-story cylindrical building at 2111 S. Clark St. will offer 176 residences to seniors. All but a single unit are one-bedroom apartments with 477 sq. ft. of space.

Rent for the 94 CHA rental units are 30 percent of household income, including utilities, to residents who qualify. The 81 affordable housing units have monthly rents between $565 and $741, also for residents who qualify.

The 22-story crescent building at 2031 S. Clark St. will offer 151 residences to families in one-, two-, three- and four-bedroom configurations that range between 660 sq. ft. and 1,489 sq. ft. Like the senior-building residents, family-building residents who are public housing clients are charged 30 percent of household income, and the monthly rents for affordable units range between $565 and $1,056.

In mid-November, leasing was about 75 percent complete in the buildings, Klopfenstein said.

Phase two started in December and involves the cylindrical 30 W. Cermak Rd. building for 176 seniors and the crescent 2030 S. State St. building for 151 families.

The entire project, which encompasses about 500,000 sq. ft. of space, will be finished in the late summer or early fall of 2006.

Extensive Interior Work

Inside, the utility systems and lines that deliver services were almost completely replaced.

The job included the plumbing, electrical and HVAC systems. Chillers were installed to provide air conditioning for the first time, and sprinklers were mounted on the ceilings, also the first ever.

"With 7-ft., 10-in. ceiling heights, it wasn't easy to put in the sprinklers," said Bob Mathes, president of Chicago-based Linn-Mathes Inc., the general contractor.

The heating system was changed. Originally, steam was fed to slab coils, but five years ago the CHA installed boilers. With this project, the slab coils were abandoned, and heated air will be provided via tenant-controlled fan-coil units.

The exterior and interior walls and floors are made of concrete, and the number of cores in the 7-in.-thick floors to accommodate the lines was substantial.

Approximately 835 cores were holed out in the senior building and 800 cores in the family building, Mathes said. A similarly large number are expected for phase two.

The amount of new risers to hold the lines in the senior building are similarly huge, such as 32 both for the fan coil system and water. Teams worked from the top down, making cuts and installing lines, and later returned to the top to install the systems' branches that supply individual units.

The addition of chillers and fan-coil system increased the demand for utility services, and trenches were dug to install new feeds.

Other key interior work included adding a third elevator to the family building, installing new appliances, opening walls in the family building to increase the size of some units and scraping the old paint and applying a new coat.

The family buildings had been vacant for years, and "the paint was literally falling off the walls," Mathes said. "There is very little old left except for the concrete shell."

A Look Outside

On the exterior, the U.S. Department of the Interior's National Park Service and Illinois Historic Preservation Agency in Springfield were consulted to ensure the work maintained the integrity of the buildings.

For instance, extensive spalling, or flaking, plagued the poured-in-place concrete exterior because pieces have fallen away due to the elements, said Michael Lisec, president of Chicago-based Lisec & Biederman Ltd., the renovation architect.

The holes were patched, but the agencies initially demurred when painting was proposed: The buildings had not originally been painted. Because the structures would have attained a pockmarked appearance with the patching, an allowance was made for painting.

There was also concern about changes to the windows. The original glazing with aluminum frames were not insulated, allowing cold to be transmitted to the interior and ice to form.

"It became obvious that the windows were in such bad shape that they were not salvageable, so we compromised," Lisec said.
Insulated glazing was installed throughout the complex, but frames similar to the originals on a few bottom levels were sought.

"We had to work quite long and hard with a manufacturer to get a replacement that more or less matched in profile the pieces of aluminum of the original windows," Lisec added.

Other work included washing the exterior, adding entry pods and basketball court and installing parking for the first time. Unfinished work includes completing the restoration of the exterior amphitheater, installing a tennis court, planting a rose garden and installing benches based on a design of the Chicago Public Art Group.

"We had to create a vision for the people who came in of what the site was going to look like," Holsten's Shaw said. "It didn't look like it does now when we started."