Smith Village
Urban Retirement Home Updated Into Modern Campus

by Paula Widholm

Two neighbors perched on a stone ledge along a sidewalk to chat on a recent warm November day on Chicago's South Side. Across the curved tree-lined street, the banging of construction was temporarily intruding on this tranquil cluster of vintage homes.

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The end result, however, will bring a modern senior living environment so that life-long residents of the South Side won't have to leave the area come retirement time.

Tucked in the historic Beverly neighborhood, the landmark 80-year-old Washington and Jane Smith retirement home at 113th Street and Western Avenue will be torn down and replaced with a $65 million community called Smith Village. The campus will provide 152 independent apartments, 82 assisted-living units and 94 nursing beds. The project is scheduled for completion in fall 2007.

Homewood-based Graycor Construction was scheduled to deliver phase one - an 82-unit, 70,000-sq.-ft. assisted-living/memory-care building - in December.

Phase two, to be performed by St. Charles-based Weiss Builders over the next two years, includes demolition of the campus' existing buildings to make way for a new four-story, 152-unit independent-living building and a one-story common-area building built above a one-level underground parking garage.

The site's existing skilled nursing wing, built in 1991, will remain. Current residents of the buildings slated for demolition will move into the newly completed assisted-living building when phase two is complete.

"One of the challenges is that it's a large commercial project within a residential neighborhood," said William Ledyard, senior project manager for Graycor. "The site is small, and there are site constraints because we're within the city block. But the residents have been understanding. There was lots of coordination and cooperation from the owners, faculty, residents and neighbors."

Phase One

The first new building to open at the community includes 58 one-bedroom, assisted-living units on the first three floors and 24 memory-care units on the fourth floor. The first floor also contains a lobby, office, kitchen and dining room.

The building's structural system is concrete masonry units with precast decks and a red-brick exterior and a beige stone base. Aged copper accent panels also appear on the exterior.

On the interior, common areas are trimmed in carpet and paint. Individual units have carpet, paint and sheet vinyl. Each unit's kitchenette includes a refrigerator, microwave and sink.

To meet the city of Chicago's requirements, the building also has a flat white reflective rubber membrane roof.

Serving Today's Seniors

A continuum of care, from independent living to some assistance to 24-hour skilled nursing, is more commonly found at facilities in the suburbs, but now South Side seniors don't have to move far away to get continuing-care housing.

"A lot of older not-for-profit providers have been in senior care for a long time," said Gene Guszkowski, president of Wauwatosa-based AG Architecture, the designer.

"We're bringing them into the 21st Century with a state-of-the-art senior living center with a number of different components."

The independent-living apartments usually house people starting at about age 78 or early 80s who can still drive or come and go but want more secure, communal living. Assisted-living residents are too frail to live independently day-to-day and need some assistance.

The third level of care is for seniors with memory issues, and the fourth level is 24-hour skilled nursing. The one-story common-area building will tie together all these elements.

One design issue was figuring out how to provide all five components within the development while working with an existing building on a tight site.

"It made it hard to evaluate what to keep," Guszkowski said. "The trick is how to continue to stay in business while moving people around. It took a lot of collaboration for the sequencing and staging."

The design also needed to capture a sense of the surrounding neighborhood. The four-story independent living building is shaped in the form of a big E, appropriate for urban Chicago. Also, the independent living units offer a view of a park across Western Avenue.

The independent-living building will resemble the original one being torn down and will have a pitched roof. "It's a family of buildings with similarities," Guszkowski said.

"We're using different construction types."
In general, senior housing development is occurring more frequently in urban areas.

"There's a movement to integrate communities closer in to the areas that they grew up in. We're repositioning old-line facilities to be competitive with all the bells and whistles."

More Space

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