West Suburban Conference Center

Holy Cow! Hotel Facility
Rising in Lombard

by Pamela Dittmer McKuen

The vision for an upscale hotel and conference facility in Lombard that was formed in the late 1990s will soon become a reality. The Westin Lombard Yorktown Center, as it is named, is topped out and taking reservations for September.

advertisement

"We're on budget and we hope to open early," says developer and asset manager Tom McGuigan, CEO of Hinsdale-based Mid-America Hotel Partners. Almost $200 million in tax-exempt bonds have been issued for the project, an amount that will cover both 100 percent of the construction costs-about $100 million-and fund the necessary reserves.

The conference center consists of a 500-room, four-star Westin hotel, which will be managed by parent Starwood Hotels and Resorts of White Plains, N.Y.; 50,000 sq ft of meeting space, including a 20,000-sq-ft grand ballroom with seating for 1,500 guests; and a 635-space parking garage plus 270 surface parking spaces. It is located near the Yorktown Center shopping center, a popular retail emporium off Butterfield Road for generations of suburbanites in the Chicago area.

Harry Caray's Restaurant Group will operate two restaurants, Harry Caray's Restaurant and Holy Mackerel! American Fish House, which are named after the late Hall of Fame baseball announcer for the Chicago White Sox and then the Cubs. The Chicago-based HC Restaurant Group currently manages three restaurants, an off-premise catering company and upscale bowling lounge, all in the Chicago area.

The facility's footprint is basically a square, with the 18-story hotel and mechanical penthouse rising from the northwest quadrant. Another quadrant houses the five-level parking garage, and the remaining two quadrants hold the single-level ballroom and other function space. Beneath the tower is a 15-ft basement.

Bankrolling a Convention Center

One of the project's most unique elements is its financing. After identifying the need and desire for such a facility, the village's initial plan was to offer incentive agreements to a hotelier or other developer to build it. But along came the tragic events of Sept. 11, 2001, and the hospitality industry turned upside down.

"The village still thought it was a good idea," says Lombard Assistant Village Manager David Hulseberg. "It was the right property and the right location."
Bill Heniff, the village's senior planner, adds: "When you look along the Interstate 88 corridor, there has not been a lot of new hotel development in recent years. There is a niche for a modern, up-to-date facility. One of the things we're hoping to accomplish by creating a conference center is that it will give renewed vitality and interest to the corridor in general and Lombard in particular and serve as a catalyst for other development in the area."

But the challenge was how to financially pull it off, Hulseburg says.

There were some legal hoops to jump through. At that time after Sept. 11, non-home-rule communities could not own facilities such as the one being proposed unless their populations were more than 75,000. Lombard is not a home-rule community, and its population is about 43,000.

Village officials garnered support from receptive state legislators to change the law to include communities of Lombard's size.

The village then created the Lombard Public Facilities Corp. to oversee the development, operation and ownership of the conference center on its behalf.

That entity issued the bonds and planning project financing. Once the bonds are retired, ownership will revert to the village.

"Investors so much liked what we were doing, we had 2.5 times the amount of bond placement than we had bonds available to place," Hulseberg says.

"This is a creative structure that has been popping up in the United States," Mid-America's McGuigan adds. "This is maybe the 20th project financed in this format. The cost of capital is less expensive than what a private developer would have to pay."

Walsh on Parade

Ground was broken in September 2005 with Chicago-based Walsh Construction Co. at the helm as design/build and general contractor. The Walsh construction trailer is easy to spot: On the front porch stands a large fiberglass cow statue with numerous holes bored through its body.

The statue, titled Holy Cow!, one of Caray's famous sayings, was Harry Caray's Restaurant Group's entry in the 1999 Cows on Parade public art exhibition in Chicago.

Also unique to this project is that it is constructed with precast floor planks on load-bearing precast walls, making it one of the tallest precast structures in Midwest, says Michael Marsch, senior project manager for Walsh.

"It's pretty uncommon," he says. "For a building this size, you might have load-bearing masonry walls with precast planks, but you usually don't see precast wall erection. But it turned out that this was the best value for the owner."

About 3,300 sheets of precast are going into the project. They vary in size, depending on their function and where they fit into the overall design, but the largest measure about 28 ft long, 10 ft wide and 1 ft thick.

Manipulating those weighty, bulky panels into position, while keeping everyone out of harm's way, requires extreme caution.

"For safety, when you're erecting precast planks, you have to clear three floors below so that if any of them break, no one gets hurt," Marsch says. "But when the sheer walls and exterior skin in erected, you had to keep that portion down to the basement empty. No one was allowed to work under those areas."

Logistics Get Plans

Tower precast supplier, ATMI Precast in Aurora, designed the logistics and posted color-coded charts as reminders. Red means "stay out," and yellow means "proceed with care."

"We erected walls for two or three days, then erected floor for two or three days and marched up the building that way, with the windows following behind," Marsch says. "Every two or three days, they weren't allowed to work within a certain area. People aren't used to being told where they can and cannot work."

Nor do they have the luxury of space. The crews have more room to maneuver than they do when building a typical city high-rise, but the site, 6.69 acres on the perimeter of Yorktown Center and tucked between Target and the AMC movie theaters, is contained by roads and a detention pond.

The site "requires us to build in a certain sequence," says Marsch. "We basically had to work ourselves out of a hole."

As for where to put those 3,300 sheets of precast?

"They were brought in by truck on a daily basis," says Marsch. "We had no real room to have more than a half a day to a day of precast onsite."

Yet another consideration is to not disrupt the business of the mall, although so much construction has been going on there that a few more trucks and a little more dust are hardly noticeable. The former Montgomery Ward & Co. store was torn down and rebuilt, and numerous restaurants are going up around the ring road.

"We're a little happy that Yorktown is undergoing this transformation because we have a bit of cover," McGuigan says jokingly. The cover is provided by the project's noise and traffic mixing with the large amount of traffic on Butterfield Road.

Click here for next Feature Story >>