On Tuesday night, about 150 residents and local stakeholders gathered in a Northwestern Memorial Hospital conference room to hear presentations on a pair of high-profile developments on the horizon in the city’s downtown medical district.

The proposals — one for a pair of mixed-used residential apartment towers at 410 E. Grand Ave., and the other for a 354-foot tall outpatient care pavilion planned by Northwestern Memorial Hospital — are both up for zoning changes that need community buy-in to pass.

Designs for the hospital project envision a 622,692 square-foot facility to be built at the northwest corner of Fairbanks between Ontario and Erie streets. The development would include medical offices, 575 parking spaces and 13,700 square feet of retail area.

Rob Christie, vice president of external affairs for Northwestern, framed the pavilion development as a facility that would focus on providing patients with efficient procedures for muscular and skeletal conditions.

“Ten years ago, there were surgeries that required a one- or two-night stay that now can be done in an office in a day,” he said. “That’s what this pavilion is designed to accommodate.”

When the presentation was opened to public comment, residents brought up the usual concerns that come with Loop-area developments: parking and auto congestion, issues of privacy for nearby residential buildings and the downtown-specific matter of “quality-of-light,” or the right to not have one’s home permanently bathed in the shadow of a neighboring skyscraper.

But about five speakers in, Jonathan Fine stepped to the microphone.

Fine, the executive director of Preservation Chicago, a historic architecture advocacy group, was there to address the demolition phase of the project, a matter briefly touched on by Christie.

This process would involve the planned teardown of the parcel’s existing buildings, which include two redbrick structures at 240 E. Ontario and 259 E. Erie.

Fine noted that the latter was a historically significant building.

Known as the Crerar Adams Warehouse building — named after railroad supply manufacturers John Crerar and J. McGregor Adams — the seven-story structure was completed in 1910 by the prominent Jewish-German architect Henry Leopold Ottenheimer.

After the original building was destroyed in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, Ottenheimer, at that point also an employee of famed architects Adler and Sullivan, fashioned the new warehouse with toned down ornamental brickwork in the style of the still-burgeoning Chicago School.

Today, the building houses administrative office space for Northwestern Memorial Hospital.

Given that the structure was one of the few remaining examples of this architectural mode in Streeterville — and in the city, for that matter — Fine called on the hospital to reconsider its plans to demolish the Crerar Adams building and instead work it in to the construction of the pavilion.

“Although it is being presented to us as a done deal, I’m hoping that we’re just looking at schematics,” he said. “If that is the case, then perhaps that can be part of the changes that are made.”

Ald. Brendan Reilly (42nd), who organized the public meeting that evening, quickly called to point that the city’s landmarks commission had already surveyed and rejected the building’s qualifications for preservation.

“Believe me, this was not something glossed over or forgotten,” he said.

Christie added that he had personally looked into saving the building, but ultimately found that the endeavor would be unfeasible.

“I’m the son of a preservationist … I know where you’re coming from,” he told Fine.

Preservation Chicago is used to this kind of refutation. The organization, along with preservation group Landmarks Illinois, is currently locked in a stalemate with Northwestern over the pending demolition of the old Prentice Women’s Hospital, located a few blocks north of the Crerar Adams site at 333 E. Superior.

The university has made public its plans to demolish the structure’s four cantilevered towers, built by Marina City architect Bertrand Goldberg in 1975, to make way for a new research facility.

While the city recently agreed to review the building’s qualifications for a landmark designation after a long stand by preservationists, the groups have had hard luck in drumming up resident support for the preservation of Prentice, as some outside the architectural field find the neo-modern structure to be irrelevant.

A similar fate may be in store for the Crerar Adams building. The structure’s non-decorative nature, though historically germane, could serve as fodder for Northwestern’s argument to raze it.

Ward Miller, president of Preservation, said after the Northwestern meeting that the debate surrounding the preservation of the warehouse was, at its base, an issue of institutional politics.

“I’m sure if this same building were on any other site, and not such a high profile site, then its preservation would be assured,” he said.

But in keeping with the group’s tenet, Miller said that Preservation Chicago would continue to push for the Crerar Adams building’s reprieve.

“I think we’re trying to save the best of the best,” he said.

Christie said that the hospital expected to have the outpatient care pavilion completed by 2014.

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By MWBrown from Rogers Park
Posted: 12/17/2011 8:43 PM

I think its time we revoke these institution's non-profit status. They're development companies plain and simple. The community is losing tens of millions in tax revenue (not to mention good buildings) that is being recouped on the backs of everyone else. We're trading our history so a corporation can make a few more dollars (make no mistake, Northwestern University is a corporation as much as Union Carbide). But I forget....we're America - the almighty dollar rules.

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By Perspective from Near North
Posted: 09/17/2011 2:09 PM

A building built in the 1890s, that barely avoided being demolished in the 1960s is historic today. A building built in the 1960s, demolished in 2012 will only be historic in books.

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By Boyee from Mid-North
Posted: 09/16/2011 9:22 PM

I do not see how a building built in the sixties is historic. Hideous, maybe, but historic, NO.

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By Brendan from Streeterville
Posted: 09/15/2011 11:49 AM

Northwestern Memorial's proposed outpatient pavillion is not a "Loop-area" development. It is in Streeterville, pure and simple. Trying to extend "the Loop" appellation to anything and everything downtown is both ignorant and insulting.