Buzzword
For the last couple of years, the old Cook Bros. warehouse building at 240 N. Ashland Ave. has stood vacant, ever since Cook Bros. moved west to 1740 N. Kostner. With its iconic clock tower and vintage red-brick facade, the 77-year-old edifice is fairly reflective of its surrounding neighborhood, in terms of both its future potential and current decrepitude.

On the one hand, the building has plenty of things going for it: It’s a beautiful old building with more than 88,000 square feet of space, and it’s close to the Ashland Green Line stop. In other words, it isn’t that much different from the scores of warehouse buildings farther east in the West Loop that have been nicely rehabbed in recent years.

On the other hand, the building is vacant, and it’s hard to believe that much money has been put into it in the last few decades. The windows are covered up with advertisements for JVC, Sony, and other electronics retailers that Cook Bros. used to sell there and the clock tower is crumbling.

But a change for the better may be on the way.

First Vice President Mitch Adams of CB Richard Ellis, which has been leasing the building for the current owners, Walnut Street Properties, said this week that the company has found a buyer for the entire building, who will then lease it to a single user.

Right now, the CB Richard Ellis Web site advertises the possibility of several "office condos" in the building, but Adams said that a single user makes more sense financially.

Adams declined to divulge the name of the new buyer or the planned tenant—the deal is currently under contract—but said the new user would use the space for a mix of office and warehouse space. Adams added that a major renovation of the building—with new windows replacing all those electronics advertisements—is on the way.

All around, it’s encouraging that someone is planning to invest money in the building. Hopefully, it will spur some private and public investment in the stretch of Ashland between Lake and Grand. While the Damen Avenue piece of the Kinzie Industrial Corridor is well lit, regularly landscaped, and replete with signage, Ashland Avenue is a mess. It is uninviting to pedestrians and drivers alike, with cracked sidewalks and potholes dominating the landscape.

It’s sad, because the Ashland Avenue Corridor connects the booming neighborhoods just north and south of the Kinzie Corridor, and the Victorian-era Green Line station was beautifully rehabilitated when the Green Line was rebuilt 10 years ago. In other words, a little refurbishing would go a long way.

In addition, thousands of music fans are expected to converge on nearby Union Park this summer for the second Intonation Music Festival, and an Ashland Avenue makeover would bode well for the neighborhood’s image. The city used the same logic when it rebuilt the similarly shoddy stretch of West Madison Street 10 years ago before the 1996 Democratic Convention, so why not do it again?

Private investment is a start, but the city needs to step up and make Ashland Avenue a priority. If Cook Bros. can be transformed from an eyesore to a piece of hot property, why not Ashland Avenue?