The only part of the Chicago Spire ever built now holds up its successor

The usual telling — the reel’s included — is a redemption story about engineering: a cursed hole, a clever developer, a discount. The engineering half survives contact with the record almost untouched, which is rare. The finance half is better than the telling. Related Midwest never bought the cursed dirt at a discount, because it never bought the dirt at all. It bought the dirt’s dead loan from the Irish state, at a price redacted from the court file, and let the loan do the rest.

And the site’s two eras rhyme more precisely than anyone retells. The Spire also promised to build DuSable Park. The Spire also pledged money to it, in its developer’s own cheerful words. The difference between a promise that sat fenced for another seventeen years and one with a park under construction is not sincerity — it is that the second promise was wired to the certificate of occupancy.

A needle, bought overnight

The Spire began as someone else’s idea. In July 2005 Chicago developer Christopher Carley announced the Fordham Spire — 115 stories, $500 million, a Calatrava design whose mast would touch 2,000 feet.² Carley could not close on the land. Garrett Kelleher — a Dubliner who had cut his teeth on Chicago buildings in the 1980s before building Shelbourne Development back home — could, and did, on 20 July 2006: $64 million for the 2.2 acres where the Chicago River meets the lake, financed with a $54.5 million loan from Anglo Irish Bank.¹ His own description of the underwriting, delivered to a community meeting six months later, deserves quoting in full: “I looked at it on a Wednesday, and we closed it the following Thursday. Did no due diligence on the site whatsoever. I decided the site spoke for itself.”³

Under Kelleher the design grew to its final form — 150 storeys, 2,000 feet, 1,194 residences, each floor rotated 2.4 degrees so the tower twisted a full turn on its way up.^1,4 Sales launched in January 2008 with a tour of Beijing, Singapore, Hong Kong, Dubai and London, Liam Neeson narrating the campaign, and a projected sellout of $3.4 billion against $2.3 billion of cost.^6,16 For a while it worked: by mid-2009 the books showed 309 closed unit sales totalling $496 million, and two weeks after Lehman Brothers failed, Ty Warner — the Beanie Babies billionaire — signed a contract for the $40 million penthouse on floors 141 and 142.^1,5 Floors, it is worth noting, that did not exist, above a foundation that barely did.

Four days before Lehman, the loan got bigger

The record dates the Spire’s real turning point with uncomfortable precision. On 11 September 2008, Shelbourne and Anglo Irish Bank formally amended the loan upward, from $54.5 million to $69.5 million.¹ Lehman failed on the 15th. By the end of September Shelbourne was conceding that underground work would slow “due to the roiled financial markets”; in October it shut the project down entirely as Anglo — soon to be nationalized — stopped being a bank in any useful sense.^5,9 The foundation was complete: 34 caissons to bedrock, a cofferdam roughly 110 feet across, an excavation 76 feet deep. The superstructure never began.^1,6,14

What followed was the slow-motion part. Contractors filed liens — Calatrava’s own, for $11.34 million of unpaid fees, among $18.4 million of them.^1,8 Kelleher, who had put in about $250 million by his own account — $180 million of it his personal cash — hunted refinancing through 2009 and found none.⁶ Anglo filed its $77 million foreclosure suit in October 2010; a receiver took the site in December; and — a detail the cursed-hole retellings never carry — Chicago Spire LLC then returned every dollar of its buyers’ deposits, about $17 million, per its own statement in the bankruptcy record.^1,7 The people who had bought apartments in a drawing got their money back. Nearly everyone else in the story did not.

400 North Lake Shore Drive, January 2008

The foundation was finished. Nothing ever stood on it but the debt.

The excavation in January 2008, its last active winter, photographed from Lake Point Tower. Work slowed that autumn and never resumed; the circle in the ground spent fifteen years as Chicago's most famous failure before its successor stood on it.Photo: Hillndale57, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Fifteen years of a circle in the ground

Between the handover and the groundbreaking sit ten more years, and they were not idle ones so much as expensive ones to be idle through. Chicago magazine’s 2015 retrospective fixed the image — a 2,000-foot corkscrew that “never materialized beyond a circular foundation sunk 76 feet” into the land between Lake Shore Drive and the river.¹⁴ Related’s first plan for the site — 1,100 feet, 300 condos, a hotel — was rejected by Alderman Brendan Reilly in October 2018 over scale and traffic.¹⁹ The revision of March 2020 cut the heights to 875 and 765 feet, dropped the hotel and the condos, and went through the Plan Commission and City Council that June as an amendment to the site’s Planned Development 368.^20,21,22,23

Two commitments rode the approval, and they are the study’s second finding, because the record prices both. The affordable one first: the site’s 2007-era entitlement predates Chicago’s on-site affordability rules, so the zoning required no affordable units at all — Related paid $3.6 million in lieu.²² The 127 affordable apartments the tower actually contains — a fifth of it, at 30 to 50 per cent of area median income — arrived three years later through the financing: they are what qualified roughly half a billion dollars of tax-exempt Illinois Housing Development Authority bonds, sold to Wells Fargo, the cheapest construction money available in 2023.^24,25,26,27 The reel says the developer promised a park to get permits. The record adds: it promised affordability to get the loan.

The same park, promised twice

DuSable Park is older than either tower. Harold Washington named the peninsula at the river’s mouth for Jean Baptiste Point DuSable in 1987 — Dr. Peggy Montes, whom he tasked with finding the site, was still writing to the Plan Commission on its behalf at 89, in 2025.^34,39 What kept it fenced for decades was not only neglect: the ground held radioactive thorium from the Lindsay Light gas-mantle works, and the cleanup — an EPA cooperative agreement worth $6.8 million, plus money from the Kerr-McGee settlement that removed nearly a thousand additional cubic yards — was not done until 2020.^34,35,36 The Spire era added its own promise: in 2007 Shelbourne agreed to build the park in exchange for using it as a staging area, and Kelleher told a public meeting he would be “quite happy” to fund his contribution.^3,34 Then the Spire died, and the park’s advocates drew the lesson out loud: “It was tied to the Spire and the Spire didn’t go forward.”³⁷

Related’s version of the promise — $10 million, committed at the May 2020 Plan Commission hearing, with the city matching $5 million — differs from the Spire’s in exactly one structural respect: the city wired it to the tower’s certificate of occupancy. DuSable Park must be finished before 400 Lake Shore can legally fill.^21,28 The park cleared the Plan Commission in October 2025 at a $13 million estimate, with construction from spring 2026 and an opening targeted by mid-2027 — forty years after it was named.³⁸ A developer’s promise is a term only when breach costs something. The 2007 promise cost nothing to break. The 2020 one would cost a tower full of empty apartments.

Built on the failure’s bones

The reel’s engineering claims check out almost line by line, which deserves saying because it is rare. The new tower’s core sits on twenty of the Spire’s 10-foot-diameter rock caissons — “We positioned the building’s core directly over them to take advantage of what was there,” SOM’s project engineer Brad Young told Engineering News-Record — with more of the 34 originals worked into the design, and at the June 2024 groundbreaking guests signed a link beam that was lowered into the old cofferdam to become part of the new structure.^24,28,31 The belt wall is real and is the builders’ own term: a continuous belt-and-outrigger system with outriggers on every floor to Level 44, where the primary belt wall — 400 cubic yards of concrete, 150,000 pounds of rebar — ties the core to the perimeter columns, a design chosen specifically so the tower needs no tuned mass damper.^29,31 The names the reel garbles are LR Contracting — Related’s in-house arm — and BOWA Construction, the first Black-owned general contractor to co-build a Chicago high-rise, with Goebel Forming on the wall itself.^24,30,31

Two of its claims do not survive. The “90 mile per hour winds” figure appears in no engineering source — what the record describes is wind-tunnel-shaped massing, tested in SOM’s own tunnel and by the consultants RWDI, doing the work a number would oversimplify.^31,32 And the tower the reel calls condos is 635 rental apartments — the condos died with the 2018 plan.^19,24,40 It topped out at 857 feet on 23 July 2026 — eighteen feet short of its approved height, a change no source explains — with first residents due in spring 2027, and the 765-foot south tower waiting on the market.^32,33,40

What transfers

The first lesson is where discounts actually live. The reel says Related “saw a discount” in cursed dirt, and the record sharpens it: the discount was in the paper, not the parcel. The land’s price never publicly fell — it simply stopped trading. What fell was its loan, from a $96.5 million claim to a reported $35 million purchase price, and buying that fall bought control of everything under it. This is the third study in this room — after the Macklowe towers and Century Plaza — where the road to owning a landmark ran through buying its debt, and in all three the person who took that road paid less than any bidder ever would have.

The second is about what “complexity is a moat” actually requires. The Spire was the most complex thing anyone proposed on that lakefront and the complexity consumed it — first-of-kind height, one-lender financing, a sales program that needed $3.4 billion of strangers’ money to close. 400 Lake Shore’s complexity is bounded and priced: reuse engineering with the caissons already load-tested by time, a belt wall in place of a damper, bond financing whose price was known the day the affordability percentage was fixed. Complexity is a moat when you are on the right side of it — when it is a cost you have already paid and your competitor has not. The Spire paid the cost and never got the moat. Its successor inherited the moat for about $35 million.

The third is the park. The same public promise was made twice on the same three acres, by two developers, thirteen years apart. The first was sincere and free to break, and it broke. The second was wired to the certificate of occupancy, and there are excavators on the peninsula. When a community trades approval for a public benefit, the whole trade is in the enforcement clause — everything else is a press release.

And one human line survives everything: the buyers got their deposits back. The developer lost nine figures of his own cash, the architect went unpaid into the lien queue, an Irish bank died holding the paper, and the people who bought apartments on the 141st floor of a drawing were made whole in December 2010.¹ Fifteen years of failure, and the retail money walked away clean — which is not how these stories usually end, and is worth remembering when one of them is retold as a curse.