Defender: Chatham welcomes green office building

This article is about the Chatham Executive Building that we have blogger about a lot here in the past. This is the very first post about this building.

Here is more from the Chicago Defender:

As you ride along 79th Street between King Drive and Cottage Grove Avenue you'll notice a few new fast food joints, several hair and nail salons and two dollar stores. You may also a notice a new “green” retail and office building on the northeast corner of Champlain Avenue, aiming to spur a re-birth of “value added” businesses to the community once completed, said the building's owners.

Clarence and Lisa Hall, proprietors of CHL Properties LLC, own a few mixed-use buildings in the area, including a barber college a few blocks away, and decided to go strictly commercial for their next investment.

“When we look for property to buy, we look for eyesores in the community. We came across the city-owned building in 2006 and began the process of trying to acquire it,” Lisa Hall told the Defender.

Since the building was owned by the City of Chicago, the Halls had to get support from Ald. Freddrenna Lyle (6th) and the Chatham/Avalon Park Community Council before snagging the final approval from the city.

As preliminary designs for the 12,000-square-foot two-level building were presented, the couple realized they were a few steps away from a Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design Green Building Rating System.

Construction on the “Chatham Executive Building” began in 2008 and it's currently 90 percent complete.

Read the whole article! It shows the journey of this building as the Halls got their building recognized as a green building. They started on this building (formerly owned by the Nation of Islam) before the "green revolution started".

Since lately we've posted blogs about possible ideas to revitalize 79th Street, this really out to be one place to start. I hope we'll find out who might rent space there in the near future.