CRAIN'S CHICAGO
April 30,2025
Dennis Rodkin




A prolific Chicago development firm plans townhouses priced at $1.2 million and up at a site on the North Branch of the Chicago River where in the past two decades at least three development ideas have failed to launch.

ZSD posted listings April 28 for four of the units at RiverWard, a development of 35 townhouses planned for a site at 2235 W. Oakdale Ave. that has 300 feet of North Branch frontage, on the north bank.

Prices run from $1.2 million for a four-bedroom, two-office unit on the interior of the parcel to $2 million for a four-bedroom, two-office facing the water and future riverwalk. The developer plans to extend an existing riverwalk that runs half a mile south from the edge of the RiverWard site.

Thirteen of the row homes will face the water, but with the riverwalk as well as rooftop decks and second-story terraces on every unit, all 35 "will be river-conscious," said Cory Robertson, the Jameson Sotheby's International Realty agent whose Corwin Partners Development Strategies is leading sales.

"It's a unique setting between two bends in the river," Robertson said. From one vantage point, Willis Tower, 4 miles away, appears to stand in the middle of the river.

Robertson said four RiverWard units were under contract to buyers before the listings went up this week. ZSD's principal, Zev Salomon, was traveling and not available for comment. The units should be price-competitive with rehabbed single-family homes in the hot Roscoe Village neighborhood, Robertson said. They'll have the added appeal, he said, of being wider than existing homes — the higher-priced units are 24 feet wide — and with not only four bedrooms but two offices and a family room.

A newly built six-bedroom house across Oakdale from the site is for sale at $1.85 million, and another new home, a four-bedroom on Wolfram Street on the south bank of the North Branch almost directly across from the RiverWard site, sold in December for $1.48 million.

Salomon and ZSD last week rolled out plans for a 149-unit apartment building on what's now a surface parking lot in River North. Among other recent projects are redevelopment of the long-vacant St. Boniface Church into condos, a pair of projects — 10 condos and 7 row houses — in Hyde Park, and a high-end condo project in the West Loop.

Designed by architecture firm Sullivan Goulette & Wilson, aka SGW architects, each of the four-story row houses will have a big contemporary-style kitchen, a two-car garage and a rooftop deck, according to the listings.

Pending approvals by Ald. Scott Waugespack, 32nd, the Zoning Board of Appeals and the full City Council, groundbreaking should happen in July, Robertson said, with deliveries of the first units 13 months later.

If that happens, the first buyers will move in 22 years after Robertson first did a market analysis of the site, an L-shaped 1.8 acres, for development firm Belgravia.

Belgravia took two runs at the site, in 2004 and 2008, Robertson said. In 2008, Belgravia announced plans to build 82 units, a mix of single-family homes and townhouses, on a 2.3-acre site that included this property and a parcel to the west, but those plans ultimately did not go through. In 2015, CA Development proposed 18 single-family homes on the RiverWard site and got the necessary rezoning, but it didn't pursue the project.

One obstacle to development in past years, Robertson said, was the shabby condition of Lathrop Homes, a 1930s Chicago Housing Authority development immediately southeast of the site. Long disinvested, "it looked terrible, almost completely vacant and boarded-up" in 2007, Robertson said. With that as a neighbor, "you couldn't get the kind of prices you needed to make (the RiverWard parcel) work."

The 35-acre Lathrop Homes closed in 2011 to undergo redevelopment as mixed-income housing. The north portion, adjacent to the RiverWard site, was completed in phases, in 2019 and 2023, but the portion south of Diversey Parkway was stalled for years until the city in January approved $60 million in tax-increment financing funds, aiming to finally get it done.

The proposed site of RiverWard has been vacant since at least 2007, layers of Google Maps images show. It's not clear when a building might have last stood on the site. Chicago Tribune ads from 1939 through 1949 identify it as Leander's Boat Yard, and from 1959 until 2017, it was owned by American Linen Supply (later Alsco), according to the Cook County Clerk. There may have been a building on the property in those years, but Crain's could not find a record of demolition, if there was one.

In 2017, Alsco sold the site to the present owner, a legal entity headed by investor Eugenio De Aguero, for $4.75 million, according to the Cook County Clerk. The property was for sale at $6.5 million when the listing was marked contingent in early December. ZSD has not yet closed the purchase of the property. It's typical for these deals to close only after all the municipal approvals are secured.