Latest news with #RenaissanceRevival-style
Yahoo
03-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Afternoon Briefing: State lawmakers move to delay ban on certain credit card fees
Good afternoon, Chicago. Illinois legislators voted to delay for one year a ban on certain credit card fees that was set to take effect July 1 amid a legal challenge by banks. A measure passed by legislators and signed into law by Gov. JB Pritzker last year would prevent banks and credit card companies from charging retailers a small fee on sales taxes and tips. Pritzker still has to sign off on the legislature's move to extend the deadline to July 1, 2026. Here's what else is happening today. And remember, for the latest breaking news in Chicago, visit and sign up to get our alerts on all your devices. Subscribe to more newsletters | Asking Eric | Horoscopes | Puzzles & Games | Today in History The mayor in his weekly City Hall news conference today reacted to the local alarm over the Illinois General Assembly adjourning this weekend without a solution to the estimated $771 million budget gap for Chicago-area transit agencies with a measured, though at times defensive, tone. Read more here. More top news stories: Mayor Brandon Johnson's photographer fired after allegedly bringing gun on city property Man in critical condition after stabbing in Streeterville A nine-bedroom vintage Renaissance Revival-style mansion in the South Side Kenwood neighborhood was sold in late March for $1.15 million by the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Chicago to a University of Chicago surgeon. Read more here. More top business stories: Meta becomes the latest big tech company turning to nuclear power for AI needs Wall Street futures edge lower in light trading Outmuscled and outhustled, the Sox looked like they didn't belong on the same field as the first-place Tigers, the best team in the majors at 40-21. With an 18-42 record, the new Sox slogan for 2025 might as well be 'At Least We're Not the Rockies.' Read more here. More top sports stories: At age 36, Kaneland alum Casey Crosby makes pitching comeback for Kane County Cougars Wake Forest baseball coach apologizes for apparent homophobic slur during NCAA regional Will Nicole Scherzinger, sizzling in 'Sunset Blvd.,' beat out Audra McDonald, who made Rose a metaphor for the tragic human condition? Could Jonathan Groff, a knockout Bobby Darin, win back-to-back kudos? Read more here. More top Eat. Watch. Do. stories: Review: 'Diana' at Theo Theatre was no ordinary opening night Caamp frontman Taylor Meier says he's 'C-list folk singer famous,' but he sold out the Salt Shed President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans have made it a priority this year to require people to prove citizenship before they can register to vote. Turning that aspiration into reality has proved difficult. Read more here. More top stories from around the world: President Donald Trump pushes a July Fourth deadline for big tax bill as senators dig in Boulder suspect backed off his initial plan to kill all in a group he called 'Zionist,' police say
Chicago Tribune
03-06-2025
- Business
- Chicago Tribune
Afternoon Briefing: State lawmakers move to delay ban on certain credit card fees
Good afternoon, Chicago. Illinois legislators voted to delay for one year a ban on certain credit card fees that was set to take effect July 1 amid a legal challenge by banks. A measure passed by legislators and signed into law by Gov. JB Pritzker last year would prevent banks and credit card companies from charging retailers a small fee on sales taxes and tips. Pritzker still has to sign off on the legislature's move to extend the deadline to July 1, 2026. Here's what else is happening today. And remember, for the latest breaking news in Chicago, visit and sign up to get our alerts on all your devices. Subscribe to more newsletters | Asking Eric | Horoscopes | Puzzles & Games | Today in History The mayor in his weekly City Hall news conference today reacted to the local alarm over the Illinois General Assembly adjourning this weekend without a solution to the estimated $771 million budget gap for Chicago-area transit agencies with a measured, though at times defensive, tone. Read more here. More top news stories: A nine-bedroom vintage Renaissance Revival-style mansion in the South Side Kenwood neighborhood was sold in late March for $1.15 million by the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Chicago to a University of Chicago surgeon. Read more here. More top business stories: Outmuscled and outhustled, the Sox looked like they didn't belong on the same field as the first-place Tigers, the best team in the majors at 40-21. With an 18-42 record, the new Sox slogan for 2025 might as well be 'At Least We're Not the Rockies.' Read more here. More top sports stories: Will Nicole Scherzinger, sizzling in 'Sunset Blvd.,' beat out Audra McDonald, who made Rose a metaphor for the tragic human condition? Could Jonathan Groff, a knockout Bobby Darin, win back-to-back kudos? Read more here. More top Eat. Watch. Do. stories: President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans have made it a priority this year to require people to prove citizenship before they can register to vote. Turning that aspiration into reality has proved difficult. Read more here. More top stories from around the world:
Chicago Tribune
02-06-2025
- Business
- Chicago Tribune
Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Chicago sells Kenwood mansion to University of Chicago surgeon for $1.1M
A nine-bedroom vintage Renaissance Revival-style mansion in the South Side Kenwood neighborhood was sold in late March for $1.15 million by the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Chicago to a University of Chicago surgeon. Built in 1905 and designed by noted Chicago architect Jarvis Hunt, the mansion was built for Homer A. Stillwell, the general manager of the Butler Bros. catalog firm, at a cost of $35,000, according to a Tribune article from Feb. 26, 1905. The house broadly would be characterized as Renaissance Revival-style, but it employs a variety of other architectural styles, including a Colonial Revival-style front door, Italianate-style quoins, and even a Gothic Revival-style oriel window. Stillwell sold the mansion in 1914, and for close to 60 years, from 1966 until 2025, the home was owned by the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Chicago, which used it as a residence for members of its Focolare movement. It's located across the street from former President Barack Obama's longtime home. The 12-room mansion largely has its original layout, along with 3-1/2 bathrooms, a primary bedroom suite with a library, original plaster, original millwork, original doors and a porte-cochere. The home sits on a 0.73-acre lot. The archdiocese first listed the mansion in October for $1.4 million and never budged on its asking price. It struck a deal with the buyer in February. Catherine Rosenberg of Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices represented the buyer. She declined to comment on the transaction. Listing agent Pasquale Recchia also declined to comment, referring queries to the archdiocese.
Yahoo
30-01-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
A world away from the Palisades and Altadena, apartment landlords try to sell fire victims on living downtown
With thousands of houses and apartments lost to wildfires in an already tight housing market, landlords in downtown Los Angeles are trying to woo displaced fire victims to a more urban setting far from the burn zones. A social media campaign has been launched by members of the Historic Core Business Improvement District to get people searching for housing to consider moving into one of L.A.'s oldest neighborhoods, where century-old office and retail buildings on blocks south of City Hall have been converted to apartments. Downtown is outside the familiar haunts of most displaced people, district Executive Director Blair Besten acknowledged, but she said she hopes the availability and price of apartments there might tempt them to consider it. "The Westside and the Pasadena area might be saturated with people wanting to move in proximity to where they lived before," Besten said. "That might not be possible." Quite a few displaced people were already apartment renters. Real estate data provider CoStar said 480 multifamily buildings with 9,500 rental units were potentially damaged or destroyed within the fire zones. The affected properties are overwhelmingly older, small-scale apartment buildings owned by mom-and-pop landlords. Nearly 75% of the buildings contain fewer than 15 units, CoStar said, and have an average age of 71 years. Many of them lack common modern amenities such as central air conditioning, fitness centers or pools. The cost to rebuild such modest housing "poses a nearly insurmountable challenge," CoStar said. "New apartment construction in Los Angeles has skewed toward luxury, with units completed last year averaging $3,300 in rent, a stark contrast to the rates associated with the rental properties in the fire zones" where the average asking rate was $2,640 per month. Modern seismic building codes and inflation-driven construction costs further compound the difficulty of redevelopment, making it financially prohibitive for many property owners, CoStar said. The Historic Core program has about 500 units available at an average of $2,046 per month, Besten said. To increase the appeal to fire refugees, landlords are offering leases as short as three months and will arrange with furniture rental businesses to furnish units for new tenants. "We've tried to very quickly furnish some homes, including kitchen essentials and bath essentials," said Laurie Miskuski of landlord ICO Group. "There are many people who have lost everything, and the last thing they need to be worrying about is a toaster or a coffee maker." Among ICO Group's properties is the Mercantile Lofts, which opened as a department store in 1907 and was turned into housing more than a decade ago. ICO also owns the Broadway Lofts, a 1907 Renaissance Revival-style building also dating to 1907. The fires that turned people out of their homes have been "an incredibly traumatic event," Miskuski said. "We're trying to extend a hand and say, 'Hey, we may not be the neighborhood you're used to, but we are a vibrant neighborhood with many things to offer where more people are welcome.'" The bulk of the units included in the business improvement district's outreach program so far are in five historic buildings that have had problems of their own as a new owner took on deferred maintenance and ejected tenants who weren't paying rent. "COVID did a lot of damage to downtown in a lot of ways," said Mark Sanders, co-founder of landlord Fifteen Group. "Habitually, people were not paying rent, and the eviction moratorium didn't help. "It's taken us a long time to cycle through a lot of those units, which is why we have this vacancy" well above market standards, Sanders said. He hopes that the ample vacancy in his buildings that include the Marley Lofts and the Thurman Lofts might even be a selling point to people displaced by the fire who might want to live close to family members, friends or members of their church or synagogue. "Now they have a chance to kind of stay together by renting in the same building," he said. The business improvement district is looking to add other landlords to the appeal program, which Besten hopes will also improve the public image of the Historic Core. The district's advertising campaign on Instagram focuses on the availability of short-term leases and the chance to live in architecturally historic buildings in a neighborhood that has shops, restaurants, offices and entertainment in walking distance. Once the commercial heart of the city for business, shopping and entertainment, the district fell on hard times in the late 20th century as businesses moved a few blocks west and department stores followed their customers to the suburbs. It revived after 2000 with the arrival of apartments, trendy stores, bars and upscale restaurants, but the tenor of some streets changed again during the pandemic as homelessness became more prevalent. Reaching out to people displaced by fire offers district stakeholders an opportunity to reach out to "people who have been curious about what it's like to live somewhere and not have to get in their car for an entire weekend" she said. They may ask, "what does that look like and would I be willing to give it a shot?" Sign up for our Wide Shot newsletter to get the latest entertainment business news, analysis and insights. This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
Los Angeles Times
30-01-2025
- Business
- Los Angeles Times
A world away from the Palisades and Altadena, apartment landlords try to sell fire victims on living downtown
With thousands of houses and apartments lost to wildfires in an already tight housing market, landlords in downtown Los Angeles are trying to woo displaced fire victims to a more urban setting far from the burn zones. A social media campaign has been launched by members of the Historic Core Business Improvement District to get people searching for housing to consider moving into one of L.A.'s oldest neighborhoods, where century-old office and retail buildings on blocks south of City Hall have been converted to apartments. Downtown is outside the familiar haunts of most displaced people, district Executive Director Blair Besten acknowledged, but she said she hopes the availability and price of apartments there might tempt them to consider it. 'The Westside and the Pasadena area might be saturated with people wanting to move in proximity to where they lived before,' Besten said. 'That might not be possible.' Quite a few displaced people were already apartment renters. Real estate data provider CoStar said 480 multifamily buildings with 9,500 rental units were potentially damaged or destroyed within the fire zones. The affected properties are overwhelmingly older, small-scale apartment buildings owned by mom-and-pop landlords. Nearly 75% of the buildings contain fewer than 15 units, CoStar said, and have an average age of 71 years. Many of them lack common modern amenities such as central air conditioning, fitness centers or pools. The cost to rebuild such modest housing 'poses a nearly insurmountable challenge,' CoStar said. 'New apartment construction in Los Angeles has skewed toward luxury, with units completed last year averaging $3,300 in rent, a stark contrast to the rates associated with the rental properties in the fire zones' where the average asking rate was $2,640 per month. Modern seismic building codes and inflation-driven construction costs further compound the difficulty of redevelopment, making it financially prohibitive for many property owners, CoStar said. The Historic Core program has about 500 units available at an average of $2,046 per month, Besten said. To increase the appeal to fire refugees, landlords are offering leases as short as three months and will arrange with furniture rental businesses to furnish units for new tenants. 'We've tried to very quickly furnish some homes, including kitchen essentials and bath essentials,' said Laurie Miskuski of landlord ICO Group. 'There are many people who have lost everything, and the last thing they need to be worrying about is a toaster or a coffee maker.' Among ICO Group's properties is the Mercantile Lofts, which opened as a department store in 1907 and was turned into housing more than a decade ago. ICO also owns the Broadway Lofts, a 1907 Renaissance Revival-style building also dating to 1907. The fires that turned people out of their homes have been 'an incredibly traumatic event,' Miskuski said. 'We're trying to extend a hand and say, 'Hey, we may not be the neighborhood you're used to, but we are a vibrant neighborhood with many things to offer where more people are welcome.'' The bulk of the units included in the business improvement district's outreach program so far are in five historic buildings that have had problems of their own as a new owner took on deferred maintenance and ejected tenants who weren't paying rent. 'COVID did a lot of damage to downtown in a lot of ways,' said Mark Sanders, co-founder of landlord Fifteen Group. 'Habitually, people were not paying rent, and the eviction moratorium didn't help. 'It's taken us a long time to cycle through a lot of those units, which is why we have this vacancy' well above market standards, Sanders said. He hopes that the ample vacancy in his buildings that include the Marley Lofts and the Thurman Lofts might even be a selling point to people displaced by the fire who might want to live close to family members, friends or members of their church or synagogue. 'Now they have a chance to kind of stay together by renting in the same building,' he said. The business improvement district is looking to add other landlords to the appeal program, which Besten hopes will also improve the public image of the Historic Core. The district's advertising campaign on Instagram focuses on the availability of short-term leases and the chance to live in architecturally historic buildings in a neighborhood that has shops, restaurants, offices and entertainment in walking distance. Once the commercial heart of the city for business, shopping and entertainment, the district fell on hard times in the late 20th century as businesses moved a few blocks west and department stores followed their customers to the suburbs. It revived after 2000 with the arrival of apartments, trendy stores, bars and upscale restaurants, but the tenor of some streets changed again during the pandemic as homelessness became more prevalent. Reaching out to people displaced by fire offers district stakeholders an opportunity to reach out to 'people who have been curious about what it's like to live somewhere and not have to get in their car for an entire weekend' she said. They may ask, 'what does that look like and would I be willing to give it a shot?'
