The Chase Building at Orrington Avenue and Davis Street in downtown Evanston. Photo: SecretName101 / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0
Most people who walk through downtown Evanston know the tower at Orrington Avenue and Davis Street as the Chase bank building. Above the branch, though, is an office building with nearly fifty tenant listings across twenty floors: doctors, lawyers, investment and marketing firms, research companies and a few businesses known well beyond Evanston.
The building, 1603 Orrington Ave., also goes by Orrington Plaza. It changed hands in late 2013, when a partnership of Golub & Company, a Chicago firm, and Investcorp bought the roughly 339,000-square-foot tower for about $61.5 million, according to The Real Deal, citing Crain’s. A Golub-controlled venture had bought it before, in 2006, for $54.5 million.
A sales force for hire
Acquirent, on the fifth floor, started in 2004 with three people. By 2014 it employed more than 100 and had appeared on the Inc. 5000 list of fast-growing private companies. It recruits, trains and manages sales teams for clients, from start-ups to Fortune 500 companies, and had recently added direct-placement recruiting. Chairman and CEO Joseph Flanagan lives in Evanston.
Older adults and minor-league baseball
Mather LifeWays occupies the 18th floor. The nonprofit was founded in 1941 to help older adults age well and runs senior living communities including The Mather in Evanston, Mather Pavilion on Foster Street, The Mather Place of Wilmette and Splendido in Tucson, Ariz. It also operates neighborhood cafes and the Mather LifeWays Institute on Aging, a research and education arm. Mary Leary was president and CEO.
On the 16th floor, Tom Dickson and Sherrie Myers run Professional Sports Marketing. They left careers in advertising and publishing in the mid-1990s to enter baseball, and now own two minor-league teams, the Lansing Lugnuts in Michigan and the Montgomery Biscuits in Alabama. The firm also consults for other clubs, and its sister business, Professional Sports Catering, supplies food service to minor-league ballparks.
Flexible office space
Regus, a newer arrival on the sixth floor, rents furnished offices and meeting rooms. Manager Keith Chaney said it serves small business owners who need a professional address, and larger companies testing a market without a big upfront commitment. The company had fourteen Chicago and twenty-four suburban locations then.
The tenant mix shows that downtown Evanston’s office market is more than a back-office annex of Chicago. The building changed hands again later, with 2018 reports putting a sale of a majority stake at about $91 million.
Thomas Brennan covers property taxes, real estate, transit and the local economy for The Evanston Edge.
