A vacant Chicago landmark that began as a sprawling department store in the late 1800s is now being re-envisioned as an urban farming innovation hub that the project’s backers say will be the first of its kind.
Local businessman and real estate investor Marc Calabria is working with vertical farming pioneer Farm Zero to create the facility within the wide, eight-story building at 401 S. State St. in Chicago’s Loop business district. Calabria bought the vacant office building out of financial distress for $4.2 million last year.
Unlike previous Farm Zero spaces only designed for growing produce, the firm and Calabria now want to convert much of the building into vertical farming racks alongside a health research center and incubator for controlled-environment farming startups, a produce market, restaurants and a rooftop garden featuring solar panels, greenhouses and outdoor dining.
“There are lots of different types of food production that we can co-locate in the building and turn it into an important brain trust,” Farm Zero's Russell Steinberg said.
The vision for 401 S. State adds a twist to the nationwide trend in recent years of vacant office spaces being converted to new uses, ranging from residential to data storage.
Calabria said he plans to convert a portion of the approximately 485,000-square-foot building, which runs along elevated train tracks near the Harold Washinton Library, into student or senior housing.
As that project is planned and financed, Calabria said he wants to simultaneously develop the Farm Zero-led facility. The full cost of the redevelopment has yet to be determined, he said.
The plan
Farm Zero in recent years launched a program to grow produce such as leafy greens, microgreens, herbs and flowers within office towers in the Loop amid a historically high level of unused corporate space.
A proof-of-concept space within the 43-story tower at 30 N. LaSalle has produced multiple cycles of produce such as romaine lettuce, arugula, broccoli, basil and red cabbage.
In the spring, Farm Zero is set to move into a larger, longer-term space within the 31-story tower at 125 S. Wacker Drive, where it plans to grow a wider range of crops.
Farm Zero’s longer-range plan is to make the nation’s third-largest city a model for growing fresh food within rows of skyscrapers and distributing the produce locally.
The next step in that evolution is a plan in partnership with Calabria and others to merge vertical farming, public health research and entrepreneurship under one roof where new technologies and startups can emerge.
The goals of the initiative are to turn unwanted real estate into sources of locally grown produce that in some cases can be used to treat and prevent chronic illnesses.
Historic property
Calabria bought the building last year in an auction, paying a tiny fraction of the $68.1 million that it last sold for in 2016. The plunging value and a loan default by the previous owner came in 2020 with the exit of the building’s lone tenant, Robert Morris University, after it merged with Roosevelt University.
The building was designed by architect William Le Baron Jenney and completed in 1891.
Jenney was a key figure in the burst of construction that followed the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, with his designs credited for advancements that were used to create modern skyscrapers.
The property has been a national landmark since 1976 and a Chicago landmark since 1997.
The building at the southern end of the Loop began as a Siegel, Cooper & Co. department store before later becoming a Sears store for decades.
After buying the building, Calabria said he was approached by Lee Golub, an executive at Chicago real estate firm Golub & Co. who also is an investor in Farm Zero.
“I thought it was a great purchase because of the price and location,” Calabria said. “I knew that it’s been overlooked for too long and that we’d find something strong to do with it. Shortly after that, I was introduced to Lee and Russ and the Farm Zero team.”
The team
Steinberg said that others expected to be involved in the 401 S. State project include the Institute for Food Safety and Health, a partnership of the Illinois Institute of Technology and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
Netherlands-based farming expert Peter van Wingerden, founder of Floating Farm — billed as the world’s first floating dairy farm, in Rotterdam — is a Farm Zero investor. Farm Zero also has a cooperating agreement with the Dutch government to help develop new technologies and to grow some products for which the country is known, such as tulips, in the State Street facility, Steinberg said.
The venture said it hopes to bring in health systems, researchers, educators and startups, with plans to seek public funding to create and run the facility.
Consulting giant Deloitte, whose Chicago office neighbors Farm Zero’s upcoming vertical farm on Wacker Drive, provided pro bono analysis to create a financial model that helped Farm Zero with its initial equity fundraising.
“There are pockets of research, pockets of growing, but to holistically create this in a city center has never been done,” said Brian Schaneberg, executive director of the Institute for Food Safety and Health.
Surrounded by Midwest farmland, Chicago may seem like an unlikely home for controlled-environment agriculture.
But project consultant Alan Shannon said just 4% of the food consumed in Illinois is grown in Illinois, with many crops used to feed livestock or to create products such as ethanol. Shannon, the former Midwest public affairs director for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, said most of the nation’s produce comes from faraway places such as Florida, Arizona and California, losing nutrients on the way to consumers.
Climate change, particularly water shortages in states such as Arizona and California, are expected to disrupt the traditional food chain in the years to come, he said.
“The current system of getting our produce from these states is not going to work much longer,” Shannon said. “We’ve got to figure out other solutions.”
The new facility could be tied to applications for the concepts of “food is medicine” for prevention of illness and “food as medicine” with boxes of produce prescribed to treat chronic disease, Schaneberg said.
Creating a huge produce market in the base of the building, as seen in cities such as Milwaukee and Cleveland, could bolster Chicago’s food tourism business, Shannon said.
Adrienne Irmer, associate vice president of external affairs at IIT, said that models created in Chicago could later be replicated in other parts of the country.
“The potential for this space is for the production of food but then the surrounding ecosystem of food research, nutrition research and testing new technologies,” Irmer said. “It’s important to build the kind of alignment that will produce the data and research that needs to come out of this to justify this as a national model.
“This concept is not just a function of novelty. It’s a function of immediacy and urgency to feed people.”