We always kind of admired the old school, slightly fusty respectability of the Tribune Tower back in the days before Pioneer Court next to it had a 26-foot piece of cheesecake in it. On a high traffic, commercial strip, you had… rocks from the Alamo and Angkor Wat, a tiny gift shop for Tribune umbrellas and Dewey Defeats Truman snowglobes, and a WGN Radio studio where you could make faces at Spike O’Dell as he broadcast. (Thankfully, both times we’ve been on WGN Radio, it was in some back studio where no one could see us.) But it was inevitable that a skyscraper owned by a real estate magnate would see that low-key frontage as money not being raked in, and so word comes that a 14,000 square foot, 300-seat restaurant will occupy most of the space (and boot WGN Radio to somewhere new). The restaurant, about which nothing is known yet other than “American contemporary” (which means you can probably guess the menu pretty accurately), will be developed by Bottleneck Management, who have similar spots already such as The Boundary in Wicker Park, South Branch in the South Loop and Sweetwater just on the other side of the river on Michigan Avenue, and probably won’t open for a good year. [Tribune]
