Whole Foods, good views

When Washington National Insurance vacated its home office in downtown Evanston in 1992, the city responded by establishing a tax-increment-finance (TIF) district to demolish its seven-story building and build the infrastructure for a new use. The chief new uses turned out to be a one-story supermarket (with parking on its roof) and an adjoining 24-story tower containing 283 higher-end rental apartments, along with a parking garage for the tenants. The developer, the Chicago-based John Buck Company, “was sensitive to what we were doing with our downtown,” says assistant city manager Judith Aiello. Buck and the Whole Foods chain agreed to build the supermarket flush with the sidewalk and to place a self-service café next to large windows, a big improvement over typical grocery store design. Harry Weese & Associates designed the supermarket with a parapet high enough so that the cars and their headlights on the roof wouldn’t be seen by people at ground level. “Some landscaping was also installed on the roof,” Aiello says, to make the views more attractive to the apartment residents and others. Nearly everyone downtown seems pleased with the development, which has operated for six years. “The TIF is doing extremely well,” says Terrence Jenkins, former head of EVMark, Evanston’s downtown development organization. “Whole Foods is doing very well, as is the other retail. The traffic issues are not significant and are manageable. The rentals are consistently over 96 to 97 percent occupancy.” And pedestrians enjoy walking past — or to — Whole Foods much more than they’d like dealing with a supermarket in a parking lot.