LaSalle Street Reinvention Gains Steam As Field Building Heads For Conversion
135 South LaSalle - Rendering
By Ryan Wangman, Chicago | October 19, 2025
One of Chicago’s historic buildings is primed to join the growing ranks of aging office stock to be converted into modern residential units.
Riverside Investment & Development, AmTrust Realty Corp. and DL3 Realty have secured public funding to convert the Field Building at 135 S. LaSalle St., an art deco building constructed during the Great Depression, into 386 residential units and 92K SF of commercial space.
The joint venture secured City Council tax increment financing approval late last month for the conversion of 624K SF of vacant office space.
The redevelopment is the largest adaptive reuse project by square footage in the city’s LaSalle Street Corridor initiative and carries the largest total project cost at $241.5M.
The project is supported by $98M in city subsidies and historic tax credits and is seen as key to reinvigorating The Loop.
“I'm excited, not only as a developer, but as a Chicagoan to see this important part of the city re-create itself, and we plan on being a big part of that,” said Patrick Kearney, managing director at AmTrustRE, which has owned the building for more than a decade.
The first phase of the redevelopment will feature 386 luxury residential units, with 270 free-market and 116 affordable units rented at 60% of the area median income, according to city documents. The building will have 228 studio apartments, 106 one-bedroom units and 52 two-bedroom units.
The venture will convert floors five through 14 — which are fully vacant — to residential units. Three lower levels will be retail and event space and two other levels will be parking. Kearney expects construction to begin on the conversion in the first quarter of 2026 with the first units to deliver in the second or third quarter of 2027.
The Field Building was planned during the Roaring ‘20s and opened in 1934 as the fourth-largest office tower in the U.S. Graham, Anderson, Probst & White designed the building and the city designated it as a landmark in 1994.
“It's this art deco masterpiece,” Potter said. “This is a really authentic Chicago property, which we know helps stand out in the leasing world for a lot of the folks that could move into this building.”
The building’s “H”-shaped floor plan makes it hard to attract large office tenants as the layout limits sight lines and doesn’t suit open-office concepts, Kearney said. Smaller tenants could fill the space, but doing so would take years of re-leasing effort, free rent periods and carrying costs in a LaSalle Street submarket that has struggled to retain office users.
But the layout allows natural light and unit depth that aligns well with apartment design, said Mike Potter, executive vice president at Riverside.
“The main principle for the floor plate was that every office occupant ought to have access to natural light and fresh air through an operable window,” Potter said. “It was that very principle that basically makes these large floor plates able to convert extremely well to residential efficient units.”
When comparing projected rents and costs, the numbers looked stronger for a conversion than for an office lease-up, but not strong enough to justify the project without outside help, Kearney said.
“The conversation with the city was sort of the ‘but for’ conversation: But for the incentive, this will not work,” Kearney said.
Another key advantage was that the building had a massive contiguous block of empty space, about 900K SF left behind when Bank of America moved out in 2020, Potter said. Because the bank had occupied nearly all the floors from 19 down, the developers will be able to immediately begin converting levels 14 and below to residential use without having to clear out smaller tenants, negotiate lease buyouts or handle relocations.
The conversion’s delivery timeline puts 135 S. LaSalle St. in position to take advantage of both a slow multifamily development pipeline and major Loop office developments coming online around the same time.
Prime | Capri Interests’ redevelopment of the James R. Thompson Center into Google's new Chicago headquarters is well underway, with the tech giant planning to move in next year. JPMorgan Chase is also undertaking a major renovation of its Chicago office tower and has mandated five days a week in the office.
Leon Walker, CEO and founder of DL3 Realty, said Chicago and the Loop are magnets for recent graduates of Big Ten universities in the Midwest, who flock to the area to start their careers. He said the building’s proximity to the major redevelopments as well as downtown’s contingent of government workers will make it attractive to recent graduates.
“It is certainly targeting young professionals and those that want to walk to work,” Walker said.
The exact tenant mix of the building’s retail collection is still in the works, but it may offer food and beverage options, a small-format grocer, a health/fitness club or other complementary uses. Potter also mentioned the potential for an all-day café that could serve as a neighborhood hub.
The building will also have 180 parking spaces on two full floors to support both its residential and retail offerings.
Kearney said the Field Building’s average unit size of about 700 SF and rents in the mid to upper $3 per SF range make the product desirable compared to the $5 per SF rents in other Chicago submarkets.
“We had a lot of market research, internally and externally, done to help think through what that rent level should be and what that size would need to be to really make this area attractive for these first movers to this brand new neighborhood,” Kearney said.