Written By Daniel Schell on August 5, 2015

Crushing barges and building dreams

Construction projects are lucky to make the news once. It might be during the planning phase, or when said plans are made public. Or maybe there’s a particularly heated community meeting, where residents make impassioned pitches for and against their new prospective neighbor. Perhaps it’s at groundbreaking, when the local dignitaries make an appearance, gold shovels in hand.

The sunken barge drew a crowd on the Randolph Street bridge.

The new office tower at 150 North Riverside took an unusual approach to garnering headlines: it sank a barge. Not on purpose, of course, but sink it did. And if you don’t think that created massive amounts of publicity — some positive, some negative — then you’ll need to remind us of the other times folks lined up on bridges to watch the early-goings of a major construction site.

But that was October. This is August, and 150 North Riverside has moved on from the three-week barge peril to create an ever-growing work of art along the Chicago River.

Thanks in part to one massive floating crane, the future 53-story tower designed by friends-of-the-blog Goettsch Partners has begun to take shape in glorious fashion. And as we’re wont to do at The Chicago Architecture Blog, we’ve been staring, gawking, and ogling the progress. But enough about words; have a look at some photos.