A four-story retail property down the street from Wrigley Field is for sale half a decade after it replaced a Taco Bell that was beloved by late-night revelers on Chicago’s North Side.
Owners of the property at 1115 W. Addison St. have hired brokers from Dash Commercial Real Estate Advisors to seek a buyer for the property in the high-traffic area near the home ballpark of baseball’s Chicago Cubs, according to a marketing brochure.
The asking price is just over $33 million, which amounts to a capitalization rate — or initial annual rate of return — of 6%, according to the brochure.
The 58,819-square-foot building is hitting the market nearly a decade after news first emerged that local investors Benjamin Cohen and Elliot Berman planned to buy the Taco Bell building on the site to demolish the fast-food neighborhood staple and replace it with a bigger building.
Fans of baseball and Clark Street’s bar scene, accustomed to picking up an early-hours burrito, reacted by raging online, creating a petition to preserve the Taco Bell and producing a tribute song.
“The one thing we thought we could always count on was the Taco Bell being open late at night,” Jeff Yoders told the Wall Street Journal in 2017. “But I guess that’s not true anymore.”
Despite the controversy, the developers bought the property for just over $8.9 million in 2017. They eventually landed a deal to keep Taco Bell in the new building in the Lakeview neighborhood.
A low-rise Taco Bell once stood on the site at 1115 W. Addison St. near Chicago’s Wrigley Field. (CoStar)
Cohen and Berman landed a $22 million construction loan from Old Second Bank in March 2020, days into the COVID-19 pandemic, according to Cook County property records. With Wrigley Field shut down by the pandemic and traffic calmer than usual, the new building was constructed by 2021.
It’s unclear exactly how much it cost to develop the property. Ownership did not immediately respond to requests for comment from CoStar News.
Construction of the Addison Street building was part of a yearslong wave of developments around the historic ballpark that replaced several low-rise buildings, including a McDonald’s across from the ballpark, with larger, modern structures. One of the leaders of that push was the billionaire Ricketts family, which also owns the Cubs.
Changes have continued recently, with three historic apartment buildings on Sheffield Avenue that once provided rooftop views of Cubs games being razed to make way for a single new apartment building.
The retail building at 1115 W. Addison is more than 99% leased, with an average weighted lease term of almost 11 years, according to the marketing materials. Tenants include a Movement climbing gym, JPMorgan Chase Bank branch, Taco Bell Cantina, Culver’s and Crumbl Cookies.
The owners previously put the property up for sale in 2022, but a buyer never emerged.
Brokers marketing it for sale now emphasize the long-term, triple-net leases that require little responsibility from the property owner and the high-visibility location near one of the world’s best-known sports venues.
The sellers are represented by Dash Commercial Real Estate Advisors brokers John Dudash, Alex Lott and Joe Lombardo.
