Business & Tech

New Target Designs Could Come at the End of September

The City Target pegged for Belmont, Ashland and Lincoln avenues was introduced in May, and now designers say they're almost ready to come back for round two.

Representatives with Target Corp. say they’re almost ready to come back to Lake View with new, updated designs for their store pegged for Lincoln, Ashland and Belmont avenues.

Designers recently spoke to officials in Ald. Tom Tunney’s (44th) office saying they hope to present the new designs by the end of September. As of now, they are still updating and fine tuning the proposed project.

Target executives visited Lake View in May to present their initial thoughts for the 160,000-square-foot store at 3201 N. Ashland Ave. It was there they revealed their plan to demolish the existing structure and build a fresh department store.

“All the City Targets that we’ve opened so far have all been in existing buildings,” said Senior Development Manager Laurie Jones. “We’re excited here in Lake View because this gives us an opportunity to look at a different City Target which is building it from the ground up. So it’s not going to be going in there, but we’re building a brand new building.”

Based on initial designs, the new building—which sits on a 65,000-square-foot plot of land—will have two stories of parking and two stories of retail space when completed. That’s double the height of the current building.

Neighbors at May’s West Lake View Neighbors meeting had plenty of concerns about the structure, especially in regards to traffic. With a projected 230 parking stalls, they said it could bring even more cars to the neighborhood.

That’s in combination with the admittedly complicated intersection at Lincoln, Ashland and Belmont. Target designers say they hope to place the parking garage entrance on Ashland and another stop light at West Melrose Street. Questions were raised bout complicated left turns and the upcoming Ashland Avenue Bus Rapid Transit plan.

Target plans to be open by late 2015.

The site was formerly destined to be a $100 million mixed-use building with 130 new condos and 90,000-square-feet of commercial space. After being approved for construction by the city council in March 2007, however, the collapsing market took its toll, putting the project by Centrum Properties on hold. 


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