By Marlys FoxGuess who owned the Fox Associates home-office building before we did? We’re talkin’ Chicago here, so who else but the remnants of the gang associated with the notorious 1920s mobster Al Capone!
We bought the building close to 40 years ago in the (now) up-and-coming River North area in the heart of the city.
Capone had died quite a number of years prior to that, in 1947, at the relatively young age of 48.
But the three-story building, plus a full basement, was occupied by his successors, with the then-godfather’s office on the top floor, all encased with bullet-proof glass. The first-floor area was carefully outfitted for money-laundering purposes! There were rows of desks and electrical outlets lined up for use. That large area was, and still is, encased in bullet-proof glass!
The building is all brick, with that typical Chicago-style layout: Tall and narrow, and all the way straight back from the sidewalk to the alley behind the building.
It has aged well, considering it’s pretty darned old. It’s now worth way more than we paid for it, not because of the building itself, but because of the expensive land it sits on. There will likely be a day when the entire block is torn down for a massive skyscraper!
Frankly, I’d almost rather it became a museum, though there are those here in government, at least, who want to put our century-old gangster days behind us permanently.
Marlys Fox.
We have carefully preserved it pretty much as it was:
- Any visitors, welcome or unwelcome, must be buzzed in through three separate sets of doors, each made of heavy bullet-proof glass, and with a spring that literally pounds it shut right behind you as you enter or exit.
- There is a comprehensive camera system that records all who enter and depart. Security is tight, which is still okay in these days and circumstances!
- We disarmed an elevator, not that it wouldn’t have been handy to avoid climbing stairs to all floors, but because it seemed to go one full stop beyond the floor of the basement with no other known access to that level, and it kind of freaked us out! There are rumors—maybe more than rumors—of a complete underground escape path for all buildings in this part of Chicago, right by the Chicago River. We have carefully avoided that route, though we do use the basement.
- There were originally a half-dozen big old safes left in the basement, locked of course, no keys. We paid a safe-cracker to open them. Who wouldn’t? Unfortunately, they were empty.
- Move-in time was about the time that Geraldo Rivera produced a major TV attraction about the bodies of mobsters showing up in Chicago, so we moved very cautiously throughout all the little nooks and crannies that are still present all throughout the building. No bodies discovered—so far.
We bought the building, with a Realtor’s help, direct from a very charming man who had inherited the building on behalf of a “business enterprise.” He had a very nice wife as well, whom we met as she came to claim some mirrors and stuff before we moved in. As one does in circumstances like this, we agreed to meet for coffee or a drink when we all got settled in. We didn’t hear back, of course. But one day his wife did stop by to see if she had left something behind. And I said to her: “Hey, sorry the four of us didn’t meet up again.” And that’s when she said: “Oh, didn’t you hear?” “No, what?” And she said, “My husband was over on Michigan Avenue, [she gave the address of a big office building], he was at a meeting, and he accidentally fell off the balcony on the 41st floor!”
So: My advice, as a Chicagoan by choice, not by birth: Always be careful who you mess with!