Adaptive Reuse of a Chicago Tall Building Gets Social Media Boost From “The Skyscraper Guy”

As cities around the country grapple with soaring office vacancies in their urban cores, one developer in Chicago is using social media to drive interest in his plan to convert office space into apartments in a nearly 100-year-old downtown building considered an architectural gem that has fallen on hard times.

The Pittsfield Building has become a viral sensation, thanks to social media posts seen by millions of people around the world that document plans to revive the 38-story tower, which has an original design combining Art Deco and Gothic details and offers sweeping views of Lake Michigan, Millennium Park and the Loop.

That surge in interest in the largely vacant building is credited to Tom Liravongsa, a developer who purchased floors 1-12 and 22-38 in the building for $7.5 million in 2023 in a foreclosure auction. He said he plans to convert them from office space into 224 residential apartments with modern amenities, while maintaining the building’s original elements—a grey terracotta exterior, coffer ceilings, brass elevator doors and light fixtures, a copper roof, white marble columns, wrought iron railings and wood paneling.

The building already includes 228 rental apartment units on eight floors owned by Chicago-based Marc Realty since 2000.

Since he started posting updates about the building in April, Liravongsa, 42, who is managing director of Grand Rapids, Mich.-based real estate investment and asset management firm L’Cre Global, calls himself “The Skyscraper Guy” on TikTok and Instagram. His videos have garnered about 80 million views and have attracted hundreds of thousands of followers.

In videos highlighting various features of the Graham, Anderson, Probst & White-designed building, Liravongsa says the social media following has allowed him to build lists of people interested in eventually renting an apartment in the building and of contractors and vendors from as far away as Germany that want to be involved in the renovation process.

One TikTok post that racked up 8 million views shows Liravongsa dropping a piece of mail down an ornately detailed brass mail chute and explaining why chutes were later banned for fire safety reasons. In another video on Instagram, where Liravongsa has accumulated 381,000 followers, he points out some of the building’s random intriguing features, including a speakeasy from the Prohibition Era and a hidden room that’s not on the original blueprints. In another, he describes features in the basement that he says “low-key scare me” including a coal chute, a catwalk and the bottom of a smokestack that extends 40 stories to the rooftop.

 “We’re discovering that people want to enjoy these older buildings,” Liravongsa says. “We say, ‘Here’s a landmark that you can go in [via social media]. It’s active. You can experience it.’”

Tom Liravongsa shows off an ornate light fixture in the five-story atrium of The Pittsfield Building.
Photo courtesy of Tom Liravongsa

Liravongsa says the posts also show “what people did [in construction and design] 100 years ago and how it is still lasting. This craft quality is hard to replicate these days. It’s not that you can’t do it, but a lot of that skill set has dissipated.”

Liravongsa is working with the Chicago-based architectural firm Papageorge Haymes Partners in adapting the building.

Jen Masengarb, executive director of AIA Chicago, says the Pittsfield Building, named a Chicago Landmark in 2002, is well suited to a residential conversion because of its narrow tower floor plates and light wells that allow natural light into the building.
“But, as with any building nearing 100 years old, the real challenges— beyond the financing—lie in modernization of the building’s systems and envelope,” she says.  

Liravongsa says the building has 15 to 16 elevator shafts with space to accommodate MEP systems.

“The beauty of these older buildings is that you have so many more elevators than modern buildings,” he says. “You can use these shafts for your systems and that alleviates a lot of problems. We have huge shafts that you can run systems through without having to drill through the floors.”

The road to revitalizing the Pittsfield building has not been easy. A previous owner, Morgan Reed filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2017 that prompted Chinese-Canadian business owner Xia Hua “Edward” Gong to purchase the building during a bankruptcy auction. Gong’s portion of the building deteriorated after the Ontario Securities Commission charged him in December 2017 with criminal securities fraud in Canada. A settlement was reached in that case, but a foreclosure lawsuit was filed in 2022 with Liravongsa acquiring Gong’s floors in the building in 2023. Although Gong then sued over the foreclosure sale, that lawsuit was dropped.

“It’s all been cleared. They settled that. That’s why we’ve been off to the races,” Liravongsa says.

Liravongsa declined to provide specifics of other developments that his company has handled other than a 1871-era boutique building in Grand Rapids, Mich., and other early-stage projects in Miami and Austin, Texas.

Masengarb praises Liravongsa’s efforts to spread the word about the charms of the Pittsfield building that she says are creating interest in adaptive reuse of older tall buildings. “Where engineers and architects watching his videos might see just a mundane century-old air plenum, for example, Tom’s dramatic storytelling skills brings the public along to discover these ghostly and seemingly forgotten mechanical spaces,” she says.

 “I think it’s a very clever approach,” adds Kendra Parzen, advocacy manager for Landmarks Illinois. “Residential is what we need and it makes absolute sense to adapt the Pittsfield building for residential use.”

 Liravongsa says using social media to create interest in a project is unusual for a developer. “I would say developers actually never get on social media, and they’d cringe at the idea of posting a story, They just would. Even I do sometimes, ” he says. But I’ve spent so much time in this building that I think it’s not right to keep it to myself and then say ‘It’s a cool building. Tenants, come and live here.'”

Liravongsa says social media is also helping him mold the building into what the market wants and ensuring it thrives down the road. “As developers, we have a vision, and we’re delivering buildings for a future that’s three to five years [or longer] out, so, as a developer, you literally have to create the future,” he says.

Annemarie Mannion is editor of ENR Midwest, which covers 11 states. She joined ENR in 2022 and reports from Chicago.