At 7:30 a.m., the Randolph Street Pedway is brimming with activity. Morning commuters walk briskly in both directions through the underground corridor that connects Millennium Station and the Daley Plaza, linking them with every building in between.

As they pass under the Heritage at Millennium Park condominium building, they walk by an Intelligentsia Café stand, a Subway sandwich shop and Heritage Cleaners. But most of the retail spaces they walk past are empty, and they have been empty for years.

When Chicago-based Mesa Development LLC built the Heritage condominiums in 2005, they renovated the pedway underneath, adding 12 retail spaces collectively known as Heritage Center Underground Shops. But after the three current tenants opened for business, the progress slowed. L.A. Fitness built a public pool within the largest space — however, it is inaccessible from the pedway. Lane Bryant leases the second-largest space, but it only uses it for storage and advertising.

For any business considering leasing the space within the Heritage Center, the current tenants’ success is something of a mixed bag. Between 7:30 and 8:30 a.m., the Intelligentsia Café stand had an average of one customer every four minutes. Sometimes, the customers arrived back-to-back, but almost never at the same time. At its busiest, the stand had three customers at once.

Luke Rickerson has been working for Intelligentsia Café for a year and a half. He explained that the café location on first floor gets most of the business. The stand exists largely because, after using the pedway for storage, Intelligentsia management decided that that they “might as well” try to make money off the passing commuters.

Rickerson explained that the traffic depends heavily on the weather.

“If the weather is too cold, too hot or too uncomfortable, more people come down here. It tends to be busier in the winter than in the summer, but not always.”

The management seems to feel that the stand gets enough business to remain open, although they recently cut service hours two hours, closing at 10:30 in the morning instead of 12:30 in the afternoon. According to Rickerson, those were the stand’s “optimal business hours.”

At Subway, the dining area has enough tables to sit a classroom, yet it gets almost no traffic. According to Margaret Hicks, organizer of the popular Chicago Elevated pedway tours, the sandwich shop gets an average of two to three customers per day. It’s worth noting that there is another Subway location only a block east, at Millennium Station.

Heritage Cleaners is the busiest of the three, thanks largely to all the business it gets from the condo residents. Unlike other Heritage Center tenants, it is advertised on the condominium website as one of the condominium amenities.

In April of last year, Mesa Development sold the Heritage Center, along with the other commercial spaces within the Heritage building, to the New York-based Acadia Realty Trust. So far, the new owners seem to be in no particular hurry to fill the vacant spaces. Mid-America Real Estate Corporation, which leases out the retail spaces on Acadia’s behalf, has only been advertising the space currently leased to Lane Bryant. At the beginning of 2012, the two-room retail space between the Subway and Heritage Cleaners was converted into an office, but only time will tell how long it will remain occupied.

Neither Acadia nor Mid-America responded to requests for comment as of press time.

Still, Hicks feels that Heritage Center has potential, arguing that it would open opportunities for businesses that would not otherwise be able to afford downtown rents.

“It’s close to Michigan and Randolph. That’s a great location, and if you’re in the pedway, the rents are much cheaper,” she said.

But in order to succeed, the businesses would need to attract customers beyond those that currently use the pedway. Hicks thinks awareness of the pedway has increased since she started her tours in 2009. However, most Chicagoans are still unaware of the pedway, and many the ones that are have misconceptions about the system. “They think that the pedway is dangerous and full of homeless people, and that’s just isn’t true,” Hicks said.

Hicks feels that if the City of Chicago needs to do more to promote the pedway — even something as simple as putting maps in the Chicago Visitors Center.

For now, the businesses have to rely on the slowly building word of mouth. Since Hicks started her pedway tours in 2009, several more tour groups sprang up. According to Rickerson, they make up a decent portion of the Pedway business. If the trend continues, the business prospect may slowly start to improve.

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By Anonymous
Posted: 01/12/2012 10:22 PM

So why doesn't Hicks make maps to sell to the city? I think the city needs to stop running people and businesses away from Downtown. The population is clearly no longer there. It has become too expensive to come downtown for anything other that to pay a parking ticket.