After he grew up in Lincoln Park and before he retired here, Jim Semmelroth spent 50 years in California. He worked on many a construction project there.
Now, the 86-year-old Semmelroth admires the Maurices headquarters project from up close on his daily walk.
Clad in his leather bomber jacket on cool days, Semmelroth walks through the alleyway above the 400 block of West Superior Street, monitoring the work and sometimes thinking right along with the progress.
“I’m out walking 3-4 miles every day,” he said, before describing his time as a construction site supervisor. “I just loved doing it. It was always nice to go to the job site.”
What Semmelroth and others see at this point is the start of an 11-story building that’s on track for its spring 2016 opening. The elevator shaft in the core of the building is rising, as is the staircase to the west. The cement base has been poured, and all manner of steel constructs housing mechanical and electrical work are pointing upward.
“It’s all gone very smoothly,” said Laura Sieger, Maurices’ director of communications and engagement, who takes part in construction meetings with the McGough contractors on a regular basis. “We started with the center core and we’ll be building out the floors from that center core.”
Foundational drilling found a couple of places with a little more rock than expected, Sieger said, but not so much as to set back progress. Water hasn’t been an issue, because the site has systems in place to whisk away the rain.
“Right now we’re doing a lot of mechanical work underground,” Sieger said.
On Tuesday, two men were operating a remote control lift from its basket, looking like birds in a hand. They were working their way around the perimeter of the site, tacking corrugated material to the exterior sides of the property. “Corrugated earth retention systems,” Sieger called them. “To make sure the ground stays intact.”
Sieger was in Minneapolis on Friday with a small group from Maurices. They were looking at furniture for the building.
“We’re starting to look at interiors,” she said.
The interior of the building will have a neutral base color, allowing the company to be fluid with its color schemes.
“Because we are a clothing company, we want to be able to add accents through pillows and things - to keep it fresh,” Sieger said. “There’s not going to be huge splashes of colors. We want small pieces to add that bring the color through.”
Sieger talked about an outdoor terrace from which employees will be able to work on nice days, and about lots of collaborative open spaces. They’re starting to think about what types of technologies to use in training and development rooms and how to outfit the corporate gym.
The people at Maurices are curious, Sieger said, to see what the winter will bring and how it will affect progress on the new building. By October, people will start seeing the floors built outward from the elevator core.
Meanwhile, Semmelroth figures to be a fixture outside the site. He explained how contractors in California used to learn a lot about earthquakes during the construction process. They created best practices by studying the buildings that stood up well to the tremors. Poured concrete with staggered patterns of reinforcing steel were always the way to go, he said. He recalled a brick hospital brought to rubble by a quake.
One key factor was the quality of the steel rods. Semmelroth always wanted the blued steel, and never wanted to see much rust. Surveying the piles of steel rods and bars on the Maurices site, Semmelroth approved.
“That’s the good stuff,” he said.
