Streeterville: Northwestern Memorial Files $51M Tower Permit

Northwestern Memorial Hospital has filed a $51.3 million application with Illinois’ health facilities regulator to demolish existing foundation structures at 330 East Erie Street in Streeterville, clearing ground for a new patient tower the hospital has pegged at roughly 1.2 million square feet. The filing, Project #26-003 with the Illinois Health Facilities and Services Review Board, lists Northwestern Memorial Hospital and Northwestern Memorial HealthCare as applicants.

The demolition filing is not the hospital’s only active project with the state board. A second filing, Project #26-005 at 251 East Huron Street on the same campus, carries a project cost of $264.9 million to add 11 new operating rooms and recovery stations on the Feinberg/Galter Pavilion’s seventh floor, with supporting space on the fifth and sixth floors.

The new tower itself is still working through City zoning. The Chicago Plan Commission’s September 2026 hearing agenda carries an application from Northwestern Memorial Hospital to amend Institutional Planned Development No. 1214, the zoning designation covering the hospital’s campus, to expand its boundaries and add subareas for the new building. That is a filed proposal, not an approved one: the Plan Commission and City Council still have to act before Northwestern can build to the scale it has laid out.

Why it matters

A Chicago hospital system running two state-reviewed capital projects at once, each north of $50 million, is one of the largest non-residential pipelines in the city right now. Power Construction and joint-venture partner UJAMAA Construction are lined up to lead the tower’s build, with Perkins&Will as architect, giving subcontractors a bid target even while the zoning case is pending.

The numbers

• $51,283,483: cost of the demolition-only permit filing (Project #26-003) to clear 330 East Erie Street for the new tower.
• $264,935,160: cost of the separate operating-room modernization filing (Project #26-005) at 251 East Huron Street.
• Roughly 1.2 million square feet and 226 to 314 new inpatient beds proposed for the new tower, at a height in the range of the campus’s existing 385-foot Lavin Pavilion.
• The new tower still needs Chicago Plan Commission and City Council approval of the Institutional Planned Development 1214 amendment filed in September; no vote has been recorded yet.

What’s next

Northwestern Medicine has said it plans to file for the tower’s demolition permit in late 2026, with construction starting in spring 2027 if the zoning case clears and finishing in 2031. The $264.9 million operating-room project does not need a zoning change and can proceed on its own state-review timeline. More on the market: Chicago.