This news about some Wrigleyville rooftops Thursday afternoon, as reported by Jared S. Hopkins in the Tribune, should not surprise you:
The Cubs-owning Ricketts family has purchased three more buildings with Wrigley rooftop businesses, increasing its grip on where Cubs fans spend their dollars around the team’s historic stadium. Sheffield Finance sold the Sheffield Avenue properties to an entity controlled by the Ricketts family, which now claims six buildings on the street with rooftop businesses. The Ricketts paid an undisclosed price for the buildings at 3637 N. Sheffield, 3617 N. Sheffield and 3619 N. Sheffield, Cook County property records show. The Ricketts, who will assume no debt on the buildings, also paid an undisclosed amount for the buildings' rooftop businesses.
The businesses at 3617 and 3619 N. Sheffield are the newer buildings shown in the photo above, and 3639 N. Sheffield is the one three doors north of the building with the billboard on top. Hopkins' article goes on to say that there are just three rooftop buildings on Sheffield not owned by the Ricketts family:
The Ricketts family had bought an interest in "Down The Line Rooftop" (which you can see clearly in the photo above) a couple of years ago. The Cubs issued a statement, quoted in the article:Murphy’s Rooftop, at the corner of Waveland and Sheffield and above Murphy’s Bleachers; and Skybox on Sheffield and Lakeview Baseball Club, which have sued the team in federal court. That suit is pending.
“The Ricketts family has said in the past they are interested in reasonable opportunities to purchase rooftop property and are willing to pay a fair price. In this case, we were able to acquire three buildings. The rooftop situation has been a political and legal morass for more than a decade and the Ricketts family will remain interested in opportunities which make sound business sense.”
Hopkins writes that George Loukas, who also owns and operates the Cubby Bear, will manage the Ricketts' rooftop businesses, which will, for the time being at least, continue to operate as rooftop clubs. The article doesn't specifically say so, but I presume that the rental apartments that are in all these buildings will continue to operate as they are now.
The summary of all this is as I've been forecasting for some time, that the endgame of the Cubs/rooftops dispute would be for the Cubs (or the Ricketts family as a separate entity from the Cubs, which appears to be what's happening) to own all the buildings and/or businesses. Some of the views from the rooftop clubs are indeed blocked by the new right-field video board and in the long run, the Ricketts family might have to find some other businesses to run in those buildings.
They just have to be wishing that the Cubs had bought all those buildings decades ago when Tribune Co. first bought the team and the buildings could have been had for $50,000 or so, which was the case in the early 1980s.