It might take a while, but I suspect that in the end, the Ricketts family will wind up owning all the rooftop buildings across from Wrigley Field on Waveland & Sheffield.
They've started that process, according to Ameet Sachdev and Jared S. Hopkins in the Tribune:
The Ricketts family, owner of the Chicago Cubs, has purchased three neighboring apartment buildings with rooftop businesses, property records and sources confirmed late Friday. County property records show that the rooftop business at 3639 N. Sheffield Ave. was sold on Jan. 9 for $4.2 million. The property is co-owned by James Lourgos, who did not return a phone call seeking comment on the sale. Two sources said that George Loukas sold two buildings at 3643-3645 N. Sheffield Ave. and 1032-1034 W. Waveland Ave. to the Ricketts family. The sources did not disclose the sales price of the properties.
3643-45 N. Sheffield is the one fourth to the left of the building with the billboards in the photo above. 3639 N. Sheffield is two doors north of the billboard building. The one on Waveland is a single building that's on the northwest corner of Waveland & Kenmore. Both of them were owned by Loukas through his WrigleyvilleRooftops.com company. The tan-color building in the photo below is 1032-34 W. Waveland (the photo dates from 2004; I just wanted an example to show you where it is:
Photo: Jonathan Daniel/Getty Images
That seems like a pretty reasonable price for the one building noted; that price is down quite a bit from the peak of the real-estate market about 2008, but based on previous reports, many of the rooftop owners just want to get out of the business. As I've written before, the likely endgame of all this is that the Ricketts family will own pretty much all the buildings on Waveland & Sheffield and might wind up using them for office space as well as using the rooftop clubs.