In 1832, the chief economic enterprise in the burgeoning settlement of Chicago was John Jacob Astor’s American Fur Company. Nearly 175 years later, the Near North Side street named for Astor (who never lived here) sits grandly atop the local real-estate market, with two of the metro area’s three priciest house sales for the past year coming from a single block of that four-block-long Gold Coast avenue.
Half a block away is the year’s number-three sale, a gracious 1922 house designed by David Adler for steel magnate Joseph T. Ryerson. John Regas, the architect who had owned the 13-room home since 1986, listed it in December 2005 for $10.5 million; on Christmas Day, he signed a contract to sell it for $9.2 million to Robert and Donna Lyon (he is the president of Institutional Capital Corporation).
There were two other multimillion-dollar sales on Astor Street during the year. While not in our top five (they went for $3.5 million and $3 million), they are among the 2,408 homes in the metropolitan area that sold for $1 million or more, according to data from the Multiple Listing Service of Northern Illinois (MLSNI). More than a third of those homes were sold in just five neighborhoods or suburbs. The leader was the city’s Near North neighborhood with 291 sales, followed by Lake Forest (166), Lincoln Park (168), Winnetka (141), and Hinsdale (122).
In second place, James Reid-Anderson, CEO of Deerfield’s Dade Behring, paid $11 million for another David Adler mansion, this one in Lake Forest.
In fourth place, Randy and Sherry Adams (he runs Bridge Healthcare Finance) paid $8.1 million for the Winnetka estate of insurance magnate and best-selling positive thinker W. Clement Stone.
Finally, a 12-room penthouse on East Lake Shore Drive sold for $8 million. Nancy Abrams, the widow of the man who redeveloped the Mayfair Regent hotel as condos and reserved this palatial aerie for himself, had listed the condo for $9.8 million.
The personal injury attorney Tom Demetriou paid $6.8 million in January for a 20-room home on 22 acres in Barrington Hills for the most-expensive residence ever sold in McHenry County.
In Kane County, a 17-room home built in 1998 on ten acres in the Crane Road Estates area of St. Charles sold in March for $3.5 million.