Healing Foundations: Former Beauty Store Adapted to Meet Neighborhood Healthcare Needs

When a beauty supply store signaled its intent to move out of its 45,000-square-foot space near 63rd Street and Cottage Grove Avenue, it could have just left another vacancy on the south side of Chicago.

Instead, the space in Chicago’s Woodlawn neighborhood became a new medical office led by Friend Health, with exam rooms, a pharmacy and other vital community services previously lacking in the area.

It’s this “interesting intersection” between healthcare and social equity that drives the work of the project’s architect, Roderic Walton. A principal at Moody Nolan, Walton helps lead the African American-owned firm’s healthcare practice, which seeks to address disparities in healthcare that have been exacerbated since the pandemic. For example, black communities in Chicago have an average life expectancy of just 71 years compared to 84 in other neighborhoods.

“We needed an injection of healthcare services into this community to directly combat that [gap],” Walton said.

In an interview with LoopNet, Walton discussed the considerations that went into the site selection for the Friend Health project and the challenges that had to be overcome before the health center opened its doors.

There were three key reasons Friend Health, along with partner DL3 Realty, chose the former Cosmo Beauty supply store for its next health center, bringing its total number of locations to five.

First, the store sits on a high-visibility corner in the heart of Chicago’s Woodlawn neighborhood. That corner is also about a block from the southern terminal for Chicago’s Green Line train on Cottage Grove Avenue, making it easily accessible by public transportation.

The development team also wanted to reuse an existing building and adapt it to medical use. Besides the sustainability factor, and the benefit of using fewer resources and finances, renovating an existing building would also fill a vacancy in the neighborhood.

“One of the main things that we see in communities of color is there are a lot of vacancies. That’s why adaptive reuse is so important in communities of color because there’s value there in using existing structures,” Walton said. “A lot of times you have these anchor buildings that are sitting there either vacant or on the verge of vacancy, that can offer clients value.”

The $43 million project received $17 million in federal and state tax credits, $8 million in tax increment financing (TIF) funds, a $2.5 million Chicago Recovery Plan grant and $250,000 in federal appropriations.

Public officials, neighbors and other stakeholders told the development team that they wanted the project to be “an impetus for broad development,” Walton said.

“They want to see more employment opportunities result from the project. They oftentimes will want the project to be a catalyst for more development along the corridor,” Walton said. “It has to be almost like an inflection point for a bigger conversation about community growth.”

The community also had a say in the project’s design.

“We don’t walk into the project with a preset goal of how it’s going to play out. Our role at the beginning of the project is to listen and to respond,” Walton said. “We ask a lot of leading questions: What kind of materiality does the community gravitate toward? What are some of the site features and programming elements that are important to them? And in answering those questions, the community is telling us what they value.”

Those values evolved into a few design goals. Friend Health has satellite locations offering myriad services throughout the south side of Chicago, but it wanted its new location to offer all of its services under one roof.

“You’ll see the pharmacy, OB/GYN, family medicine, behavioral health, community and teaching spaces, and also clinical support spaces,” Walton said.

Construction started in 2021 in the throes of the pandemic. Walton said the project was one of the first he’d done where construction meetings were held virtually.

“We only went to the job site when we absolutely had to look at something,” he said.

Challenges at the site included a slab that was sinking in and foundational elements below that slab that were conflicting with the work.

“We had to do a lot of pivoting to get rid of a lot of foundations below grade that were unknown,” Walton said.

Before it was a beauty store, the building was a furniture supply store with its 2nd-floor floor-to-ceiling height only reaching 10 feet. Ideally, the height would be 12 to 14 feet, and the team “had to do a lot of creative work” to fit the mechanical systems on the second floor because of the relatively low ceiling height, Walton said.

The team also had to build exam rooms around the building’s columns.

“The building was informing the design and that was a challenge,” Walton said.

And like many other projects of the era, supply chain delays were another hurdle. The electric transformer, for example, had to be ordered six months in advance.

Friend Health’s Woodlawn Center opened last year. If you visit the site now, you’ll be greeted by its distinct red façade, and a community mural along 63rd Street that shows the history of Woodlawn. The colorful additions help bring out the building’s façade to match the rest of the street wall and align it with townhouses next door.

For its efforts, Moody Nolan received an award for historic preservation and restoration from the National Organization of Minority Architects (NOMA) as one of the Phil Freelon Professional Design Award Winners. The American Institute of Architects (AIA) Columbus chapter gave the project a merit award in the large project category during its 2023 Architecture Awards.

And the work may not be done yet. Friend Health already moved its headquarters to the new health center, but has plans for a potential expansion nearby. Their development partner, DL3, also has “a lot of interest” in filling in other parts of the intersection that remain vacant, Walton said.

Until then, Walton cherishes the reaction he’s gotten from patients who have visited the new health center so far.

“A lot of the time we’ll see community members walk in and you can see their face light up, and that’s the reward. You’re getting that response that they’re excited that this is their new clinical home and it’s fresh, modern and new, and it feels like a place that was designed specifically for them,” Walton said. “And that kind of gives you the goosebumps when you walk in and you see that reaction.”