Chicago’s legendary rock music hall Double Door is overcoming the typical odds faced by those looking to preserve the best of a historic building while revamping it with both modern and green features. To paraphrase George Harrison, it takes plenty of money, a whole lot of precious time, and much patience, to do it right. Rendering of Double Door facade by Barker Nestor. In 2017, when they realized they had to move out of their old space on the north side of the city, the

Chicago’s storied Bridgeport neighborhood has been the home of mayors, police, and firefighters for years. But hidden in plain sight is another feature of that illustrious neighborhood: the almost century-old Ramova Theatre, newly renovated and reopened for business. Now, it includes a 36,000-square-foot complex including a live music hall, banquet space, brewery, and restaurant. The upstairs banquet space, called the “Ramova Loft,” was once a karate/boxing gym. The Ramova Th

Cream City. Brew City. Beertown. Miltown. Call it by any name, but Milwaukee is outfitting its grand old buildings with a new set of clothes at a prodigious rate. Nowhere is this trend more evident than on the city’s west side, at the 20-acre site of the former Pabst Brewery that operated there for about 150 years. An empty ghost town after the last batch of beer was churned out in 1996, the brewery complex is now being resurrected. And in a sustainable way, with specific go