DOWNTOWN — Bill Davies, the eccentric British businessman who tried for years to redevelop one of Chicago's largest development sites in the Old Main Post Office, has died a day after being forced to sell it.
He was 82.
The head of International Properties Developers died "after a short illness," company spokeswoman Sue Sadler said in an email Friday.
"I am sure you will all feel a great loss at this news as we do, and will wish the family every sympathy at this time," Sadler wrote.
The announcement came roughly a day after Mayor Rahm Emanuel announced Davies' sale of the Old Main Post Office, a vacant 2.7-million-square-foot Art Deco colossus straddling Congress Parkway, a building various developers including Davies tried and failed to redevelop for two decades.
Davies, a Liverpool native who most recently lived in Monaco, won an auction in 2009 for the Old Main Post Office after a local developer tried its hand at the difficult-to-develop site for years. Davies once proposed a 120-story tower and retail for the property, only to be set back by the recession and zeal for his ambitious vision as other prospective buyers brought offers he repeatedly turned down.
Mayor Rahm Emanuel moved earlier this year to seize the building through eminent domain after Davies proposed the latest iteration of that vision: 1,500 "micro" apartments aimed at busy professionals. City officials including Emanuel deemed that proposal improbable and, with the threat of eminent domain, forced a sale of the building to a New York developer who now plans to convert the post office into new white-collar offices.
Davies was notorious for holding on to blighted properties without developing them. He bought an abandoned Liverpool post office in 1986 and sold it 16 years later in the same blighted condition he bought it, drawing ire from city officials there, according to the Tribune.
"He was one of a kind and I will miss his unusual ways," Martin Mulryan, a consultant who oversaw the post office project here for Davies, said in an email.
Mulryan said Davies was aware of this week's Chicago post office sale and "in full agreement with it." A venture led by 601W Cos., the new owner of the post office, plans to move offices into the redevelopment by 2018.
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