RIVER NORTH — A 128-year-old row home squeezed between new condominiums in River North is going to stay, its new owner says.
Jim Passios, who along with a business partner paid $900,000 in August for the 19th century Italianate at 154 W. Superior St., said he will rehab, not raze, the vintage house.
The home has been nicknamed the "Up" house due to its similar appearance to the quirky Victorian in the Pixar film, which was inspired by a similarly out-of-place vintage house squeezed in the center of a Seattle high-rise.
Passios' plans contradict recent social media posts reporting that the home will be demolished.
"I’m hearing there’s a lot of chatter out there about us razing the property, but that is not the case," Passios said. "We're in this for the long term."
A company established by Passios and Perry Vieth, both of suburban Boston, bought the house last summer after a developer dropped its plans to build a tower on the site. Ald. Brian Hopkins (2nd), whose ward includes the row home, then scaled down the site's zoning to discourage a teardown.
Passios said the house will host offices for two businesses he and Vieth operate: Hop Head Farms — a supplier for the craft beer industry — and Ceres Partners, which manages about 90,000 acres of farmland in the Midwest.
Both men live in Massachusetts now, but Passios said Vieth is originally from Wisconsin and went to law school in South Bend, Ind.
"We walked by the property one night and said, 'wow, that could be the new office,'" Passios said. "It's always good to have your own place where you hang your own hat."
The 1,862-square-foot house, built in 1888, is the last one standing on a River North block now populated by new condominium towers.
The property was owned by the estate of a man who refused to sell during his neighborhood's pre-recession construction boom, leaving the home scrunched between two condo towers built in 2006: the 14-story Superior at LaSalle, 150 W. Superior, and a nine-story building at 156 W. Superior.
The former owner died in 2015. Passios declined to say how much he plans to spend rehabbing the home.
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