One needs only to look at Allan J. Hamilton`s office to see that the traditional trappings of corporate power are alien to Trammell Crow Co.
Hamilton`s desk is near the center of a big room on the fourth floor of 1 Pierce Pl. in west suburban Itasca. Only the conference rooms, closets, washrooms and elevator shafts have partitions.
To Hamilton`s right is the desk of John Wauterlek, division partner in charge of industrial development. To Hamilton`s left is Jim Sheridan, division partner in charge of shopping centers. The four division partners for office properties are in another big room at the other end of the floor.
If Hamilton had his druthers, he probably would do away with the elevator core in the center of the building and open the whole operation, just like Trammell Crow`s home office in Dallas.
That`s Mr. Trammell Crow, a corporate patriach in the Texas tradition, who 37 years ago founded what is now one of the nation`s largest commercial and industrial development firms.
It`s an unpretentious workplace for Hamilton, 48, senior partner in charge of Trammell Crow`s Midwest operations. The region accounts for $500 million of the company`s $6.2 billion in assets. It started approximately $400 million in new projects last year out of $2 billion in starts for the company nationwide.
”I can`t personally recall ever having a private office, here or in the Navy,” said Hamilton, who lives in northwest suburban Elk Grove Village with his wife, Phyllis Lynn, and their sons Mark, 22, and Kirk, 19.
The open office, Hamilton said, ”is our way of doing real estate. A free flow of information and easy communications is important to our style of operation; something I suspect we all learned from Trammell.”
Hamilton was born and reared in Montana. He graduated from Northwestern University, Evanston, in 1959 with a bachelor`s degree in geology. He went straight into the Navy, serving as an aviator and communications and control officer.
”During my last two years in the Navy, I was stationed in the San Francisco Bay area, where there was a very active real estate market,”
Hamilton said. ”I gravitated to real estate, having worked summer jobs during high school and college as a heavy equipment operator on construction projects in Montana.”
The Hamiltons were living in Santa Clara, Calif., ”and I planned to go to work for Coldwell Banker Commercial (Real Estate Services) in San Francisco in 1964,” he said. ”However, my wife, a Texan, asked that I look into jobs in Texas. To keep peace in the family, I agreed to do so.”
Hamilton nosed around Texas and kept stumbling across Trammell Crow`s name. He called Crow`s office, set up an interview, met Crow and was hired.
Actually, Hamilton went to work for George A. Fuller Co., a Dallas real estate firm then owned by Crow and Cloyce Box, an all-pro for the Detroit Lions in the 1950s. Crow would plan developments, and Box would build them. Hamilton was Box`s administrative assistant and pilot. In 1967, he moved to Trammell Crow`s leasing department.
Trammell Crow had entered Chicago in 1960 by building a plant for Continental Can Co. in Elk Grove Village. By the time Hamilton was tapped to open a regional office here in 1968, Trammell Crow had constructed 18 industrial buildings in the suburbs.
”I was the sole employee here, operating out of a one-room office in an old farmhouse on Touhy Avenue,” Hamilton said. Today, the regional office employs 75 people.
The company constructed office buildings: First, a single-story structure for itself at 1001 Touhy Ave., Des Plaines, and then, three more buildings at 999, 1011 and 1111 Touhy Ave., for a total of 500,000 square feet around the intersection of Touhy and Higgins Road.
Hamilton recalled the day in the late 1960s when he and Crow drove around the suburbs and ended up at Thorndale Avenue and old Ill. Hwy. 53–then an intersection of two-lane highways, but 10 years later, an interchange of Int. Hwy. 290.
”At the time, Woodfield was just going under construction” about four miles to the north in Schaumburg, Hamilton said.
Schaumburg obviously was where the action was to be, with office developers staking out parcels around Woodfield. Thorndale and Ill. 53, in comparison, was surrounded by farmland in unincorporated Du Page County west of Itasca.
However, Hamilton said: ”Trammell and I concluded that this site was strategically located between the Northwest and East-West Tollway corridors, near O`Hare (International Airport) and at the intersection of two proposed expressways. We decided to assemble land there.”
(The second expressway is the Elgin-O`Hare, which is in the planning stages.)
That decision fit Trammell Crow`s reputation for being a maverick.
”People who want to buy one lot and build one building go to an area with an identity, such as Woodfield,” Hamilton said. ”But there`s a lot of luggage that comes with a site like that, such as traffic congestion and high prices that prevent the assembly of enough land to do effective master planning.”
The big push in Itasca came in 1978, when Trammell Crow had assembled enough property, 300 acres, to announce a joint venture with Jaymont Properties Inc. for an office-hotel campus.
”We had the groundbreaking luncheon for the hotel and first office building,” Hamilton said. ”Trammell got up and said he`d tell everyone in the room something only three people–his wife, my wife and himself–knew. The name of the hotel was to be the Hamilton, and the name of the project, Hamilton Lakes.
”We held up printing brochures for three months while I tried to convince Trammell to find another name for the project.”
But Crow stuck to his guns.
Hamilton Lakes has a 420-room Stouffer`s hotel and nearly 1.7 million square feet of offices. Trammell Crow recently broke ground there for a 35-story, 850,000-square-foot tower, one of the tallest ever attempted in suburban Chicago.
When completed in the 1990s, Hamilton Lakes is to have more than 7 million square feet of offices and a second, luxury hotel. All this, on a site seasoned real estate heads once considered marginal.
Trammell Crow has 12 million square feet of buildings in the Chicago area, a number that may quadruple in the next five years ”if business conditions permit us to do all that we`d like to do,” Hamilton said.
Beyond Hamilton Lakes, Trammell Crow has begun or is planning projects totaling 3.6 million square feet of offices, 793,000 square feet of retailing and 4 million square feet of office-research, distribution and manufacturing space, as well as more than 900 hotel rooms, in the northwestern and western suburbs.
All will be multi-use properties, reflecting Trammell Crow`s preference for projects large enough to permit master planning and control over all aspects of development.
The Midwest operation also includes Detroit, Milwaukee and Minneapolis, with expanions being considered to Cleveland and Omaha and Calgary, Edmonton, Toronto and Vancouver, Canada. Wherever Trammell Crow goes, it likely will continue its management philosophy of decentralized operation.
”We don`t like to think of ourselves as a Dallas company . . . because the majority of our projects are locally owned” by the local partners, Hamilton said.
”It`s not so much a question of autonomy but the fact that real estate is a very local business in which good judgments are made by local people intimately familiar with their markets. We work hard to avoid having a grand strategy for the entire country.”
