Chicago investment executive A. Steven Crown, a member of one of the city’s wealthiest families and a partner in his family’s Henry Crown & Co., has been identified as the buyer who paid $17.4 million in March for the full-floor condominium on the 34th floor of the building at 9 W. Walton St., in what is one of the city’s highest-priced condo purchases on record.
A source confirmed that Crown, who is the son of businessman Lester Crown, was the buyer of the condo, which is one level below the four full-floor condos that billionaire and Citadel founder Ken Griffin purchased in 2017 for a combined $58.75 million. Griffin, who has relocated his business and his family to Florida, currently has the four-bedroom, 7,085-square-foot full-floor condo on the 35th floor for sale for $14 million.
Long a North Shore resident, Crown bought the condo, which was never publicly listed, through an opaque land trust. He is not the only member of the Crown family ever to have paid more than $10 million for a Chicago home. In 2002, his brother, James Crown, paid $10.1 million for a Gold Coast condo.
The sellers, who could not be identified, paid $9.91 million in 2018 for the condo as raw space.
Listing agent Susan Miner of Premier Relocation could not be reached for comment, while Jeffrey Lowe of Compass, who represented Crown, declined to comment on any aspect of the transaction and declined to confirm the buyer’s identity.
Although several subsequent Chicago condo sales have eclipsed the deal’s $17.4 million amount, the sale price is still one of the highest-priced amounts ever recorded for a Chicago-area residence. The only publicly recorded deals for more are filmmaker George Lucas and his wife, Mellody Hobson, paying $18.75 million in 2015 for the 65th-floor penthouse in the Park Tower, Groupon co-founder Eric Lefkofsky paying $19.5 million in 2014 for a mansion on Lake Michigan in Glencoe, private equity executive Bryan Cressey and his wife, Iliana Sweis, paying $20 million earlier this year for the 89th-floor penthouse in the Trump International Hotel & Tower, and Mexican billionaire German Larrea paying $20.56 million in September for a four-bedroom, 10,000-square-foot duplex condominium on the 71st floor of the Residences at the St. Regis Tower.
In addition, billionaire Justin Ishbia has paid $39.9 million for four separate lakefront properties in Winnetka, but the properties are not all contiguous, and no one property sold for more than $16 million. And while Griffin paid $58.75 million in four separate transactions in 2017 for the 35th through 38th floors in the building at 9 W. Walton, only one of the four transactions — his purchase of the 38th-floor penthouse for $21.17 million — exceeded the amount that Crown paid in March for his condo.
The 34th-floor condo at 9 W. Walton had a $208,395 property tax bill in the 2020 tax year.
Bob Goldsborough is a freelance reporter.
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