A six-bedroom, 13,000-square-foot brick mansion in Streeterville dating to the 19th century that recently was proposed as a cannabis dispensary was listed on Sept. 16 for $3.95 million.
Built in 1885 and designed by the Burling & Whitehouse architectural firm, the three-story mansion at 212 E. Ontario Street has had many varied uses over the years. For its first several decades, it was a single-family home, and its most noteworthy owner and resident was noted portrait painter George Peter Alexander Healy, who lived there until his death in 1894.
After World War II, the mansion mostly was occupied by commercial uses, including advertising agency offices in the 1950s and 1960s. In the mid-1970s, it housed a home furnishings retailer called Julian B, according to a Dec. 7, 1974 Tribune article by June Hill. The house suffered damage from a major fire in the late 1950s, and it was expanded with an addition in the 1970s.
In 2008, the American College of Surgeons, which had had a longtime presence in the neighborhood including in the building next door, paid $2.2 million for the mansion.
The American College of Surgeons sold the house in 2021 for $2.2 million to Ontario Chicago LLC, a Lake Forest-based venture that renovated the mansion, listing agent Jason Hiller of Jameson told Elite Street. Earlier this year, the co-owners of the Dispensary 33 chain of marijuana dispensaries proposed placing a dispensary in the vintage Ontario Street mansion. However, after the plan drew neighborhood opposition, the city’s Zoning Board of Appeals in August gave a thumbs-down to the idea, and less than a month later, the mansion’s owners placed it up for sale.
“It’s a very unique building. It can be made back into a single-family home if someone wants to do that, but it also has a lot of opportunity to do mixed use, with residential and office, and retail-wise as well. And we’ve had a few restaurant groups looking at it,” Hiller said. “The dispensary group that applied got denied, unfortunately. We were hoping that was going to go that way. It’s a fantastic building, and it’s got a great history.”
The mansion has five bathrooms, four fireplaces and a three-car garage. The sellers recently accepted a contract to sell the mansion. Hiller declined to comment on the buyer’s likely use for it.
The mansion had a $85,387 property tax bill in the 2020 tax year.
Goldsborough is a freelance reporter.
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