Nearly a year ago, Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava unveiled his design for a very tall, almost needle-like hotel, condo and retail tower for Chicago: 124 stories high but only 920,000 square feet altogether. He and would-be developer Christopher Carley, head of the Fordham Co.--a successful condominium developer in Chicago--held a press conference at the Museum of Contemporary Art, not far from the planned site at 400 N. Lake Shore Drive.

Notably absent that day was a source of financing for the structure. When asked about it, Carley essentially said he was looking for it, and hoped to find it soon. As of this week, he hadn't.

It began to look like the Calatrava design would end up as yet another "world's" or at least "North America's" tallest building concepts on the shelf--unbuilt, along with the others that have been proposed for Chicago with some regularity, especially since Malaysia's Petronas Towers unseated Sears Tower as the world's tallest in the 1990s.

Now an Irish real estate magnate has bought the site from Carley for about $65 million. Garrett Kelleher, executive chairman of Dublin-based Shelbourne Development Ltd. and the Shelbourne Group, plans to provide all of the equity financing for the project himself, and also has a close relationship with the Anglo Irish Bank, which has worked with him on other projects in the United States and Europe. The bank provided the financing for the site acquisition of 400 N. Lake Shore Drive.

"Putting in the equity himself will make it much easier to obtain the rest of the financing," Chicago-based Tom Murphy, general counsel for Kelleher, told CPN this afternoon. "Everything ought to come together in time for a spring 2007 groundbreaking."

Will it be the tower Calatrava envisioned? According to Murphy, Kelleher "loves the design" so the answer is probably yes, generally speaking, if not in every particular, since construction plans have yet to be completed. "The design is a very important part of appeal of the building," said Murphy. "It means that the building can and will be marketed internationally."

In the international market for top-of-the-market condos at least, 400 N. Michigan may prove to be a bargain. Last year, the condos in the tower were estimated to price out at more than $750 per square foot--high for the Chicago market but not when compared to London or Tokyo or even New York City.