The five-bedroom, 3,632-square-foot co-op unit on the 15th floor of Streeterville’s Drake Tower that attorney and former Federal Communications Commission chair Newton Minow owned until his death last year at age 97 has been listed by his estate for $1.25 million.
The affable Minow was an assistant counsel to onetime Illinois Gov. Adlai Stevenson and was active in Democratic Party politics. He campaigned for President John F. Kennedy and in 1961 was appointed by Kennedy to serve as chairman of the FCC, and shortly afterward Minow famously gave a speech calling television a “vast wasteland.” Minow later was a managing partner for many years at the Sidley Austin law firm, where he recruited to the firm a young summer associate named Barack Obama.
In 1991, Minow and his wife, Josephine, who died in 2022, sold their longtime home in Glencoe and bought the co-op unit in the Drake Tower. The unit has five bathrooms, hardwood floors, a library off the primary bedroom and a large living room with a fireplace.
“The extraordinary thing about this apartment is that it has the most amazing views of not only (Lake Michigan) but also of the buildings along Lake Shore Drive,” listing agent Monique Crossan of Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices Chicago told Elite Street. “It’s wonderful to see the beautiful architecture. This apartment is very large, but it doesn’t feel cavernous — it’s very homey. It’s a grand apartment.”
The Tribune’s Christopher Borrelli interviewed Minow in the Drake co-op in 2017, observing that it contained antique furniture, “hallways lined with art hung gallery-style,” and large picture windows at the front of the apartment that “take in a light so flat and bright and white that the rooms seem to join with the pale sky over Lake Michigan and the frozen gray waters into a gauzy cloud.”
Minow’s heirs listed the co-op in June for $1.25 million. The unit went under contract in late August, and Crossan said she expects the sale to close in the coming weeks for a price she could not disclose.
The co-op unit has a $6,921-a-month homeowners association fee, which includes real estate taxes.
Goldsborough is a freelance reporter.
