Joe Kennedy Buys

Chicago's Marshall Field & Co. was determined to sell its giant, profitable Merchandise Mart. Joseph Patrick Kennedy, onetime Securities & Exchange and Maritime Commission chairman, was determined to buy it.

Last week, the deal was made, for cash. For $17 million of his own and his family's money, Landlord Kennedy got the world's largest privately owned office building (two weeks ago, Kennedy bought a 13-story office building from the Socony-Vacuum Oil Co. in Albany for a rumored $1,800,000 cash.)

The 15-year-old Merchandise Mart (4,000,000 sq. ft. of floor space) cost Marshall Field $30 million to build, is still valued on its books at more than $21 million. Once the whitest of elephants, it is now 100% occupied, brings in an impressive $4,000,000 annually in rents.

More important, it has a long waiting list of wholesaler tenants who want to sit in on the Mart's 400,000-a-year retail-buyer traffic. From the Kennedy point of view, the deal was a thumping bargain.

Field's seemed happy too. Said short, tough, beefy Field President Hughston M. McBain: the Mart put the company into real-estate operation to a degree that was not contemplated when the Mart was built. Now that Field's has dropped its wholesale business, the Mart is just a side show. So we're selling.

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