A person fell from scaffolding during construction at the Howard Brown Health Halsted building and was rushed to an area hospital in fair-to-serious condition. The fall happened alongside the building at 3501 N. Halsted St., according to the Chicago Fire Department.
The incident, first reported Monday, was confirmed by CBS News Chicago, which cited the Chicago Fire Department for the person's condition and the location of the fall. CBS Chicago's SkyWatch camera showed scaffolding set up behind the building at the time. It was not immediately known what construction work was underway when the fall occurred, authorities said.
Howard Brown Health Halsted sits at the northeast corner of Halsted Street and Cornelia Avenue in Chicago's Lakeview neighborhood, on a site with deep roots in the city's LGBTQ+ nightlife history. The clinic occupies the former site of Little Jim's, which opened in 1975 as the first gay bar in the Northalsted district before closing in the summer of 2020. Other businesses once located in buildings on the facility's footprint included the Ram Adult Bookstore, Taco & Burrito Palace and the Pink Rhino tattoo shop, all of which were demolished to make way for the new center.
A Years-Long Build With Lingering Work
The health center's construction has been a prolonged undertaking. According to Urbanize Chicago, crews broke ground in March 2022, and with concrete work topped out, the project was on track for a July 2023 completion. McHugh Construction led the build, the outlet reported, on a site intended to eventually double Howard Brown's patient capacity in the neighborhood.
The clinic ultimately opened to patients in the last week of September 2023, even as McHugh Construction finished out work on an upper level, per a report from Wolf Media USA. Howard Brown Health itself had said construction was progressing swiftly and that a tower crane would be erected on the site, according to a construction update posted on the organization's website. The dossier does not explain why scaffolding or construction activity remained at the site more than two years after the clinic began seeing patients.
Conflicting Figures On The Building's Size
Accounts of the facility's footprint diverge. AIA Chicago has described the facility as a 91,000-square-foot flagship facility in Lakeview, while Wolf Media USA's report on the project's completion described it as a 76,000-square-foot concrete-framed building. The discrepancy between the two figures has not been reconciled.
What is consistent across sources is the scope of services inside. The five-level center brings together primary care, behavioral health, oral health, laboratory services, financial assistance and pharmacy care under one roof, according to AIA Chicago. Howard Brown Health, founded in 1974, is described as one of the nation's largest LGBTQ+ health care organizations.
What Remains Unknown
Neither the identity of the person who fell nor details about their role at the construction site have been released. The exact time of the fall, the height involved, the type of scaffolding in use and the precise sequence of events have not been verified. It also remains unclear whether any citation, inspection finding or violation resulted from the incident, or whether the work required a city scaffolding permit under rules that apply to buildings in Chicago's Central Business District above 40 feet or any building above 80 feet, per guidance from the City of Chicago. Federal workplace safety rules cited by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration require scaffolds to be designed by a qualified person and built and loaded according to that design, though it has not been established whether that standard applied to this incident.
