The Inland Steel building at 30 W. Monroe St. was designated a Chicago landmark in 1998.

A New York investment firm that bought the Inland Steel building on the verge of the recession has put the Loop landmark on the market.

Joining a recent run of downtown office landlords looking to cash out amid high property values and demand for office space in the city, a venture of New York-based Capital Properties is seeking around $88 million, or $352 per square foot, for the historic 19-story office tower at 30 W. Monroe St., according to sources familiar with the offering.

The 62-year-old modernist building, the first skyscraper to be built in the Loop after the Great Depression, ushered in a new era of Chicago architecture with its groundbreaking stainless steel-and-glass design. It is being marketed by real estate services firm Cushman & Wakefield as part of a three-building, three city portfolio. Framed as the "trophy collection," the trio of properties also includes the 946,000-square-foot Trinity Centre office building in downtown Manhattan and the Park Square office building in Boston.

The buildings could be sold separately, but Capital intends to unload them as a 1.7 million-square-foot portfolio that could fetch more than $1 billion, according to a source.

A Capital venture purchased the 250,007-square-foot Inland Steel building in 2007 for $57.2 million, according to Cook County property records. The owners took out a $50.2 million mortgage on the building in 2013, records show.

Capital is looking to unload the building, as many other downtown office landlords do the same. With a strong job market and prospective buyers looking to take advantage of relatively low interest rates, a flurry of downtown office buildings have hit the market over the past few months.

Owners are putting the buildings up for grabs amid rampant downtown office leasing, but with uncertainty ahead about how much longer the marathon economic growth cycle will continue and what will happen to Cook County property taxes as new Assessor Fritz Kaegi implements a new approach to valuing properties that will likely place more of the local tax burden on commercial properties.

The Inland Steel building is 84 percent leased—slightly lower than the 87 percent average for downtown office buildings at the end of the first quarter, according to brokerage CBRE—with 16 tenants that average just 12,431 square feet, according to a Cushman marketing flyer. Oak Street Health, a network of primary care physicians for Medicare patients, is the largest tenant with a little less than 26,000 square feet, according to real estate information company CoStar Group.

Commissioned by Inland Steel and designed by architecture firm Skidmore Owings & Merrill, the property was the first commercial building in the city to be fully air-conditioned and the first to include indoor below-ground parking, according to the Chicago Architecture Center.

Its mid-century design broke from a theme of high-ornamented buildings in Chicago, offering a column-free interior that was innovative at the time and helped set a standard for many Chicago building designs that followed. Brokers Doug Harmon and Adam Spies of Cushman's New York office are marketing the portfolio along with Tom Sitz of the firm's Chicago office and Brian Doherty of its Boston office.

This story has been updated to correct that 30 W. Monroe was the first skyscraper built in the Loop, not in all of Chicago, after the Great Depression.

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