James McHugh Construction Co.

James McHugh Construction Co. is a fourth-generation, family-owned Chicago general contractor founded in 1897 and headquartered on South Michigan Avenue. It carries a $2 billion bonding capacity and roughly 130 salaried staff alongside more than 400 tradespeople, and it self-performs concrete, which is unusual among high-rise builders at its scale. The firm covers preconstruction, construction management, general contracting, design-build and virtual design and construction, with in-house structural engineering. Its Chicago portfolio includes the 1000M tower, Park Tower, the restoration of Marina City, the Ramova Theatre renovation and 508 E Pershing. McHugh is partnered with BOWA Construction on the conversion of the former Harris Bank headquarters at 111 West Monroe into a 308-key hotel above 345 apartments.

Ten of the twenty tallest concrete towers in Chicago have been built by McHugh or are under way now, and the firm has had a hand in seven of the city’s ten tallest buildings of any construction type. It was the first contractor in Chicago to use a tower crane, at Marina City in 1960, and it has erected several buildings that were, on completion, the tallest reinforced concrete structures in the world. Renovation is a substantial share of the book: roughly three quarters of the renovation portfolio is complete gut work, the firm has delivered more than a dozen city and national landmark restorations, and it has redesigned or refurbished over 20,000 hotel guest rooms.

Self-performance goes beyond the concrete the firm is known for. In-house crews handle carpentry, drywall, excavation and demolition, which keeps sequencing under one roof on constrained downtown sites, while cast-in-place concrete runs through the affiliate McHugh Concrete. Preconstruction starts at programmatic review and early procurement of long-lead items and carries through budgeting into detailed engineering. Market coverage spans multi-family residential, hotel and hospitality, sports and entertainment venues, medical facilities, commercial and residential interiors, and adaptive reuse.

Safety sits at an experience modification rate of 0.82, and the company holds memberships in the National Safety Council, the Chicagoland Construction Safety Council, the American Society of Safety Engineers and Build Safe Chicago. About 80 percent of projects are LEED, and McHugh has supported more than $1.1 billion of green construction in the past five years. Repeat clients account for roughly 80 percent of the workload, and the Chicago Tribune named it a Top Workplace five years running from 2017 through 2021.

On workforce development, McHugh was the first company in Chicago to bring minorities into the ironworkers’ union, in the early 1970s, and the first to enter a joint venture with a minority contractor. In 2016 it founded McHugh University, a free training programme teaching business practice to disadvantaged, minority and women-owned firms. Partner organisations include Black Contractors United, the African American Contractors Association, HACIA, Chicago Women in Trades, the Federation for Women Contractors, the Chicago Urban League, Dawson Tech, the Chicago Minority Supplier Development Council and the Women’s Business Development Center. The company supports more than 75 non-profit and charitable organisations a year and has been engaged for over thirty years with the Chicagoland Associated General Contractors, the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat and the American Concrete Institute.