The timing was coincidental but totally appropriate: at two separate meetings on a single day last week, announcements were made revealing the very different fates of the Three Arts Club building, at 1300 N. Dearborn, and the organization that owned it for nearly a century.

Since the controversial $13 million sale of the structure to a developer last year, the two had gone their separate ways. Pockets stuffed with $11 million in net proceeds from the sale, the venerable Three Arts Club went off in search of a new mission to replace the one Jane Addams and 31 colleagues had articulated for it in 1912: creating a safe haven in the city for women artists. Meanwhile, the haven itself—a Byzantine-style landmark by City Hall designers Holabird and Roche, with quarters for 100 residents, a tea room, a library, a dining hall, and a spacious courtyard—headed down Zoning Change Lane toward a commercial makeover at the hands of M Development, which has also recently acquired the Cedar Hotel on north State Street as well as a big chunk of upscale Oak Street, including the Esquire Theatre.