For almost three years, a strip of precious riverfront land east of Michigan Avenue has been ready for development as a public park but kept inaccessible and in disgraceful condition. The south bank of the Chicago River along the East Wacker Drive extension is one of downtown`s worst eyesores.
Improvement of the riverside strip was long delayed by other public works projects that cluttered the area with construction materials, equipment and the parked cars of workmen. Since 1982, however, the way has been clear to turn it into a delightfully landscaped promenade.
Municipal records show that developers of the adjoining $2 billion Illinois Center long ago turned the land over to the city, which is responsible for creating and maintaining the greenway. Yet the city has failed to act.
Any analysis of the riverbank`s continuing ugliness must include recollection of a few key events dating back to 1966.
In that year, the architecture firms of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM)
and C.F. Murphy were hired by the Chicago Central Area Committee to study means of developing railroad air rights in the area bounded by the river, Michigan Avenue, Lake Shore Drive and Randolph Street.
One of the chief SOM-Murphy recommendations was that Wacker Drive not be extended straight eastward along the river all the way from Michigan to Lake Shore Drive, but that it be canted off at Columbus Drive in a southeasterly direction to link up with the lakefront.
This thoughtful routing of Wacker would have preserved more of the south riverbank as a recreational amenity without impeding auto traffic. Yet the recommendation was ignored when the city published its Illinois Central Air Rights Guidelines in 1968. Municipal planners decided to run the new triple-decked Wacker extension directly along the river, leaving only a narrow strip for park development.
That was better than nothing, of course. To their credit, city planners also refined their scheme by coming up with tentative design standards. The riverside park was to be built on two levels between Michigan Avenue and Columbus Drive and on a single level between Columbus and Lake Shore Drive.
The need for a linear park was reiterated in the city`s Riveredge Plan of 1974 and in the Chicago River Promenade Plan of 1979.
But for years, disruptive public works projects forestalled the park. Part of the six-lane Wacker Drive extension was built in 1969, and the rest of it in 1974 and 1975. When the Metropolitan Sanitary District found it necessary to dig a Deep Tunnel shaft next to the Michigan Avenue bridge, the park site was torn up for two years ending in May of 1982. A few months later, workmen finally completed the new Columbus Drive lift bridge, which had created a riverbank construction mess further east.
Today, however, the park site is still an inaccessible eyesore. Gone is the gravel once spread along its length as a temporary beautification measure. Still in place are 19 trees planted in the 1970s, but three are dead and the rest are lined up in a pattern and at intervals that suggest no intelligent landscaping plan. The weedy, often muddy riverfront land is littered with bottles, cans and other trash.
Until recent times, the riverbank just east of the Michigan Avenue bridge was reached by a stairway that was integral to the elegantly ornamented 1920 span designed by Edward H. Bennett. It was simple to walk from Michigan down to a dock where excursion boats and an occasional visiting naval vessel were once berthed. But the stairway was destroyed for the extension of Wacker and never replaced.
If the city ever gets around to building the promised park, it must absolutely restore access from Michigan Avenue as well as from the lower level of Wacker. A thorough on-foot exploration of the area suggests that this would present no insuperable design or construction problems. Any new stairway should be in close harmony with Bennett`s original design.
Happily, the new Columbus Drive bridge is likely to fit in well with park development. It is the first downtown lift bridge designed specifically to allow pedestrians to walk beneath one of its leaves (the south one). The absence of this feature on other bridges makes it impossible to stroll uninterruptedly along the river.
Yet even if the park becomes a reality, the triple-decked and ramped Wacker extension behind it will remain as an ugly backdrop and a reminder of the city`s limited sensitivity to urban design challenges–particularly when highways are involved.
How do you cover up anything as big and unsightly as the north side of the Wacker extension? A tastefully crafted screen of masonry or metal might have worked. Or Chicago could have followed the lead of other cities beset by the same problem. In Tokyo, for example, some elevated highways that pass through the central city are largely hidden behind stores and other tenanted spaces.
A remedy quite like that was in fact proposed for the Wacker extension two years ago when a group of prominent architects drafted a new downtown master plan for the Chicago Central Area Committee. Architect Stanley Tigerman conceived the idea of grafting rowhouses onto the edge of the three-decked structure, thereby hiding it and providing residents with a splendid riverside view. The notion seemed a bit far-fetched at the time, but it probably deserves serious study. Perhaps anything is better than remaining supine while highway engineers despoil the landscape.
In any case, the riverfront mess can hardly be discussed without mentioning another Illinois Center will-o`-the-wisp: to wit, a six-acre park to be privately developed and maintained near the center of the skyscraper complex.
Illinois Center promoters have been talking about this above-grade park for more than a decade and displaying artists` renderings on which appear grass, reflecting pools and trees of huge size (although a city ordinance requires only four feet of topsoil on top of the elevated support structure). One assumes the park may actually be built some day, since it is mandatory under terms of the ordinance.
But for real dreamdust, it is necessary to examine the 1968 plan mentioned earlier. That one contains artists` conceptions of new landfill park land jutting far out into the lake due east of Illinois Center. One need not be a cynic to predict it will never happen. The only landfill provided in the area recently will accommodate automobiles on the relocated Lake Shore Drive. As usual, the highwaymen have the last word and it is the developers whose high-density complexes are particularly well served by the endless road work going on east of Michigan Avenue from Grant Park north to Ontario Street. At this point, fat highway construction and real estate profits are assured, but so far as the general public is concerned it is too late to do anything about most of the planning mistakes and omissions in the Illinois Center area during the last 20 years.
Still, let us not forget the mess that was supposed to be a charming little riverside park. Aren`t you sick of looking at it? Don`t you suppose it disenchants the thousands of tourists who cross the bridge or sail by on sightseeing boats every summer? Does anybody out there care about beauty, cockeyed public works priorities–and phony promises?
