LISTENING TO THE DEBATE OVER THE fate of Goose Island, you`d think the place teemed with widget makers about to be overrun by yuppie hordes.
Forget it. The economic essence of the 160-acre inner-city enclave is garbage.
We`re not talking about run-of-the-mill household garbage, either. It`s got high-rise garbage. It`s got downtown office building garbage. It`s even got industrial garbage, er, scrap, collected throughout the Midwest and recycled on Goose Island into reusable materials.
Indeed, the one thing Goose Island doesn`t have-or, to be scrupulously accurate, doesn`t have much of-is manufacturing.
Yet that hasn`t stopped city planners and economic development activists from proposing that Goose Island become the city`s next Planned Manufacturing District (PMD). The first was the back side of the Clybourn Avenue corridor, where the trendy shopping district between North and Fullerton Avenues became a textbook example of how to convert former manufacturing and warehouse loft buildings into exposed brick chic.
The goal of a PMD on Goose Island, which is bounded, roughly, by Chicago, North and Elston Avenues and Halsted Street, is not to protect the 22 businesses with 1,300 employees that remain after three decades of industrial decline. Most of them are not in manufacturing, but are more properly classified as distribution and warehousing.
Rather, city officials promoting the PMD covet the island`s vacant acreage and abandoned loft buildings as potential sites for future industrial tenants.
”There`s so little industrial space on the North Side,” said city Economic Development Commissioner Joseph James. ”We need industrial space to accommodate existing companies (currently in the city and looking for vacant land to build new facilities) and new users not currently in the city.”
”Goose Island land is precious in that context,” said Planning Commissioner David Mosena.
The only problem with their vision is that it doesn`t correspond to what the largest owner of vacant land on the island wants. CMC Corp., the former owner of the Chicago Milwaukee Railroad, wants to turn the northern half of the island into Chicago`s Ile de la Cite, a residential neighborhood of 1,280 homes and apartments, a small pocket park, 50,000 square feet of retail space and 400,000 square feet of commercial space.
CMC wants to buy the waterfront property currently used by Waste Management Inc.`s Ace Disposal Co. as a waterfront garbage transfer station
(they take the garbage collected by small trucks, compact it and put it on large trucks for shipment to the dumps on the Far South Side) and turn it into a strip of walkways, marinas and restaurants. They view their 32-acre proposal-they already own a 26-acre vacant railyard at the site-as the logical extension of the still-growing Lincoln Park neighborhood to the northeast.
”It`s an opportunity to develop what some have called the `Super Loop,`
” said CMC chairman Edwin Jacobson. ”It`s in the path of development. It`s a significant opportunity for commercial and residential development.”
Jacobson has pushed himself into the forefront of those advocating the transformation of the inner city into a service center. Drawing a line in the dusty vacant lots of Goose Island, he has decided to take on the industrial retention advocates at City Hall who fret about the decline of good-paying manufacturing jobs and their replacement by part-time, poorly paid service sector jobs.
”Of course we have a significant economic interest we want to protect,” he said. ”But the city would be making a major mistake if it ignores this proposal.”
Only three years ago, Jacobson was willing to commit his firm to the city`s vision of building an industrial park on Goose Island. Just two weeks before Mayor Harold Washington`s death, CMC, Opus Corp., a major suburban industrial park developer, and the late mayor announced with much fanfare a warehouse-industrial park on the island.
”The plan did not work financially,” Jacobson said to explain his change of heart. ”The trend of development in this area precludes warehouse development. The value of the land is too high.” Jacobson, claiming the city is incapable of attracting the type of tenants needed to make such an industrial park successful, vowed to let his land lie vacant if his residential/commercial plan is rejected by the city.
City officials bristle at the charge that they are somehow responsible for the collapse of the CMC-Opus plan. ”CMC`s claim that it tried to make an industrial park happen and couldn`t is totally fallacious,” said Mosena, who worked on the original plan for Washington and is credited with getting Mayor Richard Daley to reverse his campaign statement opposing PMDs once in office. ”CMC changed their corporate goals for the property. They`re land speculators.”
Walking around the island, one has a hard time envisioning CMC`s latest proposal coming to fruition. The future site of the riverfront walkway is suffused by the stench of garbage. Ace Disposal trucks rumble across pock-marked streets impassable to ordinary vehicles.
CMC officials know their proposal requires the relocation of the Waste Management subsidiary. ”We`re willing to relocate them at no cost in exchange for their land,” said Jacobson.
But they unsuccessfully ran up against the same hurdle when pursuing the proposed industrial park. ”It wasn`t an equitable transaction for us,” said James Barry, vice president of operations for Waste Management of Illinois, which runs Ace Disposal and has publicly endorsed the PMD. ”In servicing our customer base, we`re ideally suited to the downtown area, which generates a lot of garbage.”
CMC`s new proposal also would require substantial investment by the city. The scheme, designed by architects at Skidmore Owings & Merrill, calls for two new bridges across the North Branch of the Chicago River-to North Avenue on the north and Kingsbury Street on the east-and streets, sewers, water and street lighting throughout the area.
The price tag is estimated at $19 million in current dollars. CMC wants the city to declare the area a tax increment financing district, so that property tax dollars from the future development at the site can be funneled into a fund to pay off bonds sold to finance the public improvements.
”This project would generate gross tax revenues of $300 million over 30 years,” asserted Jacobson. ”Debt service will be only $45 million.”
The city is willing to use the financing mechanism for infrastructure improvements on the island, but only if it is permanently zoned for manufacturing. ”We have a pro-active policy on industrial development,” said James. ”We may go after federal funding for Goose Island to pay for infrastructure.”
Businesses on the island are split over the PMD designation, and CMC isn`t the only former PMD advocate who has switched sides. ”If the city has a single industry they`re trying to bring in here, I`d like to see him,” said Richard Lissner, president of Midwest Industrial Metals Corp.
The 150-employee firm, which owns 5.5 acres on the southern half of the island, has poured $2 million into its scrap metal reprocessing facilities over the past three years and has another $1.2 million expansion on the drawing board.
”Originally we were for the PMD because the city promised to take care of the infrastructure and there would be new industry coming in,” Lissner said. He pointed to North Cherry Street outside his plant, where potholes too numerous to count sink two and three feet below ground level. ”But in the interim, there`s been less business on the island and the infrastructure is getting worse, not better.”
”What you have is sissified industry moving in on us,” he said. ”Do we want to move? No. Truthfully, do we have to move? Yes, because it`s only a matter of time before our new neighbors force us out.”
Lissner says the PMD would only hurt his firm`s ability to finance his inevitable move. ”We were looking at property off the Stevenson Expressway,” he said. ”But I`ve got to be able to get a good price for this property.”
And that`s a price only a commercial/residential developer can offer.
