There comes a time in the life of every city when it must either draw the line on key urban planning issues or watch its quality of life sink inexorably. Mayor Richard M. Daley’s administration is now taking such a stand in advocating the reuse of the McGraw-Hill Building at 520 N. Michigan Ave., which developer John Buck had sought to demolish for a Nordstrom-anchored shopping mall.
Even if Daley and previous mayors have sped the street’s descent from Magnificent Mile to Mediocre Mile by giving developers free rein to tear down first-rate architecture, the stand is significant. Preserving the McGraw-Hill Building would mark a major departure from City Hall’s policy of laissez-faire.
And it would be part of a broader story that has seen Daley push to save 30 buildings and districts, including the McGraw-Hill, that temporarily lost landmark protection in 1995 due to an obscure Council Council housekeeping measure. To date, 24 of the sites have received permanent landmark status, while the McGraw-Hill is one of six buildings expected to be voted on by the City Council before April 1.
Designed by Chicago architects Frederick Thielbar and John Fugard, the 68-year-old, limestone-clad McGraw-Hill is by no means a great building, but it is certainly a very good one. It is at once weighty, like the old Beaux-Arts buildings on North Michigan, and soaring, like the 919 N. Michigan Ave. building (originally the Palmolive Building). The art historian Richard Guy Wilson has playfully dubbed its fusion of Greek-influenced classicism and Art Deco “Greco-Deco.”
The building also is important to its surroundings. North of the Michigan Avenue Bridge, it joins the Wrigley Building, the Tribune Tower and the Intercontinental Hotel to form a powerful gateway of masonry-clad, Jazz Age skyscrapers. Imagine Buck’s ill-proportioned, glitzy 600 N. Michigan Ave. building plunked into this elegant district, like a gaudy rhinestone amid real jewels, and it’s easy to recognize what’s at stake in the 2-year-old preservation battle over the McGraw-Hill.
In 1995–fresh from winning city approval to tear down the 600 block, which included the Ludwig Mies van der Rohe-designed Arts Club of Chicago–Buck announced he wanted to tear down the McGraw-Hill to make way for a retail galleria leading to a Nordstrom store on Rush Street. He also sought to construct a deck over lower Grand Avenue; the deck would have let him build more valuable storefronts along North Michigan. For this and other infrastructure “improvements,” the developer asked for a $14 million public subsidy.
Daley not only rejected the proposed subsidy as welfare for the rich, but he also ruled out a deck with buildings on top of it. Later in 1995, the Commission on Chicago Landmarks voted unanimously in favor of landmark status for the McGraw-Hill, recommending that “critical features” of the building–its Michigan and Grand Avenue facades, along with a portion of its southern facade–should be preserved, though other parts of the building could be altered or demolished.
In December, published reports suggested that the city had shifted course and only wanted the Michigan Avenue facade saved. But Daley’s planning commissioner, Jeff Boyle, has labeled the reports erroneous. The city still wants to save the facades specified by the landmarks commission while Buck would be allowed to gut the rest of the McGraw-Hill, Boyle says.
What is one to make of all this? The short answer is that City Hall may finally have begun to recognize the importance of historic preservation on Chicago’s grandest street, though cynics surely will argue that Daley is simply punishing Buck for creating the 600 block controversy during his last re-election campaign.
The once-Magnificent Mile has taken an enormous visual pounding in the last 25 years, with bland gigantism and throwaway schlock muscling in on a once-graceful ensemble of dowager queens. Lacking either economic incentives for historic preservation or design guidelines that encourage new buildings to harmonize with old ones, City Hall has done little to prevent the carnage.
The most significant part of Daley’s stand on McGraw-Hill, however, has nothing to do with buildings and everything to do with the spaces between them–in particular, the space between the McGraw-Hill and the Marriott Hotel to its immediate north. Had Buck been allowed to build stores on a deck there, it would have walled off the street and set a horrible precedent. Other developers surely would have made similar requests, and all too quickly, North Michigan would have been transformed from a sun-washed boulevard to a dark and dreary canyon.
The city’s rejection of Buck’s proposal to build a deck with buildings atop it deck was absolutely consonant with Daley’s high-profile emphasis on open space, epitomized by the recently concluded battle with Gov. Jim Edgar over Daley’s proposal to turn Meigs Field into a lakefront park. For a city’s open spaces are constituted not only by its parks and plazas, but also by its sidewalks and the vistas they offer, however modest, like the one along Grand Avenue. Without these amenities, far too easy to take for granted, the quality of life would suffer immeasurably.
But that, of course, is only part of the McGraw-Hill story; the rest of the tale concerns how to incorporate the building into Buck’s mall without destroying the aesthetic integrity of the building or the developer’s ability to make a profit. Here again, it is instructive to see how things have changed from two years ago.
Buck reportedly told city officials in 1995 that the 17-story McGraw-Hill was too big for a mall and therefore uneconomical. Then came pressure from City Hall to save the building and, lo and behold, Buck found a way to put a four-story retail complex at the bottom of the McGraw-Hill and a hotel on the remaining 13 floors. Suddenly, the McGraw-Hill wasn’t too big. It was just fine, as long as Nordstrom executives would go along with the plan. As of early last week, they remained non-committal.
Some voices have questioned the city’s insistence on historic preservation, saying it jeopardizes the Nordstrom deal. But by sticking to the landmark commission’s recommendation more than the building’s North Michigan Avenue facade should be preserved, city officials are not being fussy aesthetes. They are recognizing that it would be a travesty to do anything less.
Among the reasons the McGraw-Hill was nominated for landmark status is the way it echoes Finnish architect Eliel Saarinen’s unbuilt, second-place design in the 1922 Tribune Tower architectural competition, which sought to surpass Chicago’s blocky office buildings with a gracefully-telescoping skyscraper. For all the attraction of the incised sculptures on the McGraw-Hill’s facade–characters of the Zodiac, such as Taurus the bull–the essence of the building’s beauty is comparable to Saarinen’s Tribune design. And that beauty is three- rather than two-dimensional. With only the Michigan Avenue facade left, this sculptural quality would be lost, replaced by a false front plastered onto a mall like an Old West movie set.
To be sure, preservationists have raised questions about the wisdom of taking down the building’s facades piece by piece and then hanging them on a new steel frame, as Boyle is willing to let Buck do. But by voting to protect the building from demolition, the City Council can ensure that changes to its facades will be subject to the landmark commission’s review. That would assure high aesthetic standards, based on the way the commission helped guide the successful 1995 renovation of the Reliance Building at 32 N. State St.
The importance of saving second-tier buildings like the McGraw-Hill in ways that allow development to proceed cannot be understated. As much as renowned architectural monuments like the Reliance, they endow cities with their special character, making time visible through the contrast of old and new, as the critic Lewis Mumford once said. Recycling them for new uses is part of an international trend, with roots in the environmental movement, which recognizes that the throwaway policies of the past squander valuable materials as well as priceless historical and cultural resources.
The past must be part of the future. Even if it is too late for the rest of the Magnificent Mile, Chicago is right to draw the line at 520 N. Michigan Ave.
