Say goodbye to the Tower with a Tutu, the proposed high-rise theater complex dressed up in a white fabric skirt to make it look light and airy. The disguise failed to mask the obvious: There is no place for the equivalent of a 17-story skyscraper in the middle of Navy Pier.
Replaced by a smaller, far less intrusive proposal–a new home for Chicago’s Shakespeare Repertory that will go on the side of the pier’s new parking garage rather than on top of it–the Tower with a Tutu danced off to the architectural scrap heap last week. There, it joined several other high-profile design duds from 1997.
In case you forgot them:
– Mayor Richard M. Daley’s discarded proposal for a 75-foot-tall decorative pylon, also known as the Mayor’s Maypole, south of the Michigan Avenue bridge. It would have been wrapped in red, white and blue metal banners that would have recalled nothing so much as gutters wrapped around a light pole after a hurricane.
– The steel gateways once planned for the North Halsted Street gay pride district. Their columns would have been ringed with neon lights in the rainbow colors of the gay pride flag, though real flags draped on the fronts of North Halsted Street already send the message that the district is a vibrant center of gay life.
– A citywide prototype fountain meant for a Rush Street park but yanked after top Daley aides thought better of it. The two-bowl, Beaux-Arts-on-a-budget fountain may someday add a touch of Grant Park’s splendor to the commercial strips out in the neighborhoods, but in little Mariano Park it would have been like an elephant stomping through jungle grass.
What unites this pantheon of public works rejects?
In a word, presence.
They had far too much of it, giving new meaning to the term “edifice complex.”
They were grossly overscaled (the fountain and the theater complex), garishly overwrought (the gay pride gateways) or both (the maypole).
But there’s more to it than that. These days Chicago is one of the nation’s leading urban laboratories, with so many public works in progress that a few invariably will overreach what’s aesthetically appropriate. In the broadest sense, then, the failed projects offer a reminder that Chicago is dynamic, remaking itself under Daley with new or refurbished bridges, subway stations, boulevards and highways. Better to have a few mistakes that can be eliminated before they’re built than a mayor who stands still and arouses no controversy.
Yet the power to remake a city cuts two ways. The same mayor who was applauded for ramming through the public works projects that brought Chicago national acclaim during the 1996 Democratic National Convention was just as easily labeled an autocrat when people didn’t like what he was up to in 1997.
That’s what happened with these four projects: They were sprung on an unsuspecting public without public hearings–and the public didn’t like it.
To be sure, city planners and the Metropolitan Pier and Exposition Authority, the powerful city-state body that runs Navy Pier and was the force behind the theater plan, consulted business leaders and civic groups–the so-called “stakeholders”–before their proposals were revealed.
But the stakeholders’ view is more narrow than that of the public at large. To merchants hungry for customers, a big piece of public art like the maypole or the gay pride gateways is the equivalent of a flashing neon sign that says, “Shop here. Shop here.” In contrast, the public takes more than dollars and cents into account. Its common sense says: If it’s ugly, get rid of it.
Nowhere did the failure to consult the taxpayers play itself out with more irony than in the plan to mark a gay pride district. There, the project was done in not by far-Right conservatives like Phyllis Schlafly, the logical opponents, but by gay residents themselves, many of whom believed that the plan would have stigmatized their neighborhood, lowering the very real estate values they had helped to raise.
The lessons to be drawn from these incidents are self-evident.
Lesson one: The public ought to be consulted–from the beginning–on public works projects. That, of course, takes time. Public hearings can be messy affairs, with people shouting and protesting for the benefit of the TV cameras. They undoubtedly make it tougher to “get things done,” which is the coin of the realm when you’re a politician readying to run for re-election, as Daley is now. When done right, however, public hearings make everyone a stakeholder. They also help ensure that politicians won’t get stuck backing silly projects, like this year’s rogues’ gallery of rejects.
Lesson two: There’s no need to make a big statement with every single project. Sometimes, there’s a virtue in modesty, in simply enhancing what’s already there, as the city has done by putting new street lights and sidewalks on the stretch of Michigan Avenue between Randolph Street and the Michigan Avenue bridge. No need for a maypole there; the street lights, with their human-scaled floral decoration and dazzling globe lights, make this stretch of Boul Mich a wonderful place to be.
Like everything else in life, Daniel Burnham’s much-quoted directive to “make no little plans” must be used sparingly.
