Fellow Chicagoans, what have we wrought?
“See that building?” said Russ Salzman, who runs the Greater North Michigan Avenue Association. He pointed to Park Tower, up the street at Chicago Avenue. Park Tower is so new and glowing that it looks bathed in honey and suntan lotion. And money, of course, layers of it. Stacked inside its 70 stories are 117 high-view condominiums topping off at $2.7 million. And a Park Hyatt Hotel where rooms start at $385, plus 14.9 percent tax. Down below–far below–stands the old Water Tower, quaint symbol of a city risen from the flames of 1871. No landmark in Chicago is more historic, but now it’s dwarfed by the vanity, the hubris, the sheer wealth of Park Tower. “Every bathtub in the hotel has a view of the city or the lake,” said Salzman. “Every bathtub.” He smiled. Just across East Chicago Avenue from Park Tower, another gilded hotel, the Peninsula, is going up over the store–Tiffany, Ralph Lauren, American Girl, Pottery Barn, Banana Republic.
Central Chicago is on a multibillion-dollar roll. In a few dozen blocks, this city is creating thousands of new apartments and hotel rooms with a view (sometimes with a view only of each other). The shopping is splashy, there’s lots to do and the crowds pack in shoulder to shoulder on North Michigan Avenue. That north-south boulevard is now bulging east and west in the blocks around Grand Avenue, where tourists roam the sorefoot trail to and from Navy Pier.
At age 167, Chicago is growing again–swelling is a better word for it–and only a hermit might cry, “Stop, I want to be alone.” Growth means vibrancy, jobs, money in the pocket, even if only a little of it may filter out to Roosevelt Road on the West Side or to Uptown’s downside.
The North Bridge development alone adds up to 4,400 jobs, said Greg Merdinger, a principal of developer John Buck Co. North Bridge is a $1.5 billion spread–nine blocks wedged between North Michigan Avenue and State Street, Ontario and Illinois Streets–that has been under construction for years. Suddenly, it’s all in place: four hotels and a fifth on the way; shopping, movies, DisneyQuest, ESPN Zone, apartments, offices–and 2,500 parking spaces. A centerpiece Nordstrom store is scheduled to open at Grand and Rush Street in late September, with a Michigan Avenue entrance.
A few blocks north of the Loop, Joel M. Carlins has put up one apartment building after the next in the State Street corridor. It’s a striking change: This was an archipelago of parking lots for 30 or 40 years. It didn’t seem to faze Carlins that his newest building, One Superior Place, was panned for its architecture; all of its 809 apartments are rented. Now he’s launching a billion-dollar development on the golf-course acreage in Illinois Center.
Central Chicago’s new growth is high and wide. There’s a gnawing sense, though, that little of it is handsome. It jars, it crowds, it jostles. Towers may make a skyline, but they can pull a street into shock when 50 stories go up where there were five or none at all. The city is wrenched out of scale, in space and time.
At North Superior Street and Wabash Avenue, for example, the towering Fordham luxury condos will replace modest buildings and little shops. Something of value may be gained when that happens. But something personal, individual, familiar, offbeat is sacrificed. A big-hearted city needs many small things at human scale.
Leaving aside Park Tower-type pomp, too much of the new seems routine, cast in ho-hum concrete or malled and walled. Nordstrom’s street walls are blunt and boxy. It’s an affront to the legacy of a city that showed the world how to build department stores a century ago with Carson Pirie Scott and Marshall Field’s on State Street.
Another issue is that very little of the new central-area housing is within reach for people of modest means. They may work there, but can’t afford to live there. That ought to be indefensible public policy by now, but is standard practice instead. The building boom is out of balance.
Consider the Streeterville neighborhood east of North Michigan Avenue. Vintage Streeterville is marble halls and doormen and lake views. Recent decades have added high-rise housing, an expanded Northwestern University campus and hospital complex, multiple garages with forbidding blank walls, high-end shopping, hotels, museums and tourist attractions. Now developer Dan McLean is into a $1.5 billion, 10-year buildup that calls for 3,000 apartments, shopping, offices, 21 movie screens, two hotels and a fitness center. McLean envisions “walking, talking” streets along Grand and Illinois, full of visitors with disposable income, flitting from Nordstrom to Navy Pier.
At North McClurg Court, he’s powering up two massive buildings. You feel small just looking at them. One will be a 58-story skyline blocker with 620 condos; the other, an Embassy Suites. Down the road are still more towers, more pizazz, more people, more walls. A rival developer is installing a big Dominick’s and covered parking for 1,325 cars at Grand Avenue and Columbus Drive. Plus the inevitable formula: a Hilton, movies, condos.
The buildup is happening on traffic-plagued streets without benefit of rapid transit or the streetcar circulator system that once was promised. Residents tend to think of themselves as besieged. Truly besieged neighborhoods, to be sure, suffer from true urban plagues: massive poverty, gangs, drive-by shootings. Streeterville’s problems are nothing like that, but the neighbors have a case to make.
Rosalind Hecim heads the Streeterville Organization of Active Residents (SOAR). She says the area, loosely defined as Lake Michigan west to North Rush Street and the Chicago River north to East Oak Street, is being transformed by 71 developments projected, reported, rumored, completed or under way in and around the neighborhood. The streets are squeezed by construction work.
“SOAR is residential,” Hecim said. “We think of this as our neighborhood. Twenty-five thousand people live here. Soon it will be 40,000. Many don’t have cars because they don’t need them. But lots of garages are being built, which means more people will drive. We’re concerned about traffic, pollution, green space, transportation and safety.
“When a new building is announced, the alderman (Burton Natarus, 42nd) tells the developers, `Talk to the neighbors.’ But it’s very hard to stop these projects.” In July, a City Council committee approved a 49-story luxury tower at East Ohio Street and Lake Shore Drive, despite SOAR’s complaints that the building would violate the character of the lakefront.
Few Chicagoans, probably, will weep for thriving Streeterville. Other favored neighborhoods, such as the South Loop, are rebuilding and gentrifying. There surely are others that would welcome some of Streeterville’s headaches.
Only 25 years ago, remember, Chicago was in big trouble. The mills and rail tracks and assembly lines were going, and so were their payrolls and their people. Loop shopping was on an alarming skid. Something had to be done. City Hall and the civic power structure, represented by the Chicago Central Area Committee, looked for a comeback trail. They found it mainly in and around North Michigan Avenue and downtown generally, where an expanding central city was pumping up, bigger and taller than ever. They planned for it and plumped for it, predicting that some day 100,000 people would live downtown. It has happened and then some. About 120,000 people already have settled in the expanded central area between McCormick Place and Oak Street, Lake Michigan and Ashland Avenue. An estimated 625,000 work in the area.
On top of that, Chicago became a tourist center: Half the customers in Michigan Avenue’s big, fashionable stores are from out of town. That helps explain the North Bridge complex, where the shopping promises to be bigtime. Not as much can be said for the vista. North Bridge claims more frontage on Michigan Avenue than Rockefeller Center has on New York’s 5th Avenue, but where in North Bridge are the charmed public spaces that distinguish Rockefeller Center? North Bridge suspends glassy shopping atriums over Grand and Rush that block views of the city for people on the street.
What, indeed, has happened to urban design in the city of such historic achievers as Louis Sullivan, John Root, Daniel Burnham, Frank Lloyd Wright and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe? Rust Belt Chicago has morphed into a comeback city scrambling for its place in the world. Three cheers for that. It’s not mere grumpiness, though, to wonder whether we’re taking the low road to creeping Manhattanization. Don’t we deserve a better-planned, better-looking new city after waiting all these years for tomorrow? Why so much aspiration and so little inspiration?
Christopher Hill, Chicago’s planning and development commissioner, sees a falloff in architectural creativity. Complacency is a factor, he said, and so are pressures on architects to get jobs done quickly.
But James DeStefano, a prolific architect who is working for McLean in Streeterville, blames Hill’s department for straitjacketing design. “The mayor doesn’t like glass buildings,” said DeStefano. “Today you couldn’t get 860-880 N. Lake Shore Drive past the planning department.”
If that is so–and DeStefano is not the only informed Chicagoan who says that–we’re living in absurd times. Those lakeside “glass houses” of 1951 are famous landmarks designed by Mies. Crisp and elegant, they were radical for their time and revolutionized architecture. Mies and his followers made mid-century Chicago a mecca of glass and steel and the severe aesthetic of “less is more.” Chicago was on the cutting edge, as it had been in the late 19th Century when it evolved the early skyscraper.
In the reaction that followed Mies, “glass boxes” fell out of favor. A friendlier, warmer look took over–more brick and stone, more allusions to the past, less glass and austerity. Now major buildings tend to be compromises, with the Daley administration favoring a traditional, familiar-looking cityscape. That doesn’t make for creativity, let alone innovation. But it does assure that Chicago won’t get another starchy Illinois Center set off by itself in a high-rise compound of lame modernist planning.
There may be another explanation for today’s hangups and pileups, and it goes deep into the civic psyche. When the 100-story John Hancock Center went up on Michigan Avenue in 1969, it was the image of its steelmaking city: tough, dark, bold, innovative. But “Big John” also announced the coming transformation of Mag Mile into Mega Mile. “Some day there’ll be so many people on Michigan Avenue that you won’t be able to walk,” prophesied Edward T. Hall, a noted urban anthropologist. Hall was laughed at then, but today’s throngs bear him out. You can walk on Michigan Avenue, but you have to like crowds and behemoth buildings.
Big John is a symbol of a bygone Chicago, the steely city that sweated in factories and bragged about it. The fashionable new Chicago sells products that other places make, and is recasting itself as a nice place to live, to visit and to shop. The buildings, by and large (very large), tell us that. They tend to be glossy (Water Tower Place), frilly (900 N. Michigan), garish (676 N. Michigan), recycling design formulas. The city’s zoning ordinance, an ultra-permissive relic of the 1950s, makes it easy to build big. It has drawn so much fire that Daley has pledged to update it, a major undertaking likely to involve years of civic tugging and pulling.
Stanley Tigerman is a Chicago architect with an international cachet and a home address in Streeterville. Like many urbanists, Tigerman contends that “it doesn’t matter how tall buildings are if there’s street life.” SOAR’s fears of being swamped by growth leave him cold. “More density? I love it,” he said. “Density means more eyes on the street and that means increased safety.”
It does matter, though, when streets become canyons, and that is happening in Streeterville. Light and air and open space are cut off. Northwestern Memorial Hospital’s hefty new buildings draw streams of traffic to Huron and Erie Streets but do little to put “eyes on the street.” And where’s the green space?
There are no perfect solutions, of course. Chicago’s planning department tries to ensure that big projects meet the street in an open, friendly way with glass at ground level, said Hill. That doesn’t necessarily make for good design, unfortunately. The buildings often emerge as towers sitting awkwardly on bulky garage slabs with stores on the first floor.
But where do we go from here?
Tom Cokins runs the Chicago Central Area Committee, in tandem with William Martin, a senior planner. The committee’s Chicago 21 plan of 1973, and a later one in the 1980s, cleared the way for change: new neighborhoods in the South Loop and West Loop, McCormick Place expansion, Navy Pier revival, the growth of North Michigan Avenue, more parking, the lakeside museum campus. City Hall, however, never mustered the will or wherewithal for other key proposals, such as a rapid-transit connector line in the Loop.
Neighborhood partisans, meanwhile, claim that too much money and attention have been lavished on downtown, at their expense. But who in power, or out of it, is going to say no to big money? Chicago has lost nearly a million people and is just starting to get some of them back.
The city clearly needs a more balanced approach to growth. The Central Area Committee advocates a plan, with a new zoning ordinance, that would define growth areas–commercial, residential, retail–so that a neighborhood would know what to expect. Commissioner Hill promises a new central-area plan, as well as revised “density bonuses” to encourage a friendlier cityscape. And, perhaps, livelier and lovelier design?
All this, of course, should have been done long ago. Without new zoning controls, furthermore, Chicago remains open to overloading and to the sacrificing of a vintage past.
It takes centuries to make a city of the world. It takes creativity and courage to strike a balance between growth and stability, the central area and the neighborhoods, plain-Jane design and the new and bold, the power of money and the voice of the neighbors. It’s adolescent to think that growing up merely requires going up. A great city needs reasonable rules for development.
Now that Chicago is growing again, cheers. Would that all parts of town could share in the largess. That’s a supreme challenge for a comeback city.
