As the sun arcs west over Chicago, the building shadows along North Lake Shore Drive appear to be advancing toward Ohio Street Beach like an invading army, but then fall just short of the downtown patch of sand as the sky darkens into evening.
Local residents and parks advocates have long fought to halt the approach of high-rises toward this patch of Lake Michigan shoreline, noting that building silhouettes have already engulfed most of nearby Oak Street Beach during late summer afternoons.
With pressure mounting to fill a vacant lot at 600 N. Lake Shore Drive, a scheduled Chicago zoning commission meeting Wednesday may set the stage for a final loss. There, commissioners will consider a new proposal to build a pair of high-rise condominiums at the Streeterville site whose combined shadows on late August afternoons would cover about 75 percent of the beach used by several hundreds of thousands of people a year.
“We’re losing one of the city’s most precious assets,” said Arani McHose, who, so far, has been among only a handful of local residents to actively oppose the luxury development scheduled to be complete by 2010. “We don’t have as many people fighting against it this time.”
That’s because, however lamentable, it’s likely the best deal possible for the former industrial site that has remained vacant for 20 years in one of the city’s most coveted locations, said Erma Tranter, president of Friends of the Parks, a non-profit group.
The 46-story and 40-story towers –to be developed by Chicago-based Belgravia Group Ltd.–would join a Streeterville neighborhood gleaming with hotels, luxury condominiums and four-star restaurants. The development’s 401 units would sell for between $400,000 and $900,000, developers say. Next door, the 33-story W Hotel already towers over Lake Shore Drive, casting its shadow into the lake on the beach’s northern edge.
Compared to previous developments that were slated for 600 N. Lake Shore Drive before failing, the Belgravia towers “are so much better,” said Tranter, whose citywide organization has signed off on the project.
Friends of the Parks was among several groups vehemently opposed to a 90-story hotel, office and residential building that was reduced to 79 stories by the city before it was approved for the site in 1986. The building, which lost its financing, would have cast a shadow that swallowed Ohio Street Beach for most of the summer, Tranter said.
During the 1990s, a 60-story building was proposed and later reduced to a 49-story residential tower that was approved in 2000. Its shadow would have covered at least 80 percent of the beach near Navy Pier during late summer afternoons, activists say. The developer of that project backed away from it less than a year later when the local economy declined.
The Belgravia towers, designed to stand at 513 feet and 453 feet, would cover about 30 percent of the beach in late June afternoons and about 40 percent in July, according to architectural plans submitted to the city.
“They are less offensive than any of the other projects that were proposed,” said Gail Spreen, vice president of the Streeterville Organization of Active Residents, which has nonetheless been pushing to shorten the towers and to set them back deeper into the property line. “The city wants more of a tax base, and this project will give it to them. I can’t blame them for that at all.”
Local residents who frequent the beach most aren’t as accepting of the realities of urban development.
“It doesn’t do any good to have a beach without sun,” said Brendan Duffy, a Streeterville resident who uses the beach in the late afternoons with his 17-month-old son Charlie. “Most people around here use it in the early mornings or late afternoons, when they have time to come out.”
