A Walk on the Weird Side: A New Barely Used Roadway in the Midst of Nothing but a Long History of Failed Dreams of a Future

It wasn’t the brightest thing to do on a sweltering 90º+ day, but after the Dragon Boat races, there was a half hour wait for the water taxi to take me back downtown, so why not take a stroll in Ping Tom Park?  I remembered you used to be able to see The 78 from the north end of the park, so I walked all the way there, only to be enticed by a single jogger running past the boundary. 

She drew me on, under a new railroad bridge, to one of the most remarkable journeys in Chicago, on newly constructed South Wells, along "The 78". 62 acres of land largely created when the Chicago River was straightened in the 1920’s, home to vast railyards ...

...until passenger rail died and they were demolished in the 1970’s to leave perhaps the biggest vacant lot in Chicago.

It remained fallow, populated only by homeless encampments along the river, until spiraling into a series of ambitious plans and broken promises.

In 2002 it was acquired by Tony Rezko, a grifter who began his career running fast food franchises and worked his way up to equal-opportunity, bi-partisan bribery, most prominently to Illinois’ Alfred E. Neuman of a  governor Rod Blagojevch. He hoped to lure an IKEA to “The 78,” named after becoming Chicago’s 78th official community area.  They passed, and soon he was turning to the city for $140 million in Tax-Increment-Financing (TIF) for another plan, for 4,600 housing units and a big shopping center.

None of this happened, and poor Rezko eventually found himself bundled off to prison for his various frauds.  In 2017, The 78 was one of 10 Chicago’s sites proposed to Amazon in its HQ2 competition scamming 200+ cities into wasting massive resources on bidding for how many billions could be squeezed out from the winner in “incentive” subsidies.  

Amazon HQ2 proposal

Chicago made the list of finalists, but lost in the end, reportedly due to high crime rates (this under St. Rahm, now plumping to be our President.)

Related Midwest proposal for The 78

For an undisclosed price, Related Midwest picked up the property in 2018 with lovely renderings of a never-to-be $7billion development, including half a billion in TIF subsidies.

Rivers Casino proposal for The 78

 In 2018, The 78 became the Rivers 78 entry in the great Chicago Casino sweepstakes, complete with a 1,000-foot-high observation tower, and a slew of community pushback.  Another not-to-be, as Bally’s won, for the right to build our new suckers’ paradise on the north side’s former Tribune Freedom Center site.

Discovery Partners Institute, original design

Then in 2020 came the announcement that the U of I was going to build a $230 million headquarters at 15th and Wells for its Discovery Partners Institute.  But soon the stunning building design from Rem Koolhaas/OMA-AMO/Shohei Shigematsu was scrapped for something far more prosaic (and undoubtedly much cheaper)...

Discovery Partners Institute, revised design

...with construction to begin in 2024.  In October of that year, with construction already underway, the U of I pulled the plug and cancelled the project, moving to the new Quantum Tech Valhalla announced for South Works at 79th street.

White Sox "idea" for a stadium at The 78

Earlier that year, the White Sox threw out “an idea-not a proposal” for moving from their hallowed Bridgeport grounds to a shiny new stadium at The 78.  Unfortunately. Gov J.B. Pritzker seems disinclined to come up with $1billion+ in state subsidies for the White Sox pipe dream. (The bonds issued for the construction of current Sox Park a quarter century ago have yet to be repaid.)

Chicago Fire Soccer Stadium at The 78, rendering from Gensler

Enter Joe Mansueto, who had the audacity to announce this month he plans to build a $650 million, Gensler-designed stadium for his Chicago Fire soccer team - with his own money.  The history of The 78 indicates no balloon of hope ever goes unburst, but the predominantly private funding - the city would still use some TIF funds to extend streets where none now exist - may be the one that breaks through.

Which leads me back to my Saturday excursion. The Wells-Wentworth connector was supposed to be the main drag for a new city.  

rendering of the Wells-Wentworth Connector from 2019

Financed with TIF funds, it was completed a couple of years ago, although it remained fenced off until finally opening for public use this past May. But instead of fronting a new city, it's currently a very pristine roadway, complete with bike lanes and landscaping, stranded in a vast plain of nothingness.

Currently, the only construction at The 78 is a baseball diamond, a soccer field, and the inevitable Big City Pickle pickleball courts.  

The foursome at play on Saturday outnumbered all the other people I encountered on my half-mile trek: that jogger, someone on a scooter, someone returning from Target.  The 78 itself is almost all untamed (natural) growth, with a wealth of wildflowers...

... remnants of unrealized projects of the past ...

... and spectacular urban vistas in the distance.

I didn’t see any way to get up to the Roosevelt Road viaduct, but there’s a passage under it, with its own interesting architecture.  

relief on the Roosevelt Road viaduct

underneath the Roosevelt Road viaduct

Beyond, there’s access to the Roosevelt Collection shopping center with its cinemas recently reopened by AMC, but you have to walk up to Polk Street to be able to continue east through a passage under the railroad viaduct.  You can still see a section of wall from the demolished Grand Central Station that Bertrand Goldberg incorporated into his design for River City.

Bertrand Goldberg-designed River City, with wall from demolished Grand Central Station

I highly recommend taking this walk through this unique, slightly surreal landscape. I look forward to taking it again myself, in less stroke-inducing weather, and to seeing if the umpteenth time is the charm for The 78.

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What Lies Behind: the secret river lookout hidden in the back of an empty $100 million+ development

This weekend, Trib architecture critic Ed Keegan wrote a piece advocating that the city acquire the moribund Lincoln Yards site and turn it into a park, which prompted me to check it out.

The beached whale of ALLY, the 320,000 square foot life sciences lab building stuffed behind a Home Depot remains inexplicably empty two years after its completion.

Its ghostly prescence looms, a little like the mansion in the movie Giant, above a flat plain of 54 bulldozed acres that had long held the A. Finkl & Sons steel mill. It's the only structure of Sterling Bay's $6 billion development to be realized.

I walked down the untraveled extension of West Concord, pristine new concrete an overture to a play that never opened. I've taken a lot of pictures of Ally from the opposite side, but never from this perspective, and what I encountered at the end shocked, surprised, and delighted me.

I came upon what calls itself the 1229 West Concord Riverwalk. It's less a riverwalk than a truncated slice of what was originally intended as a continuous amenity stretching down the riverside of the massive site, a calling card for what might have been.

Part of Gensler's overall design, there's flowers...

...and seating ...

...a place to watch traffic on the river...

. .. human and animal - go by, and take in a spectacular view of the Chicago skyline. I was the only person there during my entire visit, but, for now, it's an undiscovered contemplative refuge well worth a trip.

Keegan wants the entire Lincoln Yards to become a public park. Instead, I would suggest the city use some of the money accumulating in the massive TIFs set up to fund Lincoln Yards and use it to acquire the riverfront portions, linking them with a footbridge at the approximate location of Throop street. The 1229 West Concord "riverwalk" could become a real one, with additional acres of parkland behind it, spurring residential development on the adjacent acres, which could be a boon to new owner JDL, which actually gets stuff built (see, North Union).

The remarkable story of the University of Chicago's Accelerator Building

 

I always loved the clean concrete elegance of Hausner & Macsai’s High Energy Physics Building at the University of Chicago, but I never took pictures of its massive, more anonymous neighbor

Now, as both structures are about to be ground into dust, I’ve finally learned what an absolutely amazing story Schmidt, Garden & Erikson’s 1949 Accelerator Building held inside.

Enrico Fermi and crew may have created the “first controlled generation of nuclear power” across the street, memorialized by a Henry Moore sculpture, but Fermi actually spent a lot more time in the Accelerator, custom-built for him, to house what was at the time the most powerful atom smasher in the world.

The Accelerator Building’s spectacle was all internal: a massive four-story open space with a 100-ton crane to do the heavy lifting. Here anything could happen, from smashing atoms, to building telescopes, to housing 20 tons of dinosaur fossils or a swimming pool for crocodiles.

Walking by, who would imagine what wonders were to be found within those abject facades so staid they almost made the huge thing seem invisible. Now, the kind of bunkered concrete and stone that was the fashion of the post-war-paranoia time is considered almost antiquity when it comes to styling.

Their replacement, the new $170,00,000 Science and Engineering Building by HDR and Allison Grace Williams, reflects the fashion of our own day, two huge intersecting blocks, a festival of glass in standard office-building-meets-lab-podium aesthetic.

Best Photos of 2024

Best photos of 2024?

Who knows?  After you take almost 50,000 pictures in a year, they all sort of blur together, and not just because most of them aren’t in focus. 

But everybody else is posting their "best-of's" so I ask you guvnor: why not me?  I put it to you - and I leave it to you.

The good part is that while I may, through some perverse compulsion, post them, you, dear reader, are under no obligation to look at them, which would put you in good company with, at the very least, 99.999% of humanity.

But should you choose to persist, I've winnowed the 50k down to an arbitrary handful, and hope that you’ll be amused by this sampling of life in Chicago over the past 12 months. 

(Probably the best way to view is to click on the first, then click again to move through the images.)

Cheri Charlton

Carlos Kalmar

Fireman at smoky blaze at Smith & Wollinsky's

 

Chicago Symphony Orchestra Music Director Designate Klaus Mäkelä

Paul Anka

Heather Cherone at work

Street preacher reminding us we're all going to Hell