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.