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).