The Chicago That Never Was: The Bulletin Board Building

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 There were a lot of plans for the former Pine Street when it was widened and expanded with the construction of the Michigan Avenue Bridge, effectively letting Chicago's commercial district to jump the river and extended its reach.

In 1918, the North Central Association, representing principle property owners, along with the Chicago Plan Commission, commissioned several leading architects to imagine what the new district should look like, and the results were published in The American Architect that year. 

Holabird and Roche came up with a monumental entryway on the northern side of the bridge.

Andrew Rebori, the Architects' Committee's Managing Architect, came up with something even grander.

The North Central Association recommended uniform height limits of 140 feet and a continuous balcony projection nearly three feet wide, 36 feet up from the sidewalk above two floors of shop windows, as illustrated in the above drawing by Rebori.

The view south from the Water Tower was denser that much of what actually exists to this day.  The southwest block, for example, is in today's actuality a sequence of two-story storefronts from Ralph Lauren to Tiffany's, far shorter than this rendering of a continuous sequence of ten-story buildings that look like those aerial views of of the Burnham Plan's anonymous, uniform blocks made flesh.

Of course, reality intervened, beginning with the completely individualistic Wrigley Building arriving in 1920, as illustrated in Rebori's drawing at the top of this post.  .  That same year, Holabird and Roche's 16-story John Crerar Library, which can be seen to the far left of Rebori's drawing. was also completed at the northwest corner of State and Randolph.  (It was demolished in 1981 for the sloping-roof 151 North Michigan.)  In 1924, the Wrigley Building Annex was built about where the "Bulletin Board" building appears in the drawing, and with the completion of Tribune Tower in 1925, the new North Michigan gateway was set, asymmetrically.

Which best represented the “City Beautiful”?  The standardized ideal? . . .

Or the messier real? . . .

Wolf Point Update: Reilly yanks proposal from December Plan Commission agenda; schedules Third Public Meeting

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 In an email to his constituents, 42nd ward alderman Brendan Reilly announced he has requested the Chicago Plan Commission defer consideration of proposals for the development of Wolf Point from its December agenda.  Instead, he will be calling a third public meeting on the evening of December 20th to review the revised plan.

Since deferring this item from the November Plan Commission Agenda, I have spent the past week meeting with the City of Chicago's planning and infrastructure departments as well as representatives from the River North and Fulton River District neighborhood associations to evaluate the new details recently released by the Developer that call for a hotel use and the potential for additional residential units on the site.

Although Hines/Kennedy have been aggressively lobbying for a process that would allow them to secure all necessary city approvals by the end of 2012, in light of the recent events, I have informed the development team that their preferred timeline is simply no longer feasible. As a result, I have again requested that the Chicago Plan Commission defer this item from its December 20th Agenda, for the purpose of vetting new information related to the Bulk Table for the site and to allow for a much-needed sixth revision to KLOA's traffic study.

Reilly yanked consideration of the three-building project from the November Plan Commission agenda after, as reported by the Chicago Reader's Ben Joravsky, documents obtained by Friends of Wolf Point uncovered a request for up to 1,800 hotel rooms on the site that had never before been part of the developer's documents or discussions.

Reilly, whose ward includes most of downtown, including Wolf Point, invoked his aldermanic prerogative to request the delay in consideration.  In his Thursday email, Reilly said that in the latest "Bulk Table" defining the developer's request,  the maximum hotel "keys" requested is now down to 450. The maximum allowed construction is now listed at slightly over 4,000,000 square feet, with a maximum of 1,410 residential units and 1,285 new parking spaces.

Reilly said the revised plan submitted by Wolf Point Owners LLC, representing the Hine Interests and the Kennedy family, which owns the land, not only included the previously unmentioned 1,800 hotel rooms, but "did not include the long list of previously negotiated changes and improvements to the proposal" originally submitted in May.

You can read Reilly's complete statement after the break.