A daily blog on architecture in Chicago, and other topics cultural, political and mineral.
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Chicago, like any other great city, has any number of severe, intractable problems: the slaughter in our streets, the crushing inequality, the inability to educate our kids out of poverty, to name just three. I have no easy answers, so I hope you'll forgive me if, at least for today, I leave these issues to those more comfortable pontificating on them on a daily basis, and begin 2013 with considering three much lesser problems, more easily remediable . . .
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I. The Substation at 10 East Lake Street. This electrical substation is gated off from everyone but the pigeons, a blank-walled dead soul of a building fronting an open space carpeted with guano-spattered, haphazardly placed steel street plates. It's a slumming presence between the luxury Hotel Wit and the Page Brothers building and Chicago Theater on the other side of the street,
In form, it's not unattractive. The back elevation facing an alley that, in the old days of Chicago, was known as Haddock Place, suggests its potential elegance. Windows that are brick fill on Lake Street are actually glazed on Haddock.
In March of 2011, we wrote about about a team of School of the Art Institute Students working with architect/professor Odile Compagnon to come up with a plan to make the substation something other than an eyesore. Almost two years later, it's still the same depressing pigeon roost.
The facility appears to serve the CTA as a Traction Power Substation. Last fall, bids were let out for various mechanical improvements, but there's no indication the CTA is about to take responsibility for its anti-social demeanor. They need to be pushed. Without massive expense, this could be a charming - and badly needed - vest pocket public plaza. Already, painted on the door, there's a figure that could both serve as a mascot and suggest a name: Puffin' pigeon place . . .
II. Stairway to Heaven (or at least Illinois Center)
We've written before about the rich potential of the upper level plaza at Illinois Center, and how it's completely isolated from the flow of pedestrian traffic down Michigan Avenue. Nothing much has changed. The stairway leading up from South Water Street remains boarded up. A 2008 Chicago Loop Alliance proposal to create a Chicago equivalent of Rome's Spanish Steps that would lead up to the plaza from South Water has gone nowhere. It would probably be expensive.
The small viaduct a bit further north on Michigan Avenue, however, really sticks in my craw. Every time I pass it, I think of how relatively easy it would be to build a staircase/fire escape into that space that would become a lovely, inviting passage up to the Illinois Center plaza. I'll suggest it again: let's have a small architectural competition to design the stairway, and then let's build it. Illinois Center's upper plaza is currently an urban dead zone. Could 2013 finally be the year that we take a few simple steps (literally) to let it unlock its potential as a bridge to River East and one of Chicago's best public spaces?
III. The Chicago Casino
I can never think of the current urban obsession with gambling as the road to urban prosperity without hearing in my head Alabama Song from Brecht/Weill's opera, Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny . . .
Casino gambling is a sucker's bet, both for the rubes and for the cities that seek to fleece them. Governor Pat Quinn keeps standing on the stage trying to present a gambling bill as seemingly pure as a Disney musical, but each time he's upstaged by Mayor Emanuel, walking in from the wings singing in full Brechtian abandon . . .
Show me the way to the next casino hall Oh, don't ask why, oh, don't ask why Show me the way to the next casino hall Oh, don't ask why, oh, don't ask why For if we don't find the next casino hall I tell you we must die I tell you we must die I tell you I tell you I tell you we must die
We've been told for so long that a Chicago casino is inevitable that even I'm starting to believe it. So I've found the perfect place.
The former Lake Shore Athletic Club on Wabash has been closed for a few years now. It sits atop a still active garage and next to a large surface parking lot. The site appears to be about 60,000 square feet. Building over Rush, Illinois and Hubbard could probably add maybe 10,000 more. By the point of comparison, the gambling floor of the new Rivers Casino in Des Plaines is about 44,000 square feet.
The site is centrally located, steps from Michigan Avenue and major hotels. The pedestrian entrance could be on upper Wabash, while vehicular traffic could be kept to Illinois and Hubbard on the lower level. On that same lower level there'd be enough room left over for a large pipe, funneling cash from the casino down to the Carroll Street underpass on its ways to the basement of City Hall.
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So, what do you think? Any other things you'd like to fix?
To put it in perspective, construction on the 1161-foot-tall Trump Tower was started about the same time, and they managed to finish it over two years ago. The new home for the Museum of Broadcast Communications hasn't been so lucky. This is what they started out with, way back in 2005 . . .
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. . . a rather forlorn-looking parking garage at the corner of Kinzie and State, which within a year or so, was supposed to be transformed into this . . .
. . . a sparkling, 70,000 square-foot, $21 million facility designed by Eckenhoff Saunders Architects in partnership with sustainable design architect Helen Kessler. And for a while, things went swimmingly. The steel frame for the new State Street facade went up later that year . . .
. . . and the following March, the glazing was mounted into the frame. (See more pictures of this here.)
Then, a funny thing happened on the way to the Museum, in the person of loon Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich promising $6 million for the the project, and then never coming through with the money. Fund-raising dried up. So, shortly after the curtain wall went up, construction stopped, and the structure was left as an unfinished hulk.
At one point, the contractor, Pepper Construction, claimed there were $4.5 million in unpaid bills. Then in 2010, Illinois governor Pat Quinn came through with the originally promised $6 million, and construction resumed.
In June of this year, there was a "Sneak Preview" of the new building, complete with a red carpet entrance of Bozo and Svengoolie, and the hope is now to get the thing opened in time for the Museum's 25th anniversary next year. We'll see. But even now, especially on the Kinzie street side, it's a fairly handsome transformation.
