Once More, With Greening - Celebrating St. Patrick on the Chicago River 2014

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 I came.  I saw.  I took a lot of pictures.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Seriously, for these last two, click on the image to sell full-size

 

Gummy Passage: Why Landmarking the Wrigley needs to consider its elegant plaza

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This Thursday, the Commission on Chicago Landmarks will consider bestowing official landmark status on the Wrigley Building, the gleaming cream terra cotta pair of towers that are one of the crown jewels of Chicago architecture.  Designed by Graham, Anderson, Probst and White, the two linked buildings - the main structure completed in 1921, the annex in 1924 - ended nearly a century serving as the high-profile headquarters of the Chicago gum maker last summer when the company, now a subsidiary of global candy behemoth Mars, announced it was dumping 100 Chicago area employees, and pulling out of the Wrigley Building, shifting the last 250 workers to its research center in the ritzy confines of Goose Island.

In September, a deal was finalized to sell the structure for $33 million to an investor group led by BDT Capital Partners.  Earlier this month, the new owners announced their intentions to redevelop the buildings, and now the first new business on Thursday's Landmarks agenda is preliminary landmark designation for the Wrigley.  The second agenda item is a recommendation to the City Council to approve a Class L Property Tax Incentive that would substantially reduce taxes on the building for the next 12 years, in exchange for renovations that would equal at least 50% of the complex's value.

While the actual terms of the ordinance had not been posted on the Commission's website as this is being written, it's reasonable to suppose that it will protect all exteriors facing Michigan, the river, and on the west facades.  What is not clear is how the ordinance will address - if it all - the exterior of the two buildings facing the wide plaza between them.

As we wrote about in this photo essay, in August of 2010, the Mars subsidiary undertook a bargain-basement renovation of the plaza that saw, on the plus side, the removal of a dilapidated fountain and planters, versus, on the minus side, leaving behind an ugly motley of paving, and the installation of new generic and cheap-looking storefronts on the annex side of the plaza that gashed an ugly scar across the elegant terra cotta ornament of the historic facades.

For decades, the Wrigley Building restaurant, which had, itself, grafted a modernist entrance onto the annex's plaza facade, was a prime lunchtime destination.  Now, according to a report in Crain's Chicago Business, the new owners are planning to bring a restaurant of the same quality back to the plaza, along with additional retail.  The way Crain's describes it - "The shops will be built out into the plaza with entrances from the outside" - is fairly ambiguous.  Does it mean new storefronts and entrances will be added to the current facades, or that there will be new construction extending behind the current exterior walls?

In either case, the landmarks ordinance for the building needs to be written to protect the Wrigley Building plaza from further insensitive assaults on its distinctive architecture.  We've already seen, in the Mars renovation, how not to do it, but there are any number of ways to do it correctly, and the ordinance should make sure the new owners, whose hearts seem to be in the right place, are encouraged to adopt one of them in meeting their own needs.

The quality of the plaza has become even more important as it is now the Michigan avenue gateway to River North, leading in to the broad expanse of the Trump Tower promenade, which terminates visually in the shimmering short-and-tall backdrop of the illuminated Trump Tower parking ramp and Goettsch Partners elegant 353 North Clark office tower, disgorging pedestrians into two different pathways leading to either to Marina City or the IBM Building at 330 North Wabash.  Right now, the shopworn Wrigley Plaza is clearly the poor sister to the newer Trump promenade, even after Trump Management trashed Hoerr Schaudt's distinctive landscaping for a cheaper and more generic alternative.

Outside of the landmarking process, there needs to be more planning between Trump and Wrigley management in helping the plaza and promenade realize its full potential as a vibrant civic amenity.  In this case, the Wrigley could actually take the lead.  Imagine, on a warm summer day, people taking a break from their workday or shopping watching the world go by as they sit at a Wrigley Plaza table enjoying a leisurely meal or sipping coffee.  It's a large space, and a lot can be done with it, both with permanent retail installations, and with event programming throughout the year.

The spectacular Trump Riverwalk offers up an even larger space, but a lot more disappointment.  In the over two years since its opening, none of the retail on its terraces has been leased, so on most days, even in great weather, the huge complex can seem almost depopulated.  No one's suggesting turning it into a carnival (the way that huge O'Briens restaurant on the opposite side of the river sucks up all but the perimeter of the riverwalk is another example not to be emulated), but maybe Trump should explore some loss-leader incentives to get the momentum going.  The Wrigley landmarking and plaza development, done right, could be the spark that leads the Wrigley-Trump promenade and riverwalk to overcome its current, largely unrealized status to attain its full potential as one of Chicago's great urban treasures.

The monthly meeting of the Commission on Chicago Landmarks takes place Thursday, February 2, in City Hall chambers, room 201-A, 121 North LaSalle, at 12:45 p.m.  It is open to the public.

On an Overgrown Path

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As Chicago grew to greatness, there were two basic types of park design, the "passive" designed for strolling amidst scenic vistas, making the new housing for the affluent rising along the boulevards even more attractive, and the "active", engineered to channel the leisure time of emerging Chicago's largely immigrant working class into wholesome programs and activities - swimming pools, baseball diamonds, field houses and the like.

You can see the persistence of the two approaches even in Chicago's front yard, Grant Park.  The part east of the railroad tracks, a "passive" park that been allowed to deteriorate and depopulate to point where vagrants and drug dealers were the primary users, was transformed into Millennium Park, cram-full of attractions such as Cloud Gate, the Pritzker Pavilion, and Crown Fountain, with a huge restaurant thrown in for good measure.  Daley Bicentennial Plaza, east of the tracks at end of Frank Gehry's BP bridge, was more "passive", an oasis from the hyperactivity to the west, suitable for strolling, relaxing, reflecting, or taking your kids to the small playlot.  Hence the battle to keep the eastern half free from a new building for Chicago Children's Museum, complete with jagged, soaring skylights.

An argument is made that in a city like Chicago, dense and crammed with structure, the "passive" park's attempt to emulate nature is a anachronistic affectation.  This is the city, it's man-made - get over it.

I remain unconvinced.  The global, supply-chain economy has created a supply-chain architecture, increasingly mechanized and dehumanized, built on a Six Sigma value system where efficiency is the highest possible good and variability a hated enemy.  Whereas the best architecture of the age of Mies was an expression of regularity and order as a response to the violent anarchy of the time, the best architecture of our time is usually a disruption of the straitjacket of supply-chain architecture.

Within this context, I believe that an expression of nature, as natural and variable as our meddling little hands can make it, is an essential relief in a city like Chicago.  For me, the best part of the Chicago riverwalk is where the trees and flowers take you away from the hard edges of Wacker Drive, where the seating isn't a concrete bench or a metal seat anchored into the ground, but the movable chairs under the shade of tall trees that let the visitor improvise their own space.

That's also why my favorite new public space in Chicago is the Lincoln Park Zoo Nature Boardwalk, designed by Studio/Gang with WMD Environmental.  We still have a full article on the Boardwalk coming up, but this weekend it was a great place to visit.

At the close of its second summer, the Boardwalk is really coming into its own.  On Saturday, after the morning thunderstorms and rain, the sun glistened in the moisture of the plants and flowers.  Nature, which in the Boardwalk's first season was sedate and controlled, was, on Saturday, bursting through, as if the prairie were about to take back the city. Black-eyed Susans, Blazing Stars, Cardinal flowers, Cup Plants, to name just a few, were growing in abundance.

 

Yes, we need soccer fields and baseball diamonds, skate parks and bicycle paths, and all the other resources parks can offer, but sometimes it's a good thing to encounter an alternative path.

Trumped: An Oasis of Urban Magic Vanishes

Look at this landscaping . . .

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If you had never been in the place before, no doubt it would strike you as professional and pleasant.  Then why, when I first saw it about a week ago, did my heart sink into my stomach?  Because I was expecting this . . .

This is an example of the absolutely wonderful landscaping designed by Hoerr Schaudt Landscape Architects for the Trump Tower riverwalk, a rich, complex composition of native plantings that was a delight, as I've written before, even in the winter's snow.

Now it's all gone.  According to Tribune architecture critic Blair Kamin's report, when Peter Schaudt first saw what had befallen his design "I was aghast.  My mouth dropped."  Which was pretty much my reaction when I saw the workers from McFarlane Douglass destroying Schaudt's work, for this . . .

According to Kamin, Schaudt was not even given the courtesy of a call to warn him.  Daniel Weinbach and Partners were called in to replace him.  Weinbach is certainly capable of fine work.The firm's  tall-treed plaza for One South Dearborn is one my favorite new public spaces. Apparently, however, all Trump management was asking for was something comfortably generic, lots of the kinds of plants that people are used to seeing everywhere else, lots of evergreens that show no signs of decay, no winter's death, a kind of landscaping botox that turns the wonder of nature into a denial of the seasons.

They've already made gravel a big part of the design.  Why not just replace everything else with plastic and be done with it?

Schaudt's design was unlike anything else you could find in downtown Chicago, a special place that took seriously Trump's claim to uniqueness, giving the riverwalk a spectacular beauty.

Now the Trump landscaping looks pretty much like what you can find in any suburban apartment complex.  Serviceable.  Common.

If you've been around for a while, it shouldn't be a surprise, but it still shocks: aim low, and you can live forever. Create magic and be prepared to watch it snuffed out impatiently, as if it were a disease.  Yet for all who experienced and loved it, Schaudt's landscape will endure clean and bracing in our memories, even as its replacement is forgotten the moment you walk past it.

Trumptastic Riverwalk now open down all three levels

At the moment, still almost eerily quiet. Needs some tables and chairs along the terraces where a flâneur can sit basking in the the sun, sip an overpriced coffee and peer bemusedly over the top of his or her sunglasses at the world passing by.

If you're a dog, however . . . . . . you may already have pretty much everything you need.

Trump Riverwalk begins to Take Shape

For years, even as Trump Tower soared to its full 1362-foot height, this is what the adjacent riverwalk looked like:Reading about all of Trump's battles with his lenders, and the reports of the imploding real estate market, it made you wonder if the money had dried up, and all we'd be left with was the huge gravel pit filled with construction paraphernalia that included what looked like a giant wooden wok.

It didn't help that last September Crain's Chicago Business reported that Trump was having trouble finding restaurants and businesses to lease the four-level riverwalk's 83,000 square feet of retail space, and had hired a broker to pitch it for a price upwards of $130 million.

What looked like a radical value engineering on the some of the signage was also discomforting.
Recently, however, the site has been abuzz with activity.
The odds are looking better and better that we may finally get back the Wabash segment of the riverwalk that has been closed since just before the old Sun-Times building was demolished in 2003. Maybe it will even look as good as in the renderings.