Saturday News: What Would You put under Block 37? Crain's opens up the Hole, and Wants to Know

photograph courtesy Crain's Chicago Business

          My money lies under pedway

       My money lies under the mall

      My money lies under the pedway

     Please bring back my money to me

The bad news: the millions the city dumped into a hole below Block 37 isn't coming back.  That's how much was spent on a "superstation" for a $1 billion express service to O'Hare that didn't exist and had no plan for existing, and a crossover to a Red Line that doesn't serve any airport, in probably the most expensive place in Chicago to do it.   After dumping $218 million into the project, the city decided cost overruns were so out of control the only thing to do was just abandon construction and seal up the whole thing. 

The good news:  thanks to Crain's Chicago Business, we now know what our money pit monument looks like.  On Wednesday, Greg Hinz and photographer Stephen Serio (no just handing the reporter an iPhone here) were given the first public access to Mayor Daley's batcave - 472 feet long, 68 feet wide, and an average of 28 feet high.  See all the photo's here.

Block 37 groundbreaking ceremony, 2005

The fun news: as Mel Brooks will tell you, ridicule is often the best revenge for pain, and Crain's is now offering you the chance to put your best sarcasm to good use  . . . 

Calling all architects, designers, urban planners, visionaries! What do you see in that space? Tell us in a paragraph or two, and, because we all know a picture is worth a thousand words, send a rendering, too. 

Best of all, there are no prizes and no money, just a promise that the best ideas will be featured in a subsequent article.   Of course, you could play it straight and come up with useful concepts, but why limit yourself?  Submit your most warped concepts to Crain's via email by next Friday, June 21.

Let me get you started . . .

click image for larger view
photo courtesy Crain's Chicago Business; sheep, not

Block 37 Sheep Monument to Chicago Taxpayers and Voters:  The space will be fitted out to house a large herd of sheep that will save money by replacing the current expense of mowing with grazing at Millennium and other nearby parks.  The sheep's passivity will commemorate the passivity of Chicago voters in electing and re-electing hacks, autocrats and actual criminals.  Waste from the animals, to be sent to the city's urban farms, will represent the oratory of elected officials, while ceremonial shearings will symbolize what gets done to taxpayers.  The resulting wool will be pulled over our eyes.

Update [6/28/13]: Here's Greg Hinz's follow-up with the proposals he got from local architects, including shown below, Grant Gibson's Embrance the Hubris, keeping the space useless but giving it patterned gilded interior . . .

More here.

. . . and talking about big abandoned holes and ideas about what to do with them  . . .

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Mine the Gap at the Chicago Spire Hole

More reading on Block 37:

Tales from the Crypt: City to Bury $300 Million Mistake under Block 37
Can Signage Save Block 37?
Block 37 - The Curse Lives!
The Entombment of the Plug Bug
Planning and its Disconnects: The Cautionary Tale of Block 37

Lonely Flowers at the Gravesite of the Abandoned Subway Station

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State and Washington

October 17, 1943 - October 23, 2006

buried alive with $300 million in TIF funds

in the never-opened "Superstation" beneath Block 37.

(former stairway entrance filled in with unkempt lawn)

Forever Grand

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It was originally supposed to be finished by 1998 at a cost of $15 million.  By 2005, the estimate was up to $29 million with work still not started - construction didn't actually begin until early 2008.  It's made a mess of the major intersection of Grand and State ever since.  The cost is now up to $67 million and it's slated to be finished by the end of the year, but I wouldn't bet good money on it. 

Yes, it's the CTA's Grand stop on the Red Line, and as you can see from the photo above, there's still a lot of work to be done amidst the subterranean complex of mains, conduit, and ancient Roman catacombs. 

In addition to the glacial work on the revamped mezzanine, which will be expanded an additional 2,000 square feet, the re tiling and vaulting of the platforms is lasting longer than it took Michelangelo to paint the Sistine Chapel, with commuters waiting for their trains amidst bare walls, plywood on the floor, and a lighting system of electrician's lamps, year after year.  It looked like this in June of 2009 . . .

and remained uncompleted sixteen months later, in October of 2010 . . .

As you can see from the new sections on display in the photo above, the reconstructed design, as it slowly unveils itself, is quite attractive, and the mezzanine should eventually look something like this . . .

The station originally opened in October 1943 as part of the new Howard subway line.  At the heart of the revitalized River North, Grand is now the 8th busiest station on the Red Line, with a daily load of 8,000 passengers.  If the reconstructed station lasts as long as the original,  it will cost about 34 cents for every passenger passing through its turnstiles over the next 68 years.

It could be worse.  The Red Line's Washington stop closed in 2006 for construction of a new "superstation" under Block 37.    Two years later, with no end in sight to escalating cost overruns, the city shut the project down, a money pit consigned to mothballs. Five years after it was "temporarily" shut down,  and now mutilated to integrate with the unicorn superstation, the Washington stop remains closed.  $300 million dollars of your tax dollars down the tube, with nothing to show for it.  Makes the Grand station's $67 million price tag look like a bargain, doesn't it?