Finishing the River Walk - Conclusion: Swimming Holes and Wolf Calls

click images for larger view

When last we left our traversal of the City of Chicago's plans for finishing the Chicago Riverwalk, we were about to cross under the LaSalle Street bridge.  While design for the three blocks to the east is 90% finished, the final three blocks going west are in a much more preliminary stage, with design listed as only 10% complete.

The Swimming Hole, south bank of Chicago River, LaSalle to Wells

The first of these blocks, from LaSalle to Wells, is currently called the Swimming Hole, but according to Chicago Department of Transportation Project Manager Michelle Woods, “I've been strongly encouraged to change the name because the Coast Guard thinks people will grab their beach towel and their flip-flops and go for a swim in the river.”

The Swimming Hole is actually a zero-depth fountain that kids could run through.  “This is the block,” says Woods, “that has the most amount of sunlight throughout the day.  This could be a very fun place for families and enjoy a nice day.  There's all kinds of technology and different things you can do so that the floor could look like a dance floor and light up as the water sprays, as the kids run through.  It could light up and interact with the kids climbing on it.”  The concept includes “more robust” bathroom facilities that would include rooms where kids could change in and out of their swimsuits.

The Jetty, Wells to Franklin

In the current, early concepts, the next block, from Wells to Franklin, is called The Jetty.  “It's actually my favorite block,” says Woods.  “It has fishing piers and floating gardens.  Instead of having a concession here, this would be a place I would like to set up as a classroom space and partner with the Chicago Public Schools and the Chicago Park District to have them bring kids to come learn about ecology, water quality and the history of the river, and maybe give them an opportunity to go fishing and enjoy a natural resource in the middle of the city.  At nighttime, this could be a place where we have caterers, maybe have it leased out for corporate events and nighttime activities.  You could have a glass of wine or a beer and wander around onto the fishing piers and enjoy a nice night on the river.”

The Boardwalk, Franklin to Lake Street

The final block, from Franklin to Lake Street, is called The Boardwalk.  “This is the section,” says Woods, “where we have a 50-foot buildout, and so we have a lot more space.  The idea originally was let's put some floating gardens in, let's have a nice boardwalk area, a nice public space, right at this big confluence of the river at Wolf Point, where people can hang out and enjoy all the traffic and things going on along the river.”  The rendering depicts an “iconic bridge”, that rises from the river level to Lake Street in a gentle slope.  “This is the section,” says Woods, “where I've been challenged - ‘can you create more retail space here?’, can you do something a little bit more ‘Chicago’, so we're working on that now.”

River Point Park

As we wrote previously, this is one segment where we really need to be seeing some kind of co-ordination between the three major park projects around Wolf Point,  In addition to the Riverwalk, $29 million in TIF funds are going to burying the Metra tracks under a new park along the river at the 45-story River Point office tower rising at 444 West Lake,  At the opposite bank, once the billion dollars of development is completed at Wolf Point, 70% of the site will be parkland, with nearly 900 linear feet of Riverwalk.

planned Wolf Point Riverwalk

Everyone doing their own thing is, of course, a grand Chicago tradition, but you can't help but think that it's taken all of Chicago's 175 history to get to the point of reshaping Wolf Point as a public amenity.  Once the pieces are in place, who knows when we'll have this opportunity again.  Doesn't it just make sense to have all the parties sit down and co-ordinate the vistas and functions?

The ultimate objective is to draw 2.8 million people to the Riverwalk each year.  Woods' presentation compared this to Lincoln Park (3 million visitors annually), New York's High Line (3.7 million), and at 5.1 million, the San Antonio River Walk, the gold standard that Ernie Pyle once referred to as ‘The Venice of America’.

The cost of completing the Chicago Riverwalk is estimated at $90-100 million, with over $3 million already spent on the design.  The city is confident that funding will be available from the Federal Transportation Infrastructure Finance and Innovation Act.  Last year, the U.S. Department of Transportation made available $17 billion in loan guarantees through the program's $1.7 billion in credit assistance.

TIFA would finance the Chicago Riverwalk via a 30-year loan at a reduced rate of interest. The loans, often used for things such as toll roads, require a revenue stream to pay them back.  For the Chicago Riverwalk completion, one proposal is to repay TIFA from a TIF,  with Woods mentioning revenue from the Riverwalk concessions as another possibility.  How many concessions and closings for private parties would you need to come up with the over $3 million a year needed to pay back the loan?  And if all the Riverwalk's revenue went to debt service, where would the money come from for regular maintenance?

Those are questions that - at least publicly - have yet to be addressed, but the deal may already be near to closing.  In an interview with Tanya Snyder of the DC.StreetsBlog, outgoing U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood says that a formal announcement may come as early as next month.  If everything goes well, construction could begin this year, with a completion time of 15 to 18 months per block.

Read: Finishing the Chicago Riverwalk
Part One - Introduction and Block One: The Marina
Part Two - Opera on the River? (or Maybe just some jazz)

Finishing the Chicago Riverwalk, Part Two: Opera on the River? (or Maybe just some Jazz).

This picks up from my first Finishing the Riverwalk post last week to continue westward with City of Chicago's new plan to complete the Chicago Riverwalk along the north bank of the river from State Street to Lake Street, which has remained unfinished since the reconstruction of West Wacker Drive over a decade ago.

CDOT Chicago Riverwalk proposal - The Cove (click images for larger view)

In my previous post, I started with the Marina, from State to Dearborn.  Today, we're moving on the The Cove, in the next block, Dearborn to Clark. “This is much more of a family oriented location,” says Chicago Department of Transportation Manager Michelle Woods, who presented the proposals at a public meeting at the Chicago Architecture Foundation last week that also included architect Carol Ross Barney and Sasaki Associates Principal Gina Ford.  “Instead of formal steps going down, this gently slopes down and is like a sand dune kind of experience.  We have native grasses and things that could withstand being flooded and submerged in our 100-year rainstorm.    This could be another great place for people to come and hang out out of the traffic of the main branch of the river.  Maybe we have a kayak concession renting out vessels.  We might have something where people could come and just rent out chairs and sit and have lunch, watching all the activity taking place as the river is floating past them.”

CDOT Chicago Riverwalk proposal - River Theater, Clark to Lasalle

The next block, the River Theater, from Clark to LaSalle, is the one specifically designed to bring together a large number of people either informally or as the audience for programs. “I like to call it Michelle's Woods, ” joked Michelle Woods, “because I'm so humble.  So this is kind of Chicago's Spanish Steps, if you will.  We'll have this great big grand stairwell that comes down to the river, and then gently cutting throughout the stairways is a nice ramp so if you have a wheelchair, or if you have a child in the stroller, you'll be able to come from up to down.  This is a location where we would potentially have the water taxi service or maybe a dinner boat cruise..”

“For those of you who are into landscape architecture, I really like to point out the great job the team did on the tree pits and the tree gates.  This is the first of its kind tree gate - instead of having a typical boxed pit, we're doing trenches, mostly, so it's going to help with the sustainability of the trees over the long term.  You can also see they've cut into the steps for the tree grates to help with the life of the tree.”

It's here where you could imagine audiences gathering for formal programming, and then you have to figure out where you put the performers.  One thing that's missing from the formal CDOT presentations is context.  There are a lot of renderings of what the new installations would look like, and few showing what they're actually looking at on the other side of the river.  In the case of the River Theater, the direct backdrop is the the 1914 Reid Murdoch Building, with its distinctive clock tower.

At the Reid Murdoch, the upper level promenade is catwalk-shallow, but there's also a lower level plaza, which has had tables for the Fulton on the River restaurant, which could serve as a stage for the Theater on the other side of the River.  Or maybe you put performers on a floating barge stage. 

Or maybe one, last Neiman Marcus sized idea . . .

set for Giordano's Andrea Chénier © Bregenz Festival -photograph: Kristi Sauer

This is a photograph of a production of Giordano's opera Andrea Chénier at the Bregenz Festival, in Austria.   Every two years a stage like this is built above a concrete core in Lake Constance.  The spectacular water bourne sets, of which you can see more here, must be of lightweight construction and capable of being disposed of in an economically sensitive way.  Me, I'm holding out for a Chicago riverfront production of Turandot, with Lisa Madigan as Turandot, Mike Madigan as Altoum, Richard Daley as Timur, Rahm as Calaf, Toni Preckwinkle as Liu, and Ed Burke, Jean-Claude Brizzard and Pat O'Connor as Ping, Pang and Pong.  Costumes by Nick Cave; sets by Jeanne Gang, direction by David Cromer, the Grant Park Symphony and Christopher Bell's Chorus conducted by Carlos Kalmar . . .

Oh, sorry, got a bit carried away for a moment there.  I can just picture the very idea of a floating barge large enough to support an opera sending the Army Corp of Engineers into convulsions, but entertainment on a saner scale isn't only possible; it's already being done.

Last year, or maybe the year before, I was coming home, walking along the north branch by the ABA Tower, when I heard jazz music wafting up in the night air.  Lagniappe, one of the seasonal cafes set up in what under the new proposals is  to be The Cove on the south bank, had blues and jazz nights throughout the summer, and as I listened, I shared the music with an impromptu flotilla of boats hovering on the river around the cafe.  With the music playing out in a soft acoustic like a velvet glove, the traffic moving along Wacker, and the lights of the skyscrapers reflected in the windshields of the boats as they bobbed on the water, it was if the entire river had become a hypnotic music video.

I think the River Theater is a great concept.  Mayor Emanuel apparently thinks so, too, at least according to CDOT Commissioner Gabe Klein, who was at the back of the room for Michelle Woods' presentation last week. “The Mayor and I  both love this one the best,” said Klein, “although I shouldn't speak for him.  For me, I like that it breaks down the barrier between Wacker Drive and the River . . . Right now, there's such a barrier and the contiguous bit is so crucial to the project.  I think the Mayor also likes this because he actually seems the potential for some small performance-type space as well.”  Ballet, we could do ballet, too.  (Actually, the two level promenade and the windows and tower of the Reid Murdoch could make a great setting for choreographers to move their dancers through their patterns.)

The River Theater is the last block in the new Riverwalk proposals where CDOT says the design work is 90% done.  For the balance of the blocks, going to Lake Street, the design work is said to be only 10%, but there are already some ideas, and we'll cover them in our last post of River Walk proposals next week.

Finishing the River Walk - Introduction and Block One: The Marina

construction of Wabash-State segment of Chicago River Walk

More details emerged Wednesday on the plans for Phase II of the Chicago River Walk.  At a public meeting at the Chicago Architecture Foundation, Chicago Department of Transportation Project Manager Michelle Woods offered a presentation - which she promised would soon be on line - and she was joined by architect Carol Ross Barney and  Sasaki Associates Principal Gina Ford.

from left: Carol Ross Barney, Gina Ford of Sasaki Associates, Michelle Woods, CDOT

Ross Barney told me that the final six blocks of the River Walk were designed as a procession that goes from more structured, at the denser, eastern end, to more natural, at the less dense - at least for now - western end.

“A typical boardwalk,” said Woods, “has a consistent look from one end to the other.  On the main branch of the Chicago River, every moveable bridge is unique, every one is different and separate from each other.  So we took this as an opportunity to create a different experience as you went from bridge to bridge and we used different types of river themes to come up with those different options.”

click images for larger view

Right now, the finished river walk ends at State Street.  Planning and design for the next phases is 90% for the segment from State to LaSalle, with the last segment, from LaSalle to Lake Street, still in the early conceptual stages of design.  Cost for the overall project is estimate at $90 to $100 million, with funding still to be put in place.  Woods said the city was still working on receiving an invitation to  to apply for a federal loan program most often used for revenue producing projects such as tollways, with the funds paid back over a thirty year period.  If everything falls into place, construction could begin as early as this summer.  Drawing on experience from the construction of completed blocks of the river walk, time of construction is estimated at 15 to 18 months per block.

Perhaps the key component to the River Walk is making it continuous, as opposed to the current obstacle course.  “It's a river climb now,” said Woods.  “You have to climb the stairs, cross the street, and then descend a set of stairs to get down to the next section.”  To alleviate this, connection walkways, like the one recently built under the Wabash Avenue Bridge, have to be constructed to take each segment of the river walk under the bridge, itself.

The Marina, State to Dearborn

Each segment has been given its own name.  The first, from State to Dearborn, is called The Marina.
It will contain 1,900 square-feet of retail space; and a 3,000 square-foot plaza area for Al Fresco dining.  The tops of the tall-backed benches double as the surface for the bar.  “You have steps,” says Woods, “that go down, so you can sit there and enjoy the water very closely.  This might also be a spot for recreational boat docking.”

As I mentioned yesterday, there are still a lot of questions about the River Walk development, but there's also an enormous potential to moving the Chicago River towards its full potential as an invaluable civic amenity, which we'll pick up on as we discuss the other blocks of the design in future posts.

The Jetty - Wells to Franklin

(Right now, I have to start getting ready for the Landmarks Commission session on Bertrand Goldberg's Prentice Hospital, today - Thursday - beginning at 12:45 in the County Board Room of the County Building 118 North Clark.  Open to the public.)