Reilly Drives the Stake Through the Heart: The Children's Museum in Grant Park is Dead, Dead, Dead

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 Sometimes the good guys actually win.

From 42nd ward alderman Brendan Reilly's latest newsletter, sent out Tuesday . . .

On Tuesday, April 24th the City Council unanimously approved the ordinance I sponsored to repeal the Chicago Children's Museum controversial development "rights" in Grant Park. Many Chicagoans remember the very public debate between then Mayor Richard M. Daley and me that started in 2007 regarding the legality of the City's decision to allow buildings and development rights in Grant Park . . . 

In 2008, only 16 alderman stood with Reilly in opposing the museum.  In 2012, Reilly's repeal motion had 30 co-sponsors.

In the battle to keep the Chicago Children's Museum from building a new home in Grant Park, there were those behaving very badly, and those behaving very bravely.

The very bad began with former Mayor Richard M. Daley and heiress Gigi Pritzker, who hatched the plan to violate the A. Montgomery Ward legacy of a Grant Park Forever, Open Clear and Free by cramming a new 100,000-square foot building into what is now Daley Bi-Centennial Plaza.  It was born in arrogance and went downhill from there, into the ugliest depths of raw power politics.

Daley and Pritzker conspired to smear anyone who dared oppose the museum's land grab as not only anti-child, but racists.  They enlisted Father Michael Pfleger to bus in people to hijack a community meeting on the museum, keeping area residents in side hallways.

They recklessly sullied the reputations of many fine people, such as Jim Law, CCM's VP of External affairs who did great things when we worked for the city such as Chicago Great Places and Spaces, and the architects of Krueck & Sexton, one of the best firms in Chicago, who were given the impossible task of designing a subterranean museum where the children would enter from the gasoline-fumed reaches of lower Randolph, and the unenviable task of continually revising the design to try to peel off opponents.

They embarrassed cherished Chicago institutions such as the Art Institute, Lyric Opera, and IIT by fabricating their support for the museum in full page newspaper ads, refuted with quick, unambiguous denials.

And, lastly, they tarnished the long-standing and well-deserved reputation of the Pritzker family as benefactors of the city, as personified in the Pritzker Pavilion designed by Frank Gehry, right across Columbus drive from the Children's Museum site.

They lied, they cheated, they dragged their supporters through the mud - and they lost.

Why did they lose?  They will tell you that is was the economy, stupid.  When Wall Street crashed, money dried up.  There's no small measure of truth in that, but it's far from the whole story.  Every year, even in the worst post-crash years, Chicago cultural institutions raised millions of dollars from supporters.  The new Children's Museum raised next to nothing.  The massive swell of opposition to the Museum building in Grant Park poisoned the well.  What would normally be an automatic font of good will among the general public - charitable contributions - became toxic, as likely to generate scorn as praise.

And that was due to those who behaved very bravely, who persisted in the face of mayoral rants, who kept fighting against misdirections, deceptions and slanders.  This list is only partial:  Brendan Reilly, Richard F. Ward, Blair Kamin, the Chicago Tribune, the Chicago Sun-Times, Crain's Chicago Business, Greg Hinz, Friends of Daley-Bi, Near East Association of Residents, Peggy Figel, Andrew Patner, Mark Konkol.  There was so many others.

And here is what they achieved:  Montgomery Ward's legacy of an open Grant Park endures.  The Chicago Children's Museum - a fine institution, despite its dark period of insanity - has renewed its lease at Navy Pier, where it will grow and improve.  Daley-Bi - North Grant Park Park -  is now in the hands of a exceptionally capable design team led by Chicago Park District Director of Planning and Development Gia Biagi and architect Michael van Valkenburgh.  That team, with full public input, is creating a a new vision for the park's redevelopment that balances passive and active uses in an innovative  program.  A program that holds the potential of adding a another civic jewel to Chicago's lakefront, one that complements rather than competes with Millennium Park just to the east.

 And most importantly, here is what they achieved:   In a time where various would-be tyrants - corporate, institutional, governmental - would have us convinced that whatever they're selling is inevitable and resistance futile - nothing is written.

Reinventing Daley Bi

The clock is ticking on Daley Bicentennial Plaza.  The approximately 20 acre rectangle east of Millennium Park and south of Randolph is about to be destroyed and rebuilt, an action made necessary by the need to replace the deteriorating waterproofing membrane that seals off the huge parking garage below.

According to Chicago Park District Director of Planning and Development Gia Biagi, "fences go up at the end of summer of 2012 . . .  The current goal is finish the work in two years, and have the the new park open for summer of 2015."

Biagi spoke at an October 26th public forum where a clear picture of the design of the new park, while far from finalized, began to clearly emerge.  The first major change was that the scope of the project is now confined to the area of Daley Bi.  The Cancer Survivors Garden stays, as does the "Peanut Park" between that garden and Lake Shore Drive, although it stands to be commandeered as a staging area during the period of construction.

Also confirmed by Biagi: "My notes say, 'what's going on with the Children's Museum?' Well, they're not coming to Grant Park," a remark that evoked loud approval from the audience. "I didn't intend it to be an applause line," said Biagi, "but . . . "

The current Daley Bicentennial Plaza fieldhouse is also staying.  The Chicago Children's Museum had proclaimed - risibly, considering their almost complete ineptness in fundraising - they would simply throw in a new $20 million fieldhouse as part of a deal to let them construct a new subterranean museum in Daley Bi.  The Museum pulled the plug on that fantasy early in the battle, and sights are now being lowered.

"We're not talking about anything major," said Biaggi.  "We need to stop the bigger problems of leaking and make the building a little more operable.  We are interested in looking at the facade of the building, too, in a way that it would relate better to the park and the design ideas we have here.  So it's a pretty light touch on the building aside from the major it's got to stop leaking, it's got to be functional and that's something we're going to see if we can fit it into our larger capital improvement program to try and fund that project."

Biagi said that for rebuilding the 20 acres of Daley Bi, "We have a little over $30 million to do this project.  That money comes from the revenue from the transfer of the parking garage to the city and then on to private vendor of the garage.  Part of that exchange included a set aside of about $35 million for this project . . . It started at 35 and then with design fees and a couple other things we're just a little over 30. in terms of what we have available to build a park."  Biagi didn't out rule lining up corporate sponsors to help defray costs.

Landscape architect Michael van Valkenburgh presented the latest iteration of the park design.

Presently, Daley Bicentennial is an extension of the formal composition of the larger Grant Park.


North Grant Park, as the reincarnation of Daley Bi is being called, will be something completely different.  As you can see from the illustration at the top of this post, the goal is to create a park filled with varied program that strikes a balance between the passive and the active.

In survey feedback from the public, over 50% rated providing space for special events as "Not important", while over 70% rated both providing "Space for Quiet, Relaxation, and Repose" and "Retain and improve views of Grant Park, the city, and the Lake" as "Very Important"

"Most people", said Van Valkenburgh,  "were very appreciative and laudatory about Millennium Park,  but the main thing they said was we don't need to repeat the things that Millennium gives us.  We want things to complement, so we're using Millennium and go over the Gehry bridge and want other things to do over there.  We heard that in the public meetings and the questionnaires definitely back up this notion of more passive things to do, and things you don't have to spend money on."

So the current design is a combination of passive and active spaces, of built-up landforms that reduce noise and wind in the interior of the park while providing expanded views of larger Grant Park and the lakefront.

"We all go there to see things," said Van Valkenburgh.   "We like to feel the space.  We like a lot of borrowed landscape, especially Grant Park to the south, and the lake to east, and so getting people up on higher ground where they can look out and borrow that visual landscape is an extremely important thing . . . making hills - not crazy-high hills, but a kind of rolling topography."

Balancing this complexity is a "visual sense of welcome," said van Valkenburgh.  "You want to see deeply into the park.  You don't want it to be too mysterious at the corners.  You want to know what's up ahead as a major part of making an urban park welcoming."

The park designs includes both a "passive axis", from sw to ne, emphasizing natural landscape and a boundless sense of space, and an "active axis", from se to nw, encompassing more urban and civic aspects.

"Rock climbing as a possibility," said van Valkenburgh.  "We also liked the idea of a temporary ice rink in that area.  The problem with skating, of course, is what is it in the summer?  We didn't want to have a big water area, so we liked this idea of a skating ribbon which goes away in the summer.  It just becomes a path that you walk on.  Instead of a rink that you go around in, this is more of a meander.  Potentially that could be an area where we include the outdoor cafe [in the summer]."

Van Valkenburg is also looking to include in North Grant Park, the "very best playgrounds that any park in America has for kids, and that doesn't mean that we won't use any traditional playground equipment.  There are some things that are universal.  I don't know any kids who don't like swings, but it can't only be swings and slides and things like that."

After the presentation, the assembly broke up into three groups to ask questions and offer feedback on the plan.  What about the tennis courts?  Will the paths be wide enough to accommodate bikes?  Will parents be able to watch their kids easily? There was no shortage of opinions and concerns, not infrequently in conflict.

When former Mayor Richard M. Daley talked of Daley Bi as being a "nowhere", he was indulging himself in the kind of willful, malicious ignorance that became a hallmark of his last years in office.  Make no mistake: Daley Bi is a wonderful, calm counterpoint to the hyper-activity of Millennium Park.  That wasn't a failing.  That was a virtue.  But while there's still a long way to go, and a lot of opportunities for things to go wrong, Van Valkenburgh's redesign holds out the promise of building on that quality to create a new North Grant Park that's every bit as remarkable in its own way as Millennium Park.


You can check out the entire October 26th presentation for yourself, in the "albums" section of the North Grant Park website, here.

Virtual Facadectomy: On October 26, Grant Park Advisory talks 618 S. Michigan, unveils plans for North Grant Park

What's thinner than a facadectomy, that dubious "preservation" process that strips off the facade of a soon-to-be demolished building and slaps it onto a new structure?  How about a fritectomy?

It's part of the plan for a new facade at 618 South Michigan, a topic on the agenda of the next Grant Park Advisory Council meeting, to be held Wednesday, October 26, 2011 , 6:00 to 8:00 p.m. in the 8th floor meeting room of the Chicago Park District Headquarters, a/k/a Harry Weese's Time-Life Building, 541 North Fairbanks (enter on Ohio).

The major item at the meeting will be Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates' presentation of the revised plans for North Grant Park/Daley Bicentennial Plaza.  In May of 2010, Van Valkenburgh gave a presentation of his views of park planning even as the Park District's Gia Biagi mandated than any plans would have to accommodate a new building for the Chicago Children's Museum, the pet project of movie producer Gigi Pritzker that a flailing and exhausted Mayor Richard M. Daley tried to ram into the park while vilifying as racists and child-haters anyone who dared oppose it.  Flash forward to today: Daley is gone, Pritzker is gone.  The opponents prevailed.  A stake has been driven into the project's heart, and the Museum is negotiating to continue at Navy Pier and expand its presence.  Will this give Valkenburgh more freedom to come up with something spectacular,  like his new Brooklyn Bridge Park, which balances playlots with a salt marsh?

But back to 618 South Michigan.  It looks like the original intrusion of modernist structure into the 600 block of the neo-classical Michigan Avenue streetwall, anchored by Marshall & Fox's Blackstone Hotel at the south, and the Harvester building to the north, with the Blum's Vogue building, constructed by Florence Ziegfeld, Sr., in between.  Actually, however, as related in an excellent post on John D. Cramer's great HPRES-ist blog, 618 South Michigan was actually built in 1913, designed by architects Zimmerman, Saxe, & McBride with a Burnham-esque classical buff terra cotta facade.  That facade survived into the 1950's, but when IBM took over the building, a new Miesian steel-and-glass curtain wall replaced it, designed by Shayman & Salk, a more suitable visual expression for one of the corporate powerhouses of mid-century modernism.

In 1974, the Spertus Institute took over the building, and added that monolithic entrance wall unbeloved by many.  In 2007, the Institute moved again, to a spectacular new building by Krueck & Sexton that has quickly become one of Chicago's architectural icons. Two years before the opening, the Spertus sold 76,000 square-foot 618 South for $8 million to Columbia College, which already owned both the Harvester and Blum's Vogue buildings.

For Columbia, which has a sterling record of purchasing, retrofitting and restoring vintage buildings throughout the South Loop,  Gensler has been engaged in an Urban Campus Repositioning "to rethink the way its 16 buildings fit into this burgeoning South Loop neighborhood."  But what of 618 South? Unlike most of Columbia's other structures, 618 South Michigan's original facade, long gone, couldn't be restored, only recreated, an inauthentic process.  So what is Gensler going to do?  First, they're going to replace the 1950's curtain wall with a new curtain wall, but on the glass they're going to etch a fritting that will evoke the terra cotta original.

That kind of applied imagery is very Venturi, and not unknown.  Cramer cites its use by Herzog & DeMeuron on their 1998 Fachhochschule Eberswalde library, where Thomas Ruff transferred images onto what became a photographic concrete facade.  Looking at the redesign of 618 South in this image from the invaluable skyscrapercity.com website, it's hard to make a judgement of how it'll work out.

The fritting is described as "suggesting" the image of the original facade.  If it's too abstracted, will it be too insubstantial to register?  Still, the idea of this kind of layering, of intimating the past without denying the present, creating a tension of simultaneity, makes me look forward to seeing how it will all turn out.  And it doesn't -well, a future generation gets to take it apart and put it together still again - maybe they'll rename it "The Face Lift Building".