Six Bad Arguments for the Exploding Costs of CTA Stations

CTA Damen Green Line Station, Perkins and Will

The blowback – largely on Twitter – to my post about the $60 million cost of the new Damen and Lake station on the CTA green line is a dispiriting demonstration on how politicians play us like a violin.  The discussion revolves around a few basic arguments:

"Even if the stations could be built more economically, it doesn’t matter because infrastructure is expensive." Tell that to those on the short end of the giant TIF con, in which phony-baloney TIF's carved out of affluent areas generate – and retain - billions of dollars to make them even denser concentrations of wealth, while TIF’s in capital-starved neighborhood generate crumbs far insufficient to their needs. Well-managed cities have capital plans. Irredeemably corrupt ones have TIF's.

“Added cost = good design”  Really? Reasonable (and often unreasonable) constraints are the mother’s milk of creative architecture.

"It’s still cheaper than New York City’s new subway stations. Yes, but then so is just about everything short of the Burj Kalifa.

“We deserve it.” A perfect expression of the kind of civic balkanization the TIF system encourages.

"Other things - Jane Byrne interchange, O'Hare expansion, etc. - cost so much more!" So if we can't come to our senses, let's repeat the mistake as often as possible at slightly smaller scale.

"We need this - the CTA tends to be so shabby." Shabby indeed, but . . .

a. A station on a tighter budget does NOT have to be shabby.  That's the talent good architects bring to the equation.

State and Lake, Loop L

b. If we overspent less on the pork barrel stations, we’d have more for basic maintenance. While Red Line-Wilson got over $200 million, the Sheridan station – which boards slightly more passengers – has been allowed to be a decrepit mess for decades, just as for decades State and Lake has been a civic disgrace of peeling paint, creaking floorboards, curated pigeon droppings and general slummery even as $75,000,000 was found to build a new Washington and Wabash station to support about the same number of boardings.  The fact that rehabs for those stations only now have been announced doesn't make up for decades of willful neglect.

We think of ourselves as rational, progressive people, but at heart, we’re kittens distracted by a piece of string, the latest pretty bauble that bewitches and clouds our intellects. It's big! It's shiny! It’s expensive! Ergo, it must be good; it must be swallowed without a second thought.  Except, there is no good architecture without fitness to purpose.  

Cermak, Green Line

The new Cermak Green Line station is visually spectacular, and the poster child for construction overkill. Costing $50,000,000, it was to be the new gateway to McCormick Place and an emerging Motor Row, but so far it remains lightly used, generating less than a half million boardings a year. Multiply that by 50, for a projected 50 years until the next necessary major rehab, and it still comes out to $2.10 – more than the CTA’s basic fare – each time a passenger enters.

Original Fullerton Red/Brown Line station

I never thought I’d write anything nice about Charles Yerkes and the other traction crooks, but they understood budgets. The stations they built were cheap and aggressively efficient, but often not only simply but graciously designed.  They were not mini-Grand Centrals, but they had newsstands, a washroom – often even shops. And in most cases, they supported equal or even larger passenger loads than the CTA handles today. Many of these original stations have been preserved as important pieces of architecture, standing in constrained, silent contempt of the bloated counterparts that took their place.

To be sure, those original stations had drawbacks - not the least of which access for the physically challenged - that newer stations - all newer stations - must and should address.  Elevators, wide platforms, longer platforms to accommodate longer trains, are among functional improvements that are a welcome addition to all new and rehab construction.  Unwarranted, relentless monumentality, perhaps not.

We need a forensic breakdown on the costs of these mega-stations.  How much for the basics - structural support, platforms, stairways and elevators - and how much for all the bling?

If we're going to spend money on gateways, structures that define and help develop their communities, why would we be putting the big bucks into those that people spend only seconds rushing in and out of, and most of their time on the platform immersed in their smartphones waiting for the train to arrive?  Wouldn't it be better to spend more of that money on signature public spaces where people are actually encouraged to linger, enjoy and interact with the neighborhood around them?

Morgan Street, Green Line

As a lover of architecture, I delight in the design of Morgan, Cermak and Washington (Wilson, not so much). They're among the few bright spots in a city where the mediocrity of more and more new construction threatens to make a cruel joke of our reputation as a city where architecture matters. As a citizen of Chicago, however, I can’t walk by without smelling the reek of pork - fat contracts for the connected, even as greater needs are left to starve.

We've gone from $38,000,000 for Morgan Street, to $50,000,000 for Cermak to $60,000,000 for Damen, a 58% inflation in just 8 years.

Wilson Station, Red Line

We’re in thrall to a binary system. Dazzling displays of spending to give the beaming politicians ribbons to cut, or chronic neglect of facilities used by millions more but lacking in press opportunities. Shabby and/or derelict, or blingful and extravagant.  There has to be a middle way.

Less is more. Ever hear of it?

Chicago Under Construction: The Park at River Point Makes Train Tracks Disappear

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For the better part of the past century, north from Lake Street was where the Chicago River began to again show its natural roots.  To the east and south, the river had long before a constructed ditch with towers on either bank often coming right to the edge.

At Wolf Point, however, and along the western bank, the river retained what at least appeared to be a natural shoreline, hugged by trees, shrubs and plants that arose free from the guiding hand of any landscape architect.  For those long decades, this assuming structure, just north of Lake Street, was the most ambitious building on the site . . .

All that's history now.  There are big plans for all those last empty sites along the river in the Loop.  No fewer than three buildings are planned for Wolf Point, and renderings of a new office tower at 150 North Riverside were unveiled just last month.

That brick Metra building - and the ramshackle wooden stairway leading down to the river -  is now only a memory, as another massive tower, River Point, is about to go up in their place.  It's been designed for Hines Interests by Pickard-Chilton, architects of the 60-story 300 North LaSalle, completed in 2009.  The actual building, to be set back from the river along Canal Street, has yet to break ground.

First the developer is creating a 1.5 acre riverfront park, for which they've shook down the city for a $29.5 million TIF subsidy.  (150 North Riverside, to be constructed on the other side of Lake, is also making a riverfront park part of their project, but without recourse to TIF money.)  The park at River Point is being built over the existing train tracks leading into Union Station.

On a chilly day back in April, a painter was already documenting the vanishing surface tracks clinging to the river.

Soon, the construction equipment was rolling into place.

Things begin, slowly and deliberately . . .

. . . cranes flew in on barges . .  .

. . . basic contours began to reveal themselves . . .

. . . and by July, there was no longer any mistaking but that this was the start of something big.

By August, there was enough green rebar in sight it might as well been St. Patrick's Day.

 The irregular riverbank has already been replaced with a new river wall . . .

 

. . . even as concrete walls quickly began to rise to support the surface of the new park, and swallow up the accustomed, almost lullaby sound of locomotive bells forever . . .

 

When it's all done, it will look something like this . . . 

Read More:

Hour of the Wolf: The Transformation of the Pivot Point of Chicago

First Renderings for 150 North Riverside office tower and park

Baron von Steuben Refashioned - Randolph Tower: Restored Faux Gothic with a Candy Core

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 So, let's the negative stuff out of the way first.

If you're smitten by the beautifully restored Randolph Tower, at Wells, originally built for The Steuben Club in 1929, you can take a bit of additional pride that you, dear taxpayer, pretty much paid for it.  You just don't own it, and you won't get any taxes from to pay for schools or other city services until 2034.  As we wrote three years ago, Ronald Reagan may have thought it was some grandmother in Garfield Park, but it's a project like Randolph Tower that's the real Welfare Queen.

What started out in 2006 as a $78.4 million project with a TIF component of $8 million (about 10%), grew the very next year to a $97.5 million project with $10 million in TIF funds. After the crash of 2008 caused two of the project's three lenders to back out, a new Randolph Wells TIF was created just for the Randolph Tower.  The final tab?  It's estimated at $145,000,000 with the TIF contribution escalating to $34 million, nearly a quarter of the total investment.  Of the rest, there's another $8 million in a grant from the Illinois Housing Development Authority, $40 million in tax-exempt municipal bonds backed by IHDA (the AFL-CIO Housing Investment Trust is picking $20 million of those bonds), $6.6 million in Low Income Housing Tax Credits, and $30.2 in historic tax credits.  The developer?  Their skin in the game consists of $13.9 million (less than 10% of the cost), plus another $3.2 million in deferred development fees.

The good news is that developer is actually making good on the standard mandate that 20% of the units in a TIF-backed project be affordable housing.  Unlike most developers, who simply weasel out of that commitment by kicking in just $100,000 per unbuilt affordable unit into a city trust fund, Village Green is actually offering up 63 affordable apartments to qualifying applicants at rentals priced at less than half those of the market-rate units.

Negative number two:   You can certainly understand why they did it - the salt and chemicals Chicago uses to combat snow are hell on terra cotta - but the dark granite at ground level looks much darker than the material used in the original design.  As it rises high from the sidewalk, it detracts significantly from the the part of the building seen by the most people.  The granite makes the first floor facades look like an old geezer with his pants hiked up to his armpits

After this article was originally published,  Brett Laureys of Wiss, Janney, Elstner, to which developer Village Green turned for the exterior restoration, took the time to write me about the investigations that went into the stone:

Please note that the historic photo you published is very washed out.  We did find some reference to dark colored granite bases in our historic review, and we found some small fragments of dark granite behind the 1950's granite.  On a building of this vintage, they commonly used a contrasting color at the base of the building as an accent.  From all the facts and data, we believe this is the original color.  The height of the granite matches the original drawings and is taller than normal due to the vertical scale of the elevation.  Look at it from a distance and you'll see why that height was used.

As anyone who remembers walking by the building during its long derelict period can attest, the restoration of the crumbling terra cotta facades is a major triumph.  The Chicago Architecture Foundation has left up on the web the visuals used for a great presentation by Laureys that gives a thorough, richly illustrated overview of the project.  To aid in their efforts, Wiss Janney turned to The National Building Museum.  In 1982 the NBM had acquired 50,000 drawings from the Northwestern Terra Cotta Company, the Chicago-based firm which had produced terra cotta used on the Steuben Club.   For Wiss Janney, the museum digitized 80 of the original Steuben Club blueprints.

photograph:  Wiss, Janney, Elstner Associates, Inc.

The $22 million terra cotta facade restoration was “was one of the largest ever done in Chicago,” says Laureys.  “To be able to restore all the terra cotta and granite back to original is rarely done.”  Of the building's over 90,000 pieces of terra cotta, approximately 12,000 units were completely replaced, 10,000 reset, and about 10,000 repaired in place.  “Another really great thing we did,” adds Laureys, “was to restore the gargoyles at the 39th floor of the building.  They were removed in the 1960's and replaced with flat limestone.  Gladding McBean remade the terra cotta gargoyles for us from a historic photograph.” 

photograph:  Wiss, Janney, Elstner Associates, Inc.

So now, after half a century, the gargoyles again stand guard at the capstones of two-story-high flying buttresses.

 Considering how 1920s Chicago's coal smoke air could filthy up even the shiniest new surfaces in no time flat, the Randolph Tower may well look better now than the day it opened.

photograph:  Wiss, Janney, Elstner Associates, Inc.

The path from Steuben Club to Randolph Tower can be said to have begun on March 15, 2001, when potentially murderous chunks of the building's terra cotta came crashing down onto the street and Loop L tracks.  Over the next three days, city crews hastily erected steel-topped canopies all the way across Randolph Street and the L tracks on Wells.  The city sought reimbursement from the building's owners for what was claimed to be “hundreds of thousands of dollars” of ‘Make-Safe’ repairs, which eventually led to the owners filing for bankruptcy.  Finally, in 2005 the property was sold to Village Green, which had previously done apartment rehabs of the historic Burnham/Atwood Fisher Building and, more recently, a handsome rehab of the MDA City Apartments on Wabash, which we wrote about last October.

A Century and half of History at Randolph and Wells

Not unlike Adler and Sullivan's Schiller Theater, the Steuben Club tower had its roots in Chicago's vibrant German-American community.  In the early part of the 20th century, nearly a quarter of Chicago's population was said to have been of German ancestry.  That didn't save it from the great wave of German-bashing that came with World I, when sauerkraut was renamed ‘Liberty Cabbage‘ and Boston Symphony Orchestera Music Director Karl Muck, born in Germany but a Swiss citizen, was arrested and interned in Georgia.

After the war, German-Americans sought to combat anti-immigrant prejudice by forming the Steuben Society of America, named after Baron Von Steuben, a Prussian-born Revolutionary War general who was said to have been the man who transformed George Washington's rag-tag army into a formidable fighting force.  When the 2,500 Chicago members decided to build themselves a clubhouse, they thought big.

image courtesy Chicago History Museum

They bought the corner at Randolph and Wells that since 1852 was the location of one of Chicago's first grand hotels, the Briggs House, which was rebuilt after the Great Fire of 1871 and stood on the site until demolished for the Steuben Club.  John M. Van Osdel was the architects for both buildings. It was in his suite at Briggs House that Abraham Lincoln learned he had been nominated for the Presidency of the United States by the Republican delegates meeting at The Wigwam convention center, at Lake and Wacker, just a couple of blocks away.

In the wake of great fire of 1871, the hotel had featured prominently on the cover of Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper in the drawing ‘The Terrified Population in Front of the Briggs House’.  (The image you see here is taken from the Chicago History's Museum excellent The Great Chicago Fire and the Web of Memory website.)

Image courtesy Chicago History Museum

In May of 1927, the Chicago Tribune reported that the Steuben Club had paid $1.5 million to acquire the Briggs House and its site, beating out the Frontenac Athletic Club, which was also said to looking at the property for its own building.   The Steuben Club said they would be building a 32-story tower, with a hundred sleeping rooms and a 1,200 seat theater, for which a lease to a New York theatrical firm was said to be already under negotiation.

One day the following February, trucks lined up at Briggs House's rear door to cart away for auction the red plush sofas, wooden bedsteads, marble washstands and other furnishings.  A Tribune reporter described how a carelessly dropped cigar stub started a grease fire whose smoke “poured out into the surrounding streets . . . the savory odors of roasts cooked in the Briggs House ovens for more than two generations.  It was probably the odors of the buffalo steaks, venison chops, bear steak, and mallard ducks for which the old grill was famous.”

The next week, in a display of eminent domain, Chicago-style, City Commissioner Michael Hughes threw up a police cordon around the four-story Leonard Hotel, also on the Steuben Club site, stopping guests from entering, and shutting off the water.  In 1929, another lawsuit charged the club's officers with building themselves office suites so lavish  - 135 square foot reception room, 420 square foot office, plus full bathrooms - as to constitute a misuse of funds.  The case was ultimately resolved in arbitration.

The cornerstone for the new building was laid on September 17, 1928,  both Baron von Steuben's birthday and the 141st anniversary of the adoption of the U.S. Constitution.  City Building Commissioner Chris Paschen made an appearance dressed up in revolutionary-era attire, complete with “powdered wig, buff and blue uniform, and high boots.”  A similarly-attired trio portrayed The Spirit of 76.  Last year, workers at Randolph Tower came across the time capsule that had been placed in the cornerstone that day, which included a copy of the Constitution, a bible,  “that future generations may know that we were a God fearing people,” copies of newspapers, a 48-star flag, and a banana smoothie.  New, contemporary items were added to time capsule, just as when the it was first opened in 1955, and it was re-interred in the walls to again be rediscovered by a generation still to come, or space aliens investigating the ruins of our civilization.  Place your bets now.

As related by the commission staff's usual excellent report on the building, issued in 2006 when it

Karl M. Vitzthum

received official designation by the Commission on Chicago Landmarks, the Steuben Club found its architect in Karl M. Vitzthum.  Born in Germany in 1880, Vitzthum had emigrated to America in 1902, and came to Chicago in 1914 to work for the Burnham Company.  In 1919 he founded K.M. Vitzthum and Company, and went on to design prominent buildings throughout the city, including a number of banks, the Old Republic Building and St. Peter's Church on Madison.

His design for the Steuben Club, like the one he did for another, nearby skyscraper, One North LaSalle, was a response to Chicago's first zoning ordinance.  Passed in 1923, it lifted the height restrictions on new buildings in exchange for mandating setbacks as buildings rose, to keep natural daylight from being blocked by shear-walled towers.  The final setback could cover no more than 25% of the site.

And so the Steuben Club has two basic parts. The 27-story base, containing retail and offices - many originally occupied by club members -  takes up pretty much entire site.  On top of it is an 18-story, telescoping polygonal tower that was home to the club, with a large ballroom and skylit swimming pool at the top of the large block below.  The basement held a rathskeller.

A great beginning to be sure.  Timing?  Not so much.  Not long after its opening in 1929, the club was hit hard by the Great Depression.  Optimistic revenue projections proved evasive. In the mid-1930's, the club wound up selling floors 31 to 43.  The interior was rehabbed.  A 1950's modernization erased much of the original design, and the building became a regular visitor to tax court.  Another 1980's remodeling removed “nearly all of the historic finishes.”  Which takes us into the 21st century, falling terra cotta, and the more recent history described above.

I actually first noticed the rehab last week.  Walking by the building, I stood looking through a window at this stairway inscribed with the names of Chicago architects, Karl Vitzthum on the bottom rung.  The manager on duty graciously came out to invite me inside, and I took the lobby shots you see here.

I suppose there could be some mourning that the original lobby design wasn't restored, but from what I can remember of it, it was dark and not especially distinguished.  Which is what I would say about the building, itself.   I know this will get preservationists upset, but a lot of money - TIF's, subsidies and tax breaks - has been poured into this building, and I still wrestle with the idea that, no timeless masterpiece, it would ultimately have been the wiser decision, in the larger view of the built city and its finances, to have let it go.

But we didn't, and so we have what could said to be a rather happy balance beneath the new, as represented in the sparkling restored Gothic-styled terra cotta of the exterior, and re-designed interiors by Hartshorne Plunkard Architecture that are refreshingly free from fidelity to the previous, rather bland historicism. 

In an interview in the January, 2012 CTBUH Journal, Ray Hartshorne and Paul Alessandro refer to what they did at Randolph Tower as less a restoration than a “rehabilitation . . . We try to restore not just the image of the building, but more so the life inside the building through combining old qualities with new ones.”

Ballroom turned fitness center.  Image courtesy Village Green

The huge old ballroom, with its tall, Gothic framed windows has been rehabilitated as a fitness center and club space, complete with super sized chess pieces and a . . . pig.  The Olympic-sized swimming pool again has light streaming in through the top skylight.

Image courtesy Village Green

If there were any doubt, the lobby proclaims clearly this is not a less-is-more kind of place.  It has a sort of overstuffed, modernist Baroque exuberance, with bold patterns, bright colors, and chairs that looked that they could be refugees from Pee-Wee's Playhouse.  (And I mean that it in a good way.)

Not at all what you'd expect to find within that smug girdle of glazed Gothic tracery, it's like opening up a potato and finding a party inside.  It may not age well, but right now the untidy, insistent eagerness to please is like a shot of caffeine.  It may make you a bit jumpy and nervous, but against the self-serious proclivities of the architecture of the Loop, it packs a youthful, welcome kick.

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)

Richard M. Daley, Emperor of Dirt

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On Thursday, just months before he leaves office after a record 22 year reign, Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley announced the city would demolish the 1908 Michael Reese Hospital building that he had promised to save.

On a cool, Fall day in October of 1989, Richard M. Daley watched a Caterpillar tractor ram through the wall of a building opposite Marshall Field's on State Street.  It was the ritual beginning for the destruction of almost every last building on a full city block, Block 37. "We take a giant step forward today," said Daley, "to rebuild our central business district" and make it a place where "people will live, work and play . . . "  There would be over 2 million square feet of new construction,  worth $500 million, including a five-story shopping  atrium, and two sleek towers, 30 and 50 stories tall, designed by Helmut Jahn.  Over 10,000 people would find employment, and nearly $10 million would go the to city each year in sales taxes.

Except, of course, it was all a mirage.  The proposed project fell through.  Jahn walked away after years of work. For nearly two decades, except for an existing ComEd substation,  Block 37 would basically remain a sprawling dirt pile. The development that was going to save the Loop became its most enduring blight.

The city, which had spent $80,000,000 to assemble all the property on the site, and sold it to the original developer for $12 million, finally bought it back in 2002 for $32,500,000, only to sell it to still another developer two years later for $12,900,000.  And then the city dumped a quarter billion dollars on a Block 37 "superstation" for an express train line to O'Hare that didn't exist, pulling the plug before it could open because no one could see where the cost overruns would end.  Instead of $9 million a year, not of dime of sales tax was generated by Block 37 over the next nearly 20 years, another $150 million+ down the drain.


Daley had inherited the scorched earth concept from the Washington administration, which had rammed through the City Council a de-designation of an official Chicago landmark, the 1872 McCarthy Building on Block 37's southwest corner,  so it could be destroyed along with everything else.  Also destroyed was the 1928 art-deco Hillman's building housing the venerable Stop & Shop gourmet emporium, which, if it could have been helped to hold on for a few more years, would become the great downtown Food Emporium that Daley always wanted for State Street but never got.  There was also the landmark-quality 1890 Unity Building, the skyscraper built by heroic Illinois governor John Peter Altgeld, and the United Artists Theatre, designed by Holabird & Roche as the Apollo, opened in 1921 as a legitimate theater, which could have provided a much-needed smaller capacity venue for the mayor's revived Randolph Street district.

Richard M. Daley, of course, was willfully blind to all this.  He chose to see only Block 37's then diminished state.  He would solve the influx of gang-bangers with what one police official called "crime prevention with a wrecking ball."  Leave no trace of the city's proud history or architecture behind.  Wipe it out.  Wipe it all out. 

Richard J. Daley had actually done this successfully, leveling three city blocks along Dearborn and creating three great civic plazas adjoining iconic new towers that revitalized one of the world's greatest promenades of modern architecture.

Richard M. Daley wouldn't be so lucky; the world he lived in was very different from that of his father's.  It wasn't until sixteen years later, in November of 2005, that ground was finally broken for Block 37, in a strange, high-glitz show with dancers, quick-change artists, models in gold lame, gold shovels for everyone, and even gold-flecked soil to turn over.  Which all turned out to be more than a bit ironic when the developer who put on the show, Mills Corporation, soon went bust and passed the project onto another developer who, in turn, also lost control of the development just before its completion.

When Block 37 finally opened four years later, it was a sad, "better something than nothing" subset of the  grandiose original ambitions, centered on a half-empty shopping mall which had fallen into receivership to a consortium of banks that now refuses to fund the build-outs required to sign additional tenants.

Richard M. Daley began his political career as "Dirty Little Richie", an obnoxious, bullying favorite son of the all-powerful Richard J. Daley. But, especially after a defeat in his first mayoral run in 1983, he learned and he grew.  He won in 1989 as a conciliator, bringing together neighborhoods and constituencies that had risen in protest against his father, healing the fractures of the Council Wars years that followed Harold Washington's untimely death.  Daley's earliest terms of office were times of optimism and great achievement, but as his tenure wore on, the city again grew lazy, all too eager to dump more and more of the heavy lifting at Daley's door,  with the mayor all too happy to accept the additional power.  He slowly assumed his father's role as civic monarch without anyone taking much notice.

And no one really noticed when it began to curdle.  It's my sense that Richard M. Daley started to develop a contempt for all those people who flattered him - the courtiers, the developers, the boodlers - heaping praise on the mayor in public and holding out their hands for their share of the favors in private.  The mayor's most willful initiatives were often his most embarrassing blunders; his greatest achievements, such as Millennium Park, those where we had the good sense to lend a helping hand and get out of the way.  And the nasty habits of his youth returned: the bullying, the intolerance to dissent, the constant ridiculing of any ideas other his own, the incoherent, angry rants that were always sure to lead off the 10 o'clock news.

The job of running Chicago and securing its future started to become too much for him, but we had become so accustomed to willfully not seeing the truth that it flew beneath our radar, even when the mayor publicly confessed, while pushing for the 2016 Olympics, that he was coming up empty. He told reporters that the Olympics was now all he had got - he no longer had a single alternative idea for generating growth and securing Chicago's future.  "I have nothing up my sleeve," the mayor told us, but we chose not to hear.   It was an all or nothing gamble on a two weeks sports extravaganza six years into the future.  Which we lost.  In the first round.  Now, The Hangover.

Block 37 and Michael Reese - twin bookends of Richard M. Daley's reign.  At the beginning, he destroyed Chicago's architectural legacy on Block 37.  At the end, to make way for a chimerical billion dollar Olympic athlete's village, he indulged himself in another insane rush, to destroy every last vestige of the city's irreplaceable legacy of Bauhaus-inspired architecture, designed with the collaboration of Walter Gropius: the buildings of Michael Reese hospital.

When the threat to Reese and the importance of its architecture was presented with meticulous documentation and research by architect and scholar Grahm Balkany of the Gropius in Chicago Coalition to the Commission on Chicago Landmarks, one commissioner quickly agreed that some of buildings met the National Register criteria for landmarking.  And then the useless Commission did what it's designed to do when confronted with mayoral whims or the desires of clouted developers: nothing.  The Commission's then Chairman, Daley crony David Mosena, was the mayor's Planning Commissioner during the obliteration of Block 37.


It's a truism that Adrian Smith again mentioned at his IIT lecture last night: the greenest building is the one that already exists.  Yet "America's Greenest Mayor" destroyed 1.6 million square feet of constructed space, creating 120,000 tons of debris, enough to fill a train seven miles long,  representing the embodied energy equivalent  of a million barrels of crude. It's estimated that it will take 65 years for new construction to break even against the embedded energy lost in the demolished structures.

 (Photograph: © Grahm M. Balkany / Gropius in Chicago Coalition.)

The city borrowed $85 million to acquire the Michael Reese site, and another $12 million to demolish all the buildings, except the original 1908 hospital building, which was to be preserved.  A new TIF district was to be created to funnel another $100 million in subsidies to the project.

For what?  For nothing.  Another mirage.  Another financial sinkhole.  Another empty, endless, dirt-filled lot.  Check it out in this aerial photo by Lawrence Okrent on Blair Kamin's Cityscapes blog.

Oh, and that original 1908. Prairie style hospital building by Schmidt, Garden & Martin that  Daley promised to save?  He lied.   After acquiring the property, the city did nothing to seal and secure the building from rain, scavengers and squatters.  Blair Kamin reported on Thursday that it's been allowed to deteriorate to a state where the mayor now says there's no alternative to demolition.  And they'll spend another $2 million to do it.   "If the structure was sound, if there was no hole in the roof, you would save it.  But there's a huge hole in the roof.  How are you going to save it," opined Daley, glossing over his own role as slumlord-in-chief.

Daley claims it would cost $13 million to secure the hospital, so where's the money?  You can bet that if it were a hugely profitable company with its hands out, Daley would find some TIF fund to dip into, but unless you're a clouted insider, there's apparently no longer money in Chicago for preserving or building things - just for tearing them down and creating more empty lots.  Welcome to Detroit. 

This is how it began.  This is how it ends.  As Rahm Emanual is in L.A. to help raise millions for his quest to become Chicago's next king, this is the deeply troubled, bankrupt city, the government run out of ideas, that Richard M. Daley dumps in our laps as he walks away. 

And you could have it all
My empire of dirt
I will let you down
I will make you hurt