The best thing about the remodeling of the editorial department here at the Tribune would have been more ventilation in the big men’s room near the city desk.
Or so I had hoped.
Now, after many months of inconvenience and several million dollars of expense, the work is almost complete. And guess what? There is no additional ventilation to go with all the new wall coverings and plumbing fixtures in that bathroom. Late on a warm afternoon, it’s still enough to make you gag, breathing that stale air.
I bring this up not to irritate my bosses (which it will) but to illustrate a point about the nature of planning and public works. This is a good time to think on this because the City of Chicago is unveiling some major physical improvements.
Like the redo of our city room, these projects are well-intended and full of good features. The proposed rebuilding of upper and lower Wacker Drive, for instance, is absolutely necessary to save that crucial-but-crumbling downtown beltway. Same goes for the Lakefront Millennium Project, which is Mayor Richard M. Daley’s revival of a concept–long high on the civic wish list–to move Grant Park’s Petrillo Music Shell to what is now a derelict railyard east of North Michigan Avenue and south of Randolph Street.
Both projects deserve public support. But don’t think for a minute that the planners and architects will do the right thing unless the rest of us watch them like hawks.
Take the Wacker Drive project.
The architecture critics were right to applaud the attention the city promises to pay to aesthetics. It will be great, once the double-decked roadway is swung away from the Chicago River at Wabash Avenue, to have a ceremonial plaza along the river’s edge. The Lorado Taft statue of three Revolutionary War heroes will look spectacular in the new space. (Surely it deserves a better setting than the nearby traffic island where it now stands.)
Some may cringe at devoting $40 million of the project’s $350 million cost to such aesthetics. Not me. Wacker Drive is Chicago’s architectural main drag. Bring on the limestone balustrades. Stint not on the Victorian lampposts. .
I do have, however, one simple question.
How is my CTA bus going to get to my Metra station?
This is important not just to me, but to thousands of commuters who ride the shuttle buses that traverse lower Wacker from the Metra train stations west of the Loop to east Loop destinations, such as Illinois Center and North Michigan Avenue.
Turns out, however, my bus is not high on the list of concerns shared by design architects and traffic engineers. In the interest of beauty, safety and smoother traffic flow (for cars, that is) the city proposes to eliminate all but two of the eight pairs of ramps now used by cars and buses to go from upper to lower Wacker and vice versa. Among those eliminated will be the ramps used by my bus (the 120 Northwestern Express) to get to and from the Metra station.
At first I thought: Don’t worry. Trust the experts. No doubt they have a trick or two up their sleeves to make my bus service even better.
Then I thought about that bathroom and immediately called the city’s transportation department and asked for the project manager.
“Not a problem,” said a pleasant fellow whose name I will omit. He then explained matter-of-factly that my subterranean bus will have to travel three extra blocks every morning and evening through choked surface streets. All in the interest, he said, of “improving the level of service.”
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Whose service? Why, the motorists who use lower Wacker to shoot from North Michigan Avenue to the Eisenhower Expressway. They’ll get clear sailing once those messy ramps are gone. As for us CTA mopes, we’ll just add another 5 or 10 minutes to our daily commute. For many that will necessitate taking an earlier train in the morning or having the family push back dinner in the evening. But what do we know? We’re not experts.
Then there’s the Lakefront Millenium Project.
What the city needs is a permanent outdoor amphitheater that can accommodate the Grant Park Symphony and the big ethnic music festivals–and one with enough peripheral strolling and picnic area to accommodate Taste of Chicago. There’s plenty of room for all of this at the derelict railyard at Randolph and Michigan. The city is getting the land for free and Daley has come up with a way to finance the thing by putting the new music park on top of a revenue-generating parking deck.
Trouble is, the high-minded project architects don’t want anything so crass as a Hollywood Bowl-type facility that could seat 20,000 or so. Instead, they propose a classical French garden with a grassy elipse in which music-lovers would sit, as they do on the lawn at Ravinia, and listen to smaller-scale concerts. (Pass the Grey Poupon, won’t you, Cybil?) Taste of Chicago and the blues and jazz festivals would remain at the Petrillo mudflats, street closings and all.
This also prompts a simple, non-expert question: Fellas, what’s the point?
My point is that major projects, public and private, too often get planned without much input from those who must live with the results. Most planners, it turns out, don’t ride the bus to work or sit in the mud at concerts.