Reverse the flow of the Chicago River? Big deal.
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Straighten the Outer Drive’s “S” curve? A snap.
Rebuild upper and lower Wacker Drive? No problem.
But as urban remodeling jobs go, few civic transformations have caused as many headaches as the transformation of a 24 1/2-acre piece of property at the north end of Grant Park from a shabby and dusty collection of railroad tracks and parking lots into a recreational and cultural playground to be called Millennium Park.
On a brisk day in May, Ed Uhlir stands on what will eventually be the stage of the music pavilion, where there will be a bandshell designed by the eminent architect Frank Gehry, and imagines a summer day a couple of years from now when the gently sloping stretch of concrete in front of him will be filled with 4,000 people plunked into fixed seats, with some 7,000 arranged on the grass behind them, lying on blankets, tossing Frisbees, listening.
“And–who knows?–Barbra Streisand singing right here,” says Uhlir, who has been the consulting architect for the park since 1998, a few months after Mayor Richard Daley unveiled plans for it and voiced the unrealistic intention of opening it in 2000. That has been pushed back to the spring of 2004, Uhlir says.
For most Chicagoans, it still takes a great deal of imagination to envision the finished product. That is because this project has been beset by cost increases and delays that would tax the patience even of those baseball fans awaiting a World Series game in town. Moreover, most of the changes are taking place away from public view. What people who regularly pass by the site notice, says one city employee, “is a Michigan Avenue totally screwed up by construction and a few trees being planted.”
As Uhlir talks, huge shovels are huffing and puffing their way into the ground near Randolph Street, digging a hole for what will be the Music and Dance Theater Chicago, a $35 million, 1,500-seat facility designed by Chicago architect Thomas Beeby and intended to give performance space to about a dozen local arts organizations. It is the sort of construction site that would fascinate gawkers if it were taking place in a more visible location.
Chicagoans will get their first serious look at this controversial park on June 21, with the opening of “Exelon Presents Earth From Above,” an outdoor exhibit of massive photographs that will run through September. The photos are the work of Frenchman Yann Arthus-Bertrand, who has documented the relationship between man and nature in aerial photos taken across the globe.
“I am happy for the people of Chicago to see the world,” says Arthus-Bertrand.
That’s fine, and the photos are amazing. But most Chicagoans are more interested in seeing the park. Though some 16,000 hardy souls availed themselves of the park’s ice-skating rink when it opened in late December, few others have gotten a look at any of the park’s particulars.
Come June, when the exhibit opens, the park will be about 40 percent complete, says Uhlir. People will see some beautifully landscaped gardens; a nearly completed granite reproduction of a Grant Park peristyle, a semi-circular grouping of Doric columns razed in 1953; and the photo show, exhibited on the site of the ice rink.
“They will see enough to get a sense of what [the park] will look like when finished,” says Uhlir.
What they won’t see completed are the park’s big-ticket attractions: the bandshell, whose design was described by Tribune architecture critic Blair Kamin as “a highly sculptural form topped by ribbons of stainless steel that suggest the petals of a flower”; a 65-foot-long kidney-bean-shaped metal sculpture by British artist Anish Kapoor; a year-round fountain featuring 50-foot-tall glass towers, one of which will feature video images of water-spouting humans, and a reflecting pool that invites pedestrians to “walk” on water, created by Spanish artist Jaume Plensa; a new garden on Monroe Street designed by Chicago’s Gustafson Partners; an 800-foot-long pedestrian bridge also designed by Gehry that will connect the park with the Daley Bicentennial Plaza to the east; a restaurant adjacent to the ice rink; and dozens of other details and embellishments.
When the park is finally completed it will be, according to Richard L. Thomas, civic activist and former chairman of First Chicago NBD Bank, “a postcard for Chicago.”
It was, for more than a century, just an eyesore. The land, bounded by Randolph and Monroe Streets, Michigan Avenue and Columbus Drive, had been occupied by the Illinois Central Railroad since 1852 in an agreement that allowed it to run its tracks across the property in exchange for having built a breakwater in Lake Michigan to prevent erosion. But the tracks had not been used in decades, and after a bit of legal wrangling with city attorneys, Illinois Central returned the land to the city in 1996 and Daley’s plans began to take shape.
“When the mayor first announced the park and the plans to open it by 2000, no donors or private money was in place and as those began to come in, the schedule went from ambitious to unrealistic,” says Uhlir. “Adding these things to the original plans of course have caused delays, but they have also enriched the park tremendously.”
Originally budgeted at $150 million, the project has grown to $370 million and counting. An ongoing Tribune series of investigative stories concluded that sloppy planning, an unrealistically fast-paced construction schedule, cronyism and contract disputes have contributed to the delays and cost overruns. To make matters worse, revenue from the parking garage under the park has fallen far short of projections, forcing the city to divert millions of dollars from a Loop economic development fund into the project.
“We learned that many people are leery of parking under what was essentially still a construction site,” says Uhlir.
Boosters of the park say the delays and additional spending have resulted from privately funded features added to the original design. Structural underpinnings had to be increased, for instance, with the addition of the Gehry bandshell and Kapoor sculpture.
“You have to look at the creation of the park as an organic [process],” says Uhlir. “It will be much more wonderful than originally conceived.”
Uhlir was one of those who took Arthus-Bertrand on a tour of the park when he visited Chicago in January to scout locations for his photo exhibit. They settled on the ice rink. “Even though there was construction going on everywhere, he could see what a tremendous space this was,” says Uhlir. “He wanted it to be as accessible as possible.”
More than a million locals and tourists are expected to view the exhibit. “That validates the original idea,” says Uhlir, “that this be a place for all people. This has never been, as some have argued, an elitist park, a place merely for those who live downtown. It’s a people’s park. Yes, it’s been frustrating but it will be worth the wait and now, with this show opening, the wait is over. Now, it’s getting exciting.”
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Since the ice rink opened, he says, Park District and city offices have been getting calls from those seeking to reserve various park spaces for future events. He says that construction is now going smoothly and that the biggest challenge is to raise from private sources the many millions for an endowment that would help cover future operating costs.
Some potential donors are spending elsewhere, as nine major residential developments are rising or being converted around the site, adding more than 2,000 apartments and condos to the Loop. Among them are the Heritage at Millennium Park, a 57-story tower at Wabash and Randolph Streets that will have more than 350 condos, and Park Millennium, a 52-story, 480-unit building on Columbus Drive near Lake Street.
Many other buildings, especially those that line Michigan Avenue, are undergoing extensive renovation and conversion. The former Blackstone Hotel, at 636 S. Michigan Ave., is going condo and so is the building at 6 N. Michigan. “That one,” says Uhlir, pointing to the top floor of the building, “is priced at $4.5 million.”
The building was once the headquarters of Montgomery Ward. More than a century ago, the firm’s founder, A. Montgomery Ward, had a vision: to keep the city’s lakefront free of buildings and other encumbrances. He spent a lot of his own money fighting land developers and promoters to keep the city’s shore “forever open, clear and free.”
That worked out to everyone’s benefit, and time will judge whether Daley’s visions for Millennium Park fulfill Ward’s legacy.