Chicago just gave its stamp of approval to an enormously promising plan to transform the vast, long-shuttered U.S. Steel plant site on its far southeast lakefront into a thriving community of high-rise apartments, town homes, shops, offices, medical facilities and parks.
Imagine: Sleek residential high-rises lining a vast industrial slip where ore boats delivered the raw materials for steel-making. A new park built over the foundations of a massive open hearth. A broad extension of South Shore Drive that would be an urban boulevard. Parks and alleys that would channel stormwater into Lake Michigan instead of the city’s sewers.
But there is a long and treacherous road to travel before this grand design — a “noble diagram” in the tradition of planner Daniel Burnham — can become reality. And the potential potholes extend beyond the battered economy. They include the up-for-grabs character of the site itself: Will the redevelopment retain the grit of the old steel plant, which was called South Works, or will it reproduce suburban banality, giving us Generic City, USA?
Ever since Pittsburgh-based U.S. Steel closed the plant in 1992 and scraped away its awesome array of blast furnaces and refining mills, South Works has loomed as the ultimate post-industrial landscape. With nearly 580 acres, sandwiched between 79th and 91st streets, it’s bigger than the Loop.
Here, as the writer John Maclean once put it, roaring melting pots turned iron ore, limestone and coke into prime steel, and turned Scots, Irish, Poles, Czechs, Ukrainians, Mexicans and others into generations of Americans. And here, men built the steel that undergirds the Loop’s skyscraper behemoths, the rocket assembly structures at Cape Canaveral, and the railroads that crisscross a continent.
Today, the once-humming plot of land remains hauntingly empty, save for massive concrete walls where the raw materials for making steel were stored and a “road to nowhere” extension of 87th Street that is a legacy of a recent failed bid to attract a cup-making factory to the site.
But at the behest of Mayor Richard Daley, the Chicago City Council looked beyond the economic downturn last week and approved up to $98 million in infrastructure improvements for the first phase of rebuilding South Works. This could be money well spent. The South Works plan, crafted for Chicago developer Dan McCaffrey by the Chicago office of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill and Sasaki Associates of Watertown, Mass., is full of good ideas:
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Streets and roads that weave neighborhoods
into the urban fabric
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: The essence of Chicago’s urban form is its street grid, a vast tic-tac-toe strip that joins every neighborhood of the sprawling, fractious city. Instead of going suburban and calling for cul-de-sacs that would have isolated the new South Works from the existing South Chicago neighborhood to the west, the planners wisely call for extending the street grid through the site.
Better yet is their proposed rebuilding and rerouting of South Shore Drive, already under construction. The new road, due to be complete in late 2012, will be a boulevard, complete with bike lanes, and it would be lined on both sides by stores and housing. It would thus be a new and more human-scaled version of South Shore Drive, more neighborhood-friendly and less expresswaylike than its famous counterpart to the north.
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Parks that fill gaps along the lakefront and reach inland:
With 95 acres of lakefront parkland between Rainbow Beach & Park to the north and Calumet Park to the south, the new South Works will take a major step toward realizing Burnham’s vision of a continuous chain of lakefront parks.
But what is truly inspired about the plan is that the lakefront parks reach inland as “finger parks,” 35 acres of them. The most impressive of the finger parks would stretch along one of South Works’ monolithic “ore walls,” where iron ore, limestone and coal were piled before making their way into blast furnaces and refining mills. In this bracing public space, the planners envision an amphitheater, a South Side version of Taste of Chicago, and (why not?) a chunk of wall for climbing.
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Remnants of the industrial past that celebrate the story of working Americans
: Most developers would have wiped the slate clean at South Works and completed the destruction of its industrial past. But McCaffrey and his planners deserve credit for seeing the inherent value of the ore wall and the site’s other industrial remnants.
Not only would those remnants lend the redeveloped site an irreplaceable character, but they would also tell the story of the people who labored at South Works, enduring the heat of the blast furnaces and the punches of the foremen.
There is much more to like about the South Works plan, from its proposal to ferry residents to nearby Metra stations in small hybrid buses to its efforts to ensure that the new parkland creates habitat for wildlife. In many respects, the plan is a model for painting a vision of the post-industrial future.
Yet God (or the devil) is always in the details, particularly when the responsibility for carrying out a master plan shifts from the original author to an architect who may have his own ideas about what to do. We’ve seen that happen in the watering-down of Daniel Libeskind’s master plan for ground zero in New York. Likewise, a hard look at the plan for the 87-acre first phase of development at South Works, which would start construction in 2013, reveals some cause for concern.
The shaper of that first phase, Chicago architect Joe Antunovich, has worked with McCaffrey on a wide range of retail and mixed-use projects. For South Works’ first phase, McCaffrey and Antunovich are proposing a mix of townhouses, residential high-rises and mid-rises, anchored by a T-shaped cluster of shops and housing. The latter is based on their commercially successful Market Common project in Arlington, Va., outside Washington, D.C.
To be fair, the two are suggesting a lot of things that remain faithful to the original plan, like the way the high-rises and the mid-rises would form a continuous, street-defining edge along the new South Shore Drive.
But in its overly pragmatic adherence to the suburban model of the store set behind a vast field of parking, the phase one plan calls for too many highly visible surface lots. This could be Clybourn Avenue South. The street-friendly new Target store in Uptown shows us that there’s a better way.
The phase one design also suggests the construction of ungainly residential high-rises plopped atop parking garage podiums, a discredited form of tall building design that has deadened the streetscapes of River North with its blank concrete walls. Other developers have taken the hint from Daley and upgraded their high-rises. McCaffrey should too.
And then there’s the proposed cluster of shops and housing, which can be expected to have gazebos and other landscape cliches you’d encounter in a suburban lifestyle center. It could be a pleasant deviation from Chicago’s tough commercial strips. Or it could be dreadfully banal if the developer and his architect don’t fine-tune their Virginia model and embrace South Works’ special brand of industrial grit — just as the master plan for the old steel plant suggests.