Lee Bey: The Urban Observer

The great planner Daniel Burnham proposed a high-domed, classically-designed civic center complex in his 1909 Plan for Chicago. Lesser known, however, is the Chicago Civic Center Plan, put forth by the Chicago Plan Commission in 1949. I unearthed this long-lost project as part of my ongoing research of unbuilt Chicago architecture.

The Chicago Civic Center would have combined Chicago's city, county, state and federal agencies, plus 100 courtrooms into seven slab-like buildings on a campus bounded by Madison, Wells, Van Buren and the Chicago River. A shopping center, underground parking for 3000 cars and subterranean streets were planned. One tower was proposed west of the river; the Plan Commission said the complex would run as far west as Halsted.

Architecturally, Chicago Civic Center dispensed with Burnham's "city beautiful" classicism in favor of the towers-in-a-park vernacular of Le Corbusier. Each form of government would have been financially responsible for construction its own building----which alone would have been enough to kill the proposal, had it gotten that far. Aldermen beefed about the site, which was then home to the city's wholesale district. The Chicago Wholesalers District Council mounted a campaign against the plan and by 1952, the Civic Center was basically forgotten.

An alternative plan developed in 1954 to build a civic center on 151 acres along the north bank of the Chicago River and Hubbard Street. Also dead and buried. But the concept never went away, it just scattered over time. Mayor Richard J. Daley built the modernist Daley Center (originally called Chicago Civic Center) for city and county offices in 1965 at Washington and Dearborn. Chicago Federal Center, with its government office buildings, skyscraper courthouse and pavilion-like post office, was built a few blocks south of the Daley Center. The state contributed the James R. Thompson State of Illinois Center in 1985.