Lee Bey: The Urban Observer

On three separate occasions, Chicago won the right to a world's fair. No other city in the world has been more fortunate. You know about the first two fairs--the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893 and A Century of Progress in 1933.

Chicago won a bid to host the third fair--Age of Discovery, slated for 1992. But in the political, social and civic tumult of 1980s Chicago, the city folded its cards on the venture and the fair never got further than renderings and excited talk. But here's what some of it might have looked like. The scene is a view looking from an expanded Northerly Island across a bridge onto the mainland.

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Indeed, this is Schaumburg, IL---or rather would have been, under an ambitious but ill-fated scheme from 1973. The monorail streaking in from the left is headed to the Schamburg Space Needle, which would have been the world's tallest building. I discussed the plan in more detail here, but couldnt help but revisit the plan today so I could show the monorail.

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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.

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Here's another installment in my never-ending quest to unearth Chicago's unbuilt plans and proposals---and, also, to re-use stuff from my old website whenever possible.

Today's offering: a 1973 rendering for a new State Street in Chicago's South Loop area. Under the plan, the then-bedraggled street--with its fading businesses, vacant parcels, panhandlers, homeless chaps and the like--would be remade into a Utopian commercial strip with uses divided as neatly as the columns on a business ledger. Retail? It's on the ground floor. Residences? Two flights above the retail. Transportation? If those Mercury Comets and AMC Matadors that are rolling down the lightly-traveled street above won't do, then hop the monorail to the left.

Then, look. Up in the sky. It's an enclosed skybridge where pedestrians could traverse above whatever urban hazard remained after old State Street was bulldozed---as safe as hamsters in a Habitrail.

I shouldn't poke fun. There are a few things here I do like. The design has a post-Habitat '67 vibe. And the green street-edge is okay by me. I rather approve of the subterranean business. Might they be jazz clubs? An after-hours library. Maybe a future foie gras speakeasy with a big guy at named Moe at the door.

 It took 30 years but the South Loop did get much of what was proposed here. The dead zone has been revived with shops and residents running down State Street almost to Cermak. We didn't need the monorail and the skybridge after all.

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The Chicago Transit Authority's funding problems prompted me to dig through my "Paper Skyline" files for this gem: the 1968 Chicago Central Area Planning study, which advocated pulling down the Loop el and replacing it with a vast new subway network. The proposal included an east-west shuttle subway that would have begun below Morgan Street at the University of Illinois-Chicago, run north to Monroe, then beneath Monroe to the lakefront, where it would meet a lakeside subway shuttle that would run between McCormick Place and Oak Street; and a new subway operating in a loop pattern beneath Franklin, Van Buren, Wabash and Randolph. The plan included high-quality physical connections between the new system and the existing trains coming into downtown.

Here is a subway kiosk of the downtown subway system that would have replaced the Loop el. (Look at the cars parked on the left...Chrysler 300s, 40 years before the fact?). In the top image, a glass wall on the left brings in sunlight and provides views of a sunken landscaped plaza. The image below shows one of the underground stations on the Monroe Street shuttle line.

The $1.4 billion system was slated for completion in 1975. The city needed the federal government to cover about $1 billion, but the Urban Mass Transit Administration was willing to put up only $500 million. Cash starved from the get-go, the project died before it could begin. 

Since this effort's demise, Chicago has never again dreamed this boldly--and was never again this visionary--about public transportation. Looking at it now, it's clear the project would have represented more than additional infrastructure for the CTA. This new system would have given the city's downtown a first-class rail system and provided the nucleus to revolutionize how we plan and fund public transportation in this region.

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Urban planning ideas in Chicago never really die; they just resurface when the time is right. Millennium Park along Michigan Avenue has an outdoor ice-skating rink, of course, but this rendering from 1957 shows the idea of skating near the boulevard had been around a while. This unbuilt rink was proposed on the south of Jackson, next to the Art Institute--about two blocks of where Millennium Park was later built. Look at the detailing. With modernism in Chicago in full bloom, planners were still willing to propose a Beaux Art rink. The light standard at right is contemporary, though. It's a beautiful rendering, by the way. I like view of South Michigan Avenue across the street...a perspective that hasn't changed that much since then: the Sante Fe Building is to the left; then the Chicago Symphony Orchestra building, the then-brand new and modernist Borg-Warner building is next to that. The broad fourth building with the columns near the top is the former People's Gas Building.

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