NOT REALLY. The 'meh' blocks west of Navy Pier are a cautionary tale for Chicago's next round of megaprojects PUBLISHED: October 18, 2018

A CLOCK SCULPTURE SITS AT THE CENTER OF CITYFRONT CENTER'S OGDEN PLAZA PARK, A PUBLIC SPACE ON THE EAST SIDE OF COLUMBUS DRIVE AND ILLINOIS STREET.

JUST STEPS OFF THE MAGNIFICENT MILE, A 60-ACRE DEVELOPMENT ALONG THE CHICAGO RIVER WAS PARKING LOTS AND DIRT FIELDS IN, AFTER BEING CLEARED OF FACTORIES AND WAREHOUSES.

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Share this on Email Viewed from the air, it’s a stunning transformation — in just 30 years, a gritty swath of cleared land and surface parking lots has become a glistening new part of Chicago. But people experience cities on the ground, not in the air. Put the 60 acres between Navy Pier and Michigan Avenue under a microscope and what you see is a cityscape of great expectations and half-kept promises. The deal was simple: The city would let developers build tall at Cityfront Center, Chicago’s largest real estate development of the 1980s. In exchange, there would be beautiful buildings, streets, parks, plazas and a riverwalk. Yet the architecture, with rare exceptions, is mediocre. The public spaces were supposed to be vibrant and interconnected. Instead, they are unfinished, underachieving, largely disjointed and even, in one case, off-limits to the public. Urban planning flops like these loom large as city officials review new megaplans from developers who pretty up their visions of skyscrapers with dazzling drawings of riverwalks, bike trails and other amenities teeming with smiling, attractive people. For the 53-acre Lincoln Yards on the North Side, developer Sterling Bay wants to construct 12 million square feet of buildings, including towers as tall as 800 feet. It’s sweetening the deal by proposing amenities like an extension of The 606 bike and pedestrian trail east of the Kennedy Expressway. At The 78, a 62-acre project on the Near South Side that Amazon is considering as an HQ2 site, developer Related Midwest has laid out plans for 13 million square feet, including skyscrapers up to 950 feet tall. Its sweeteners include a 100-foot-wide, half-mile-long riverwalk lined by restaurants and shops. The planner of both projects, the Chicago office of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, co-designed Cityfront Center’s master plan. But if Cityfront Center is any guide, some of the promised amenities will never materialize. Real estate busts, changes in property ownership and the absence of a firm timetable for improvements all share the blame. So does a lack of effective oversight by the city’s Department of Planning and Development and the City Council’s zoning committee, which were charged with monitoring Cityfront Center. The district’s shortcomings open a window onto a broader subject: Whether public space serves the public or real estate developers — developers who promise more parks and plazas in order to win permission to build more profitable square footage. Millennium Park has taught Chicagoans that great public spaces provide focal points of urban life and lead to millions of dollars of private investment around them. At their best, these parks and plazas act as a social glue, bringing together people of different backgrounds in a metropolitan area separated by the fault lines of race and class. Bad public spaces do none of that, as revealed by a small piece of Cityfront Center — Ogden Plaza Park, a sloping 1-acre parcel across Columbus Drive from the NBC Tower. A man sleeps Sept. 27, 2018, in Ogden Plaza Park, a public space on the east side of Columbus Drive and Illinois Street. Dog walkers and other passers-by typically remain on the plaza's edges. (Brian Cassella / Chicago Tribune) Image p2p slug: ct-cityfront-kamin-ogden-plaza-sleep-20181005 The plaza’s pavement is cracked. In its center, the hands of a floor clock sculpture by artist Vito Acconci are gone. Homeless men camp out behind the plaza’s concrete walls, leading other people, like Kari Boyer, a claims specialist who works nearby, to remain on the park’s edges. Once, Boyer recalled, she saw human feces in the park, which was pretty unappetizing as she ate lunch. “So I sit out here a lot of the time,” she said, referring to a bench along Columbus. Three years ago, when developers floated plans for a new apartment tower next to the plaza, they dangled a $3.5 million plan to redesign the park. Yet now that their 47-story high-rise is finished and rent is pouring in, the park remains unkempt and unwelcoming. “If it’s space, not place, it dissipates energy,” said Ethan Kent, senior vice president of a New York-based nonprofit, the Project for Public Spaces, who has walked through Cityfront Center. Pioneer Court 1 Apple store 2 Riverfront esplanade 3 Cityfront Plaza 4 Ogden Plaza Park 5 Centennial Fountain 6 Ogden slip 7 400 Lake Shore Drive site (Former Chicago Spire site) 8 DuSable Park site 9 Cityfront Center OHIO Grand Illinois 7 4 5 9 8 1 2 6 3 WACKER Cityfront Center OHIO Pioneer Court Cityfront Plaza Ogden Slip DuSable Park site Grand Illinois WACKER Apple store Riverfront esplanade Ogden Plaza Park Centennial Fountain 400 Lake Shore Drive site (Former Chicago Spire site) OHIO DuSable Park site Cityfront Plaza Ogden Slip Pioneer Court Grand Navy Pier Illinois Cityfront Center Riverfront esplanade Ogden Plaza Park Apple store Centennial Fountain 400 Lake Shore Drive site (Former Chicago Spire site) WACKER

HIGH ASPIRATIONS, HARSH REALITIES Bounded by Lake Michigan, Michigan Avenue, the Chicago River and Grand Avenue, Cityfront Center is part of the Streeterville neighborhood east of Michigan Avenue. It once was home to warehouses, factories, docks and a canal-like channel of water called a “slip.” The industrial facilities were built by the Chicago Dock and Canal Co., which was established in 1857 by Chicago’s first mayor, William B. Ogden, with help from his lawyer, Abraham Lincoln. In the early 1980s, having reconstituted itself as a real estate investment trust, Chicago Dock and Canal joined with the real estate arm of the Equitable Life Assurance Society of the United States to redevelop its land into what became Cityfront Center. Chicago, a city of big plans, had never seen anything quite like it. The project’s cost was pegged at $3 billion, equivalent to more than $6 billion today. Some 13.5 million square feet of office space was planned — enough to fill 3½ Willis Towers. There would be hotels, apartments and shops. And the design aspirations were high. Reacting against sterile modernist complexes like Illinois Center, an island of steel and glass built in the 1970s, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill and New York’s Cooper, Eckstut Associates drew up a master plan based on the traditional town-planning principles of the design movement called the New Urbanism. The plan, whose aims were included in the 1985 ordinance that changed Cityfront Center’s zoning, proposed extending Chicago’s street grid through Cityfront Center. It called for masonry-clad buildings with setbacks and distinctive bottoms, middles and tops. It demanded public spaces that would be ample in size, not mere pocket parks. “It’s the spaces that endure over time in cities and that create the identity, the addresses and the value,” Alexander Cooper of Cooper, Eckstut said at the time. “The buildings will come and go.” (Cooper declined to be interviewed for this story.) The goal was a “progression of spaces which are intended to unify the entire mixed-use project,” according to a 1987 document signed by then-planning commissioner Elizabeth Hollander and Chicago Dock’s president, Charles R. Gardner. Thirty-one years later, no one disputes that Cityfront Center is a real estate success, even though it includes Chicago’s most infamous hole in the ground — the foundation for the unbuilt Chicago Spire, the twisting, 2,000-foot condominium tower that went bust in 2008. The area, which turned out to be a better site for apartments than offices, is home to thousands of residents and generates tens of millions of dollars in annual property tax revenue. Its developers spent millions on street, park, plaza and utility upgrades. They even kept a “view corridor” that preserves a vista of the Tribune Tower as you look west over the aforementioned slip, which is named for former Mayor Ogden. “We’re proud of converting a former industrial park into a connected commercial and residential section of the city,” Gardner said in a recent interview at his Cityfront Center apartment, which overlooks the Ogden Slip.

The elevated plaza between the CityView Condominiums at 440 and 480 N. McClurg Ct. was supposed to be open to the public. (Brian Cassella / Chicago Tribune) Image p2p slug: ct-cityfront-kamin-cityview-plaza-20181016 The elevated pedestrian plaza between the CityView Condominiums was originally intended to be open to the public, but the entrance has been locked. (Brian Cassella / Chicago Tribune) Image p2p slug: ct-cityfront-kamin-cityview-plaza-2-20181016

But the saga of a now-closed promenade at Gardner’s residence — CityView Condominiums, a pair of 12-story high-rises at 440 and 480 N. McClurg Court — paints a more complex picture, one that hints at how private agendas have trumped public space at Cityfront Center. When the buildings opened in 1991, there was an elevated public walkway between them, reachable by stairs from the street. The idea was noble: An above-ground path that would extend west to Ogden Plaza Park. Yet residents complained about visitors hanging out along their private terraces, Gardner said. So the gates to the privately owned promenade were locked. Instead of demanding a reinstatement of public access, city officials in 2012 granted the CityView Condominium Association’s request to eliminate it. The gates remain locked today.

PROBLEM PROMENADES AN ESPLANADE ALONG THE NORTH BANK OF THE CHICAGO RIVER DOESN'T LEAD WALKERS TO LAKE MICHIGAN OR THE LAKE FRONT PATH — IT DEAD-ENDS AGAINST A BEIGE FENCE. PLANS CALLED FOR THE WALK TO LEAD TO A REMADE DUSABLE PARK. (BRIAN CASSELLA/CHICAGO TRIBUNE) AN ESPLANADE ALONG THE NORTH BANK OF THE CHICAGO RIVER DOESN'T LEAD WALKERS TO LAKE MICHIGAN OR THE LAKE FRONT PATH — IT DEAD-ENDS AGAINST A BEIGE FENCE. PLANS CALLED FOR THE WALK TO LEAD TO A REMADE DUSABLE PARK.

The gating of that promenade is but one example of Cityfront Center’s fragmented public spaces. The most prominent of them, a riverfront esplanade, gracefully lines the Chicago River’s north bank east of Michigan Avenue before it comes to an abrupt end. Cityfront Center OHIO Grand Illinois 2 5 4 3 1 WACKER Riverwalk esplanade 1 CityView Condominiums 2 Centennial Fountain 3 400 Lake Shore Drive site (Former Chicago Spire site) 4 DuSable Park site 5 Chiefly designed by Chicago’s Lohan Associates, which was hired to oversee implementation of Cityfront Center’s master plan within the trust’s portion of the complex, the esplanade is a handsome spot for strolling, lined by mature trees, obelisk-shaped light standards and plantings. But it doesn’t continue all the way to Lake Shore Drive, as the master plan called for. Nor does it continue east to DuSable Park — the public space, east of the drive, that would honor Chicago’s first permanent nonindigenous settler, Jean Baptiste Pointe du Sable. There is no DuSable Park. Instead, the esplanade runs smack into a shabby wood fence that lines the Chicago Spire’s weed-strewn site. “It’ll be nice when it opens up,” said Streeterville resident Betsy Peterson while she was walking her dog. “For tourists, it’s terrible. We’re stopped every day by tourists who don’t know how to get to Navy Pier. They’re lost and frustrated.”

Financial and environmental challenges have slowed restoration of land near the abandoned Chicago Spire, which would be DuSable Park. (Nancy Stone / Chicago Tribune) Image p2p slug: ct-cityfront-kamin-dusable-park-20181005 The site of the failed Chicago Spire is a hole in the ground at 400 N. Lake Shore Drive. Plans for a 2,000-foot tower went bust in the 2008 recession. (E. Jason Wambsgans / Chicago Tribune) Image p2p slug: ct-cityfront-kamin-spire-20181005

Related Midwest, the developer that now controls the 2.2-acre Spire site, has proposed finishing the esplanade and has promised $10 million for building DuSable Park as part of its plan for a two-tower residential and hotel complex on the property. The developers also suggest an eastward extension of another Cityfront Center promenade, this one on the south side of Ogden Slip, to DuSable Park. But who knows if all that will happen? The promenade along the slip could be vulnerable to NIMBY pressure, given the presence of adjoining town houses. As the story of the gated plaza at CityView Condominiums suggests, not everybody wants strangers streaming past their front door.

DULL PLAZAS AND WEAK CONNECTIONS CONCRETE WALLS FLANK THE SIDES OF OGDEN PLAZA PARK, SHIELDING THE SPACE FROM THE NOISE OF STREET TRAFFIC AND MAKING IT A POPULAR SPOT FOR HOMELESS PEOPLE TO SLEEP. (ANTONIO PEREZ/CHICAGO TRIBUNE) CONCRETE WALLS FLANK THE SIDES OF OGDEN PLAZA PARK, SHIELDING THE SPACE FROM THE NOISE OF STREET TRAFFIC AND MAKING IT A POPULAR SPOT FOR HOMELESS PEOPLE TO SLEEP.

Promenades are about moving; plazas are where you stop and take in the city. They are its living rooms. But Cityfront Center’s plazas don’t issue much of a welcome. Cityfront Center OHIO Grand Illinois 6 3 4 5 1 2 WACKER Pioneer Court 1 Apple store 2 Cityfront Plaza 3 NBC Tower 4 Ogden Plaza Park 5 465 North Park tower 6 The problems begin at what’s supposed to be the western gateway to the district — Pioneer Court, a large but underachieving expanse of pavement at 401 N. Michigan Ave., next to the new Apple store. On the plaza’s north side are rows of trellislike pavilions, trees and shrubbery. While those features provide much-needed places to sit, they block the view into the heart of Cityfront Center and partly obstruct the path to it. They even end in a cul-de-sac of fountains that forces pedestrians to retrace their steps. Getting from one of Cityfront Center’s plazas to the other, it turns out, is no walk in the park. The portion of the project west of Columbus Drive is built on bilevel streets in sync with the double-decked stretch of Michigan Avenue; the eastern zone is at ground level. Utilitarian outdoor staircases do their best to draw together these disparate realms. But they’re no Spanish Steps. To the east of Pioneer Court is Cityfront Plaza, which adorns an elevated roadway that links North Michigan and Columbus.

A fountain is positioned at the east end of Pioneer Court. The trellises obscure the view of Cityfront Center from Michigan Avenue. (Antonio Perez / Chicago Tribune) Image p2p slug: ct-cityfront-kamin-pioneer-fountain-201810111 The raised Cityfront Plaza, in front of the NBC Tower, was intended to be the entryway to several buildings around it. Instead it is adjacent to several ground-level parking lots. (Brian Cassella / Chicago Tribune) Image p2p slug: ct-cityfront-kamin-cityfront-plaza-20181011

A long rectangular space with sunken seating areas, it’s hardly the bustling hub of activity envisioned by Chicago architect Adrian Smith, who helped craft the Cityfront Center master plan while at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. As he designed the handsome NBC Tower, one of Cityfront Center’s few distinguished buildings, Smith envisioned the plaza as a front door for the buildings around it. They, in turn, would enclose the plaza and energize it when their inhabitants spilled out onto the streets. Yet the plaza is still surrounded by surface parking lots, including two that flank the NBC Tower. Metropolis Investment Holdings, which bought the properties in the 1990s, said in an email that it is “reviewing various options to build two beautiful buildings.” But it declined to provide renderings or a timetable. For now, then, Cityfront Plaza continues to feel like a nice little park that sits incongruously atop a road. A surface parking lot remains undeveloped to the north of the NBC Tower. Metropolis Investment Holdings said it is reviewing construction options but declined to provide renderings or a timetable. (Brian Cassella / Chicago Tribune) Image p2p slug: ct-cityfront-kamin-nbc-lot-20181005 Things are worse at Ogden Plaza Park, which is named for the former mayor and administered by the Chicago Park District. Modeled on an English garden, the plaza is a case study in good intentions gone wrong. Take the concrete walls on the plaza’s flanks, which shield it from the noisy traffic on Columbus. Unfortunately, the walls also provide a screen for the homeless men who sleep in the plaza. Put off by their presence, people walking their dogs typically stick to the plaza’s fringes. As the cracked pavement shows, the Park District is letting the plaza fall apart. And a previously announced effort to remake the public space, which would add stepped terraces and a dog-friendly area, doesn’t seem to be going anywhere. Hopes for such a remake rose in 2015 when Chicago developer Jupiter Realty floated its plan for the 465 North Park apartment tower. Ald. Brendan Reilly, 42nd, whose downtown ward includes Cityfront Center, said he would seek such a “public benefit” in determining whether to approve the developer’s plan. Yet now that the hyper-curvy high-rise is open, no remade plaza accompanies it. The public’s been stiffed again. Reilly did not return calls asking him to explain the situation.

SUBPAR STREETS AND BUILDINGS ILLINOIS STREET RUNS ALONG THE BLANK WALLS OF THE RIVER EAST CENTER ON THE WAY TO NAVY PIER. (BRIAN CASSELLA / CHICAGO TRIBUNE) ILLINOIS STREET RUNS ALONG THE BLANK WALLS OF THE RIVER EAST CENTER ON THE WAY TO NAVY PIER.

Seen from afar, Cityfront Center projects a sense of order. Its buildings along the Chicago River form a nearly continuous wall, much like the range of high-rises along North Lake Shore Drive. Lower buildings step down to the Ogden Slip. But something’s wrong when you walk the streets. They, too, are a kind of public space, but they do a poor job of accommodating the public. Cityfront Center OHIO Grand 5 3 1 Illinois 4 2 WACKER River East Center 1 New Street 2 500 Lake Shore Drive 3 474 N. Lake Shore Drive 4 Navy Pier 5 Many are lined with blank-walled parking garages. Most lack interesting storefronts. They don’t form the sort of coherent cityscapes — rows of carefully articulated buildings of brick and stone — that Cityfront Center’s planners foresaw. Why? For starters, developers and city officials failed to anticipate the impact of the 1995 reopening of Navy Pier, which turned the once-crumbling municipal dock into a popular entertainment hub that drew hordes of pedestrians. The pier “was derelict at the time. There were those that thought it would wash into the lake,” Gardner said. Instead, Cityfront Center’s big east-west streets, Illinois Street and Grand Avenue, were conceived as wide arterial roads that would move traffic to and from Lake Shore Drive and nearby expressways. No matter how much you dress them up with trees and sidewalk plantings, they’re so wide and busy with car traffic that they feel like drag strips. Another reason for the bad pedestrian vibe: Because Cityfront Center has no alleys, some of its streets, most notably New Street, must take on that utilitarian role, with entrances to loading docks and parking garages. They aren’t alleys, but they’re alleylike. New Street, a side street in Cityfront Center, is essentially an alley with loading docks and mechanical louvers facing the street. (Antonio Perez/ Chicago Tribune) Image p2p slug: ct-cityfront-kamin-new-st-20181011 Ultimately, though, the blandness of Cityfront Center’s streets can be attributed to the city’s unwillingness to enforce its own design standards: • One states that “the maximum effort shall be made to contain parking in below-ground structures.” The developers of 474 N. Lake Shore Drive, a blunt 61-story residential tower whose 15-story parking garage is covered with ugly louvers, apparently didn’t get the memo. • Another says that the first floor of all structures facing major roads like Illinois and Grand “shall maximize space with active uses such as retail, daycare, restaurants, et cetera.” Anyone who has walked past the hulking River East Center at 350 E. Illinois knows that mandating human scale is easier said than done. • Still another requirement, based on the idea that masonry walls are better at framing walkable streets than sleek glass ones, says “reflective glass shall not be allowed.” Yet many of Cityfront Center’s recent high-rises, like 500 Lake Shore Drive, have walls of, you guessed it, reflective glass. Not all glass buildings are street-deadening, of course. But if you’re going to have mandates, you need to stick to them. Or you need better mandates. In retrospect, it was a mistake for Cityfront Center’s planners to prescribe the use of certain types of materials and compositions. Styles and technologies invariably change over multidecade projects. So do owners and their tastes. It would be wiser to rethink the fundamentals of good urban design than mandating superficial features.

REAL CHANGE? All this is not to say that Cityfront Center is beyond repair — or that its shortcomings portend failures at The 78, Lincoln Yards or the proposed redevelopment of the 25.6-acre Tribune Media site at 777 W. Chicago Ave. that the Chicago Plan Commission approved Thursday. The current development boom has put city officials in a stronger position to regulate public space — and deliver better results — than they occupied 30 years ago, said David Reifman, commissioner of the city’s Department of Planning and Development. He pointed to the success of Lakeshore East, a 28-acre cluster of mostly residential high-rises across Randolph Street from Millennium Park. Skidmore, Owings & Merrill planned the development. Early in the project’s life, in 2004, the project’s developers built a 6-acre park with curving pathways, fountains and swaths of grass. Today, the park teems with activity. Reifman said it exemplifies the city’s embrace of “place-led development,” which views public space as a driver of commercial districts rather than a tacked-on amenity. The commissioner also cited the rezoning ordinance for the Tribune Media site, which requires “un-gated and unobstructed public access” to proposed riverfront open space. It also mandates that successive chunks of the riverfront be completed before the city allows the first building in each phase of the multiphase project to be occupied. “Today, we look at the idea of open spaces more carefully,” he said. “The thinking has evolved.” But Lakeshore East and the Tribune Media site are models of limited relevance for The 78 and Lincoln Yards. They’re only about half the size of the megaprojects, and Lakeshore East’s park is more of a hidden gem than a highly visible amenity. While it’s all to the good that city officials insist they’re now taking a harder line on maintaining access to public space than they’ve done at Cityfront Center, little of a fundamental nature has changed since the district was planned more than 30 years ago. The cash-poor city still relies on private developers to build and finance public space in exchange for zoning bonuses. It still links the required completion of public spaces to the completion of new construction. As long as it continues to do so, delivery of the promised amenities will remain vulnerable to disruption from recessions and changes in property ownership. Even when new high-rises that are supposed to produce better public spaces are finished, as the saga of Cityfront Center’s Ogden Plaza Park reveals, city officials can’t always be counted on to make good on their promises to produce a “public benefit.” Their assurances about the quality of future public space would be more credible if they had detailed plans for fixing existing parks and plazas. Buzzwords like “place-led” development mean little without the sharpening of outdated standards for human-scaled streets and vibrant public spaces. All the dazzling renderings in the world are no guarantee that you’ll be strolling along beautiful riverwalks. There’s a dramatic difference, Cityfront Center shows, between real estate success and building a great city. Blair Kamin is a Tribune critic. bkamin@chicagotribune.com Twitter @BlairKamin