https://archive.ph/odjGM


So he did some light terrorism. Who hasn't.

I dunno. Gotta do something with that land, and I don't sense any burning desire to subsidize another new stadium for the White Sox. Get the land out from under Saddam Hussein's co-conspirator, unload Arlington Park, and maybe the Bears can build a stadium within their means, even if it can't attract the mythical Final Fours that every new stadium says it's going to get.

I didn't realize this guy was involved, too?

The new stadium, which would hold 60,000 to 70,000 fans for football, is a dull structure by any architectural standard. Sitting within yards of the Lake Michigan shore, the stadium would offer no acknowledgement of this prime locale. Its primary nod to Chicago would be an enormous window at its north end placed to frame the downtown skyline. Little else would acknowledge the building’s place in the world, much less this city. If a view of the Loop is the most important thing to the Bears and NFL, that could be done elsewhere in the city, without using public lakefront land.

I will give them this: The Chicago Bears are thinking big.

But they’re playing with the house’s money.

And we are the house.

Let’s be clear about what’s driving what. A private corporation is looking to mold a large portion of Chicago’s precious lakefront into an entertainment district that supports its private operations. Sure, there might be a public-private component to some of the new facilities, but Chicago has historically kept private ventures off the public lands of the lakefront.

The Bears occupancy of Soldier Field should remain the anomaly, not the norm. A facility tailor-made for fewer than a dozen days a year should not be driving the development of land dedicated to public use. The Bears’ suggestions of further development demonstrate a vision of public land as a commercial zone similar to Navy Pier. These are exactly the types of development that Montgomery Ward, Burnham and generations of Chicago’s civic visionaries have worked to keep off our beloved lakefront.

This new stadium and its associated facilities have no place on Chicago’s lakefront. Any number of large planned developments across the city could absorb this beast within their footprints: The 78, Lincoln Yards, Bronzeville Lakefront (the old Michael Reese site) or the McCormick Place truck marshalling site.

It’s time to stop the Bears’ ill-conceived plans and send them back to the locker room.

The future holds the possibility to be great or terrible, and since it has not yet occurred it remains simultaneously both.

It sounds like you were here last weekend.