Something to remember as Chicago gears up again to elect its next mayor: The Person on Five has the power to remake the city — or large portions of it.
For better or worse.
It’s easy to lose sight of that as Chicagoans rightfully clamor for a mayor who can make the city safer, keep the streets clean, and not fleece us with higher taxes or shady parking meter-type deals.
But the mayor is also the city’s chief architect and urban designer.
The late Mayor Richard J. Daley led the rebuilding of downtown in the 1960s and 1970s. Richard M. Daley built Millennium Park. Rahm Emanuel expanded the downtown Riverwalk. And Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s Invest South/West plan to rebuild neighborhood retail corridors likely will be her legacy.
But what should the next mayor do? And which Lightfoot initiatives should be kept, improved, or hoisted into the back of the Streets and San Garbage Truck of History and hauled away?
I have a few ideas.
The Big Casino? Hold ‘em
The next mayor might want to have that garbage truck at the ready for Bally’s plan to build that giant casino entertainment district on the site of the Chicago Tribune’s Freedom Center at Chicago Avenue and Halsted Street.
As it currently stands, the complex is huge, loud and yet architecturally anonymous. The whole shebang is better suited for a stretch of I-15 in the Nevada desert heading toward Las Vegas than for the prime urban riverside site for which it’s slated.
And I’m convinced the casino will turn the area’s already nightmarish rush hour conditions into full-blown night terrors, with drivers and bus passengers frozen in traffic along Chicago Avenue for long stretches of time, unable to move.
Lump all that in with the odd way the city picked Bally’s as the casino developer — a process this newspaper’s editorial board has frequently questioned — and there is more than reason enough for a new mayor to put the deal on ice and conduct a thorough review.
Neighborhood redevelopment
There is no shame in continuing a mayoral predecessor’s initiatives. The new mayor should keep Lightfoot’s Invest South/West initiative. But he should improve it by adding homeownership to the program’s current goal of rebuilding retail districts with new commercial spaces and rental housing.
And it wouldn’t hurt if the program also brought in new or improved schools, parks and open space.
Meanwhile, Landmarks Illinois CEO Bonnie McDonald rightly suggests a new mayor could expand its financial incentives programs — and work with banks and real estate lenders — in order to help homeowners out in the neighborhoods buy and maintain properties.
“The city has its access to its own funds, and it also has the ability to incentivize the creation of other innovative funding sources, or at least to marshal those or make sure that people are aware of them,” she said.
Three the hard way: Soldier Field, Lakeside Center and the Museum Campus
Unlike Lightfoot, the new mayor must face the reality that the Chicago Bears’ days as Soldier Field’s prime tenant are over and abandon the city’s thirsty and quixotic attempt to keep them there after the team’s lease ends in 2033.
I say let ‘em go — then entrust the city’s design talent and savvy civic leadership to outline a new and better combined future for the stadium, the aging Museum Campus, and the ever-listing Lakeside Center convention center. Throw in Northerly Island too, while we’re at it.
The end result, if done well, would be a tremendously vital public and cultural space. And the new mayor needs to show the leadership to make that happen.
“We see [the Bears planned departure] as a real opportunity to rethink the use, not only in the stadium, but right around it, because some of these big festivals do require multiple stages,” said Friends of the Parks Executive Director Juanita Irizarry.
All of the above — and more
The next mayor has a full buffet of built environment issues. He has to figure out how to reuse all those shuttered public schools across the South and West sides, for instance.
The new administration has to revitalize downtown without short-changing the neighborhoods — a high-wire act, no doubt.
And the new mayor has to substantially reinvest in the West Side, a sector of the city that’s been wrongfully under-resourced since at least the 1960s.
“We have to start thinking about Chicago in ways other than just crime,” a veteran city planner and consultant told me.
Good advice. The next mayor would do well to listen.
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