A look at downtown’s future — as seen 40 years ago

Imagine a full-fledged performing arts center occupying the southern tip of Grant Park, running along Roosevelt Road between Michigan and Columbus avenues.

And on a nice night, you might even walk there after spending the afternoon at Discovery Park, the former Meigs Field airport that was turned into green space not by Mayor Richard M. Daley and the bulldozers in 2003, but as a result of the World’s Fair of 1992.

Welcome to a glimpse of downtown’s proposed future as seen nearly 40 years ago by the 1983 Chicago Central Area Plan.

Since the heralded Chicago Plan of 1909, the city every few decades or so rolls out big, visionary downtown urban planning documents, then uses them as a guideline to direct development.

But the lesser-known 1983 plan didn’t want to totally remake downtown but instead sought to suggest solid ideas to improve and enhance what was already there.

“It was really meant to work around the edges and energize the civic and business leadership [who were key players in downtown’s development] to continue what they’re doing,” said urban planner Kimball Goluska, who worked on the effort.

Reading the plan now, I couldn’t help but think there’s some merit in that approach today as business, civic and government leaders right now try to figure out a new chapter for downtown.

Forgotten plan got some things right

Subtitled as “A Plan for the Heart of the City,” the 1983 plan is barely remembered today, if at all. I’d forgotten about it until I saw a copy on eBay a few weeks ago and snapped it up.

And although we didn’t get the performing arts center or the 1992 World’s Fair (Meigs Field was turned into a park, but not one as sculpted and cool as Discovery Park), the 1983 document ended up getting a lot of things right.

The plan successfully outlined in the relocation of northbound lanes of Lake Shore Drive, creating today’s Museum Campus.

It foresaw Navy Pier redeveloped as a major tourist destination, and the Ontario and Ohio street corridors as entertainment and dining districts.

The 96-page report also called for rebuilt harbors, more downtown housing, better public transit and more.

The 1983 plan was created by a who’s who of civic leaders led by the Chicago Central Area Committee and its then-president, Bruce Graham, leader of architecture firm Skidmore Owings & Merrill. The city’s major universities were also represented.

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And though largely created in the final years of Mayor Jane Byrne’s single term in office, the city’s newly elected boss, Harold Washington, signed off on the plan.

“I gave a presentation of the Central Area Plan, and he’d say, ‘Wait, can you back up?’ ‘Explain those numbers to me.’ We’d do a two-hour meeting, and he was smart, sharp and interested in the details,” said Goluska, then a 29-year-old urban planning associate at Skidmore Owings & Merrill.

There were some blunders, such as the proposed “European”-inspired canal south of Cermak Road between the Chicago River’s South Branch and Lake Michigan that would’ve been more of a barrier than an amenity.

And were there missed opportunities in the plan? The performing arts center could’ve been intriguing. Same for an idea brought to the group by the late architect Stanley Tigerman to build rental townhouses on the river east of Michigan, replacing much of that still-ugly double-level portion of Wacker Drive.

“We could never convince city leadership because we were giving away public land,” Goluska said.

So what’s the plan for today?

The benefit of hindsight gives a lot more context to the 1983 plan and its aims. Suburbia and its corporate office parks and shopping malls were still on the rise, and downtown needed a solid, measured answer.

Also, the plan marked the beginning of the end of the old school “downtown first” way of dividing the city’s spoils. Washington’s election as mayor brought neighborhood redevelopment more into focus.

But whither downtown today — a place built for people to shop and work — when more folks are now shopping and working from home?

And as the central area continues to grow outward, the fate of downtown is tied to neighborhoods far more than it was in 1983.

“What we are witnessing now is that the central area has expanded out into and influenced surrounding neighborhoods up to Division [Street] and North Avenue, west to Ashland Avenue, and south to 31st or 35th,” a longtime urban planner told me.

Downtown faces a different set of challenges today, but it needs key leaders — from across the city this time — to rally up and work toward an answer, just as much now as it did in 1983.

Maybe even more.

Lee Bey is the Chicago Sun-Times architecture critic and a member of the Editorial Board.

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