chicago park district

Residents of Chicago's historic Prairie District have a new neighbor moving in. After a year-long battle over the National Vietnam Veterans Art Museum, the Chicago Park District's Board of Commissioners officially approved the acquisition of the property at a Nov. 14 meeting.

The museum will be moved to the third floor of the building, located at 1801 S. Indiana, while the park district will utilize the remaining space for yet-to-be-determined programming.

The Prairie District Neighborhood Alliance circulated petitions and worked with 2nd Ward Alderman Bob Fioretti's office to ensure the city transferred the building over to the park district and not to a private owner. The group shared its success with residents at their Nov. 14 meeting-just hours after the board's approval. PDNA officials said the group will continue its involvement with the Park District to determine what the new community center might offer to residents.

"We are working with the park district to actually be the resident voice and have an official group that will facilitate and go through the transparent process as the curriculum gets developed," said PDNA president Tina Feldstein. "So this is really, really exciting for the community."

The acquisition of the property came after a year-long battle between the museum and Café Society, a neighborhood restaurant and first-floor tenant in the building. The museum was facing roughly $600,000 in debt when it attempted to evict the eatery by claiming its owner failed to pay rent.

The museum sought out a lease-to-own agreement with another tenant in hopes that it might solve outstanding debt issues by allowing the new tenant to purchase the property in 2013. Since the museum was initially developed from TIF money, however, this plan violated regulations for its use.

The city stepped in and approved the repurchase of the property in June with plans to transfer it over to the Park District. Conditions of the Board of Commissioners' approval allow the museum to occupy the third floor of the space for three years.

"The city is looking at finding [the museum] a better home that's more conductive to foot traffic and a better location for their business," said Jeffrey Ayersman, treasurer of the PDNA. He added that future assessments, repairs and modifications to the building during the pending transition might delay park district programming well into 2008.

The PDNA plans to meet with the Chicago Park District soon to discuss plans for the property, Ayersman said. The group plans to send out surveys to residents requesting their suggestions for programming at the center.

"We'll work on what the next step is with the organization to get the residents involved in the operation of that community center," he said. "We really want to get folks involved."

Fioretti told residents at the PDNA meeting that he's pleased with the outcome of the situation. He feels it was best that the National Vietnam Veterans Art Museum remain at its current address until a more suitable location is found. He added that the community center could give more exposure to all of the historic and cultural landmarks that already exist in the neighborhood.

"By making it a viable community center for everybody," he said, "it will increase participation with everybody."
Chicago's rough-hewn cityscape, already studded with architectural jewels, has a sparkling new gem. It resembles an exquisitely cut diamond dropped into the great wall of stone that rises like a cliff across from Grant Park.

With its faceted, folded facade of glass glinting softly in the sun, the new Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies at 618 S. Michigan Ave. is a beguiling expression of light, both actual and metaphoric. It is at once novel and neighborly, a building whose spectacularly sculptural, computer-aided design is truly of our time even as it engages in a dialogue across time with masterpieces that put Chicago on the architectural map.

The 10-story, $55 million structure, which opens to the public Friday and was paid for almost completely with private funds, represents the finest cultural project in Chicago since the 2004 completion of Millennium Park -- and a welcome sign that the park's bold embrace of the new was no one-shot deal.



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The new Spertus Institute Photos
Designed by Chicago architects Ron Krueck and Mark Sexton, who have been in the public eye as the shapers of the controversial plan to put the Chicago Children's Museum in Grant Park, the new Spertus forms an object lesson in how the past should engage the present: through sophisticated counterpoint rather than through facile imitation.

There is no tacked-on brick and limestone here to "blend in" with the mighty row of historic buildings across from Grant Park. Nor are there Stars of David or other overt religious symbols.

Instead, the building's wall stands, like so much glass origami, for the power of lifelong learning in -- Jewish culture and the rich complexity of that culture -- its tragedies, triumphs, wisdom and marvelously self-deprecating wit. If there is overt symbolism in this building, it can only be seen in what is not present: No concrete barricades, no off-putting walls of stone, no barbed wire. Howard Sulkin, the institute's ebullient president, had the courage and foresight not to turn this building into a fortress after the calamitous events of 9/11.

Located on a former vacant lot just north of the institute's old home, a banal glass-faced building at 610 S. Michigan, the new Spertus provides more space for each of the institute's three main divisions -- Spertus College, the Spertus Museum and the Asher Library -- and adds such attractions as a 400-seat theater and a Kosher cafe (said to be the only one in downtown Chicago).

Well-connected

In the old building, these uses were stacked like flapjacks on separate floors. Ho hum. The new offers a spatial surprise: The architects punched a soaring lobby and a meandering atrium through the building's steel floors, symbolically connecting its functions in a series of grandly scaled rooms that borrow light, space and vitality from each other.

To be sure, the new Spertus is neither faultless nor wholly original. Modernist architects have for years been playing with the idea of folded facades as an alternative to the postmodern custom of slathering building with decoration. And the Pritzker Prize-winning Paris architect, Christian de Portzamparc, completed a much-praised facade of folded glass in his slender, 23-story LVMH Tower in Manhattan way back in 1999.

But this is the first time such a treatment has been pulled off in any significant way in Chicago and it truly occupies center stage. It marks the first insertion of a contemporary design into the clifflike wall of buildings that extends along the western edge of Grant Park since Mayor Richard M. Daley pushed through city landmark status for the strip in 2002.

At the time, architects fumed that giving city bureaucrats tight rein over this so-called Historic Michigan Boulevard District, which includes such masterpieces as Adler & Sullivan's muscular Auditorium Building, would put a crimp on their creativity. But Krueck and Sexton have shown that accepting constraints, opposed to unbridled freedom, is an essential part of the creative process.

So, like the other buildings in the Michigan Avenue historic district, theirs has a bottom, a middle and a top, and is deeply three-dimensional, not just a flat plane.

And yet, its startling wall of glass is every bit a product of computer age and the freedom it gives architects to customize forms rather than standardize them, as in the industrial age. The new Spertus facade is composed of 726 pieces of glass, formed in 556 different shapes, including parallelograms that tilt in two ways, not one. The glass pieces are clipped onto extruded aluminum frames whose three-legged, twisting profile resembles human femur bones. The pieces project outward over the sidewalk by as much as 5 feet and inward toward the center of the building by as much as 2 feet.

Far too often these days, such technical wizardry seeks only to produce "wow" buildings, as if architecture's job was to make us yelp. But in the capable hands of Krueck and Sexton, whose resume includes award-winning modernist houses and a supporting role in the design of Millennium Park's Crown Fountain, the new Spertus is no one-liner, like the clunky, slice-topped skyscraper at 150 N. Michigan Ave.

The building's crystalline forms are dramatic enough to stand up to the heft of such muscle-bound neighbors as the Chicago Hilton. Yet they do not seem jagged and aggressive, as silvery, sharp-pointed buildings of Daniel Libeskind can. Rather, they appear soft and billowy, like folds of drapery or a woman's body. The building even has a "skirt," a sheltering projection of glass that playfully sweeps over the sidewalk and lets you discover the structural girdle that makes it all stand up.

Mirrors surroundings

To the architects' credit, they have extended such elegance down to the minutest details, such as the thickness and low-iron content of the building's glass, ensuring that the glass handsomely mirrors its surroundings -- the clouds, the sky and the trees across the way in Grant Park -- rather than reflecting them in the equivalent of a fun-house mirror. The overall result is that the design thrillingly but nobly transports the Michigan Avenue wall into the 21st Century.

Yet the beauty of the new Spertus runs deeper than that voluptuous glass facade. It isn't showoff architecture that fails to back exterior style with internal substance.

For starters, the building's transparency communicates far more effectively than the opaque glass of Spertus' former home that this is a public place, a cleft in the wall of stone buildings along Michigan Avenue. Here, the architecture democratically seems to say, passersby are welcome to venture in, partake of what's offered (there is a museum admission fee) and glimpse the over-the-treetops views of Grant
Daley administration has settled on an East Coast company to help find ways to turn naming rights and sponsorships into cash to help pay the bills.

Octagon Inc. of Norwalk, Conn. has been awarded a $285,000 contract to examine what the city has to offer and, by next spring, produce a "comprehensive strategic marketing plan" designed to attract corporate sponsors and advertisers.

The action comes as the city is exploring the possibility of leasing Midway Airport in effort to generate revenue.




Octagon, under terms of the contract, will inventory city programs, events, buildings -- presumably from the Jardine Filtration Plant to the Cultural Center -- vehicles and other physical assets and determine which would be most attractive to companies that might want to affix their names in some way.

Any plan must "detail a strategy for ensuring the integrity of the city of Chicago's brand image," according to contract terms, and ideas are to be bounced off a group of civic leaders yet to be formed. The group may advise on "the perceived limits of the appropriate introduction of commercial entities into public space."

Chicago already has sponsorships, but in an approach that is not organized. For example, various city festivals have corporate backers including Taste of Chicago, though no sponsor has come up with a large enough amount to get its name into the official title of the popular annual food and music fest.

After toying with the idea of a comprehensive sponsorship effort six years earlier, City Hall got serious in 2006 when it issued a call to marketing firms to submit proposals in a competition ultimately won by Octagon.

Other cities already have marketing deals, said Wendy Abrams, a spokeswoman for the city's Budget Office. Nextel has sponsored the Las Vegas Monorail, for example, and New York has entered into partnership agreements with such firms as Snapple, Verizon and Pepsi Cola, she said.

One asset expected to be on the list compiled by Octagon is the Chicago Skyway. The city last year tried on its own to attract a client willing to pay enough to get its name on the Southeast Side expressway, but was unsuccessful.

But the skyway proved to be a cash cow in another money-raising effort in 2005 when the city received $1.8 billion from an Australian-Spanish consortium for a 99-year lease to operate the roadway.

In a similar deal last year, a private operator paid $563 million for a 99-year lease for the city-owned Millennium Park garage and three other downtown parking facilities owned by the Chicago Park District.

Chicago Park District
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The Chicago Park District is the oldest and (financially) largest park district in the nation, with a $385 million annual budget. The park district also has the excellent reputation of spending the most per capita on its parks, even more than Boston in terms of park expenses per capita. It is an independent taxing authority as defined by Illinois State Statute and is considered a separate (or "sister") agency of the city of Chicago. The CEO of the Park District is appointed by the Mayor of Chicago.

The agency was long considered a dumping ground for political appointees; most famously, it was run by Ed Kelly, one of the "Eddies" who frustrated Mayor Harold Washington in the 1980s. The size and personnel of the park district was dramatically pared down during the reform administration of Mayor Richard M. Daley-appointed CEO Forrest Claypool in the mid-1990s. Until 1983 it was District policy to underfund parks in minority neighborhoods[1].

Since the 2004, the district has been run by Tim Mitchell. During his tenure, the park district has taken steps to return programming to the neighborhoods and created a lakefront concert venue on Northerly Island (formerly Meigs Field).


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