Chicago Under Construction: The Park at River Point Makes Train Tracks Disappear

click images for larger view

For the better part of the past century, north from Lake Street was where the Chicago River began to again show its natural roots.  To the east and south, the river had long before a constructed ditch with towers on either bank often coming right to the edge.

At Wolf Point, however, and along the western bank, the river retained what at least appeared to be a natural shoreline, hugged by trees, shrubs and plants that arose free from the guiding hand of any landscape architect.  For those long decades, this assuming structure, just north of Lake Street, was the most ambitious building on the site . . .

All that's history now.  There are big plans for all those last empty sites along the river in the Loop.  No fewer than three buildings are planned for Wolf Point, and renderings of a new office tower at 150 North Riverside were unveiled just last month.

That brick Metra building - and the ramshackle wooden stairway leading down to the river -  is now only a memory, as another massive tower, River Point, is about to go up in their place.  It's been designed for Hines Interests by Pickard-Chilton, architects of the 60-story 300 North LaSalle, completed in 2009.  The actual building, to be set back from the river along Canal Street, has yet to break ground.

First the developer is creating a 1.5 acre riverfront park, for which they've shook down the city for a $29.5 million TIF subsidy.  (150 North Riverside, to be constructed on the other side of Lake, is also making a riverfront park part of their project, but without recourse to TIF money.)  The park at River Point is being built over the existing train tracks leading into Union Station.

On a chilly day back in April, a painter was already documenting the vanishing surface tracks clinging to the river.

Soon, the construction equipment was rolling into place.

Things begin, slowly and deliberately . . .

. . . cranes flew in on barges . .  .

. . . basic contours began to reveal themselves . . .

. . . and by July, there was no longer any mistaking but that this was the start of something big.

By August, there was enough green rebar in sight it might as well been St. Patrick's Day.

 The irregular riverbank has already been replaced with a new river wall . . .

 

. . . even as concrete walls quickly began to rise to support the surface of the new park, and swallow up the accustomed, almost lullaby sound of locomotive bells forever . . .

 

When it's all done, it will look something like this . . . 

Read More:

Hour of the Wolf: The Transformation of the Pivot Point of Chicago

First Renderings for 150 North Riverside office tower and park

Finishing the River Walk - Conclusion: Swimming Holes and Wolf Calls

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When last we left our traversal of the City of Chicago's plans for finishing the Chicago Riverwalk, we were about to cross under the LaSalle Street bridge.  While design for the three blocks to the east is 90% finished, the final three blocks going west are in a much more preliminary stage, with design listed as only 10% complete.

The Swimming Hole, south bank of Chicago River, LaSalle to Wells

The first of these blocks, from LaSalle to Wells, is currently called the Swimming Hole, but according to Chicago Department of Transportation Project Manager Michelle Woods, �I've been strongly encouraged to change the name because the Coast Guard thinks people will grab their beach towel and their flip-flops and go for a swim in the river.�

The Swimming Hole is actually a zero-depth fountain that kids could run through.  �This is the block,� says Woods, �that has the most amount of sunlight throughout the day.  This could be a very fun place for families and enjoy a nice day.  There's all kinds of technology and different things you can do so that the floor could look like a dance floor and light up as the water sprays, as the kids run through.  It could light up and interact with the kids climbing on it.�  The concept includes �more robust� bathroom facilities that would include rooms where kids could change in and out of their swimsuits.

The Jetty, Wells to Franklin

In the current, early concepts, the next block, from Wells to Franklin, is called The Jetty.  �It's actually my favorite block,� says Woods.  �It has fishing piers and floating gardens.  Instead of having a concession here, this would be a place I would like to set up as a classroom space and partner with the Chicago Public Schools and the Chicago Park District to have them bring kids to come learn about ecology, water quality and the history of the river, and maybe give them an opportunity to go fishing and enjoy a natural resource in the middle of the city.  At nighttime, this could be a place where we have caterers, maybe have it leased out for corporate events and nighttime activities.  You could have a glass of wine or a beer and wander around onto the fishing piers and enjoy a nice night on the river.�

The Boardwalk, Franklin to Lake Street

The final block, from Franklin to Lake Street, is called The Boardwalk.  �This is the section,� says Woods, �where we have a 50-foot buildout, and so we have a lot more space.  The idea originally was let's put some floating gardens in, let's have a nice boardwalk area, a nice public space, right at this big confluence of the river at Wolf Point, where people can hang out and enjoy all the traffic and things going on along the river.�  The rendering depicts an �iconic bridge�, that rises from the river level to Lake Street in a gentle slope.  �This is the section,� says Woods, �where I've been challenged - �can you create more retail space here?�, can you do something a little bit more �Chicago�, so we're working on that now.�

River Point Park

As we wrote previously, this is one segment where we really need to be seeing some kind of co-ordination between the three major park projects around Wolf Point,  In addition to the Riverwalk, $29 million in TIF funds are going to burying the Metra tracks under a new park along the river at the 45-story River Point office tower rising at 444 West Lake,  At the opposite bank, once the billion dollars of development is completed at Wolf Point, 70% of the site will be parkland, with nearly 900 linear feet of Riverwalk.

planned Wolf Point Riverwalk

Everyone doing their own thing is, of course, a grand Chicago tradition, but you can't help but think that it's taken all of Chicago's 175 history to get to the point of reshaping Wolf Point as a public amenity.  Once the pieces are in place, who knows when we'll have this opportunity again.  Doesn't it just make sense to have all the parties sit down and co-ordinate the vistas and functions?

The ultimate objective is to draw 2.8 million people to the Riverwalk each year.  Woods' presentation compared this to Lincoln Park (3 million visitors annually), New York's High Line (3.7 million), and at 5.1 million, the San Antonio River Walk, the gold standard that Ernie Pyle once referred to as �The Venice of America�.

The cost of completing the Chicago Riverwalk is estimated at $90-100 million, with over $3 million already spent on the design.  The city is confident that funding will be available from the Federal Transportation Infrastructure Finance and Innovation Act.  Last year, the U.S. Department of Transportation made available $17 billion in loan guarantees through the program's $1.7 billion in credit assistance.

TIFA would finance the Chicago Riverwalk via a 30-year loan at a reduced rate of interest. The loans, often used for things such as toll roads, require a revenue stream to pay them back.  For the Chicago Riverwalk completion, one proposal is to repay TIFA from a TIF,  with Woods mentioning revenue from the Riverwalk concessions as another possibility.  How many concessions and closings for private parties would you need to come up with the over $3 million a year needed to pay back the loan?  And if all the Riverwalk's revenue went to debt service, where would the money come from for regular maintenance?

Those are questions that - at least publicly - have yet to be addressed, but the deal may already be near to closing.  In an interview with Tanya Snyder of the DC.StreetsBlog, outgoing U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood says that a formal announcement may come as early as next month.  If everything goes well, construction could begin this year, with a completion time of 15 to 18 months per block.

Read: Finishing the Chicago Riverwalk
Part One - Introduction and Block One: The Marina
Part Two - Opera on the River? (or Maybe just some jazz)

Erasing the Dead: for bKL, Brininstool and Lynch never existed

Wolf Point, West Tower - click images for larger view

 OK, let me be honest.  This blog, as you may have noticed, may not always be the most impeccably researched document on the web, or the most hard-hitting journalism.

Still, I was a bit taken aback by the Chicago Architecture Blog's The Backstory on bKL.  The first thing I noticed was that it was squishy-soft on Wolf Point, the billion-dollar project that in which bKL is a major design partner, parroting the official line it's all wonderful and that anyone who dares raise questions must be an obtuse NIMBY.  As indicated in our own history, Hour of the Wolf: The Transformation of the Pivot Point of Chicago, it's a bit more complicated than that.

More interesting was this exchange on the origins of bKL Architecture:

Editor: What does �B.K.L.� stand for?
Thomas Kerwin, Principal: The �B� stands for �build.� I�m the �K,� and Jim Loewenberg [co-CEO of Magellan Development], who set us up in business is the �L.�
Editor: So the �B� is lower-case because it�s not a person.
Kerwin: Right. The �B� means �build� because we both built a lot of work all over the world. BKL is a new entity, but we felt it important to emphasize the fact that we�ve built many many projects. So, we�re a new firm, but we have a lot of experience.
Editor: How long has bKL been around?
Kerwin: We started in January of 2010.

I can excuse Kerwin the spin, but if he's claiming to go back to 2010, then a little reality might be in order, and it has nothing to do with the charming fairy story Kerwin was peddling.  Just ask Google, which provides the following search result pointing to bKL's current website:

Here's the actual announcement, from the February 2010 issue of Architect Magazine,

David Brininstool and Brad Lynch, partners for 20 years in Brininstool+Lynch, announced on Jan. 26 that they had closed their firm and teamed with Tom Kerwin, previously a managing partner at Skidmore, Owings and Merrill's Chicago office, to form Brininstool, Kerwin and Lynch (BKL).

Somewhere between 2010 and now, the �B� and the �L� of BKL vanished, and we now have the current firm, with the same letters jiggered to create a different backstory.  Maybe they just didn't want to have to buy new stationary.  Brininstool and Lynch are back to having to their own website. There's no trace of any break in continuity there either. What actually happened?  Now there's a story I'd pay good money to read.

There's a lot a talk in the interview about the firm's pack of talented young architects, but the only people we hear from and the only photo portrait is of the usual gang of old geezers (in this case, Kerwin, Carl Moskus and Michael Karlovitz) actually running things.  [Full disclosure:  I myself am 97.]

End of grousing.  (And who can't love a man who has Marina City as his favorite Chicago building?)
Read: The Backstory on bKL - The Young Chicago Firm Leading the Pack on Wolf Point.

Shall We Gather at the (Chicago) River?

The Cove, south bank, Dearborn to Clark (click images for larger view)

Tonight, Wednesday February 6th, the Chicago Department of Transportation is holding a public meeting to formally present plans for the completion of the Chicago Riverwalk.  The session will be at the Chicago Architecture Foundation, 224 South Michigan, from 5:30 to 7:00 p.m.

A funny thing happened when they rebuilt the east-west segment of Wacker Drive, the double-wide, double-deck roadway that runs along the south bank of the Chicago River.  For cars, it was finished completely in 2002.  For people, well, the attitude was that they'd get to it eventually.  No one had bothered to get the money for finishing the lower riverfront promenade, and it's remained in a raw, abject state ever since, mitigated only by a series of rudimentary summertime cafes.

Things began to look up a bit with the 2005 completion of Carol Ross Barney's Chicago Vietnam Veterans Memorial.  In 2009, Ross Barney carried the riverwalk forward to State Street, with a striking reflective panel under Wabash that captures the waves of the river . . .

. . .  and a new one block segment to State where the actual riverwalk was shunted to the periphery, in favor of a massive outdoor patio for a restaurant that, entirely coincidentally, was best known for running full page newspaper ads with pictures of local politicians . . .

In 2009, Skidmore Owings and Merrill issued a comprehensive Chicago Riverwalk Main Branch Framework Plan, which provided co-ordinated analysis and proposals for the entire stretch of the river from Wolf Point to the Lake.  It's scope was sweeping, from completion of DuSable Park to the East, to a public market under upper Wacker, to a �Confluence District� along all banks around the split of the river into north and south branches at Wolf Point.

Last October, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel announced plans for the completion of the Riverwalk -   �our second shoreline� - the final six blocks from State Street to Lake Street.   Partners in the project are Ross Barney Architects, Sasaki Associates, Alfred Benesch and Company, and Jacobs/Ryan Associates.

The new plan works hard to balance formal and informal, with a wide range of concepts and functionality.  Each block has its own concept: The Marina (from State to Dearborn); The Cove (Dearborn to Clark); The River Theater (Clark to LaSalle); The Swimming Hole (LaSalle to Wells); The Jetty (Wells to Franklin) and The Boardwalk (Franklin to Lake).  Anticipated functions include kayak rentals, docking space, fishing, fountains, gardens, and educational installations on the ecology of the river.  (If it's finished in time for President Obama to come by for the dedication, maybe they'll even be skeet shooting.)

Franklin to Lake segment of riverwalk, current condition

The Boardwalk, Franklin to Lake segment, new plan

The Confluence, Franklin to Lake segment, 2009 SOM plan

As far as the public disclosure is concerned, the new proposals appear to exist primarily as a series of pretty pictures.  If detail and specifics on the order of the SOM plan exist anywhere on the internet, I've yet to find it.  Where is the night lighting in the renderings?  Where are the back-office operations - storage, public restrooms, etc?  I've already mentioned how the O'Briens cafe overwhelms its segment of the riverwalk from State to Wabash, but in the final six blocks, food service appears to end in the easternmost segment, and even there it's all but invisible in the rendering.

The Marina, State to Dearborn segment, new plan

Where SOM had their Confluence District, the new plan seems to be everyone for themselves. If there's any co-ordination between what the city wants to do along the south bank, and how it will relate, visually or functionally, to what Hines Interests is planning for the TIF-funded park at their new River Point office tower at 444 West Lake, or what the Kennedy Interests is planning for their mega-development at Wolf Point, I've yet to find any reference to it.

The Jetty, Wells to Franklin segment, new plan

At the time of the Mayor's announcement last October, there was no funding in place for the project's estimated $90-100 million cost.  According to the press release, Emanuel �has charged CDOT to find creative ways to finance the construction of the remaining six blocks from State to Lake .�  It looks like the U.S. Department of Transportation is the most likely mark from which to shake the loose change.

The River Theater, Clark to LaSalle segment, new plan

So many hopes.  So few details.  Maybe tonight.  Again, it's a public meeting, so you can check it out for yourself, 5:30 to 7:00, at the Chicago Architecture Foundation, 224 South Michigan.

The Swimming Hole, LaSalle to Wells segment, new plan