Planning Chicago"s future

‘Tis the season, it seems, for Chicago’s mayor and business leaders to roll out their wish lists for the city’s future.

This is a good thing.

Cities, like people, do better when they have a plan. Chicago is still collecting dividends from the Plan of Chicago drafted more than a century ago by Daniel Burnham and Edward Bennett for the Commercial Club of Chicago.

As an armchair urban planner, though, I can’t keep from adding some wishes to the latest list. Why let Mayor Rahm Emanuel and the business executives on his Choose Chicago tourism panel have all the fun?

Last week the panel let fly with an “aspirational and aggressive” list of things the city might try to draw more tourists. If the annual number of visitors can be boosted by 26 million to 70 million, members of the panel reason, it will generate billions in new economic activity, millions in local taxes and 100,000 new jobs.

Highlights from the list include: nightly light shows to dramatize downtown’s architectural wonders; upscale “carriage” cars on the CTA’s transit line to O’Hare International Airport so tourists won’t have to deal with the hoi polloi; a float plane offering bird’s-eye views of the lakefront; bubble-type cable cars gliding above the Chicago River; and, of course, a spectacular casino complex, if ever Springfield gives gambling here a green light.

A suggestion was made that nearly all can be accomplished via private investments.

Sure, it would be easy to poke fun at these ideas, so I won’t. In fact, some of the ideas are downright intriguing. So are previously announced plans by the city-state McPier Authority to reconfigure attractions on Navy Pier and build another high-rise hotel alongside McCormick Place.

By my lights, though, the powers-that-be left out a few things. So here are three ideas — none terribly aspirational or aggressive — that ought to be added to our city’s to-do list:

Idea No. 1: Build an off-street bus-way that would whisk commuters, visitors and, yes, tourists from West Loop Metra stations to downtown destinations now served only by the CTA’s too-often gridlocked Loop buses.

Say you want economic development? Why locate a business on Michigan Avenue, or anywhere east of State Street, if it can take longer to get there from the Union or Ogilvie Metra stations than the train ride in from the suburbs? For that matter, why spend precious weekend time or cab fare to reach Navy Pier or the lakefront museums or the Chicago Auto Show at McCormick Place when it’s far easier to go to the movie theaters at your local suburban mall or stay home and watch cable?

What’s more, all the rights-of-way needed for the off-street bus-way already exist.

Idea No. 2: Reconfigure the navigational lock that separates Lake Michigan from the Chicago River so the river extends to the foot of Navy Pier.

While Chicago still has a friend in the White House, we need to snag federal matching funds to rebuild and relocate the sea wall south of the pier so people can take a boat taxi from the aforementioned Metra stations to the pier.

The sea wall was an idea submitted to the 1990 design competition for Navy Pier by Booth/Hansen Associates. Unfortunately, the firm came in second.

Idea No. 3: About that big downtown casino, how about building something, or better yet, rehabbing something, that looks like it actually belongs here? Press coverage said Choose Chicago has in mind something like the $5 billion Marina Bay Sands resort in Singapore.

Huh?

I have in mind an adaptive rehab of the cavernous old Main Post Office that straddles the Eisenhower Expressway; or a retrofit of the late architect Gene Summers’ 40-year-old-but-still-striking McCormick Place East overlooking Burnham Harbor.

Then again, mine are bread-and-butter suggestions for things the city actually needs. They lack the pizazz of cable cars swooping over the river or stage-set imitations of tropical resorts.

Nor are they cheap. Converting old rail spurs into a bus-way, moving a sea wall, turning a convention hall into a casino — these are nine-figure projects.

So City Hall may be tempted to keep grabbing traffic lanes on existing streets for bicycle paths or “bus-rapid transit.” Those ideas cost less. The ribbon-cuttings are just as splashy. And our civic groups seem not to get the difference between window dressing and the real thing.

Or so it seems, from my armchair.

John McCarron teaches, consults and writes on urban affairs.

Planning Chicago"s future