Tuesday Trivia: 10 Things You Probably Don’t Know About Marina City
Yesterday we published a review of the new book Marina City: Bertrand Goldberg’s Urban Vision. Today, we present
Ten Things You Probably Don’t Know About Marina City
-
You’ve heard of the retail and office complex at “Block 37” in the Loop. Well, Marina City is on “Block One” of the City of Chicago plan.
-
The land Marina city sits on was formerly a rail yard.
-
Marina City was originally called Labor Center.
-
The original plan for Marina City called for two 40-story towers, and a third 10-story tower.
-
Marina City once had its own ice skating rink and supermarket.
-
Marina City’s architect, Bertrand Goldberg, first experimented with curved concrete in the design he made for the city of Nashville’s sewage treatment plant.
-
Marina City was built for the Chicago janitors’ union.
-
Ten years before Marina City became a reality, its architect designed a smaller, but very similar, set of twin towers for a South Side motel that was never built.
-
The boatyard underneath the Marina City complex was once known as Phillips Pier 66, after the oil company.
-
What is now the House of Blues was called the Field Television Center at the time it opened, because WFLD Television had its studios there.
