33 Years Later, Chicago’s DuSable Park Still Not Ready
If you thought this was going to be the year you could finally pack a picnic hamper with egg salad sandwiches, pull on your favorite sun bonnet, and head to DuSable Park to enjoy a warm spring afternoon in downtown Chicago, you’re as loopy as that lady who sits in the hobo corner on the Brown Line scat singing the Check Please theme music to herself. It’s been a third of a century since Mayor Harold Washington declared the...
Downtown Chicago’s DuSable Park Closer to Becoming a Reality
For decades people have looked at the verdant peninsula of land sandwiched between the Chicago River and Ogden Slip and wondered how such a prime location escaped development, and wouldn’t it make a simply lovely park? The answer to both questions is simple: Radiation. The four-acre plot, bounded on three sides by water and the fourth by Lake Shore Drive is officially known on city charts as “Jean Baptiste Pointe.”...
Ghosts, Fake Butter, and Digging the Boring Construction at One Bennett Park
It’s all work work work work work at 451 East Grand Avenue, the future home of One Bennett Park, the 69-story condos-over-apartments snack pack by Robert A.M. Stern Related Midwest. Dozers are digging, and caisson crews are boring into the supple lakeside loam that characterizes this corner of Streeterville. You can see the busy beavers in the photos above and below from Joe Zekas over at YoChicago!. But what will they find...
Building With Dark History on Path to Becoming a Landmark
In this age when so many people have lost faith in government, it can be hard to believe, but sometimes the system works. Case in point: 161 East Grand Avenue, the former Lindsay Light Building. Over the summer the owner of the building applied for a demolition permit in order to turn the four-story building into a pile of rubble. Or perhaps to let someone else do it, because at the time, the building was being shopped around as a...
