Olympic Plans on Southside Chicago

If Chicago actually lands the 2016 Olympics, the dramatic shift in the city's main stadium plan announced Wednesday is likely to go down as a turning point.

Under a clear blue sky, on a broad green meadow with the downtown skyline preening in the distant background, Mayor Richard Daley and his Olympic point man, insurance executive Patrick Ryan, implicitly admitted that their first stadium plan was a loser and introduced another one, which, if properly handled, may have the glint of gold.


The new plan, which moves the stadium from the downtown lakefront to Washington Park on the city's South Side, strikes the proper balance between doing what is right for the Olympics and doing what is right for Chicago--two imperatives that have quietly been in conflict since Chicago's plans began leaking onto the front pages this summer.

While the stadium's price tag remains uncertain and it is not known where the private funds to build it will come from, the plan's merits are clear:

With the Chicago Transit Authority's Green Line running along the western edge of Washington Park, the Metra Electric line shooting through Hyde Park, and major highways like Lake Shore Drive and the Dan Ryan Expressway offering additional access, this stadium would be far easier to reach by public transit than its lakefront counterpart.

This stadium promises economic and urban redevelopment opportunities for the neighborhoods around Washington Park that a lakefront stadium did not. It could do for poor areas on the South Side, already seeing some redevelopment, what the 1996 Democratic National Convention did for the West Side: Provide a long-term shot in the arm that would outlast the event itself.

The plan also means that the downtown lakefront will not have a massive sports facility crammed between Soldier Field and McCormick Place, which would have walled off Chicago from its shoreline. Instead, that meadow in Washington Park offers all the room that's needed to design a state-of-the-art sports venue, a factor that could help Chicago defeat San Francisco and Los Angeles in its bid to become the U.S. city that vies for the games.

To be sure, the city's overall Olympic plan, due Friday at the U.S. Olympic Committee, has yet to be released to the public. But the stadium concept, prepared by Chicago architects Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, takes a major step toward solving the chief conundrum for Chicago: How to build a massive stadium that will excel during the Olympics and not become a white elephant afterwards.

Skidmore's concept calls for the construction of an oval-shaped, 95,000-seat temporary stadium that would host both the opening and closing ceremonies as well as track and field events. The stadium would have at least two tiers of seats. The first would consist of an amphitheater-like bowl that would be hollowed about 25 feet into the ground. At the bottom of the bowl would be the track surface. Other tiers of seats would be built above ground, but would disappear after the games.

Left in place would be a 10,000-foot amphitheater that could be used for track and field and cultural events. The plan also promises to make a variety of improvements to Washington Park, which was designed in 1871 by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, the landscape architects whose masterwork is New York City's Central Park.

At the press conference announcing the stadium plan, some asked whether the new plan would undermine the compactness that has been a major selling point of Chicago's Olympic plans. But there's a difference between moving the stadium to some far-flung suburb like Naperville and moving it to Washington Park--a short drive from the expected site of the Olympic Village south of McCormick Place and west of Lake Shore Drive.

The plan also appears sensitive to the landscape of Washington Park, a serene combination of meadows, ponds and lagoons with islands within them. Skidmore proposes, for example, to take a portion of a road that now splits the northern and southern halves of the park and bury it in a tunnel. This would allow pedestrians to cross easily from one side of the park to the other, separating car and pedestrian traffic in a way that wisely learns from Central Park.

True, having the stadium several miles from downtown will make for slightly less dramatic pictures of the skyline. But, as Wednesday's press conference made plain, the downtown skyline is clearly, if somewhat distantly, visible from Washington Park. Besides, blimps and TV cameras at close-in Olympic venues will still deliver the jaw-dropping panoramic shots broadcasters crave.

As good as it is, though, the stadium concept can't be viewed in isolation. Its merits (or failings) will only be fully apparent after the city's leaders make public Chicago's overall Olympic plan. So stay tuned: Chicago's Olympic urban planning marathon isn't over. It's just begun.

By Blair Kamin
Tribune architecture critic
Published September 21, 2006