[Mr Downtown]

^Yeah, I was very involved with this issue at the time. Metra's tracks were on a "relocatable easement" through the land that's still vacant and the land that became Target/Amli 900/Roosevelt Collection. The owner of part of that land, U.S. Equities, commissioned a study "proving" that the Rock Island trains could be moved to Union Station. This would have given Bob Wislow a big chunk of near-Loop land unencumbered by all those trains. After all, he'd done it at One Financial Place, where he moved the trains south an entire block. But Metra said a moveable easement doesn't mean you can evict us; legally we still have to get from one end of the property to the other.

As I've said before, if someone had just had the foresight to put the Metra tracks up on a viaduct (and Roosevelt down on the ground) we'd have been a lot better off. But the two projects were planned and built separately three years apart, what today we'd describe as thinking in silos.