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Originally Posted by Via Chicago
Perhaps youre not as large a proponent of prinicpals as you think you are. Because frankly if you are, I dont see how those viewpoints are compatible.
Parkland was not established for any swinging dick with billions of dollars to do whatever they want with the land. The land is owned by the public as a reprieve from city life, and it dosent have a price tag on it for a reason. We dont have mountains in Chicago. We dont have endless ocean. We dont have pristine forests. This is it, this is what we as residents have as a salve to the insanity of living in a giant concrete jungle.
Is nothing sacred to you as long as a dollar sign is attached?
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Everything has a price, in all honesty it does. Would you sell a 20 acre piece of Washington Park for $100 million? How about $500 million? How about $1 billion? If someone offered to pay the parks district $100 million for 20 acres of Washington Park, I hope to god they'd take it. They could acquire ten times that amount of land directly adjacent to the park for that and still have a fat stack left over. Anyone who doesn't believe that everything has a price is mad.
I don't believe the Lucas museum or this actually changes any precedents, because we already have tons of museums in parks and on the lakefront, and I do think every effort should be made to force the U of C to build it on the vacant land to the West, but I really don't think it would be even remotely worth it to lose this asset over it. The stakes are simply too high for this city, we are being handed multiple new billion+ dollar institutions, do you know how rare that is? The Lucas museum is going to start out with an endowment of up to $400 million. That's about the same size as the Art Institute's endowment. That's 10% larger than the endowment of DePaul University. That's not even including the value of his existing collection and what will undoubtedly be one of the largest construction projects (in terms of cost) in Chicago over the next decade. These kinds of institutions are the things that make cities great, we can't afford to turn opportunities like this down because we don't like that it is eating up some open land in the far corner of a massive park.
As was said above: let one billionaire build a museum and before you know it there are presidents and billionaires lining up at the door trying to get their own slice of park. What a terrible problem to have!
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I dont remember ever being asked if this was where I thought the best spot was. I dont recall any other Chicago taxpayer being asked either. All I seem to recall is being told by people in an ivory tower that "this is what we're doing".
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Thank goodness we don't live in a direct democracy or I'd think there is something wrong with our system! Guess what, this is why we have elected officials, so they can quash noisy dissenters when the public good is at stake with an unpopular decision.