The 78 site was all railyards, with some freighthouses and grain elevators, by the late 19th century. In the late 1920s, remarkably, the railroads agreed to a series of property swaps that allowed the river to be straightened. However, the Depression soon ended the city’s dream of extending LaSalle and Wells through the site.
The land between Clark and the new river channel got some freighthouses and team tracks, but most of it by the 1960s was used for parking trucks used in piggyback (trailer on flatcar) operations. Several long concrete parking pads were laid. Here’s what it looked like in 1970 (the circle is at State & Roosevelt):
NIPC aerial
Bankruptcy of the Rock Island and Penn Central in the 1970s ended most railroad operations, and the land went to the surviving real estate subsidiaries and spinoffs.
In the 1990s, ownership was split, with the land next to the river controlled by one owner and the land next to Clark by another. One planning exercise I was part of absurdly proposed putting the Wells-Wentworth connector right on the property line so neither owner would bear more of the burden. Besides the 1985 White Sox stadium scheme, there was a circa 1990 plan to move the main post office there that Mayor Daley stepped in to block.
In 2001, Rezmar gained control of both parts and began planning a big development. They went through a couple of iterations with IKEA-anchored retail along Roosevelt, and then a retail center without IKEA. When Rezko’s empire collapsed, General Mediterranean bought the dirt. They’re still the actual 90% owner; Related Midwest is just the development partner.
The reason it remained undeveloped is a combination of it having no infrastructure and successive owners holding out for big dreams. Because you have to put in so much street and pipe network at once to get any access from Clark or Roosevelt, you can’t just parcel it out a few acres at a time to townhouse developers. Until about 10 years ago, a bunch of highrise residential just didn’t seem all that realistic on this site. Had Related Midwest not advanced such a big plan a couple of years ago, I fear Amazon would now be looking to swoop in and create its version of the big UPS hub across the river.
People always bring up its brownfield history as a dominant factor, but I don’t think that’s a serious issue. It was just a parking lot and railroad tracks onto which some lubricants and diesel fuel might have spilled. Any remediation would be a simple matter of scraping the top six inches and sending it to a Downstate strip mine. I was happy to see Skidmore dedicate most of the old riverbed as parkland, and that might remove a certain amount of doubt, but the old riverbed was mostly filled in with what they dug from the new channel, so nothing especially evil. The river was only 20 feet deep, so no problem for drilling caissons—but because the river channel had wandered so much over the last 10,000 years, pretty much everything southwest of Polk & Clark has been built on pilings, anyway.
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