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Originally Posted by west-town-brad
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As a 2019 Trib article points out, this new facility frees up a number of near-downtown sites.
https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/...htmlstory.html
There's the Near North High School site at Larrabee/Clybourn, which is pitched for the next phase of CHA development at Cabrini.
There's the current police academy at 1300 W Jackson, which is a PRIME West Loop development site for residential. This could be sold to private developers, or possibly used as expansion for Skinner or Whitney Young (which also benefits downtown development, in a general sense). The worst option is that they turn it into a new police precinct house for West Loop. There will be pressure to do this from nervous-Nelly West Loopers who think it will stop carjackings or something.
There's the fire academy at Jefferson and DeKoven - built on the site where the Great Chicago Fire started. I don't expect anything great to happen here, DPD seems intent on locking this area into suburban chain retail and light industrial only.
Then a few other miscellaneous smaller sites.
The current police and fire academies are both cool Modernist buildings, but something tells me that left-leaning preservationists won't be clamoring to save police and cop buildings.