CHICAGO | General Discussions

[the urban politician]

Originally Posted by Steely Dan

potentially, yes.

1969 saw the completion of two 800+ footers.

'73-'76 saw the completion of three 800+ footers.

'89-'90 saw the completion of four 800+ footers.

2000 saw the completion of one 800+ footer.

'09-'10 saw the completion of three 800+ footers.

currently, there are three 800 footers U/C with a further seven solid proposals on the drawing boards.



will all 7 of those proposals get built? history teaches us that is pretty unlikely, but even if just half of them can squeak through in the next handful of years, it's gonna be epic!

Problem being, we need to view this in relative terms. In the 1960s and 70s, how many 800 ft towers were being built in the world compared to today?

Unfortunately, today Chicago has to do way the hell more to match the greatness it was achieving in 1969 or 1970. I’m not saying it has to be all about height, though.

I think we are there already but for a different reason. We are building a truly 24 hour, walkable, live-work-play environment in the core of town, and reinvigorating & expanding the core’s role as the center of commerce and importance for generations to come—and I think that will end up being far more transformational than a couple of wow-inducing skyline enhancers.

[NYer34]

Originally Posted by 10023

Chicago needs to protect all of its old buildings, whether they have historic or architectural significance or not...

I live in New York - a city that has, at best, a mixed record on preservation (we're still demo'ing 200+-year-old Federalist buildings pretty regularly).

That said, I'm always absolutely shocked / mortified at how much Chicago seems to crap on preservation. Every time I'm in Chicago, I see beautiful old mansions, townhouses, etc., in places like River North or Lincoln Park biting the dust for fairly ugly new condos.

Given the huge number of surface lots and parking garages, the city could easily, without any impact on development, put down a blanket landmarking of its irreplaceable pre-WWII architectural stock. Unfortunately, I don't think that's likely, as it would be a very far cry from what seems to happen today.

[SpireGuy]

Originally Posted by NYer34

I live in New York - a city that has, at best, a mixed record on preservation (we're still demo'ing 200+-year-old Federalist buildings pretty regularly).

That said, I'm always absolutely shocked / mortified at how much Chicago seems to crap on preservation. Every time I'm in Chicago, I see beautiful old mansions, townhouses, etc., in places like River North or Lincoln Park biting the dust for fairly ugly new condos.

Given the huge number of surface lots and parking garages, the city could easily, without any impact on development, put down a blanket landmarking of its irreplaceable pre-WWII architectural stock. Unfortunately, I don't think that's likely, as it would be a very far cry from what seems to happen today.

Agree 100%. Given that Chicago loves to tout its amazing architecture, it's mindbogling how much Chicagoans and politicians allow developers to destroy what makes this city special. Until we change our ways here, it's difficult to argue that Chicago loves its architecture (aside from a few trophy buildings). We can do so much better!

[LouisVanDerWright]

Honestly guys, I'm just as much of a preservationist as anyone, but Chicago isn't THAT bad at it these days. It's really the glaring and disgusting examples from the past and the fact that we have so many good buildings to lose in the first place that paints an ugly picture. Yeah we are losing a few dozen very nice smaller buildings a year and probably 3-4 true landmarks a year, but that's out of tens of thousands of nice prewar structures and thousands of landmark caliber structures. That doesn't make it acceptable, but it's not a wholesale slaughter either as the hysterics would suggest.

Keep in mind that for every nice greystone you see torn down in Lincoln Park or somewhere for a mansion there's half a dozen of them being rehabbed to last another 100 years elsewhere in the city.

The real slaughter of Chicago's historic building stock lies in the wholesale neglect of entire sections of the city where you might have two or three beautiful buildings on a single block in danger of being wrecked at any given time. It's also these areas where renovations once made no sense and new construction still makes no sense where I think we've ironically made the most progress in the latest boom. There is a silent revolution going on throughout the West and South sides at the moment as investors chase yield anywhere they can get it. Companies like Pangea have gobbled up tens of thousands of units and made a cottage industry of saving properties that would otherwise be left to rot until they fall down or are torn down. And Pangea is just the biggest of these players, there are dozens of smaller shops with hundreds or thousands of units of historic structures. It's now very rare for a nice six flat in Washington Park or South Shore or Austin or Englewood to bite the dust just because it needs to be gutted. Almost all of these buildings are now snatched up by investors at rock bottom prices, rehabbed, and then rented to Section 8 or even market rate tenants.

So for as awful as our current losses are in certain developing areas or the occasional moronic demolition of a Burnham design in the West Loop (these people should be dragged out in the street and tarred and feathered) we've made an insane amount of progress in stopping the real bleeding which is the wholesale destruction of the South and West sides. We've also pretty much put a complete stop to the destruction of true landmarks in an around downtown when it used to be wanton pilfering of our architectural heritage for purely business purposes. When is the last time we lost a prewar skyscraper of any note to the wrecking ball? The mercantile exchange maybe? I think the last true landmark lost downtown was Prentice.

So yeah, what we still lose every year is most definitely unacceptable, but we are working our way back from a status quo and mentality of "old=bad" to one where an extremely special purpose building like the Athletic Association can be repurposed as a wildly profitable experiential multipurpose development. 20 years ago that would be unthinkable and the closing of the original occupant of such a structure would mean the building sitting vacant for years and slowly being destroyed. Now the norm is that old historic skyscrapers become boutique hotels or condo buildings, not parking lots. We just need to organize to apply that mentality to smaller buildings in developing areas where the damage is most easily avoidable.

[10023]

I’m surprised McCormick Place doesn’t have a green roof yet.

[Steely Dan]

Originally Posted by the urban politician

Problem being, we need to view this in relative terms.

no, we don't need to do that.

you can look at things on a relative basis, if you want to, but it won't change the fact that chicago is potentially on the cusp of seeing the biggest skyscraper building boom in the city's history.

nothing that happens in china or the middle east or wherever can change that.

[LouisVanDerWright]

^^^ Also if you 'need' to view something in relative terms then you need to view it on per capita basis for it to be truly relative. On that basis pretty much no skyline on Earth save maybe oil-dick-measuring-contest Dubai competes with Chicago's skyline and certainly not with the highrise boom we are seeing.

[MayorOfChicago]

Originally Posted by moorhosj

To clarify, is this second set of data compared to just Chicago or is it the Chicago metro?

metro chicago vs the other metros. apples to apples.

[k1052]

Originally Posted by 10023

I’m surprised McCormick Place doesn’t have a green roof yet.

Their roofs drain to the lake, not the combined sewers.

[Investing In Chicago]

Originally Posted by LouisVanDerWright

^^^ Also if you 'need' to view something in relative terms then you need to view it on per capita basis for it to be truly relative. On that basis pretty much no skyline on Earth save maybe oil-dick-measuring-contest Dubai competes with Chicago's skyline and certainly not with the highrise boom we are seeing.

This is all silly, and I don't know what you mean by "compete" but NYC (metro) is ~2.5x larger than Chicagoland and certainly has a skyline more than 2.5x larger than Chicago's. So I would think on a per capita basis, I can't see how no skyline on Earth competes with Chicago's.

[moorhosj]

Crain's: The best large and small cities in America

In ranking order, the top 10 big cities (and their lead attributes) were:

1) New York (culture, nightlife)
2) Chicago (conventions, nightlife)
3) Los Angeles (social media clout, diversity)
4) San Francisco (household income, educational attainment)
5) Las Vegas (attractions, culture)
6) San Diego (quality of natural and built environments, household income)
7) Houston (restaurants, number of Fortune 500 companies)
8) Miami (diversity, quality of natural and built environments)
9) Seattle (educational attainment, household income)
10) Boston (quality of natural and built environments, safety)

Source data

[bnk]

New parkland ranking for cities. The only region left in the hq2 hunt ranked higher than Chicago is DC area.


https://chicago.suntimes.com/news/ch...rkscore-index/

Top 10 best cities for urban parks

1. Minneapolis
2. St. Paul
3. Washington, D.C.
4. Arlington, Virginia
5. San Francisco
6. Portland
7. Cincinnati
8. Chicago
9. New York
10. Irvine


http://parkscore.tpl.org/city.php?ci...100y2juah5cip9


http://parkscore.tpl.org/ReportImages/Chicago_IL.pdf

[bnk]

Originally Posted by moorhosj

Crain's: The best large and small cities in America


Source data

Even though Chicago and Chicagoland in general are not even listed per capital in the top 25 cities in murder rate...

Even in changing times, one factor remains a constant concern: safety.
“Chicago performs really well in all of our 'product' factors, but it doesn't perform that well when it comes to Ipsos perception,” Fair explains. “If you're asking me to take an educated guess, the bad press the city has received on murder rates and social issues is probably dragging down its perception performance,” he adds.

A lot of the bad press is 10 constant years of conservative news sources that bashed the city since Obama became elected.


The national perception needs to change. It could be our rate limiting factor on a major hq relocation in addition to the pension fiasco.


Even so, here's another snippet of the study's take on Chicago: "Programming and culture keep locals and visitors hopping, while robust infrastructure facilitates exploration. But it's the affordability of life here that keeps Chicago excited about the future."

.

[sixo1]

Originally Posted by bnk

New parkland ranking for cities. The only region left in the hq2 hunt ranked higher than Chicago is DC area.


https://chicago.suntimes.com/news/ch...rkscore-index/

Top 10 best cities for urban parks

1. Minneapolis
2. St. Paul
3. Washington, D.C.
4. Arlington, Virginia
5. San Francisco
6. Portland
7. Cincinnati
8. Chicago
9. New York
10. Irvine


http://parkscore.tpl.org/city.php?ci...100y2juah5cip9


http://parkscore.tpl.org/ReportImages/Chicago_IL.pdf

Nice! In 2016, Chicago was 15th. Great progress. The city has even moved past NYC.

[ardecila]

I've said before how ParkScore is BS, right? SF is #5 and Chicago is #9, but the only difference is that SF is geographically tiny so their large City Beautiful-era parks constitute a large percentage of the overall city.

Also ParkScore dinged Chicago for not having more dog parks and restrooms...

#9 in the country is actually a pretty good ranking when we are being compared to little cities like Arlington and Irvine, CA. Somehow folks like Friends of the Parking Lot still think a #9 ranking is a crisis, and that we have an acute parkland shortage.

[ardecila]

Originally Posted by k1052

Their roofs drain to the lake, not the combined sewers.

Also there is literally a whole farm on the roof of McCormick Place.

https://openhousechicago.org/sites/s...-rooftop-farm/

[Baronvonellis]

Originally Posted by LouisVanDerWright

Three things:

1. Chicago has the best built environment in the world, not Paris. We have a lot of "missing teeth" as a city, but you can hardly fault a city so young for not yet being "complete" in the way an ancient city like Paris or London is. But our unique fabric of a thoroughly modern commerical city built on a pre-auto scale with modern planning and transit isn't found anywhere else.

Man, have you been to cities in Europe like Paris, Berlin, or Munich? The transit system is light years better there. You can get to any neighborhood to any neighborhood quickly across town. You can effortlessly hop from commuter rail, to subway, to tram, to bus. The commuter rail acts as express trains in the core city, running frequently. Just imagine Metra running trains every 5-10 mins with lots more stops in the city of Chicago, with transfers to subways. They have much better urban planning of active midrise neighborhoods, without any ugly parking podiums to be seen. Then outside the city is farm land and forests without the miles and miles of suburban sprawl we have in the US. Basically what the suburbs of Chicago were like pre-WW2. Quiet walkable commuter train suburbs with frequent trains going to downtown near nature.

[the urban politician]

^ Yeah, that's what you get when your city is built by an 18th/19th century monarchy

It sure would be nice if people actually appreciated certain American cities for achieving what they have even while protecting private property rights and facing a Government that is about as transit-hostile as could possibly exist in the western world, and zoning that has been quite hostile to dense housing. Not to call people out, but it kind of gets old hearing 10023 and his incessant questioning about "why isn't Chicago like this and that?" as if you never spent 1 day living in the United States, and certainly aren't acknowledging just how BAD 99% of American is in comparison.

I for one can move to a European city and jump for joy that I live somewhere that looks like it was built by gnomes and elves, but instead I love the fact that, AGAINST these odds, and they are indeed steep ones (population stagnation, car-culture that is even more dominant in the midwest, transit hostility, NIMBYism, etc etc etc) Chicago still is a beautiful and urban city that is becoming more so, despite some of the necessary evils.

[LouisVanDerWright]

^^^ All I know is every foreigner I've brought here who hasn't seen Chicago before loses their shit as soon as they see it. A couple of buddies of mine from London were flabergasted because London simply doesn't have the gargantuan ultra dense CBD that Chicago does. So when I say I like Chicago's built form better than any other city, I mean I think it is outstanding already and not nearly complete like much older cities that have accumulated many generations of buildings filling in every little nook and cranny. The exciting thing about Chicago is that we already have the bones we do and we have plenty of room to be the ones who "finish" neighborhoods and finally bring them to a level of maturity more like what you see in Europe.

If the entirety of Chicago was like Lincoln Park in terms of it's level of development, would you agree with me? I think you would. Fortunately for us we are living in the middle of Chicago's second gentrification cycle, we have opportunities to add to our city that haven't been available to places like Paris or London for many centuries. I mean just look at the mega development sites like Lincoln Yards, 78, LSE, etc. then look at how areas like Logan Square or Wicker Park have gone from "missing teeth" to skyscraper TOD in a mere 10 years or so. Drive down Belmont and see how they've basically demolished every rickety frame structure and built on every underutilized old industrial parcel. Look at the freaking West Loop for Pete's sake! Literally adding an entire new district to the city in what? 5 or 10 years?

So yes, we have lots to work on, yes not everything we build is going to be a masterpiece. But the opportunities we have right now are pretty much non existent in the history of cities. I mean you have places in Europe like Rome that were world superpowers for 800 years ending over 1500 years ago. That's not something Chicago is going to be able to match in a couple of centuries despite being the first truly modern industrial boomtown. Chicago in many ways set the mold for what is happening in every developing country like China where vast cities sprung up overnight. And guess what, I think the original is still the best. Oh and those boomtowns are going to also have to face their own busts at some point as well. There will be a depreciation hangover at some point for any city that blows up like Chicago, and it's almost more fun to be given the opportunity to work on rebuilding the city for the first or second time than it is to build it or be working in the constraints of something more or less complete that anciently sacred.

[Baronvonellis]

Built by gnomes and elves haha! Funny!
Yea, I know Chicago is much better than 99% of the US. I just stopped in Louisville recently, and it was so un-urban in comparison.

I'm guessing the European's coming here are reacting to the tall buildings downtown. They don't have anything like that in Europe. All the people I talked to in Germany were blown away by all the skyscrapers, when I showed them pictures of Chicago. They are jealous of Chicago skyscrapers.

Yes, European cities have 1000 years of development since after the Viking raids subsided basically. Chicago only has 180 years of development so it has a long way to go yet, but the pace of development has been much faster now than from 1000-1500 for example.

Sure, Lincoln Park is very nice, and I'd love to see the rest of Chicago get there, with out the NIMBYs hopefully. I know Chicago is doing lots of good things right now and in just the last 10 years. The 78 and Lincoln yards look very promising, and look just like really nice developments in Copenhagen and Oslo.

I think if we can work on improving transit for the next 100 years that things will be very bright in Chicago. I hope Trump would get serious about investing in infrastructure on a big level like he talks about. We'd really need a big federal push of money for infrastructure, instead of giving more tax cuts to the rich and corporations.