Monday, February 23, 2009

SHAPING A NEW MIX-INCOME NEIGHBORHOOD FROM CHICAGO’S OLYMPIC DREAMS

Chicago’s $4.8 billion Olympic Games bid features details about a new neighborhood that is planned to house some 16,000 athletes and officials on the current site of Michael Reese Hospital on the Near South Side.

Preliminary Olympic Village plans, drafted by architects at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, call for 21 high-rises, each about 12 stories high built in rows on grid-style streets on the 37-acre site of the shuttered hospital near 31st Street and Cottage Grove Avenue.

Some 2,000 to 3,500 housing units are planned across the giant 128-acre Olympic Village neighborhood just south of McCormick Place. Plans also call the village to become a mixed-income residential community after the Games.

As the economy improves, it is likely that a good percentage of the housing units in this brand new neighborhood could be sold to investors, rented during and after the games, and later converted to condominium ownership, experts say.

The Olympic buzz likely would attract thousands of permanent residents to the village.

At least one architectural critic has called the preliminary housing plan for the Olympic Village “uninspired” and compared it to projects dreamed up in the 1960s, perhaps to Sandburg Village.

However, more than a dozen private developers already have responded to the city’s requests for qualifications (RFQ) from prospective bidders, and it is likely that each will select their own architects for the high-rises, so there is optimism for great design creativity.

Experts say it is very unlikely that Chicago’s sophisticated development firms would submit run-of-the-mill high-rise designs for the village. Most recently, Kargil Development, LLC, one of the prospective Olympic Village bidders, hired renowned architect Lucien Lagrange to creatively design X/O, an avant-garde twin- tower condo development proposed in the South Loop.

Other major developers who have submitted RFQs for the $1.1-billion Olympic Village include: The Enterprise Companies, Joseph Freed & Associates, LLC, Magellan Development Group, LLC, and Related Midwest.

Initial plans for the Olympic call for the city to raze the aging hospital complex and pump millions of dollars of infrastructure improvements into the site, and create a street grid-pattern. Then, developers would build the Olympic Village in stages over a six-year period between 2010 and 2016. A Tax Increment Financing District already is in place for the village.

However, restoration specialist William Lavicka of Historic Boulevard Services, wonders why the Olympic Village master plan does not call for saving and renovating at least a few of the historic buildings on the hospital site.

“An interwoven mix of restored vintage hospital buildings and new high-rises would create a much more interesting and affordable weave in the urban tapestry at the Olympic Village,” Lavicka said.

He recalled that the late developer Harold Lichterman’s restoration of the historic St. Frances Xavier Cabrini Hospital in the “Little Italy” neighborhood on the Near West Side in 1997 resulted in the development of Columbus On The Park, where 105 affordable loft condominiums were built.

“Chicago now is struggling to produce affordable housing to fill the void created by the razing thousands of vintage apartments on the South Side,” Lavicka said. “Why not save a few of these solid old brick and stone hospital buildings, rehab them at half the cost of new construction and provide hundreds of affordable units?”

The Olympic Village site also adjoins the historic site of the Farragut Boat Club at Lake Park Avenue near 31st Street—the birthplace of Chicago-style softball.

Olympic Village planners also should build a new softball complex and name it “Mike Royko Park” to honor the memory of the city’s greatest newspaper columnist, a Chicago 16-Inch Softball Hall of Fame player, and one of softball’s greatest promoters.