Patient Chicago Awaits
The Millennium's Arrival

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In the spring of 1998, Chicago mayor Richard Daley announced the pièce de résistance of his downtown redevelopment efforts. Mr. Daley intended to transform a sunken rail yard, just northwest of Grant Park, that is still in use but has long been considered an eyesore on the city's front stoop. Mr. Daley's plan, designed by the Chicago office of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, called for a three-story, 2,500-car parking garage above the tracks, on top of which would be built a 16-acre park with a band shell, garden and ice-skating rink. Original opening date: 2000.

The new garage would be so successful, the mayor predicted, that revenue bonds based on its income would pay for $120 million of the $150 million project, with private donors expected to make up the difference. The proposal, called Millennium Park, roughly spanned the eastern two-thirds of the area between Michigan Avenue and Randolph, Monroe and Columbus streets. The remainder of the site is occupied by city-owned Grant Park Garage.

The project was put on the fast track, with designs completed only a clip ahead of construction, which began in 1998. But then came some big changes: In 1999, the city enlarged Millennium Park to 24 acres by incorporating an existing eight-acre stretch of Grant Park above the 1,800-car Grant Park Garage, which was undergoing a $31 million reconstruction by the Chicago Park District.

The park district had planned about $1 million in improvements to the Grant Park parcel, but the city's proposal was more ambitious: Its $37 million in upgrades included the ice-skating rink, a giant sculpture, a peristyle, a fountain, an incline to connect it to the rest of the park 15 feet above and possibly a granite promenade.

About the same time, the private donor group, which includes the Pritzker Foundation, BP Amoco PLC and the McCormick Tribune Foundation, suggested that it could help the city persuade top-dollar talent to design the park's amenities. With its help, the city hired architect Frank O. Gehry of Santa Monica, Calif. (who won the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 1989), to design a stainless-steel-clad band shell, a 700-foot-long stainless-steel arbor to shelter 11,000 of the band shell's patrons and a stainless-steel pedestrian bridge over Columbus Drive to Daley Bicentennial Plaza to the east.

British artist Anish Kapoor was tapped to fabricate a 60-foot-long steel sculpture referred to by wags as the "Jelly Bean," and Chicago architect Thomas Beeby designed Music and Dance Theater Chicago, a 1,500-seat underground structure north of the band shell. Seattle-based landscape architect Kathryn Gustafson, Dutch plant expert Piet Ouldolf and Los Angeles theater designer Robert Israel collaborated on the 2.5-acre Millennium Garden.

The high-culture extras have raised the total sticker price of the project to $320 million, pushed the delivery date to summer 2003 and required workers to go back and beef up the caisson supports for the park and garage. To cover the additional costs and satisfy Mr. Daley's long-standing insistence that taxpayers not foot the bill, in the spring of 1999 the city issued $33 million of additional bonds (the year before it had sold $137 million, $17 million more than its initial $120 million estimate), banking that the garage would generate enough revenues to pay off the higher amount. In addition, last summer Mr.  Daley announced that the city will use $50 million from a Loop tax-increment development fund for the project, even though the park is outside the Loop. Chicago's stake is now $220 million, and the private donation piece has climbed to $100 million, all of which has already been pledged.

In mid-August, the Chicago Tribune blasted the city for cost overruns and delays, which it blamed on the decision to fast-track the park. Miguel d'Escoto, commissioner of Chicago's Department of Transportation, bristles at the term "cost overrun." Millennium Park, in Mr. d'Escoto's view, is analogous to a house being upgraded while under construction. "This park does not look like the one we started with," he says. "We made a decision that the added value justified the additional costs, and we went forward."

Because the project bridges the railroad tracks, the transportation department initially oversaw it. In July 2000, however, because of the rising stature of the park and its amenities, it was taken over by the city's Public Buildings Commission, which generally oversees such initiatives.

Judging from the lack of critical letters in the local press, citizens of Chicago are agreeable to waiting longer for a grander vision. Hill Burgess, senior project manager for McClier Corp., an architectural, engineering and construction firm that is not involved in the endeavor, says, "It's not atypical of cities to get so deeply committed before they know the real costs and schedule. But I don't think people are focusing on that -- what we're getting is much better than what we had."

Still, in his role as chairman of Friends of Downtown, a nonprofit group concerned with development and quality-of-life issues in the Loop, Mr. Burgess is uneasy about the $50 million for the project taken from the Loop fund. "We haven't dealt with that issue yet," he says. "But technically, it takes away from other opportunities."

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