'Manhattanization'
is changing Twenty-five years
ago, a stroll south down Wabash Avenue toward the Chicago River on
the Near North Side of Chicago was sooty and uneventful. A highlight might
have been the aroma of fresh-baked deep-dish pizza wafting from Uno’s
and Due’s, legendary pizzerias housed in two Victorian buildings
that still stand on Wabash Avenue between Ohio Street and Grand Avenue.
Nearby, stood the aging Medina Temple and the landmark Tree Studios,
an artist and writer’s haven at State and Ohio streets. Then you’d
stroll pass a series of rundown loft buildings and a couple of newer
residential highrises before the Wabash Avenue bridge came into view
– flanked by the squat Chicago Sun-Times Building on the left
and the IBM Building, on the right. A decade or so
earlier, before Mies van der Rohe designed the stately IBM Building,
the riverfront site was a parking lot dotted with three-story buildings,
including Gitano, a rowdy flamenco nightclub. Today, if you
walk south down Wabash Avenue toward the river in what is now called
River North, it’s like strolling through the bottom of a dark
highrise canyon in Manhattan. And the bumper-to-bumper traffic makes
the neighborhood nearly as congested as Midtown New York. Uno’s and
Due’s are still there, with lines out the door on weekends. Medina
Temple has been transformed into an upscale shopping mall, and the
glittering Shops at North Bridge spans Grand Avenue between Michigan
and Wabash avenues. Today, the rents at the famed Tree Studios are
too lofty for most artists and writers. Downtown Chicago
is changing. The skyline’s rearranging, and experts say it’s
all part of the “Manhattanization” of the Windy City as
it slowly transforms into a world-class city of luxury highrise condominiums
and apartments from a blue-collar bungalow and two-flat town formerly
known as the “City of Big Shoulders.” The eventual “Manhattanization
of Chicago” was a concept first suggested in the early 1980s,
when visionary real estate developer Tom Rosenberg uttered those words
while giving this writer a tour of rows of highrise apartments he
was building on urban renewal sites along LaSalle Street, land where
mansions once had been wedged between the Gold Coast and the Cabrini-Green
public housing projects. Apparently, Rosenberg
decided the trend wasn’t developing fast enough. A few years
later, he headed to the West Coast to become one of the most successful
movie producers in Hollywood. But it is apparent
today that Rosenberg’s script for Chicago was of Academy-Award
quality. Highrise man is gradually replacing Chicago’s bungalow
man, especially in the downtown lakefront neighborhoods as Chicagoans
become more and more like New Yorkers. Take that same
stroll down Wabash to the Chicago River today and you will find the
Sun-Times Building gone and the first construction work underway on
the huge Trump Tower project, soon to be the newest New York-style
skyscraper icon on the Windy City skyline. Cross the bridge
to a reborn State Street and you’ll find it’s vibrant and
alive again thanks to thousands of resident students and “in-towners”
who are buying highrise condominiums on State Street, Wabash Avenue
and Michigan Avenue. But if you keep
walking on State past the Marshall Field’s store, you’ll
see yet another sign of Manhattanization. In a New York minute, the
Field’s store is expected to be renamed “Macy’s.”
Chicago may be buying into Trump Tower at $1,000 a square foot, but
experts say Macy’s may be the marketing mistake of the new millennium. On the upside,
downtown Chicago again has street life, culture and a wonderful pulse
of prosperity. Experts say weekend
residents and tourists – some from Chicago suburbs and some even
from the Big Apple – are flocking here in droves. And a growing
number of neighborhood people also want to live downtown. They shop on State
Street and along Michigan Avenue’s “Magnificent Mile,”
tour Millennium Park, visit the Art Institute and the Museum Campus.
They dine at their choice of hundreds of restaurants, are entertained
at more than 65 theaters as well as dozens of nightclubs and concert
halls, and shop at hundreds of upscale boutiques, shops and malls. Despite the inevitable
recasting of Chicago in the towering architectural tradition of New
York, the Windy City still has a few unique icons of its own to cheer
about – in addition to the winning White Sox and the also-ran
Cubs. Let’s applaud
Burnham for our miles and miles of green parkland framed by a blue
Lake Michigan, the vision to develop an expanding new housing market
in emerging off-the-lake neighborhoods, and an uplifting “back-to-the-city”
psychology that seems to growing daily. That may be part
of the reason displaced New Yorkers are starting to say: “I love
Chicago.” |