March 03--Ah, the lakefront. It's Chicago's playground, battleground and three-ring circus, with George Lucas and his embattled museum dream occupying the center ring.
With the shoreline site that the movie mogul covets tied up in federal court and Mayor Rahm Emanuel fretting that the "Star Wars" creator will take the museum elsewhere, would-be Daniel Burnhams are stepping up with scripts of their own for Lucas. And they range from the frivolous to the serious to the utterly implausible.
Frivolous: Put the museum in New York's Central Park. (Why give this plum project to the Big Apple?)
Serious: A sketch from architect Helmut Jahn, which proposes stripping McCormick Place's Lakeside Center down to its bones and adding a curving museum pavilion that would pop through its boldly overhanging roof. (Interesting, but Lucas has said he wants a new building. More on this later.)
Utterly implausible: Now that the plan to redevelop the old U.S. Steel South Works property has fallen apart, 10th Ward Ald. Susan Sadlowski Garza has floated the idea of building the museum on the vast but empty lakefront site, 10 miles south of the Loop. (Forget it. The Southeast Side might as well as be in a galaxy far, far away.)
As in the great "Star Wars" flicks, tension is building, passions are rising, and it's difficult to divine how this tortured saga will play out.
After Emanuel said Wednesday that Lucas has his "heart kind of set" on the 17-acre site south of Soldier Field, City Hall tea-leaf readers speculated that the mayor had suggested alternative sites to the Lucas camp and been rebuffed.
In other words, Lucas doesn't appear to be open to a Plan B.
Making matters worse for the mayor, U.S. District Judge John Darrah indicated Wednesday that the Lucas case might not go to trial until fall at the earliest. That will give other cities time to make pitches to Lucas. San Francisco and Oakland, Calif., have already started overtures.
Is compromise possible? Probably not, given that Lucas is used to getting what he wants. When the board that oversees Presidio of San Francisco national park rejected his first museum plan, he pulled a "my way or the highway" and bolted for Chicago.
If my email offers any guide, many of the city's architects see a revamped Lakeside Center as an ideal middle ground. It's on the lakefront, it could draw visitors from the Museum Campus and the rest of McCormick Place, and it's architecturally distinctive -- and could be made more so, as Jahn's sketch suggests.
No one is better suited to suggest a repurposing of the building. In the late 1960s, Jahn helped architect Gene Summers of C.F. Murphy Associates design the Lakeside Center. It's a structural tour de force, but a huge urban planning mistake that destroys the lakefront's openness and blocks access to the shoreline.
The lakefront's "Berlin Wall," I called it last fall in a column that urged Emanuel to tear down the building.
