May 05--Chicago financial executive Mellody Hobson is smart and civic-minded, but I don't buy her argument that Friends of the Parks has "hijacked" the Lucas museum debate and that the city's "young and black and brown children" will be the losers if Lucas takes the museum elsewhere.
Hobson and her husband, billionaire Star Wars creator George Lucas, are hardly the victims she's making them out to be. This is a fight over the legal principles that govern Chicago's greatest public space, its lakefront -- a civic achievement whose benefits to millions of people (past, present and future) must be weighed against Hobson's self-aggrandizing claim that she and Lucas are prepared to bestow upon Chicago "the largest philanthropic gift to an American city in the 21st century."
The significance of that fight was underscored Wednesday when the city took the extraordinary step of asking a federal appeals court to dismiss Friends of the Parks' lawsuit -- before a ruling has even come down in the lower court.
For starters, let's throw out the red-herring race card and get to Hobson's tired rhetorical device of invoking the welfare of children. Proponents of putting the Chicago Children's Museum in Grant Park made the same case eight years ago, wrapping themselves in the cloak of kiddiedom before they thought better of it and decided to stay at Navy Pier.
We're doing this for the children!
Oh, please.
If Lucas and Hobson care so much about the children, they should have considered building their arts museum off the lakefront, where it never would have run into the present legal thicket and might even be under construction by now. Yet they insisted from the first on a shoreline site, as if the $743 million Lucas plans to sink into the museum entitles them to build it on prime public space. And they have apparently turned thumbs down on alternative sites west of Lake Shore Drive.
So who, exactly, is being intransigent?
Despite the natterings of the Lucas camp and the political class, Friends of the Parks is not fighting to preserve a parking lot. It is battling to stop a large museum, a twin-peaked sky-blocker that would be as tall as Soldier Field, from being constructed where there's now a parking lot. Once you build that mountain, you can't go back and convert it to what it ultimately should be -- a green plain of open space that's accessible to everyone.
