A few months ago the Tribune asked the English-born hotelier Darryl Hartley-Leonard what he liked about Chicago. “What a unique set of circumstances it was that caused the city fathers back then to fight for the idea that the entire lakefront never be commercialized,” he enthused. “We look at that lakefront, and we think, ‘This is a good town. Greed didn’t take this town.’”
Wille sounds her main themes in her prologue, and anyone who’s lived in Chicago for even a little while will be able to whistle along. Chicago, being Chicago, set out to do what no other city in the world has done. “It would give its most priceless land, its infinitely valuable shoreline, to its people,” she writes. “The lakefront would be dedicated to pleasure and beauty, not to commerce and industry.” Wille’s story spans a century and a half. The early decades saw not only the physical construction of the lakefront, mainly by filling in the lakeshore, but the erection of the legal principles that preserved it for public use. In more recent years the building has been mainly political, as a coalition of groups employing “citizen action and citizen pressure” has risen to protect the lakefront against erosion by politicians eager to appropriate it for everything from pet public-works projects to private clubs.
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While Burnham promised Jane Addams that the lakefront would be designed to draw the working classes to fresh air and sunshine and wholesome recreations, he sold it to the boys downtown as a tourist draw. Its real patrons would be those Chicagoans of means who used to flee to Paris, Vienna, and the Riviera for their amusements; the irony is that Burnham’s parks have enticed the middle classes to spend their money in Chicago, only now they do it not as residents but as tourists from the suburbs.
Burnham believed that parks were an antidote to unrest, to overcrowding, vice, disorder, and–it probably need not be said–political radicalism. Chicago’s new parks were meant from the first not to amuse the common man but to change him, to render him safe. Wille seems to share Burnham’s ambivalence about the People. About Navy Pier she warns, “Care must be taken to prevent it from becoming cheap, gaudy, and overly commercial”–in other words, popular.
Only a romanticized antiestablishmentism could lead anyone to identify with a pair of cutthroats like the Streeters. Cap’n George Streeter was the drunkard and thug who laid claim in the 1880s to land that eventually became Streeterville. Streeter was the archetypical Chicago hero, the little guy who took on city and federal authorities, rich neighbors, and the press with hired thugs and birdshot.
Ward was the father of all lakefront obstructionists, a Puritan who first promulgated the creed that since the government could not be trusted to build even a necessary structure adequately, prudence required it be prevented from building anything at all.
The demise in the 1960s of the industrial riverfront opened up new possibilities for residential development near the lake. Wille tells how city planners in 1964 endorsed the 1948 Plan Commission’s Lakefront Resolution, which restricted the lakefront to cultural and recreational uses “except for the sections between Grand Avenue and Randolph.” In fact the 1948 exemption in those sections was only for harbor and terminal facilities. The omission of that qualification in 1964 in effect okayed residential projects such as Lake Point Tower. And as Wille writes in Forever, “The omission wasn’t exactly an oversight.”
