Maybe no one will want the Sears Tower. “It seems curious to us that the downtown office-building boom continues at breakneck pace,” write Edward Keegan and Paul Krieger in Chicago (January 1989). “Everywhere we look, there’s evidence that people don’t seem to need their offices any more. At least half the phone calls we receive seem to be from someone in a car–and any builder can tell you that cars are cheaper than buildings. Fax machines have eliminated any need for face-to-face meetings downtown, and there are more pleasant ways to do business–at least the desperate urge for more stadium skyboxes would indicate as much.”
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Stop drooling, developers. “Fort Sheridan is a major recreational open space opportunity,” Chicago’s Open Lands Project pointed out in a January 6 statement. Besides facilities for swimming, golf, softball, football, tennis, archery, and gymnasium sports, the soon-to-be ex-fort’s 200 open acres and one and a quarter miles of lake shoreline are a valuable public asset in the increasingly crowded north suburbs. “Within the area bounded by the Lake/Cook county line north to the Waukegan city limits, and Lake Michigan west to the I-94 tollway there is no major recreational open land.” A Fort Sheridan Park would compare well with Grant Park’s 319 acres and 1.4 shoreline miles.
If you wish that Chicago had a mammoth airport in Lake Michigan, a nuclear-power plant in the Indiana Dunes, or continued “Red Squad” surveillance of dissenters, then you’ll be sorry to hear that one of the key organizations in stopping all three is still around and will celebrate its 20th birthday this spring. Business and Professional People for the Public Interest (BPI) was also involved in the integration-promoting Gautreaux court decision, and in the formation of Project LEAP, Friends of the Parks, and the Citizens Utility Board (BPI Newsletter, December 1988).
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): illustration/Carl Kock.
