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 A plan to upgrade Chicago's historic stadium raises questions about the role of civic structures. May 2001
The country's third-largest city is moving forward with a $587 million plan for its Bears football team that preserves Soldier Field, the 1924 neoclassical structure designed by Holabird and Roche that has been the team's home since 1971. Under the plan a gigantic and more lucrative "seating bowl" will land on top of the city-owned stadium. Designed by Lohan Associates of Chicago and Boston's Wood & Zapata, the strikingly modern 63,000-seat structure will be inserted within the historic shell, rising above its signature colonnades by 30 to 45 feet. It's a seemingly enlightened gesture, but it may be more outdated than the edifice it's trying to save. Indeed it raises serious questions about whether stadiums still belong in the civic realm. Soldier Field is a civic structure, after all. It's a vestige of the City Beautiful tradition of grand axes and ornate facades that architect, urban planner, and Chicagoan Daniel Burnham so ingrained in the city at the turn of the last century. But nostalgia and Doric columns aside, the stadium perhaps more importantly rests in Chicago's civic core. On the shores of Lake Michigan just south of a healthy central business district, it sits across the street from the Museum Campus, a thriving waterfront cluster of sizable Beaux Arts and Art Deco buildings set among parks. The stadium plan attempts to recognize its illustrious surroundings with 19 acres of new parks and gardens (which will cover an existing sea of parking lots), a veterans memorial, and a visitors' center. The Bears gleefully herald the project as "a multi-use lakefront wonder," and with the support of Chicago's mayor and a funding bill signed by the governor of Illinois, its completion is virtually guaranteed. This apparent inevitability hasn't stopped opponents, however--nor should it. In December former state treasurer Patrick Quinn and city alderman Ted Thomas initiated a failed attempt to place the issue on a voter referendum. "We think it's corporate welfare," says Quinn, questioning the $387 million in state bonds that will help finance the project (the remaining $200 million will be evenly divided between the Bears and an NFL loan). "Most cities that have had publicly financed stadiums have had a voter referendum, and that's all we're asking for." (Both architects' offices are deferring comment to the Bears, who are providing no further remarks.) Proponents of the referendum have a tougher case to prove. Whereas proposals in such cities as Detroit, Philadelphia, and Baltimore have made stadiums the centerpieces of revitalization efforts, Soldier Field is in a vibrant part of town. "We don't need to build any more into the central city," says Erma Tranter, executive director of local civic group Friends of the Parks. "If anything, the opposite should take place." Tranter and her organization propose a more sensible alternative that they claim would also cost less. Under their plan, the 1939 Chicago Park District headquarters that currently abuts Soldier Field--a building doomed in either proposal--would be demolished to restore both the stadium's original open horseshoe plan and its axis with the neoclassical Field Museum of Natural History. New parks would also replace the parking lots, and with only 15,000 seats Soldier Field would more closely resemble the humbler playing fields Burnham suggested for the site in his famous 1909 Chicago Plan. It might also become more useful. The stadium's original charter described it as a venue for "processions, pageants, military maneuvers, concerts, outdoor dramatics," and so on. Granted, there aren't many of those nowadays. But with high school and college football games, and the city's numerous music and ethnic festivals, Tranter claims the ability to provide well over 100 days of programming for Soldier Field instead of "the fifty hours a year with which the mayor wants to monopolize it for the Bears." A new stadium would be built adjacent the McCormick Place convention center, enabling that complex to host not only the ten-game Bears home season but events like religious and political conventions. Faith healers notwithstanding, the provision of more parkland and the preservation of the historic structure are not the issues here, because both plans allow for those. The subsidization of a private business venture is a valid concern but not a defining problem, as Quinn's "corporate welfare" already exists in too many industries to enumerate. The more relevant question resides in the appropriateness of inserting a gargantuan profit-making facility within a public structure in Chicago's civic core. Stadiums are no longer the public amenities they were when Soldier Field was built. The care given to its original design and siting is responsible for Soldier Field's longevity. Indeed the comparative mediocrity of more recent stadiums has made--and will continue to make--their demise relatively painless. As sites of civic interaction, stadiums currently rank below shopping malls, and as traffic problems they rank above them. Now that stadiums have names like PSINet Stadium, Safeco Field, and the Staples Center, their place in public life has been sufficiently privatized, and perhaps they deserve to be located accordingly. Put a new stadium where it might do some good, and where it won't matter once the team owners again decide they need a new one. Plop it in a declining industrial area, next to the convention center--anywhere except the places that are meant to inspire us, where we are expected to act as citizens and deal with each other for more than 50 hours a year. Blair Kamin, architecture critic for the Chicago Tribune, has expressed concern that the futuristic seating bowl "could dwarf [Soldier Field's] columns, making them seem toylike and inconsequential." Even more harsh is David Bahlman, executive director of the Landmarks Preservation Council of Illinois, who has deemed it an "egotistical, look-at-me work of architecture." But that appears to be part of the point. On the ground, Burnham's oft-cited directive to "make no little plans" continues to resonate throughout a city that has made it an unofficial mandate; there is nothing low profile about this plan. High above the ground, city officials have exuberantly pointed to the stunning view of their beloved skyline that will be afforded from the proposed stadium's press box. Indeed image plays a crucial role here. This is a plan that, scheduled to be completed in 2003, is meant to powder the city's nose for the television cameras, focusing the lenses on its grandeur. It is meant to raise the city's standing as a capital of American urbanism--but, unfortunately, this plan will only diminish it. |
