Mayor Daley’s Green Crusade
The longtime Chicago mayor has vowed to make his city the greenest in
the nation.
By Lisa Chamberlain
July 2004
On March 30, 2003, in the dead of night, a bulldozer lumbered through
downtown Chicago toward its much celebrated lakefront. Dispatched by
Mayor Richard M. Daley with a police escort, it turned onto a 90-acre
peninsula, home to a tiny airport known as Meigs Field, and without
warning, plowed giant Xs into the airport’s single runway,
rendering it useless. Chicagoans were stunned by this seemingly bizarre
act of destruction. Mayor Daley said the war in Iraq and fears about
airport security were the reasons for bulldozing the runway. This
brass-knuckles move, however, stranded 16 airplanes—infuriating the
corporate community and cementing Daley’s reputation as an
autocrat. Of course, it’s not unheard of for unilateral action to
be justified in the name of national security, even if the real motive
turns out to be quite different. So what was the mayor’s strong-arm
tactic really about?
Believe it or not, a simple park.
Daley has been working for years toward his oft-stated intention to make
Chicago the greenest city in America, no small matter given its size and
industrial past. Turning Meigs Field (now known by its original name,
Northerly Island) into a park is just part of his ambitious vision.
First elected in 1989, Daley has since built the first municipal rooftop
garden on City Hall and opened one of only five LEED (Leadership in
Energy and Environmental Design) Platinum-certified buildings in the
country. A dozen more city buildings are expected to be LEED certified,
including three libraries, several fire stations, a police station, and
a refueling station for the city’s newly purchased fleet of
natural-gas vehicles. The Department of Environment, established under
Daley in 1992, has overseen the remediation of 1,000 acres of brownfield
sites. Chicago has lured green technology businesses, such as
solar-panel manufacturers, by using the city’s purchasing power. An
entire sustainable landscaping industry has sprung up around the
city’s beautification initiatives. Daley has even hired a cadre of
ambitious young assistants who answer directly to him on everything from
improving wastewater management to overhauling the city’s recycling
program to restoring one of the largest wetland areas in North America,
on the southeast side of Chicago.
“I’ve lived in the city all my life,” Daley says at
Chicago City Hall, a place he was quite familiar with even before taking
office. His father was, of course, Richard J. Daley, the longest-serving
mayor of Chicago, from 1955 to 1976. “My belief is that
environmental initiatives should not just be out on the West Coast, in
Alaska, or by the ocean, but in cities. If we don’t do this, the
expansion will be overwhelming: more cars, more concrete, more pollution
in the air and water. They won’t have any environment left out
there, and no one will want to live here either.”
Seated at a long conference table surrounded by reports and memos, Daley
covers topics that ricochet from a grand vision of environmentalism to
the vexing minutiae of urban life: the damaging effects of rock salt,
poor drainage, abandoned gas stations; how to properly dispose of
batteries and aerosol cans; and getting homeowners to disconnect their
downspouts so rainwater can be returned to the earth rather than
funneled into an overtaxed wastewater system.
“I like to say he’s a janitor with a vision,” says Barry
Burton, a zoo horticulturalist from Detroit who came to Chicago’s
Department of Planning and Development in 1998 (he is now assistant to
the mayor for landscaping initiatives). “It starts with him
noticing the trees are all gone and having them replanted. Suddenly life
springs up, and there are cafés and people where there were none
before. Then it becomes, let’s not just make it attractive but a
healthier place. Trees reduce the heat-island effect and clean the air.
Landscaping is labor intensive, so we provide a lot of jobs. That has
turned into a model of economic development based on green technologies,
attracting renewable-energy companies, and creating a sustainable
landscaping industry.”
As the legendary story is now retold, shortly after taking office Daley
asked the Bureau of Forestry what had happened to all the trees he
remembered from his childhood. Told they had been devastated by Dutch
Elm disease, and that the bureau’s entire budget went only to tree
removal and not planting, he ordered the agency to redirect its
resources. Despite some ridicule—this is still a meat-eating
blue-collar town, after all—people’s reaction to Daley’s
tree-planting initiative was mostly to applaud it (to date 400,000 trees
have been planted, although that’s still half the number Chicago
had in the 1950s). Like any politician, Daley saw an opportunity to
build on his success.
The next step might be called the ‘Planter Phase.’ Median
strips with planters were built into city streets and filled like
cornucopias with flowers, plants, shrubs, and of course, more trees. So
far 63 miles of medians have been built and landscaped. It was then that
Daley was accused in this magazine of being the Martha Stewart of mayors
(“Fussing with the Cityscape,” March 2001), and was
criticized for focusing too much on aesthetics. “At first people
didn’t really understand the larger benefits,” says Lisa
Roberts, director of the Garfield Park Conservatory—one of the
nation’s largest and oldest—which was on the verge of total
collapse when Daley put her in charge of a complete renovation.
“It’s not just about beautification. And he gets that. One of
the smart things he did was to bring in some researchers to address city
council members who showed that the presence of greening in
people’s lives has a direct link to lowering crime rates, improving
test scores, boosting real estate values, et cetera. That’s the
stuff that people really care about. I’m not supposed to say this,
but it’s not easy working for government. But when you’ve got
a mayor like this one who, for all his faults, has this absolutely
fantastic vision, you put up with a lot.”
The most remarkable aspect of Daley’s consciousness-raising green
crusade is that, after stumbling into it, he has committed major
resources to developing a holistic approach to greening the city.
Nothing illustrates this better than the Chicago Center for Green
Technology (CCGT), the first and only municipal building in the United
States to be awarded LEED Platinum status by the U.S. Green Building
Council. (Only six buildings in the entire world have achieved this
ranking, all but one in the United States.)
What has become a showcase project costing approximately $15 million
started as a fairly routine enforcement action undertaken by the
Department of Environment. A 17-acre site on Chicago’s beleaguered
west side had become an illegal dump. The company running the site was
supposed to be recycling concrete, asphalt, and other construction
materials but instead allowed more than 600,000 cubic yards of debris to
accumulate into pyramid-size piles nearly 70 feet tall. After winning a
legal fight with the owner, the city petitioned the bankruptcy court to
take control of the site in order to lead the cleanup effort.
Once the site was remediated, rather than put it up for sale, the city
decided to renovate the 1952 office building. But this wasn’t just
any old rehab job. Seven years and $5.4 million later, the
34,000-square-foot building opened in spring 2002 and features some of
most innovative green technologies available—including geoexchange
pumps, extensive daylighting, and a stormwater management system.
“We pretty much went out and got every green thing we could think
of,” says David Reynolds, first deputy commissioner at the
Department of Environment, whose training as an engineer turned out to
be quite useful for overseeing such a complex project. “When the
mayor asks us to do something, we do it big and splashy the first time.
After that you show how you can get the same benefit from a simpler
system. But with this building, we went over the top.”
The CCGT is an educational and resource center where developers,
architects, homeowners, and community gardeners can learn about the
latest green technologies, such as rooftop gardening, recycled building
materials, solar panels, and sustainable landscaping. It also houses one
of the Department of Environment’s favorite programs: Greencorps
Chicago, which teaches landscaping skills to difficult-to-employ people,
many recently released from prison. The trainees then go out into the
community and assist local gardeners with cleanup and replanting
efforts. Just prior to graduation (about 200 have graduated so far),
Greencorp trainees are placed in internships with landscaping companies.
“Graduations are so meaningful,” Reynolds says. “These
are proud people, and they so often say, ‘I’ve never completed
something like this before.’ We’ve got trainees who went from
Greencorps to running crews at private landscape companies.”
Many of the lessons learned from renovating CCGT have been incorporated
into a comprehensive building standard based on LEED but adapted to the
unique conditions of Chicago. So rather than have one fantastic building
that sits like an island in a sea of inefficient and outmoded
architecture, all new city buildings are mandated to use green building
technologies, and millions have been committed to retrofitting existing
buildings.
“It’s not just about the Department of Environment over here
going, ‘Hey guys! Do these environmental things,’”
Reynolds says. “It’s the mayor saying, ‘This is so
important to me, I’m going to hire someone whose job it is to make
sure all the departments are doing this.’ Sadhu being hired is an
indication of just how committed the mayor is to this.”
Reynolds is referring to Sadhu Johnston, assistant to the mayor for
green initiatives, a newly created position to coordinate Daley’s
green team. Until October 2003 Johnston was head of Cleveland’s
nonprofit Green Building Coalition. He had just presided over the
opening of a renovated historic building that is now the city’s
environmental center. On a trip to Cleveland, Daley asked for a tour of
the building, and Johnston happily obliged. A few weeks later he was
recruited to work for Daley to coordinate all of the city’s green
initiatives. Before agreeing to take on such a daunting challenge,
Johnston came to Chicago for a tour and was “blown away.”
“The mayor realizes that greening strategies are about quality of
life and about making cities competitive because they’re great
places to live,” Johnston says. “In Portland or Seattle you
expect it. But you look at Chicago and its industrial past, and it
provides such a unique model for how big cities can go green.”
The most ambitious undertaking to date is particularly relevant to the
challenges of greening an old industrial city. In the farthest southeast
section of the city is the Lake Calumet region, a 20-square-mile area
that was once one of the largest wetland complexes in North America. In
the late nineteenth century steel companies built factories there that
eventually employed hundreds of thousands of people, and it became one
of the most polluted. Over the last couple of decades manufacturing
interests consolidated and decamped, as vast areas of wetlands that
managed to survive years of pollution, dumping, and destruction began to
thrive again.
In 2000 the city of Chicago, the state of Illinois, and the Chicago
Environmental Fund launched an ambitious program to mix industrial uses
with wetland restoration; 3,000 acres will be designated for economic
redevelopment, but 4,800 acres have been set aside for the Calumet Open
Space Reserve, where preservation and restorative programs are already
underway. Within the reserve will be the Ford Calumet Environmental
Center, a research and education center for environmental remediation.
The design competition attracted some of Chicago’s best architects,
including winners Studio Gang, Helmut Jahn, and Ross Barney +
Jankowski.
At the unveiling of the five finalists’ designs for the
Environmental Center in March, Henry Henderson of the Chicago
Environmental Fund fairly well summed up the whole point of urban green
initiatives. “There are 2,000-plus species in the Calumet
area,” he said. “That is more diversity of species than you
have in Yellowstone. And I would also point out that we have more
manufacturing jobs here than they have in Yellowstone too. So we want
the human economy and nature’s economy to work together.”
Of course all mayors want to make their cities healthier and greener,
but Daley has the political power to see his agenda through. At the time
of the bulldozer affair, he had just been elected to a fifth term,
winning 79 percent of the vote. While his unprecedented popularity is in
part the result of making Chicago a beautiful place to live, it’s
taken 15 years, five mayoral terms, and virtually unchallenged power to
get this far. Landscaping aside, green initiatives are expensive and
take a long time to come to fruition.
While plenty of people complain about Daley’s dictatorial
style—always off the record—when all is said and done very few
will argue with the end results of Meigs Field/Northerly Island. On the
one-year anniversary of the airport’s destruction, Daley bragged it
was one of the best decisions he’s ever made. Private aviation
interests “really don’t care whether or not we
have...public space,” the Chicago Tribune quoted him as saying.
“They don’t care, but we care in the city of Chicago....
People live here, and they want that lakefront. It belongs to them and
not to private businesses and not to small planes.” Just as Rudolph
Giuliani showed that cities don’t have to be crime-ridden,
Daley’s leadership could permanently alter how urban dwellers
across the United States expect to live in their natural habitats. And
just as Giuliani stirred up controversy with his heavy-handed tactics,
so has Daley. But to achieve such a fundamental paradigm shift,
sometimes you have to dispatch the bulldozer.
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Chicago City Hall features the country’s first rooftop garden on a
municipal building. |
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Chicago City Hall is a potent symbol of Mayor Richard M. Daley’s crusade for a
greener city, which includes plans for about a dozen LEED-certified
city-owned buildings. |
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CCGT
Before the Chicago Center for Green Technology could be renovated (by a
design team led by Farr Associates) the city had to remove 600,000 cubic
yards of illegal debris. Selling it for use in concrete manufacturing
reduced the $9 million cleanup tab by $1.5 million.
Photo courtesy City of Chicago/Mark Farina |
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The center utilizes 36% recycled or renewable materials—like the
entrance canopy built of reclaimed redwood from pickle barrels—50%
of which is regional.
Photo courtesy City of Chicago/Mark Farina |
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Photovoltaic systems on the roof and the south facade reduce the
cooling load while generating power. A stormwater management system
recharges groundwater, reduces outflow to the city’s sewer system,
and biologically cleans the parking lot runoff. |
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The CCGT’s ground-level solar farm. |
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The outside of the CCGT.
Photo courtesy City of Chicago/Mark Farina |
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Inside
The CCGT is an office building, educational facility, factory, and a
“Garden in the City”—so multifunctional components, like
a lobby that doubles as a classroom, were devised. Seventy-three percent
of the floorplate is daylit, creating sizable energy savings. The
building is cooled and heated by geo-exchange heat pumps, and the
elevator uses canola oil rather than hydraulic fluid. It is one of only
five LEED Platinum-certified buildings in the country. |
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Green Fuel
Chicago was the first city to employ hydrogen-fueled buses. Now, The
Illinois Coalition, the City of Chicago, and the State of Illinois are
working on a long-term plan to provide hydrogen fuel filling stations
along I-90 to allow ease of travel for alternative-powered vehicles.
Construction is underway for a number of hydrogen energy demonstration
projects along the highway. |
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Planters
Daley has changed the face of the city by incorporating greenery in as
many ways as possible. On many major boulevards throughout downtown
Chicago, medians are now adorned with flowers, trees, and small
parks. |
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Northerly Island
The mayor is converting Northerly Island—the site of the 1933
World’s Fair and later Meigs Field, a private airport—into a
public park, as it was intended when the island was built in the 1920s.
His scheme calls for renewal of the landscape and the adaptive reuse of
the existing terminal building for public programs.
Photo courtesy Associated Press |
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Click
here to download a PDF version of the Greening the Windy City map.
Map by Criswell Lappin; all other photos by Nathan Kirkman |
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