It was 1961, and architect Bertrand Goldberg was declaring his vision for Chicago’s downtown. He told a newspaper, “An error in thinking has led Americans to turn our downtown city areas into canyons of glass and steel, teeming with office workers during weekdays but deserted nights and weekends.” Government-backed suburbia, he said, was the rational outcome of America’s outmoded notions about what cities should be and do.
Downtown Chicago is no longer the off-hours ghost town it once was; in parts of the Loop you could say that mixed-use has made strong inroads. But while the architect’s diagnosis of the city’s problems was sound, the cure–or, we might say, the treatment–has not been quite what he envisioned.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
By the late 1950s Bertrand Goldberg Associates had designed more innovative buildings than it had built. But Goldberg was starting to get larger commissions, such as the Drexel Town and Garden Apartments at 48th and Drexel, a complex of 64 three-bedroom row houses. It was one of his smaller projects, however, the offices of union boss William McFetridge, that would lead to the crowning achievement of Goldberg’s career.
In the 1950s Chicago’s population was plummeting as whites fled along newly built expressways to seedling suburbs. In an interview he gave in 1992, Goldberg recalled McFetridge, who ran the janitors’ union, saying, “My people cannot get jobs out in the suburbs. People move to the suburbs to avoid paying my people the wages that we need to live. If I could persuade people to come back into town to live by showing them a desirable way of living in town, I would like to do that. Do you think you could design such a thing for me?”
Goldberg, still in the city’s favor for his success with Marina City, was awarded the commission to build the Raymond Hilliard Homes, a four-building CHA project near Chinatown. What he produced resembled the other projects rising along South State Street in scale, but it was something else entirely. Two gently curving buildings housed families and two circular buildings the elderly. There were as many amenities as Goldberg’s budget would allow, from a pottery kiln to an amphitheater. Above all, the buildings broke tenants out of the boxes that the standard CHA models were confining them in.
Chicago chose to back Dearborn Park over River City. The scale and density of River City clearly worried City Hall, where it was feared that if Goldberg’s project failed the Loop would be caught in a pincer between Cabrini-Green to the north and something very much like it to the south. When Dearborn Park was finally well under way, the city gave the go-ahead to a redrawn River City that was a fraction of the original.
After decades of decline, the 2000 U.S. census figures showed Chicago’s population rebounding from 2.8 million in 1990 to 2.9 million. The population of the central district–North Avenue to the Stevenson, Halsted to the lake–increased by 32 percent. Mary Ludgin, president and CEO of Heitman Capital Management, says the central city has been hit by two recent waves of settlers. Printer’s Row and Presidential Towers kicked off the first, with federal tax credits reducing the risk run by developers building downtown. “This was the first wave of residential,” says Ludgin, “which captured a demographic wave of the baby boom arriving college degree or graduate degree in hand and not being particularly interested in commuting to the downtown from Wheaton.” These boomers didn’t have kids, didn’t need a yard, and didn’t mind a patchy array of amenities.
