Four years ago, in the spring of 1999, veteran arts patron Lewis Manilow announced that he and developer Allison Davis of the Davis Group had made the winning $5.85 million bid on adjacent city-owned properties in the South Loop. The Davis Group, the principal bidder, was to build a 39-story condominium tower where the razed Avenue Motel had stood, on the northwest corner of Roosevelt and Michigan. Manilow was to convert the long-shuttered Continental Trailways Bus Terminal, at Roosevelt and Wabash, into a contemporary visual arts center. The two-story, 20,000-square-foot terminal, built in the 1920s, was supposed to hold 10 to 15 established and start-up art galleries as well as nonprofit offices, temporary exhibition areas, and space for local collectors, including Manilow and his wife Susan, to show their works.
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Given Manilow’s connections in Chicago’s art and political worlds, few doubted he would get the job done–after all, the center had the support of Mayor Daley, a friend. Manilow was a founder and former president of the Museum of Contemporary Art and is a trustee at the Art Institute. He was a booster of the new Goodman Theatre and of the Chicago Theater District. A lawyer, he’s also a high-powered Democratic Party fund-raiser and in 2000 received a National Medal of Arts from President Clinton, also a friend. Not everything Manilow touched turned to gold. He was an angel to the Randolph Street Gallery in the 1980s, but the renowned alternative art space later struggled and finally closed several years ago. And the large donation he made to the New Art Examiner in 2001 didn’t prevent the magazine from folding last spring.
Remodeling on the terminal was to begin early in 2000 and perhaps be completed by the fall. Manilow had John Vinci of Vinci/Hamp Architects draw up plans for the place, whose cavernous waiting room was to be carved up to accommodate several storefront spaces, ranging from 1,500 to 4,000 square feet. But the package deal still needed the approval of other city agencies, and work on the terminal couldn’t start until the condo tower was a sure thing.
Vinci says he hasn’t talked to Manilow lately and doesn’t know if he’s still part of the bus terminal renovation, though he notes he’d rather build from scratch these days than do rehabs. Manilow, he says, “had good intentions.”
