The Bears and Mayor Daley got their way, and the new Soldier Field’s been built. But the criticism won’t die. The stadium’s design and location may be moot, but its price tag still rankles. “Soldier Field’s a symbol as much as it’s a football stadium,” says Jesse Sharkey, a history teacher at Senn high school. “As long as it’s there on the lakefront it’s a reminder of all the other things we might have done with the hundreds of millions of dollars–or whatever it was–we wasted on Soldier Field.”
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The mayor did win a few people over in the weeks following the press conference. But most architecture critics said the plan was an abomination–the Tribune’s Blair Kamin described it as a “monumental eyesore” that “brings the gargantuan modernism of McCormick Place smack into the middle of the handsome classical ensemble of the museum campus.” Veterans’ groups objected to a provision in the deal that enabled the Bears to sell the naming rights to the highest corporate bidder (an idea they’ve apparently dropped). The advocacy group Friends of the Parks filed suit to block the project on the grounds that it violated the lakefront protection ordinance (the suit was dismissed). The Tribune’s editorial board hammered the proposal, mostly because the stadium would be an unsightly intrusion on the lakefront. And many disgruntled football fans said it made no sense to help out an organization that was so inept–the Bears have made the playoffs only once in the last nine seasons (this year they’re off to a 1-4 start).
Nevertheless Daley’s plan, backed by Governor George Ryan and former governor James Thompson, was quickly approved by both houses of the state legislature, the Chicago City Council, and the Chicago Plan Commission. In January 2002, just a few days after the Philadelphia Eagles trounced the Bears in a playoff game, workers started gutting the old field.
Curiously, the one aspect of the project that engendered little early public criticism was that price tag. As Sharkey and other critics see it, the new Soldier Field is a glaring example of the city’s skewed priorities. It has cost the city at least $360 million to build, though all of the money is supposed to be covered eventually by a special 2 percent tax added to the bills of lodgers at hotels and motels around town. The Bears are supposed to come up with the remaining $200 million, plus any construction overruns. City officials contend that a boom in tourism all but guarantees that the hotels and motels will generate enough revenue to pay off the money that was borrowed, though if they can’t come up with the cash, the bonds will have to be repaid with money that comes out of general city revenues–in other words, repaid by the taxpayers.
Minarcik happens to be a passionate Bears fan and a longtime season ticket holder. “I love the Bears–my whole family loves the Bears,” he says. “My dad has four season tickets, and I have two. I can tell you anything you want about Chicago Bears trivia–I can start telling you all the quarterbacks going back to Sid Luckman. In my family we eat, drink, and die Chicago Bears.”
