Lee Bey

A long-gone hotel, caught on video

By: Lee Bey | Jul. 16, 2012

Jul. 16, 2012

Here's a building I'd forgotten about until I ran across the above video clip on YouTube recently: The McCormick Inn, a high-rise convention center hotel that was demolished after only 20 years of use.

The silent video, posted by YouTube user firemann57, shows the action around a 1976 two-alarm fire at the hotel, located at 23rd and Lake Shore Drive. Drive. The camera sweeps around a bit, but there are great views of the glassy, black 25-story hotel designed by A. Epstein & Sons as a companion piece to the then-new McCormick Place on the Lake.

I'm also digging the clunky fire equipment, the old school green-and-white CTA bus stop sign at 1:22 and the traffic whizzing by on a stretch of 23rd street that--like the hotel--no longer exists. At 1:39 you can see McCormick Place (now Lakeside Center) and the open breezeway that separated the convention center side from Arie Crown Theater. The opening was later closed with a glass wall.

The 625-room McCormick Inn opened in 1973 at a cost of $30 million with the Teamsters' Union pension fund covering about $20 million of the construction price. The hotel was demolished in 1993 to make from for McCormick Place's western expansion — which included a new hotel.

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Official: Heat threatens thousands of trees

By: Lee Bey | Jul. 13, 2012

Jul. 13, 2012
Without intervention, the summer's sustained high temperatures and dry weather could kill off thousands of trees next year, according to a city parks official.
 
"We could lose thousands," Chicago Park District General Superintendent Michael Kelly, discussing the city's entire tree inventory — not just those in parks. "Those that are three years old [and younger] are at risk."
 
Kelly's remarks came in an interview with this blog.
 
Protecting city trees means preserving one of Chicago's most distinctive features. There are at least 520,000 trees maintained by the city's Bureau of Forestry with a few thousand planted each year, giving credence to Chicago's Urbs in Horto motto.

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UNO breaks ground on second academy

By: Lee Bey | Jul. 12, 2012

Jul. 12, 2012
Almost a year after debuting an architecturally forward-looking Southwest Side soccer academy, the United Neighborhood Organization will break ground Thursday on a similarly-themed high school to be built right next door.
 
Designed by Wight & Co., an architecture, engineering and construction firm in suburban Darien, the $27 million UNO Soccer Academy High School is a glassy, circular structure for 960 high school students. It will be a few hundred feet from the UNO Soccer Academy, an eye-poppingly contemporary and angular elementary school designed by JGMA Architects and Ghafari Architects that opened last fall. The edge of the existing school can be seen to the right in the image above.
 
The two buildings will compose a single campus 51st and Homan in the predominantly Hispanic (and soccer-loving) Gage Park neighborhood.

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Finding house in Jackson Park

By: Lee Bey | Jul. 9, 2012

Jul. 9, 2012
In this space a year ago — almost to the day — I marveled over the temporary transformation of the old U.S. Steel site in the South Chicago neighborhood into an outdoor festival featuring the Dave Matthews Caravan.
 
The Caravan performances made for big news. But the Chosen Few Old School Reunion Picnic, held in Jackson Park on the Caravan's second day, was relegated to radio traffic reports telling motorists to say away from the park because of crowds and street closures. That an event was going on there, too — something worth seeing and at least 50,000 people showed up — wasn't even worth reporting, it seemed.
 
The picnic is a big event that honors house, a rythmic pulsating dance music that originated here in clubs in the late 1970s and early 1980s and gave birth to other musical styles including trance and techno.

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Lights out for historic Hammond power plant

By: Lee Bey | Jul. 3, 2012

Jul. 3, 2012
The massive State Line power plant has been a fixture on the Illinois-Indiana lakefront since 1929, turning trainloads of coal into enough electricity to power a small city.
 
But that ended when State Line's owner, Virginia's Dominion Resources, closed the facility in March. Higher coal prices and the prohibitive cost of installing new federally mandated air emissions equipment were cited by the company as causes.
 
Now comes word that State Line was sold last month to BTU Solutions, a Texas company that demolishes energy generation facilities like this one. The move disturbs some architectural preservationists and industrial history buffs. The fine-looking complex was designed by Graham, Anderson, Probst & White, right when the firm was turning out Chicago's most distinctive buildings such as Wrigley Building, the Shedd Aquarium and the Civic Opera House.

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The writing on the wall: City viaducts as canvas

By: Lee Bey | Jun. 28, 2012

Jun. 28, 2012
Muammar Gadhafi lives in the form of a stenciling on the whitewashed walls of a viaduct at Hubbard and May streets.
 
He's dressed in his colonel's uniform — his hair curling out from beneath his military dress hat — holding a sign with a bit of wordplay that indicates he might still, even now, have a thing for Condolezza Rice. Admittedly, I smiled a bit when I saw it.
 
We live in a city of viaducts and underpasses — a legacy of our time as railroad capital of the world. Viaducts separate "here" from "there," "us" from "them." They mark the boundaries of our neighborhoods. But their white-painted walls — better to reflect light and convey safety — provide a big, blank canvas for art and messages that are sometimes crude, thoughtful, humorous or mysterious.

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Upgraded terminal could put South Side on right track

By: Lee Bey | Jun. 27, 2012

Jun. 27, 2012
 
The CTA's 95th Street Red Line station has long been one of the biggest missed opportunities in the city.
 
Hovering above the mighty Dan Ryan, the big terminal handles 20,000 riders a day and 13 bus routes — including Greyhound — feed into it. Yet station has almost zero amenities and feels cramped despite its relatively large size.  Not to mention the once-groundbreaking station — the modernist Dan Ryan portions of the line were designed by SOM — looks every bit of its 43 years. Furthermore, its hard angles, encampment-style steel fencing and utilitarian canopies are a visual fist in the face of the surrounding community.
 
Given its location and use, the station should function as hub rather than a funnel. So preliminarily, at least, this week's announcement that the terminal is in line for a $240 million upgrade is good news. The above image shows a concept of what the exterior of the terminal could look like.

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In photos, storied Mecca Apartments live again

By: Lee Bey | Jun. 21, 2012

Jun. 21, 2012
Here's a glimpse of the long-gone Mecca Apartments: a massive 96-unit apartment building that began life among the city's finer residences, then hit times hard enough to put it in the path of bulldozers making room for future landmark, IIT's Crown Hall.
 
Built in 1891, the four-story Mecca spanned the north side of 34th Street from State to Dearborn. Made of brick and terra cotta, the building belonged to a class of large and ornate early apartment houses built around Chicago. Its most stunning feature can be seen in the photo above: Each of the building's two wings feature a skylight interior court – 34 feet wide and 178 feet deep – ringed by apartments. When it opened, the Mecca was billed as the largest apartment house west of New York.
 
The Mecca's heyday was relatively short.

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