One of State Street's bright spots has been the reuse of the former Carson Pirie Scott flagship store.
Joseph Freed & Associates restored the giant old retail landmark, designed by Louis Sullivan, converting the building into offices, a restaurant and retail. And now, five years after Carson's departure, a new CityTarget store opens Wednesday in the historic space.
Design-wise, it is a tricky thing bringing the retailer — and its famous red bull's-eye logo signage and color scheme — into one of the world's most celebrated pieces of architecture. But the marriage seems pretty good so far.
The temple-like bank in the Beverly neighborhood has sat empty for months now. Its altar, as it were, is barren.
But the former PNC Bank at 108th and Western has one good thing going for it: All things considered, it is pretty good piece of architecture. The building's design takes the "temple of money" architecture of old banks — columns and monumentality — and gives it a modernist turn.
Let's take a look around. Built in 1967 as Chesterfield Federal Savings & Loan, the flat-roofed, two-story building sits behind 54 precast concrete exterior columns.
A North Side congregation has bowed out of its bid to purchase and architecturally alter the historic Portage Theater, according to the office of Ald. John Arena (45th).
The decision by Chicago Tabernacle, a ministry based in the Albany Park neighborhood, came on the eve of a Zoning Board of Appeals hearing today. The congregation's application for a special use permit to allow the theater to be rezoned as a church was to be deliberated at the hearing.
Chicago Tabernacle's plans to buy and convert the functioning 92-year-old theater, 4050 N. Milwaukee, into a church facility faced a strong head wind from cinema buffs, preservationists and residents of the Six Corners area when the effort became public in March.
Even Chicago Sun-Times film critic Roger Ebert weighed in on Twitter then: "Chicago has countless churches but not enough theaters like the very special Portage.
Built at 23rd and Lake Shore Drive in 1973 across from what was then McCormick Place's only building, the architecturally modernist McCormick Inn was demolished in 1993 after only 20 years of service. It's already been gone as long as it was there.
Gone — but apparently not forgotten. Many of you emailed me or commented on my Facebook page saying you attended events and proms there, or swam in the hotel's big pool. But the most entertaining response came from Epstein Global, the 91-year-old Chicago architecture and engineering firm that designed the hotel.
Epstein put up great early images of the McCormick Inn on the company's Facebook page, including the great sunrise shot atop this blog.
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.
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.
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.
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.
