Posted on Wed, Sep 8, 2010
Chicago Tribune - September 8, 2010
Even as speculation swirls over who will lead Chicago in the post-Richard M. Daley era, the mayor's agenda for re-shaping the city rolls on.
Backing a request from Daley, the Chicago City Council today agreed to kick in up to $98 million in infrastructure costs for the long-dormant expanse of lakefront property that once housed the U.S. Steel South Works plant, according to Molly Sullivan, a spokeswoman for the city's Department of Community Development.
Meanwhile, Daley announced that the city is considering a tech park at the former Michael Reese Hospital campus, the Tribune's Clout Street blog reports.
The city demolished all but two buildings on the campus, which was co-planned and partly designed by Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus school in Germany, to make way for an Olympic Village if Chicago won the bid to host the 2016 Summer Olympic Games.
Rio de Janeiro won the bid instead, leaving the future of the 37-acre South Side site in doubt.
Chicago developer Dan McCaffrey, together with U.S. Steel Corp., plans to transform the nearly-barren, almost 580-acre South Works site into a $4 billion minicity of high-rises aparments, town homes, parks, shops, offices and medical facilities that would be home to 150,000 people.
The proposal will involve issuing bonds that ultimately would be paid back with property taxes generated by the development. The money would pay for infrastructure, such as new streets, for the first phrase of the project, which is expected to get underway in 2013 after a relocation and widening of South Shore Drive is completed south of 79th Street.
The South Works master plan was designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill of Chicago along with Sasaki Associates of Massachusetts. The former steel plant has been shuttered since 1992.
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