For the past two years Greg Summers, who lives on the 52nd floor of one of the Marina City towers, has been watching the on-again, off-again construction project on the other side of the Chicago River. Last month he noticed something strange. “I watched them destroy the very thing I saw them construct over a year ago,” he says. “You hear about make-work projects in Chicago, but it’s a little startling to see one going on right outside your window.”
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A few weeks ago the workers returned. “They pulled out their jackhammers and started demolishing the stairs,” he says. “I’m thinking, ‘Wait a minute–what’s going on?’ On one level it’s sort of funny. But on another level it’s not funny. I’m a city of Chicago taxpayer–I’d like to know where my money’s going.”
Without realizing it, Summers was watching the latest twist in the strange saga of the city’s Vietnam veterans memorial. The original memorial was a fountain that sat on a traffic island in the middle of Upper Wacker Drive. In September 2001, as part of the $200 million Wacker Drive reconstruction project, the city dismantled it and hauled the pieces away. Officials from the transportation department, which oversaw the project, assured Vietnam veterans that they would keep the memorial safe. They said they’d hired an archivist to inventory all the plaques, historical markers, and monuments along that section of Wacker, and they promised to return each to its proper place once construction was completed.
So what were those concrete steps Summers says he saw workers build, then tear out?
Summers stands by his story. “I know what I saw–and I saw them install those stairs, and then I saw them dismantle those steps,” he says. “I don’t know how much money it cost them to do all this, but there’s definitely a screwup. They either changed their minds about what they wanted to do, or they misread the drawings. But one thing I know–those stairs were there, and now they’re gone.”
