John Ronan sees dead people, more than a million of them, floating in boats up the Chicago River, being driven in hearses down the Eisenhower, carried on train cars. They’re all headed for the same place: the old central post office just west of the Loop.
Booth contends that “expressways don’t make livable cities,” and his plan would start by demolishing the post office except for the end pavilions along Van Buren and Harrison–substantial buildings in their own right. In between, under a covered plaza, he’d put an “intermodal transit center”–a transfer point for people entering the city via cars, Metra trains, the CTA, boats, bicycles, and Greyhound buses. (He’d relocate the current Harrison Street station.) The Eisenhower would end three blocks west of the transit center at the spaghetti-bowl interchange, and the newly open areas west and east of the old post office would be converted to a public park. To the north and south would be a chain of multistory “live-work” buildings, with parking on the first seven floors, offices on the next three, and apartments on the top six. The plan is forward-looking in that it allows people to live close to where they work and encourages them to use alternatives to the automobile. It also harks back to the 1909 Burnham Plan and the elegant, if somewhat monolithic, neoclassical buildings that lined Congress Parkway as it led to a great new domed city hall on Halsted.
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His “rusting steel doors,” nearly 30 feet high, would be made of Cor-Ten steel, which can be found on the Daley Center and the Time-Life Building; this steel starts out a bright orange, then oxidizes, creating a deep brown protective coating. The “long hall” would be the block-long former lobby of the post office, one of the few heated areas in the mausoleum, and the chapels, also faced in Cor-Ten, would open up off the lobby. After a service the dead would be taken from the chapels in the old freight elevators up to the 14 internment floors, where their remains would be stacked six high. In front of each crypt or niche would be a memorial plaque with the name and dates of the deceased, and in front of that a slot for a votive candle and a sealed glass chamber where mementos of the departed could be placed. Seven-foot-wide aisles would separate the stacked coffins and urns, leaving room for 90,000 sets of remains on each floor–a total of more than 1.2 million.
Many of the architects who participated in Visionary Chicago Architecture displayed a remarkable lack of curiosity about the worthwhile attributes of their assigned gateway sites and either demolished them or overwhelmed them with out-of-scale new structures. Ronan focused on the value in what was already on his site. He sees demolition not as visionary but as massively expensive and wasteful. “Seventy percent of what’s in landfills right now is old buildings,” he says. “The silliest thing would be to put a green building in its place–you carted away this three-million-square-foot thing. When I started I said, I can’t justify that.”
Where: Harris Theater for Music and Dance, rooftop terrace, 205 E. Randolph
