Navy Pier's cheesy makeover plan is full of holes

Great article! I don't know about the monorail and the floating parking garage proposals. A little overly Disney world style for me. Thoughts on this development? Louroz Navy Pier's cheesy makeover plan is full of holes By Blair Kamin Tribune architecture critic Published January 22, 2006 Here's some friendly advice for the Navy Pier officials who -- surprise! -- embraced the glitzy pier makeover plan they commissioned for the Midwest's top tourist attraction. Stop. Disengage. Think. Then rethink. While not without good strokes, such as a spiffy monorail that would zip up and down the pier, the plan for the lakefront landmark is riddled with faults both practical and aesthetic. Some would inject the 90-year-old public space, already suffering an advanced case of tackiness, with lethal doses of future schlock. Why drag down the pier with predictable stuff -- a giant indoor water park, which seems straight out of the cheesy Wisconsin Dells? Why not instead compete for tourists and conventioneers with what Chicago does best? Bold, forward-looking architecture. Millennium Park has shown the way, revealing that entertainment and high-quality design can go together as naturally as City Hall and scandal. Besides aesthetic lapses, the plan's designer, Toronto-based Forrec, a shaper of theme parks and water parks, doesn't seem to have a clue whether the revved-up pier will worsen congestion on already crammed roads around it. Nor does Forrec show much respect for Chicago's tradition of reserving the lakefront for public space. Its plan tramples on that doctrine, suggesting that a floating hotel, a largely private use, be attached to the public's pier. Are we to have a two-tier pier with separate zones for haves and have-nots? Daniel Burnham, who believed in the virtues of public space as a social mixing chamber and proposed two downtown piers in his epic 1909 Plan of Chicago (only Navy Pier was built), must be spinning in his Graceland Cemetery grave. Unveiled Jan. 13 by McPier, the Metropolitan Pier and Exposition Authority that oversees the lakefront attraction, the makeover aims to attract more visitors to the pier during cold months and to increase the average visitor's stay by offering more to do. Yet more will only be more if it comes with what Navy Pier has sorely needed since it reopened in 1995 after an $187 million redevelopment designed by Benjamin Thompson & Associates of Cambridge, Mass., and Chicago's VOA Associates: Better architecture and more attention to the quality of the public realm. To some extent, the Forrec plan delivers that. By eliminating the little-used Skyline Stage, the curving, white-tented theater that resembles a mutant beetle, and replacing it with a glass barrel vault, the designers restore the pier's clean-lined silhouette between its graceful Head House and the equally appealing Terminal and Ballroom buildings. The consultants also are on target in their suggestions for improving the pedestrian's experience. Getting rid of the roadway that slices between the pier's 19-acre Gateway Park and the Headhouse would let those on foot get more easily from park to pier. Placing semicircular lookout points along Dock Street would allow visitors to see Lake Michigan (instead of having it blocked by those confounding tour boats). And putting a semicircular plaza lined with restaurants alongside the largest of the fan-shaped lookout points would help make Dock Street's sometimes-dreary midsection more festive. But the flaws, oh the flaws. Let's take them one by one: Traffic: The plan does far more to deal with traffic at the pier than traffic around it. But ignoring the cumulative impact of nearby projects on congestion won't work here. Not with new condo towers sprouting like weeds in Streeterville and developers proposing a 2,000-foot broadcast tower, complete with an observation deck and restaurants, just west of the pier across Lake Shore Drive. City planning and transportation officials, who will be picking up the mess if the redone pier makes traffic worse, need to press McPier on solutions, such as expanding the pier's already effective network of trolleys ferrying tourists to and from Michigan Avenue. Absent that, expect mass gridlock on the Drive and the east-west streets leading to the pier. Parking: Skepticism also should greet the suggestion to nearly double the pier's 1,700 parking spaces by adding a two-story, partly underground garage in Gateway Park and placing two floating parking decks (a replica aircraft carrier and a replica steamship) on the pier's north side. If you build it, they will drive -- and traffic jams invariably will follow. Granted, more parking may be needed, but McPier will never be able to build enough. The garages also invite aesthetic scrutiny. While the replica garages have an appropriate dose of nautical whimsy, comparable to the steamshiplike North Avenue beach house, turning a real aircraft carrier into a garage might prove less theme-parkish. For its part, the Gateway Park garage is a non-starter. Who would waste time climbing to its rooftop "sculpture garden," about 20 feet above street level? Here, the needs of the car trump the needs of the pedestrian when it should be the other way around. Uses: The plan threatens to undermine Navy Pier's identity as the "people's boat" -- a democratic waterfront attraction for those who don't own real boats. That planned hotel (another replica steamship) would appear to violate the 1973 Lakefront Protection Ordinance, which states that Chicago's lakefront parks and the lake itself should be "devoted only to public purposes." When the pier was being redeveloped in the 1990s, an earlier and more civic-minded set of McPier officials rejected bringing in a hotel because it would be "too private." The water park might be worse. Water parks aren't free. The water park at the popular Cedar Point Amusement Park/Resort in Sandusky, Ohio, charges $18 per person. How many poor families are going to be able to pony up $72 for four people to visit the pier's water park? Sure, the pier has fancy restaurants that are equally unaffordable to the masses. But shouldn't its major attractions be reasonably priced and open to all? If not, the admission fee throws up an invisible barrier and, in effect, privatizes public space. Architecture: While the plan represents an improvement on the pier's present visual mishmash, it's reverential to the point of dull. A bigger Ferris wheel? Why keep recycling that 19th Century icon, invented for Chicago's 1893 world's fair? Is there no place for a 21st Century icon that would incorporate the latest technology? Helmut Jahn's proposed "Sail Tower" for Northerly Island comes to mind. Wind would turn the 550-foot-tall sail tower, which would double as a giant LED screen. Visitors could take stairs and elevators to sample the drop-dead views. The pier needs something like that, an icon that would generate buzz, not yawns. Forrec rightly promises to upgrade the architectural quality of the pier's labyrinthine and poorly-detailed interior hallways, but its insistence that these spaces won't look like a shopping mall are of little value. The drawings make them look like-- you guessed it -- a shopping mall. All this raises a central issue: Why did McPier feel compelled to go all the way to Toronto for design advice when Chicago is loaded with world-class design talent? Chicago architect Laurence Booth brazenly suggests putting together a local team to respond "to the Canadian plan." Call out the National Guard! Seriously, if we're going to spend hundreds of millions in public funds on remaking Navy Pier, it's time to reassert the value of architecture and the vision that this public space should be a distinguished work of design, not a glorified theme park. View of the Headhouse retail area, looking up to the Crystal Gardens The Floating Hotel Floating parking facilities? WTF? Aerial view of the waterpark Aerial view of Pier Park Louroz>