Millennium Park: Building the Public Realm in the Livable Downtown

Millennium Park will transform an 18-acre rail yard into a world-class cultural and recreational facility adjacent to historic Grant Park. It is designed as an extended cultural complex, offering a wide range of facilities, including a new skating rink along Michigan Avenue. The heart of the park will be the Great Lawn, with its Frank Gehry designed music pavilion, which will share backstage facilities with a music and dance theater designed by Hammond Beeby Rupert Ainge, Inc.

Frank Gehry, winner of the Pritzker Prize in 1989, the AIA Gold Medal, and 1998 National Medal of the Arts, is also designing a pedestrian bridge across Columbus Drive, a heavily traveled street that bisects the park. Millennium Park sits atop a multi-modal transit center that includes a 2,400-car garage. Park designers and coordinating architects are Skidmore, Owings & Merrill of Chicago, under the direction of design partner Adrian Smith

Edward Uhlir, assistant to Mayor Daley and Project Director for the Millennium Park (and an Ely Chapter member), will discuss the planning process with Lambda Alpha International members.

Touring the Livable Downtown

• The Workshop tour begins boarding Coach USA at the Burnham Hotel at 8:30 a.m., with Barbara Lynne, President of Near South Planning Board, leading the way through the Near South Side.
  
• Leroy Kennedy, Vice President of Community Development for Illinois Institute of Technology, will guide us through Bronzeville and the ITT campus.
  
• We will tour the 1-miltion-square-foot Lakeside Technology Center, Chicago's largest telecom hotel, with General Manager, John Derby.
  
• The route will take us through the Chicago Museum Campus that now unites three internationally-known museums in a pedestrian-friendly reconfiguration.
  
• Jon Devries, Manager of Real Estate Advisory Services, Arthur Andersen, will guide us through Fulton Market, and industrial area on The Near West Side that is attracting residential and retail uses as well.
  
• A tour of Block Y, a new-construction residential development, will be lead by the Bill Wolk, President of The Thrush Group.
  
• The lunch stop at Goose Island Brewery (Chicago's famous micro-brewery) will allow a walk-around tour of new and adaptive-use retail developments in the area.
  
• Albert Friedman, President, Friedman Properties, will provide a narration on River North.
  
• Amy Curran of the John Buck Company will present the story of North Bridge, a new 460,000-square- foot shopping and entertainment environment anchored by Nordstrom.
  
• We will walk through the new River East Community, an entertainment, retail, hotel, and residential development by MCL Properties, which will be represented by Dan McLean, President, and Kevin Augustyn, Vice President.
  
• The tour will conclude with a stop at Navy Pier, the number-one tourist attraction in Illinois. The bus will return to the Burnham Hotel at 5:00 p.m.

Patti Gallagher, Assistant Commissioner, Strategic Planning, City of Chicago, and Mary Ludgin, President, Heitman Capital Management, and architectural guide extraordinaire will guide the tour.