Michael Reese Park: A better spot for the Lucas Museum in Chicago
posted 6-30-2014 - 6:36 pm
Last week, the Chicago Tribune ran an article announcing the site selection for a new museum that director and producer George Lucas is hoping to build. It could have been in San Francisco, but that city blew its chance. That, the fact that we get more than double the annual number of tourists that San Francisco gets, and the fact that Lucas recently married a Chicagoan (Ariel Investments president Mellody Hobson) and lives here part time now gave the nod to us. The museum, which is obviously still in the planning stage, will shortly be renamed the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art; the tentative name had been the Lucas Cultural Arts Museum.
The name change is a minor thing. The thing that does concern me and a lot of other Chicagoans is that Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who vigorously courted the project and supposedly has a Site Selection Task Force, seems willing to let Lucas break a time-honored rule about not building on the lakefront: the proposed museum as presently imagined would tear up the existing parking lots between Soldier Field and McCormick Place. Great idea, bad location; it’s not that those lots shouldn’t be torn up and put underground anyway to create more park space – they should. But the building doesn’t belong there. I hope the Chicago Plan Commission, which has to approve the site, insists on an alternative — and I have one in mind that’s only a few blocks further south.
