If you want to know how to make 1,800 hotel units magically disapper, I urge you to study the mysterious case of the Wolf Point Development, the three-tower project planned along the Chicago River near Kinzie.
Why couldn’t I have been that smart?
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On May 29, the developers unveiled their project at a meeting hosted by 42nd Ward alderman Brendan Reilly. They said it consisted of three towers—including one 950 feet tall—on the undeveloped spit of land just south of the Apparel Center (which, coincidentally, I call the Mothership, since it’s where the Sun-Times and the Reader are headquartered).
Over the summer, the developers worked with Reilly to accommodate concerns about traffic and congestion. At no time in any of those hours of negotiations with Reilly and the residents did the developer talk about hotel units.
By that time, Friends of Wolf Point had hired a lawyer, Reuben Hedlund, to represent them at the Plan Commission meeting. And he’d been pestering the developers and the city for every relevant document.
Gage contacted the alderman’s office. And Reilly asked the plan commission to take the matter off the agenda, on the grounds that he hadn’t heard about the hotel units before this point either. As the alderman put it in a press statement: “Unfortunately, the final documents submitted yesterday did not accurately reflect what was negotiated.”
I called, texted, and e-mailed Alderman Reilly, but he didn’t get back to me. But he did tell David Roeder of the Sun-Times: “In the interest of transparency this has to go back to the neighbors.” Don’t worry, alderman—I’m only a little bit hurt you talked to Roeder and not me.
