Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
The prospects appear to be dim. At the end of last year a Lowe’s home improvement store and Potbelly sandwich shop opened on the old steel plant site. Still, while acres of muddy land remain, in March the Daley administration officially refused to support putting a Wal-Mart on the site; sources say the mayor wants peace with unions as he tries to bring the 2016 Olympics to Chicago. Brookins, though, is vowing to try to get other aldermen to join him in passing an ordinance to overrule the administration. Here’s what he had to say about it in a recent interview at the new Potbelly’s.
So where do things stand now with this site?The site is so vast—it’s about 50 acres—that in order to make all the numbers work and the infrastructure that had to be put in there for this to work, we still need a second major anchor to the development. And for at least five years we have been unable to find anybody willing to take a chance. Target at one point said they were interested, but we found out they were more interested in blocking Wal-Mart from coming to the site than going to the location. We’ve talked to people at Costco. We’ve talked to people at Kohl’s. Dominick’s looked at the site and passed on it. So it’s been hard to get a retailer to come into that spot. I don’t even know of any other nonretailers that would be interested in this type of location, but all options are really on the table.
So what are the prospects now, since planning commissioner Arnold Randall essentially said “No”?We can take the authority out of his hands in the City Council and approve or disapprove the particular use of this land within a new ordinance. But the question that I have, and it hasn’t been fully vetted with Wal-Mart yet, is how far they’re willing to take this particular fight, and how far the developer is willing to take this fight. The developer is Goldman Sachs, and Goldman Sachs does bond work for the city of Chicago. Do they want to risk angering the powers that be? And how does Wal-Mart want to come into the city—do they want to come into the city being welcomed, or do they want to come in filing a lawsuit against the city? Because I do think this discrimination against one company is illegal.
