Twice last winter, I heard cultural affairs commissioner Michelle Boone’s pocket speech on the city’s new cultural plan. Both times she brought along a chart studded with dozens of red check marks indicating progress on some of the plan’s hundreds of goals.
Redmoon is getting $100,000 from the city for planning the event, which could cost about $1 million to produce and will be supported by both public and private funds.
Both projects have been controversial: River Point, a 45-story office building under construction on the west bank, is getting a very expensive little 1.5-acre park built with $29 million in city TIF funds. Wolf Point, to be developed by the Kennedy family, which owns the property, and Texas-based Hines Interests (also the developer for River Point), will cram three taller buildings—one soaring to 950 feet—onto a 3.8-acre peninsula that’s now a parking lot in front of 350 N. Orleans (which happens to be the home of the Sun-Times and the Reader). In recent months, in spite of protests about density and limited access (and rumors of a casino), Wolf Point won City Council approval for the trio of towers and up to 450 hotel rooms.
Who could hear this without seeing in their mind’s eye a huge, smoking gun sailing down the river in tandem with representations of homelessness, unemployment, drug addiction, bad schools, segregation, and poverty?
But early on he’d described the idea to Michelle Boone, then the cultural programming officer at the Joyce Foundation, who was “very interested,” Lasko says. “So when the cultural plan was being written and researched, she wondered if this project would fit into it. We had a few different conversations . . . and I began to work on it again.”
Which is why it’ll probably never happen. What we’ll get is something tamer and more generic. Lasko suggests “greed” as an example, and “media oversaturation,” as in “violent video games.”
