On June 4, Mayor Daley will be recognized by the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C., as one of their “Visionaries in Sustainability” for his “long dedication to a sustainable urban environment.” Yet within a month, if his administration has its way, bulldozers could be moving in to demolish and discard at least 28 of the 29 buildings on the former campus of Michael Reese Hospital. Last week the city opened the bidding process for the job.
Once all Michael Reese is rubble, expensively smashed and carted away, then the mayor is expecting to sell off the site to a developer willing to commit $1.1 billion to construct more buildings that can house the 15,000 athletes participating in the 2016 Summer Olympics, the sugar plum that ate Daley’s brain.
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Housing that many people would take much more space than the Michael Reese buildings have to offer, but based on the report cited by Moe, just replacing Reese’s current 1.6 million square feet with new construction would release as much carbon into the atmosphere as a car driving 89,600,000 miles. At 20 miles a gallon, that’s the equivalent of another 200,000 barrels of crude. And, according to Moe, even if 40 percent of the construction materials are recycled and energy efficiency is maximized, it will take 65 years for a new building to recover the embodied energy lost in a tear-down.
By the mid 1940s the neighborhood around the hospital had changed dramatically, and not for the better. Thousands of poor African-Americans who had migrated from the south were segregated in a narrow strip of the south side that included Michael Reese, placing enormous pressure on the area’s housing stock and turning much of it into slums.
That wasn’t for lack of trying on Reginald’s part. “He wanted the absolutely best architect he knew,” says Henry, and that man was Gropius. “My father tried to get him hired to design the whole thing,” but the project committee “wanted a firm that was willing to be right there.” Ultimately, says Henry, Gropius “wasn’t that interested.” His father continued to try to get Gropius on board, he says, and “as late as 1959, a check would be approved and then stopped.” Reginald would run everything past Gropius, as a student does with a revered teacher. But the real work at Reese, Henry maintains, was done by Isaacs and, largely, the Chicago architectural firm of Loebl, Schlossman & Bennett.
The half-century mark is often the time of greatest peril for important buildings. It was at the same point, in the 1950s and ’60s, that dozens of buildings designed by Louis Sullivan and Dankmar Adler were determined to be outdated and disposable. Today the destruction of buildings like the Babson House, Walker Warehouse, and Garrick Theater are widely recognized as tragic losses.
The Daley administration is already feeling the heat. A spokeswoman was in full spin mode as she insisted to Tribune architecture critic Blair Kamin that it would be “incredibly misleading to characterize” the city’s request for bid proposals as evidence of a planned “demo of every single building.” The actual document, however, is unambiguous, calling for “the demolition and abatement of the structures on the Michael Reese Hospital campus” and noting that “the campus includes 29 structures totaling approximately 1.6 million square feet.” Just six days later, on April 20, that same spokeswoman was telling Kamin that saving anything other than the 1907 building “was not feasible.” The rest would be “cleared and cleaned for new construction” as “current plans for athlete housing and support facilities… are extremely dense.”
