Option 10: Ride with Sandi

I've been hearing about this site for years in the 7th Ward. Bill Beavers had his plan when he was alderman. It would be nice to see a lakefront park here. Then there could be some housing or even some commercial development. At least put a park there though or at the very least a beach. From the Tribune:

Bounding over this manmade moonscape in her brawny sport-utility vehicle, Ald. Sandi Jackson (7th) enthuses about the future of a 650-acre lakefront site that's bigger than Chicago's Loop.

What once was U.S. Steel's South Works is barren now, fully decontaminated and, as the endless truck traffic and the infrastructure work attest, just beginning its rebirth as a residential and commercial community. Jackson ticks off her expectations: 17,000 new residences, a high-end mall, parkland galore and—if Jackson gets the attention of her fellow aldermen and Mayor Richard Daley—an extraordinary new Chicago Children's Museum.

Jackson calls this astonishingly big and promising site—the northern part is in her ward—the best-kept secret in Chicago. So secret that it didn't appear on the list of 37 sites that real estate consultants in the Chicago office of Jones Lang LaSalle say they vetted before the museum settled on its Grant Park land-grab. Maybe this week the consultants will flesh out their list of site names with their reasons why every one except Grant Park was beneath consideration.

The former South Works is as inviting a canvas as gifted architects—now condemned to designing a hole in the ground—could ever want. "The museum officials haven't presented us with any other option," Jackson says in evident frustration. "This would be a wonderful lakefront forum, open and accessible to all of Chicago. We don't have the restraints that Grant Park has."

Jackson is right about accessible: Her truck is bouncing along the edge of Lake Michigan, five minutes south of the Museum of Science and Industry. Plans call for water taxis from downtown and trolleys from the four nearby Metra stations. (Are we the only ones to notice that museum officials keep complaining that sites away from downtown don't have adequate CTA service—as if bus routes couldn't be extended a few blocks to . . . a spectacular new children's museum?)

Jackson expects construction to begin in earnest at the South Works site in a year. She envisions a special expanse for the museum, a luscious tract of open land near the hoped-for site of a year-round indoor water park.

An interesting twist, the Chicago Children's Museum can come this way. Unfortunately I wonder if they already look down their nose at the south side.