Is McCormick Place's owner finally looking to spice up Lakeside Center?

McCormick Place's Lakeside Center could be in line soon for big changes — including placing an array of solar panels on its 19-acre cantilevered roof — under prospective redevelopment plans for the aged, but architecturally significant, convention hall.

"It's definitely a jewel," Larita Clark, CEO of the Metropolitan Pier and Exposition Authority, said of the 53-year-old building. "We're going to capitalize on that."

It's about time.

Built in 1971 and designed by the late architects Helmut Jahn and Gene Summers for what was then C.F. Murphy Associates (now Jahn), the steel and glass building with that signature, prairie-flat roof is a high point of Chicago modernism.

But as buckets of MPEA cash and attention went to constructing and maintaining the new and shiny McCormick Place buildings west of DuSable Lake Shore Drive starting in the late 1990s, the old hall by the lake looks more forlorn by the year.

On the plus side, the MPEA upgraded Lakeside Center’s glass facade so migratory birds don't run into the building.

But the agency still hasn't replaced the decorative brickwork that came tumbling from the building's base onto DuSable Lake Shore Drive in 2022. The concrete wall that was once beneath the bricks now just sits there, looking raw and exposed.

That's no way to treat a building. Particularly this one.

Part of largest convention center in North America

The MPEA has struggled for years trying to find a way to redevelop Lakeside Center and add new money-making uses, while preserving the building's nearly 600,000 square feet of convention space.

The building needs at least $400 million in repairs, according to the MPEA.

In 2022, the authority issued a "request for information" seeking ideas to redevelop all or parts of the 51-year-old structure without giving up any of the convention halls.

If done correctly, the plan could turn Lakeside Center into one of most exciting destinations in the city.

Imagine dining and dancing on the building's huge terraces, overlooking the lake from beneath the roof's 75-foot cantilever? Or converting the convention spaces into a food hall, a market or a museum of some sort?

What could bollix up this whole thing? For my money, it's still the request for information's requirement that any exhibition space that would be lost in this plan would have to be rebuilt elsewhere by the new operator — and at their expense.

"We are still the largest [convention center] in North America," Clark said. "We don't want to shrink. So we do need that nearly 600,000 square feet."

An operator — or operators — willing to pay to let the MPEA have its cake and eat it, too? Who'd agree to such a thing?

Yet, Clark said the MPEA received "more than 10 responses" to the RFI. The agency has now issued a call to hire a consultant team that can "help go through those ideas and maybe even come up with new ideas for redeveloping Lakeside Center," she said.

The consultant team would also tackle the MPEA proposal to cover a third of Lakeside Center's roof with solar panels. The agency said the array would generate nearly 4.5 million kilowatt-hours of power yearly.

Clark said a green roof was considered, as was constructing a venue of some sort atop the building. Both ideas were scrapped over concerns Lakeside Center's roof can't handle that much added weight.

The MPEA said it hasn't yet figured out how much of the McCormick Place campus the panels could power. But it is enough juice to power 415 homes a year, the agency said.

From lakefront barrier to asset?

Clark said the redevelopment consultant team could be hired by the end of this year. She said respondents are being asked to provide a rough estimate of the cost of adding all these improvements to the building, "so I can start trying to figure out how to pay for it."

Whoever is hired as the consultant must also figure out a way to edit down the list of proposed uses and functions for Lakeside Center. As the kids say, "Y'all doing too much."

And that request for information provision that essentially requires the tenant to move into the space, at the risk of having to build a replacement spot for their MPEA landlord, needs to be rethought.

But a lot of potential lies in all this. The lakefront and the city would greatly benefit from a reinvigorated and more public Lakeside Center.

And it's better than tearing it down.

"There are perspectives that [say] it doesn't legitimately occupy that space and therefore it shouldn't be there anymore — but it's there," Evan Jahn, president of the architecture firm his father led, said of Lakeside Center.

"I think that something that occupies such a prominent piece of real estate," he said, "has to also be maintained and treated with the significance that it has."

Lee Bey is architecture critic for the Sun-Times and appears on ABC7 News Chicago. He is also a member of the Editorial Board.

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