Olympic Village could shift west

MICHAEL REESE |Might cut costs, aid neighborhood

BY FRAN SPIELMAN City Hall Reporter fspielman@suntimes.com

A $1.1 billion Olympic Village to be built above a truck staging area for McCormick Place could be shifted west -- to the campus of Michael Reese Hospital -- under changes in the works to reduce construction costs and enhance neighborhood benefits, City Hall sources said Tuesday.

If the village is built at ground level -- instead of on air rights over an inaccessible sliver of south lakefront -- it would eliminate the need to build a platform and support columns, a dedicated bus lane extension and a pair of pedestrian bridges over Lake Shore Drive.

Fears that the village would be an "isolated little spur of McCormick Place" would be put to rest. Instead of creating a street grid to link the village to the Bronzeville community to the west, the connection would be built-in. And construction would not interfere, even temporarily, with truck staging vital to convention center operations.

'Will be some changes'

Ald. Toni Preckwinkle (4th), whose complaints already have prompted Olympic Village design changes, would not comment on the possible site shift. In January, Preckwinkle touted the Reese site to reduce construction costs and integrate the 6,000-unit project into the surrounding neighborhood.

Chicago 2016 spokesman Patrick Sandusky acknowledged that "there could be changes to the village" as Olympic planners seek to "make it better and the best long-term legacy for the city." But he said, "No final decisions have been made."

At a City Hall news conference last week, U.S. Olympic Committee chief executive Jim Scherr also opened the door to changes in what he called Chicago's "very, very developed" Olympic bid.

"We know that there will be some changes in the process -- whether to the village or other parts of the concept -- as we react to the feedback from the IOC through the first evaluation and then the second phase of the evaluation," he said.

Neither hospital officials nor Mayor Daley's chief of staff Lori Healey could be reached for comment on the possibility that the city might condemn or buy the 37-acre Michael Reese campus owned by Medline Industries now being marketed to potential buyers by the firm of Colliers Bennett & Kahnweiler.

Michael Senner, a senior vice president at Colliers Bennett, said talks with the city have focused on zoning issues central to any planned development.

"They haven't said to us, 'This is where we want to put the Olympic Village,' " Senner said. Asked if that was a possibility, he said, "If they paid enough, sure."

The Olympic Village on the Michael Reese campus would be a boon to a hospital whose owners emerged from bankruptcy a few years ago and have talked about renovating or rebuilding smaller.

Lakefront had been touted

More recently, Michael Reese has been talking merger with Cook County's Provident Hospital. Michael Reese operates primarily out of four main buildings on a campus that includes 17 buildings.

Construction of the Olympic Village on air rights over land described as the "missing tooth of the lakefront system" was the focal point of Chicago's bid.

The complex would house 16,000 Olympic athletes and place one-third of them within five minutes of their competition venues. Eighty-five percent would be 15 minutes away. Those times would not be significantly altered by a shift to the west.