“It’s taken generations to get where we are today so the riverfront is like a 50-year, 30-year, 20-year timeline. “Great public works are multi-generational projects,” Kamin said. And it will be significant beyond its site, as a key part of the connective tissue linking the improved river downtown to what it will be elsewhere. So what is going in its place will be, almost by default, a big improvement. “It had no connection with the river other than, I guess, receiving paper for the presses.” “The Freedom Center was just awful,” said Blair Kamin, the Pulitzer Prize-winning former architecture critic for the Chicago Tribune. Along with the property’s massive private parking lot, it holds the “saddest park ever,” or at least that’s what she’s heard Chicago Architecture Center river tour docents call it, Masengarb said. Right now the big printing plant known as Freedom Center shrugs off the river with its stark brick wall. The Tribune’s Freedom Center printing facility largely shrugs off the river, with the exception of what some architectural tour docents call a ‘sad’ park. The major, multi-faceted real estate developments Lincoln Yards (on the North Side, between Lincoln Park and Bucktown) and the 78 (on the Near South Side, just south of Roosevelt Road) enfold the river into their plans, not only because the city requires it but because the people who would live and work in those places expect it. “The Riverwalk has shown that people aren’t going to fall in, and that we want to have that connection to the water,” said Jen Masengarb, executive director of the American Institute of Architects Chicago, noting that in earlier phases of river development, protective fences were the norm.īut now that centerpiece is mostly done, and the riverfront beautification is expanding up the North Branch and down the South.

Things were so bad for so long that the city’s official design guidelines for the river begin by noting its history of being “neglected and abused.”

It’s a stark contrast to previous decades of riverfront development, which put cold seawalls and sterile parking lots up against the waterway.

The mostly unfenced waterside pathway has become an instant icon, a place to grab a drink with friends or just stroll for blocks without traffic. The Riverwalk downtown, of course, is the shining example.

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