Access to Chicago’s lakefront Museum Campus has been dreadful forever. Isolated by the no-man’s-land of Lake Shore Drive, the campus’s three great museums—the Adler, the Field, and the Shedd—sit apart from the city, remote as castles across a dangerous moat. It’s an inconvenience we’ve tolerated, like the weather. It hasn’t been the city’s most pressing problem.
This caught the attention of Friends of the Parks, which has opposed putting the Lucas Museum on the campus. FOTP posted news of the meeting on its website and urged its supporters to take advantage of this opportunity to speak up for keeping the lakefront open, clear, and free.
Especially since it had figured prominently in the official presentations. Park District chief of staff Gia Biagi noted that it has entered into a “memorandum of understanding with the Lucas Museum,” expects to see the design concept for the building “before the end of the year,” and anticipates opening the museum in 2018. Chicago Department of Transportation planning director Jeffrey Sriver said Lucas Museum representatives have been part of its Museum Campus discussions, and Grant Park Conservancy president Bob O’Neill touted the Lucas Museum as “a shot in the arm of hundreds of millions of dollars.”
So FOTP is rattling the only saber it has—the threat of taking the issue to court. “We challenge all the involved parties to look at alternative sites, and we’re getting very close to finalizing our legal strategy if they don’t,” Francis says. That could be expensive, but Francis says they “already have a majority of the costs covered. We believe that this issue is worth the effort, given its impact on the legacy of our city and its lakefront.”
