The Daily Parker

Politics, Weather, Photography, and the Dog

Neither spire nor park shall be

What was to be the tallest building in the hemisphere, the Chicago Spire, now can't seem even to become a proper park because of the bickering:

When plans for the twisting downtown skyscraper known as the Spire died, so, too, did the project to turn a weedy nearby lakefront lot into a park named for Chicago's first non-native settler, Jean Baptiste Pointe DuSable.

And there doesn't seem to be a timeline for developing the 3-acre stretch on the north side of the Chicago River where it feeds into Lake Michigan into DuSable Park, as has been the plan for nearly three decades. The land has been designated as DuSable Park but is waiting to be developed into green space, a Chicago Park District spokeswoman said.

For years the park was linked to the Spire development, which would have used the park site as a temporary construction staging area while the skyscraper was built. But neither the Spire nor the park got developed.

Ah, well. Chicago was great once, and will be again. Just not yet.

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