“Capital attracting talent was 20 years ago,” Donna Lasinski told us on a recent visit. “Now talent attracts capital.”
Why did that change? “People now want to live where they want to live and they’re willing to prioritize quality of life over everything else,” said Lasinski, the former Democratic minority leader in the Michigan House of Representatives who now has switched her attention to the health of downtown Chicago where she long has lived part time.
More specifically, she is the new president of the Cultural Stadium, an ambitious umbrella organization launched by Broadway in Chicago President Lou Raizin and designed to make downtown Chicago (broadly defined) more livable — and thus more likely to attract the talent that attracts the capital.
“Experiences are now the nexus of community for young people,” Lasinski told us. “We need a radically livable, radically walkable downtown. That is what will attract and retain talent.”
We’ve written about the Cultural Stadium before. Although it takes some explaining, the name was designed to make the argument that urban cultural projects, if considered collectively, can have a greater economic impact than the sports facilities that capture most of the media oxygen. But we’re back on this topic because we got an advance look at how a lot more flesh now has been put on its aspirational, nonprofit bones.
That’s thanks to a $500,000 grant from the state to formalize Culture Stadium operations and some new philanthropic monies from from Abby O’Neil, a founding board member and former chair of the Harris Theater for Music and Dance, and Carroll Joynes, co-founder of the University of Chicago’s Cultural Policy Center (CPC).
Several so-called “pilot projects” are now, or soon will be, visible in the Loop.
One is PARKing, a beautification initiative for the Loop’s many parking garages, as manifest in a huge, just-completed mural of koi fish by Ryan Tova Katz, installed with lots of weatherproofing on a concrete rooftop at 181 N. Clark St. More rooftop murals are to follow, we’re told, thanks to an agreement with InterPark. This fun, completed one will be visible from many of Google’s new offices once its employees move into the Thompson Center at 100 W. Randolph St. Better than staring out onto a gray void all day.
Another is “Midblock,” a series of pilot “activations” slated for next spring that will turn some of the prosaic alleys and service corridors that pockmark the Loop into more interested passageways.
One coming as soon as March of next year is the transformation of the alley just south of the Chicago Theatre into Poetry Way, a celebration of Chicago poets involving the well-resourced Poetry Foundation (its president and CEO, former cultural commissioner Michelle Boone, is on the board of the Cultural Stadium) and the Joffrey Ballet (the outgoing CEO Greg Cameron is on the Cultural Stadium board, too, and so is Joe Ferguson, President of the Civic Federation). The idea is that passersby will be able to interact with, maybe by walking on, lines from iconic Illinois poets like Carl Sandburg. Other poetry will be visible on the exterior of the Walgreens store at the corner of State and Randolph Streets.
You’ll be able to ponder the 1914 poem “Chicago,” which coined the phrase “City of Big Shoulders” and, yet more interestingly came up with this descriptor of our town: “Flinging magnetic curses amid the toil of piling job on job, here is a tall bold slugger set vivid against the little soft cities.”
Roger that, Carl.
Other alleys are earmarked for the same treatment, including the old passageway behind the Nederlander Theatre, set to be dedicated to Chicago theater and coming replete with a store window-like option for karaoke. Another alley is set to become a short history trail exploring Chicago’s long relationship with its trade unions.
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These kinds of activations also extend to the outside face of buildings: The Lyric Opera of Chicago has plans to project some performances onto its massive blank exterior visible from the Chicago River. And, of course, lighting up the Merchandise Mart already is underway to some degree.
A third pilot, dubbed “The Community,” aims to take vacant office spaces downtown and redeploy them as workspaces for local artists; already, a new, low-cost space has been found for the International Latino Cultural Center in a property owned by Marc Realty. Another plan is for the Cultural Stadium, a nonprofit itself, to offer pro-bono help to nonprofit downtown cultural organizations for their back-office operations.
Other more complicated plans in the works outlined by Raizin include the creation of a year-round Loop marketplace and dining street akin to Restaurant Row in New York City and an initiative (known as The Trove) to turn the Museum District’s storage overflows into warehouse-style cultural attractions in their own right, given the city’s museums only have room to display a small percentage of their holdings at any given moment.
Eyes also are on the grim reaches of Lower Wacker Drive as a potential site of cultural activity beyond towing and also of public art. Why not?
It’s easy, of course, to scoff at this kind of thing as soft answers to Chicago’s very hard problems (money, guns, the things we write about all the time). And, indeed, many of those involved in this effort have a self-interest: Broadway in Chicago, which owns and/or operates in four big theaters in the Loop, for example, has a vested interest in building a more pleasant environment immediately beyond its doors. But then that would apply to any Loop cultural organization or any Loop business. And to any Loop resident for that matter.
Many of these kinds of projects are common in European cities already. They’re not just common, but often definitional.
There can be no question the Loop has suffered from two mayoral administrations that largely have emphasized neighborhoods at the expense of the downtown business district. The Cultural Stadium crew don’t want to get into that toxic political fight, of course, but we can say, yet again, that without a pulsing center city, Chicago will never get back its moxie or reestablish its reputation as a must-see destination for international tourists, yes, but yet more importantly as a magnet for new college graduates who want to live in a city filled with bespoke experiences for them to enjoy. New college graduates who might then build thriving companies here, employing folks from our neighborhoods.
The theory behind the Cultural Stadium is that if you focus on that first, then the employers of said graduates will be more likely to open offices where the talent they need already exists. One early example of the wisdom of this theory was the move of the McDonalds Corp. to the West Loop from the Western suburbs, a decision made in pre-pandemic 2016.
At the time, McDonald’s cited a major reason for the move was a desire to locate closer to where the workers it wanted for its headquarters preferred to live.
Would McDonald’s still make that choice today? Hard to say.
But the Loop has to fight on to get back to “yes,” and the Cultural Stadium is a way of helping the city’s leaders understand that the Loop cannot be reinvented as a great place to live and work by one project, stadium or otherwise.
It will make many small, street-level initiatives to bring it back to life. And we are behind that all the way.
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