A Little More Digging

What can I say? There’s close to twenty inches of snow on the ground, and I was bored. So, I went on eBay last week and bought that wire photo of White Sox owner Arthur Allyn I’d seen. It shows a very serious Allyn, with crew cut, pointing to what the caption calls a “sketch of a new proposed $50 million sports complex to house professional sports in Chicago. Allyn said the complex will include a baseball park, an enclosed area for basketball and hockey, a football and soccer stadium and will be located on the south side of Chicago’s Loop.” You don’t say. The thing is, I don’t recall any of it. The proposed dome over Comiskey Park, yes, but not this, and now I know why—the back of the photo is stamped June 20, 1967. At the time, I was with my parents in Montreal for Expo 67, the World’s Fair that year, which is just as well. If I’d known about this, it’d probably given me a case of juvenile hypertension. McCormick Place, the large convention center on Chicago’s south lakefront, had gone up in flames that January, so Allyn’s proposal could have been intended for the same site (about a mile down from Soldier Field). In today’s dollars, Allyn was proposing a project costing somewhere between $387.4-$393.7 million. And what did it look like? From what I can tell, three separate venues rested atop a massive, one-story base that stretched for blocks, so big it had room enough for parking on the roof. The football facility looks a little like Arrowhead Stadium; the indoor arena could pass for the Forum in Los Angeles; and the ballpark has elements of Comiskey to it, that is, if a modernist architect with a gun to his/her head were told to come up with a ballpark design, or else. I truly consider Allyn and his brother John to be the unsung heroes among Chicago sports’ owners. They could’ve made like the football Bidwells and left for greener pastures. Instead, what Arthur Allyn wanted was a different city address, away from the perception of crime and decay that people connected with the neighborhood around Comiskey Park. That that same area is now gentrifying makes for more than a little irony, at least to me. There’s no way Allyn was going to come up with close to $400 million all on his own. Did he want public involvement? Was there a consortium of investors willing to go in with him? Which architectural firm did he have in mind? Those and related questions will require a trip to Harold Washington Library downtown. After all, curious minds want to know.