George Lucas has given up on plans to build the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art – which would feature Andy Warhol, N.C. Wyeth and other artists from his $1 billion personal collection – in Chicago, but an architect is making a last-ditch Hail Mary to bring it to the former U.S. Steel South Works site.
New York City-based Michael Sorkin envisions a new museum campus on the site on Chicago's far South Side where U.S. Steel made metal for more than a century. He pleaded his case in an open letter to George Lucas and Mellody Hobson, urging them to "Come back to Chicago!"
"I’m writing urgently with a suggestion for another location that could solve many problems for both you and for the City of Chicago, yielding a far superior result," Sorkin wrote. "It's the 600 acres formerly occupied by U.S. Steel, jutting magnificently into the lake, engaging panoramic views to the Loop, bounded by Lake Shore Drive, and served by Metra. More, it is completely clear and ready to build. No need to tear down a huge building, no need to back away from the lake, no need to take park land, no need to cram into an overcrowded architectural zoo!"
The letter was first sent to the commercial real estate blog Chicago Curbed.
A plan by McCaffery Interests to build a city-within-a-city development on the site fell apart in March. Sorkin, president of the Terreform Center for Advanced Urban Research, said that was "divine serendipity" and U.S. Steel was "doubtless eager to be rid of the place."
A U.S. Steel spokeswoman has said the company is looking at options for the property near the mouth of the Calumet River, which has sat vacant since the closed in 1992.
Sorkin suggested the city of Chicago could acquire the northern portion of the site from the Pittsburgh-based steelmaker and expand its park system there, including by building "a great South Side Chicago Community Art Park." He envisions a fleet of Millennium Ferries – boats decked out to look the the Millennium Falcon in the "Star Wars" films – that would bring people from the Lucas Museum to the Museum Campus, Millennium Park, Navy Pier and other attractions.
Other institutions could cluster around the museum, including a lakeside amphitheater, a larger South Shore Cultural Center, a railway museum, an all-weather amusement park, and The Mellody Hobson Institute of Environmental Research and Technology, according to Sorkin.
"You build your project according to its original design," he wrote in his plea directed at Lucas. "It will look so much better here, offer excellent access to an enlarged constituency of visitors—coming from north, south, and west—and do so much more good."
Sorkin said he admired the wish Lucas and Hobson "have expressed to make your museum extremely accessible, especially to those communities who have been so ignored by traditional cultural institutions."
"By building your project on this waiting site in South Chicago you will dramatically assert this principle of inclusion in the strongest terms and offer this neglected part of the city tremendous dignity and the opportunity to create its own narratives," he wrote.