September 12, 2006

To:
International Olympic Committee
Chateau de Vidy
1007 Lausanne Switzerland

United States Olympic Committee
1 Olympic Plaza
Colorado Springs, Colorado 80909

Dear Sirs/Madams:

Unless you make your own special effort to assess the
site at Roosevelt Road and the river, easily the best
stadium site in the city of Chicago, actually the only
practical one, it will pass under your radar. Unless
you open a public discussion of it you might easily
miss the best site anywhere else as well.

It is over sixty, unobstructed acres of abandoned
railroad yard, unused for over three decades, for
which recent development plans have recently collapsed
amidst some scandal. Less than a mile walk from
downtown public transportation and parking, it is also
in the midst of near-by expressways. No less than the
Chicago Tribune, April 25, 1986, called it the most
attractive, most accessible stadium site in the city,
which it definitely is. It has been highly rated by
prominent civic bodies, even the City itself. Enclosed
are ratings for stadium use from then, qualified upon
infrastructure that has since largely been built. The
site is easily viewed from the recently reconstructed
Roosevelt Road bridge, which itself creates a
ready-made walkway to the fifteen or so vacant acres
to the north, and which has a magnificent view of the
downtown.

Immdeiately to their north is River City, an
avant-garde but failed and somewhat drropy mid-rise
housing complex which might finally find itself as an
Olympic village. (And just beyond is the still vacant
site of Grand Central Station, the architectural gem
of Chicago train stations, which I would like to see
reconstructed.)

A serious Olympic proposal would also reopen near-by
Meigs Field. If there is some island of sanity in the
airline industry, it might even be served by 2016 with
the Lockheed Electra, the original airliner version of
the veteran navy patrol plane, almost as fast as jets
in the air but which can serve small airports with
little noise and using much less fuel. A serious
proposal would also offer to install a promising
monorail technology to connect the two and other
points in the city.

The current Olympic proposal by the City of Chicago is
to build a temporary stadium in parking lots just
south of the new $606 million but grossly mislocated
and grossly inadequate football stadium on the
lakefront. The site is considerably less accessible
and more congested, in the midst of heavily used
lakefront museums and exhibition halls. It has only
one major road and one transit line near-by, and that
a barrier to the west. About twice as far from the
downtown as Roosevelt and the river, with precious new
upscale downtown neighborhoods just across the
multi-track electric commuter line, pedestrian access
is poor, to say the least.

The real reason for passing over the incomparably
superior site is in those same ratings, that it has
long been saved for downtown housing. This is also the
real reason for closing Meigs, as shown in the 1973
Chicago 21 Plan. Questioning such long-standing
ambitions is simply not done in local circles, even
among the loyal, enervated opposition. See Cohen and
Taylor, American Pharaoh, index entries under "Central
Area Committee," as to how this town has been run for
the past fifty years.

The City originally proposed a stadium on the
Sportsmans Park horsetrack site about three miles
north of Midway Field and an Olympic village on the
abandoned U. S. Steel site on the south lakefront.
These sites are not far from the route of the long
proposed Mid-City transit route, some 20 miles along
Cicero and 75th, the former Crosstown Expressway route
and lately proposed for a truck by-pass. It is only
ten years until the 2016 Olympics, but it might be
possible to install a heavy-duty monorail on that same
route, one capable of hauling trucks as well as
passenger vehicles. This particular if little known
technology could allow mile-a-minute express runs as
well, thus making possible a scattered site Olympics
with high-speed links among the three sites, no more
than fifteen minutes from each other.

Unfortunately the City of Chicago stunted its own
industrial development for decades, instead insulating
the downtown from poor neighborhoods. Indeed, a fall
1968 Daedulus article by the long dreaded planner
Anthony Downs decried "enrichment" strategies that
would attract poor migrants and adovcated the
"integrated core" strategy by which downtown housing
would expand and eventually push everything else out
of the city.

Unfortunately, too, there are precious few people in
this precariously toddlin' town willing and able to
discuss such things and they are convinced no one else
cares. Too, Second City syndrome is still in full
effect here; no one pays any attention unless you make
a splash somewhere else. That an Olympic bid could
advance this far with these issues unmentioned in
public shows the paralysis of the civic culture. It
will take an out-of-town influence to get things off
dead-center. Otherwise downtown housing could easily
push out the Olympics too.

The current situation is more fluid than usual because
of the upcoming municipal election in February. While
intervention in the election would be no proper role
of yours, you still have a duty to secure the best
possible site. Thus you have a vital, proper interest
in land use and transportation policies, inevitable
political implications notwithstanding. Thus you have
a most proper interest, even a public responsibility,
in opening a full discussion of these matters,
election or not.

You do have to toot your own horn, don't you? Who else
will? Is the Missouri mule ready for reform yet? Who
knows, but the 2 x 4 will have to come from out of
town.

William F. Wendt, Jr. -