What Chicago can teach us

By Harris Steinberg

Travel can teach you more about your hometown than it does about the places you visit, as I learned during a recent trip to Chicago.

My graduate students in planning at Penn are studying the potential for development above the rail yards at 30th Street Station, and we visited other cities to learn how they've handled similar challenges. We've been to New York, which is working on an impressive plan to create a 26-acre platform for new development over the Long Island Rail Road tracks on the West Side. And we went to Chicago to visit Millennium Park, a public space built over active rail lines.

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Chicago is a gangly, gnarled, energetic place. It's no wonder scenes from

The Dark Knight

were shot there. Buildings are block-size huge, and the "L" (like our El) clamors through the dense Loop on roller coaster-like tracks, snaking past architectural icons such as Louis Sullivan's Auditorium Building.

The streets are buzzing with activity at all times. As a friend of mine said, Sunday on the Magnificent Mile is like Easter on Fifth Avenue.

They do big things in Chicago. Indeed, the famous planner Daniel Burnham, whose name and plan are synonymous with the city, is reputed to have admonished, "Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men's blood. ..." This, in a nutshell, is Chicago - brazen and bumptious.

And yet I saw glimmers of Philadelphia during our visit there. Both places are struggling to define the postindustrial city. Both cope with a long history of socioeconomic stratification and racial division. Vast swaths of each city are given over to the decimated remains of once-vibrant communities. And Chicago's aldermanic prerogative is the same scourge as our councilmanic prerogative, allowing politics to override sound planning practices throughout our neighborhoods.

Both Chicago and Philadelphia grew at a fevered pitch in the late 19th century but screeched to a halt in the Depression. Both emerged as beacons of postwar design and planning. And both are products of waves of immigration, the railroads, mass transportation, industry, and fine early-20th-century architecture.

Burnham's 1909 Plan of Chicago, most of it unrealized, has profoundly affected several generations of Chicagoans who take planning very, very seriously. (There are court cases brought by Montgomery Ward himself ensuring that no permanent buildings can be constructed in Grant Park.) Meanwhile, as Burnham was shaping Chicago, the great French American architect Paul Cret, who was every bit Burnham's equal, was redefining our metropolis.

Cret literally tamed the industrial city with elegance and élan, leaving his mark on everything from the Benjamin Franklin Parkway to the Benjamin Franklin Bridge - powerhouses, schools, banks, and industrial buildings. His Rittenhouse Square is the epitome of Philadelphia urbanism, with a quiet elegance unmatched anywhere in the country.

Which brings me back to Chicago and Millennium Park. Opened with brio in 2004, the park is a mélange of eye-popping public art, "starchitect" theater, and incongruous classical colonnades. It's a collection of donor projects - the CEO of Sara Lee raised $220 million in private funds for the project, nearly half of its cost - that don't add up to a coherent urban design.

And it is wildly popular.

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And therein lies a lesson for self-effacing Philadelphia. While Chicago lost 200,000 people in the last census, we grew slightly, adding 8,500 souls and retaining our position as the nation's fifth-largest city. We do have things to crow about. We're a city on the move again.

And I'll take Cret over Burnham any day. Nobody can top his Rodin Museum - from gates to garden, a hands-down winner. And while Burnham was planning grand diagonals that would never be realized in Chicago, Cret was laying down one very elegant civic boulevard in Philadelphia.

What we learned from Chicago is that civic pride mixed with great programming, along with a large dose of philanthropic largesse, can create very well-used public spaces - regardless of the quality of their design.

Philadelphia's cityscape has design in spades compared with Chicago's. What we need is a heaping helping of that city's sense of self.