As Mayor Richard M. Daley prepares to leave office next Monday, I have a confession to make: I'm going to miss him. Some of Daley's mega-projects, like the Klingon meets Parthenon mismatch that is the renovation of Soldier Field, are permanent scars. Others, like Millennium Park, are sheer triumphs.
But whether you hated or loved what Daley was doing, this much never changed: He was always doing something. An "idea a minute" guy, the billionaire Lester Crown called him the other day. The industrial-age metaphor of the dynamo fails to capture the postindustrial essence of a leader who shrewdly realized that he was governing a very different city than his father, the late Mayor Richard J. Daley.
Daley had longevity and he had luck. His record-setting 22 years in office, one more than his father, allowed him to experiment and to consolidate the power that led to dramatic changes to the cityscape. Like his father, he had the good fortune to govern during good economic times. He rode that wave to strengthen the city's downtown, improve the city's infrastructure and make Chicago work.
But it did not work for everyone. The city actually lost population during the last decade, the only one of America's 10 largest cities to do so. While Chicago's burnished downtown confirms its status as a world city, other parts of the city are little different from the urban nightmare of Detroit. The blooming tulips on North Michigan Avenue have not stanched the bleeding in Englewood, a South Side neighborhood where more than 9,500 people, a quarter of its population, have left in the past ten years.
Historians will have the ultimate say about his complex legacy. Here is my assessment, based on nearly 20 years of covering the mayor.
SHINING MOMENTS: •Millennium Park — When Daley looked down on the ugly commuter railroad tracks in the northwest corner of Grant Park from the high-rise office of his dentist in 1997, the wheels for what would become his greatest design triumph started turning.
By placing the world's largest green roof over the tracks, the park created a postindustrial playground of contemporary architecture and sculpture, including Anish Kapoor's iconic "Cloud Gate," aka "The Bean." Despite its cost overruns and delays — it opened in 2004, four years behind schedule — Millennium Park became a sparkling example of how big cities get big things done.
•The Museum Campus — It was one of Daley's predecessors, Jane Byrne, who floated the idea of forming an uninterrupted, pedestrian-friendly green space for Chicago's three natural sciences museums. But it was Daley who actually carried out the heroic urban planning act of shifting northbound lanes of Lake Shore Drive west of Soldier Field, creating a vast greensward between the Field Museum and the Shedd Aquarium.
The 1998 opening of the Museum Campus taught a broader lesson: If we want to move highways to create more humane cityscapes, we possess both the ability and the artistry to do so.
•The Greening of Chicago — Early in his tenure, Daley was a kind of Martha Stewart, prettying up the cityscape with trees and flowers. But he grew beyond being a mere beautifier and became a leading advocate of greening cities to combat global warming. According to city officials, he oversaw the planting of more than 600,000 trees, the construction of more than 85 miles of landscaped medians and the building of more than 7 million square feet — more than any other city in America — of planted roofs.
Admittedly, Daley's recycling program was a flop and his green roof and green alley programs remain in their infancy. But his leadership on environmental issues was visionary.
•Upgrading Infrastructure — Daley didn't just build roads and bridges. He built infrastructure that sought to uplift its surroundings.
From the 1996 revamp of State Street, which turned a cold and colorless bus mall into a pedestrian-friendly streetscape, to the 2002 rebuilding of Wacker Drive, which tweaked the road's configuration to make way for new parkland and a river walk, Daley's transportation projects reminded us that a road or a bridge should be more than a passageway.
•Saving Landmarks — Daley's leadership in one historic preservation crisis was exemplary. In 1996, after aldermen stripped 29 buildings and historic districts, including Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's 860-880 North Lake Shore Drive apartments, of temporary landmark status, Daley pushed the City Council to safeguard 28 of the threatened sites. Subsequently, the Cook County Board enacted a package of property-tax breaks for owners of landmark buildings.
These acts represented a bold departure from the infamous destruction of the Adler & Sullivan-designed Chicago Stock Exchange Building during the tenure of his father.