Randy Mehrberg had to work late at the office New Year’s Eve. “It wasn’t my wife’s idea,” he says. As general counsel and lakefront director of the Chicago Park District, he was putting what he hoped were the finishing touches on an intricate three-way transaction among the Park District, the Lincoln Park Zoo, and the Chicago Academy of Sciences. If the deal goes through, each institution will get something it wants–and the south end of Lincoln Park will get even more people and more traffic.
If the triangular trade does go through it will cost tens of millions, yet the deal came about because of a $300,000 gap. For over a year the Park District had been anxious to turn the management of the city’s landmark free zoo over to the Lincoln Park Zoological Society. But last fall Randy Mehrberg’s contract negotiations with the society were stuck. “They said they had to have an operating subsidy of $5.5 million a year [from the Park District for the 30 years of the contract]. We didn’t want to go over $5.2 million. They had justified 5.5 for us, but 5.2 was our number.”
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
This was a momentous idea for several reasons. Two years ago the zoo got the OK to build a new central administration building–over the objections of park advocates who wanted no more encroachment on green space. “Our offices are literally all over the zoo and across the street [on Lincoln Park West],” says zoo vice president of operations Neal David. “It’s very difficult.” By December 31 a contractor had torn down the plant propagating houses that were on the site and broken ground–and suddenly Mehrberg was saying the zoo could have the money it needed if it would change plans midstream: stop the construction and move its offices into an existing building instead. “That was a very painful and nervous decision for them,” Mehrberg says. And that’s why the larger deal is on the fast track: if the Plan Commission doesn’t OK the academy’s new building, the zoo needs to be able to resume work on its own building.
In its 138-year history the Chicago Academy of Sciences has rarely had a home it considered adequate. At its founding in 1857 the academy was modeled closely–and ambitiously–on the Smithsonian Institution. But its two most charismatic early leaders, Richard Kennicott and William Stimpson, both died young, and its proudly fireproof headquarters at Wabash and Van Buren was reduced to ashes by the 1871 fire. In 1893 it accepted $75,000 from Matthew Laflin–a classic 19th-century Chicago entrepreneur involved in gunpowder, stockyards, resort development, and the Elgin Watch Company–to build its current home.
Although it has its own board of trustees, the academy–like the other eight “museums in the park”–is in many ways a creature of the Park District. Not only is the district its landlord, but the academy gets about one-third of its operating budget and about half of its capital needs from bonds floated by the Park District. In 1989 the academy’s board proposed adding on to the Laflin building, but the Park District suggested the North Shops site as an alternative and eventually agreed to vacate the buildings by June 30, 1991. (At the time, park advocates called the idea premature because the Lincoln Park framework plan was still being developed.) Yet when park maintenance crews didn’t leave North Shops as promised the academy couldn’t enforce the deal. “The date came and went,” recalls Heltne. “We kept talking, but there wasn’t a whole lot we could do. You don’t sue your landlord unless you want to move out.”
But the only people who acknowledge the difficulties the academy faces are outsiders or near-outsiders. “We feel bad about the position they’re in,” says Kathleen Dickhut of the Lincoln Park Steering Committee, a coalition of park and neighborhood groups. “They can hardly address anything but the immediate needs. We all acknowledge Paul Heltne’s in a tough spot.”
For the park and the neighborhood this deal is not the chance of the century that it is for the academy. It’s more of too much already: traffic and visitors. “There’s a lingering question in the minds of many,” says 43rd Ward alderman Charles Bernardini, “whether this is the right place to put this beautiful new building. Should it go on the south lakefront instead? Or in Garfield Park?” Under Bernardini’s auspices, the Wrightwood Neighbors, Lincoln Park Conservation Association, Lincoln Park Advisory Council, Lakeview Citizens Council, Friends of the Parks, Friends of Lincoln Park, and the 43rd Ward Traffic and Parking Committee have laid down several concerns they want met before they will go along. High on the list are public transit from El stations into Lincoln Park south of Diversey; some safer way for pedestrians to cross Fullerton between Stockton and Cannon; limitations on nearby parking lots; and lowering the profile of the new academy building.
