As WBEZ settles into its spanking new home on Navy Pier, with a press conference next week featuring Mayor Daley, WBEZ watchers are batting around two theories about the public radio station’s future:
No one doubts that the news and jazz station needed to update its home. “WBEZ is one step above a homeless shelter as a radio facility,” says one station insider. Not surprising, considering its 47-year history as a creature of the Chicago Board of Education. When the school board cut the station loose five years ago it hadn’t invested in new equipment for the broadcast studios at 105 W. Adams since 1952. The news department still had rotary phones.
So the newly independent station’s fledgling board of directors, the WBEZ Alliance Board, made acquiring a new home its first priority. Eventually it decided to erect a $7.6 million building at Navy Pier. Station manager Torey Malatia cites two main reasons for the move: to increase and improve local programming production and to distribute programs nationally.
WBEZ’s deal at Navy Pier includes a 99-year rent-free lease, which officials say will save it enough money to build a 24,000-square-foot facility, essentially the third floor of a building just north of the Ferris wheel. WBEZ’s portion of the building also includes a small ground-floor lobby that’s open to the public, featuring a fishbowl studio. The station pays no common-area charges in exchange for making promotional announcements for Navy Pier. And station officials emphasize that they won’t have to pay real estate taxes because they’re on the pier.
The board considered 40 to 80 other properties, depending on who’s estimating. Older properties were problematic, says House, and they were as expensive as new ones. He says that with leases “what we found was you pay now or you pay later, but you always pay.” Ken Davis was also on the committee, and he agrees that in every case lease arrangements were “unbelievably expensive,” though some landlords offered one or two years of free rent and up to $750,000 toward construction costs.
So could WBEZ have found more economical lodgings? It’s true that downtown leases can include real estate taxes that run up to 25 percent, say Ron Ruby, a vice president at Habitat Company, and Edwin Mills, professor of real estate at Northwestern’s Kellogg Graduate School of Management. But they both thought the figure was high. Ruby says rates vary considerably and 25 percent would be high even for a Class A building. House says WBEZ looked at Class B buildings and didn’t even consider Class A ones.
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WTTW produces talk shows from its campus, renting studios to such programs as the Danny Bonaduce show, Danny! Four nights a week it produces John Callaway’s half-hour Chicago Tonight, which usually has several guests a night. V.J. McLeer, Chicago Tonight’s executive producer, says it was hard getting guests to make the trip only for the first couple of years. “But really it hasn’t been a problem for us. I can’t remember a time that was the deciding factor on whether a guest was on. I suppose it’s probably been a discussion point once or twice with national presidential candidates or something, but I don’t think it ever kept anyone off the show.”
