The development incorporates significant aspects of New Urbanist and sustainable planning guidelines by extending the city’s existing street grid and emphasizing smaller blocks, narrower streets and access to mass transit.
“I think this will be the new downtown for the South Side of Chicago,” said Philip Enquist, a principal at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill.
The plan also includes about 125 acres of new lakefront parkland as well as several smaller parks that are consistent with the architect Daniel Burnham’s bold Plan of Chicago of 1909, which called for expanding the city’s lakefront park system as part of a comprehensive regional approach to urban planning.
“South Works is the biggest missing piece in terms of completing Burnham’s vision” for the lakefront, said MarySue Barrett, the president of the
Metropolitan Planning Council, a nonprofit advocacy group in the Chicago region.
The site is vacant except for a small brick building at the entrance, which will become a marketing center, and several massive masonry walls along an old boat slip that bisects the property. One of the walls would be preserved as a reminder of the area’s industrial past.
“I love the walls,” Mr. Enquist said. “They look like they came from a different civilization.”
In many ways, they did.
South Works began in the early 1880s as a division of the North Chicago Rolling Mill and was absorbed into U.S. Steel in 1901. For most of the 20th century, South Works was the largest employer on the city’s South Side with upward of 30,000 workers.
Over the years, the plant produced the steel responsible for such structures as the Sears (now Willis) Tower, the John Hancock Center and the McCormick Place convention center.
In the 1970s, however, U.S. Steel began consolidating its Chicago-area steel-making activities at its plant in Gary, Ind., and in 1992 South Works closed. The closing left a huge void in the neighborhoods to the west and south, which were largely populated by the families of steelworkers.
“If you walk through the various neighborhoods, it is still possible to talk to residents who either worked there or whose fathers and grandfathers did,” said Sandi Jackson, the alderwoman for the Seventh Ward, which includes the northern part of the site. “They have fond memories of South Works and want to see something exciting happen on that site.”
The site required years of environmental remediation and was also subject to several competing visions for its future before the current plan began to take shape in the early 2000s.
Mr. McCaffery, who has developed mixed-use projects around the country, including the Market Common in Arlington, Va., said he planned to break ground on the first phase of the project in late 2012 after the completion of a new road along the western perimeter of the site. The road is an extension of U.S. 41, also known as Lake Shore Drive.
“The first step for this redevelopment was to realign U.S. 41 and make it more accessible for the site,” Ms. Raguso said. “We need to bring traffic down there.”
The first phase will include about 1,000 residential units, but the main focus will be 800,000 square feet of retail space. The cost, including the $98 million in new infrastructure, is about $397 million, a not inconsiderable sum in the current economy.
Mr. McCaffery, however, is sanguine about his prospects.
“I don’t have to find the money,” he said. “I have to find the guys who can find the money. We’re going to slice and dice the different phases. We need to engage a range of architects and developers.”
Mr. McCaffery said the decision to focus primarily on retail in the first phase was grounded in demographics. “We’re smelling, tasting and feeling pent-up demand for retail. I’m not going to kid anybody that we’re going to have a Tiffany’s down here, but it’s also not going to be pawn shops,” he said, referring to the poor economic conditions of much of the area. “We’ve already talked to a number of grocery stores, and not one has turned us down in terms of continued interest.”
Paul Vogel, a retail consultant here, said he thought the developers were on the right track. “There are few places in America today that are understored, but the South Side of Chicago is one of them,” Mr. Vogel said.
The decision also acknowledges that the city is overwhelmed with unsold condos and housing units left over from the housing bubble
“We currently have years and years of oversupply,” said James Kinney, the vice president for luxury sales at Baird & Warner real estate.
The long-term forecast may be brighter. A study by the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning predicted that the Chicago area would add 2.4 million residents over the next 30 years.
“The right time to build is when demand meshes with the availability of financing and resources,” Mr. McCaffery said. “What we have done is to prepare ourselves for the next right time. And I believe it will be sooner than many people think.”
