An Olympic stadium's lasting legacy

What's the impact of the proposed Olympic stadium?

06/17/2009 10:00 PM

By TYLER BLUE
Medill News Service

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Washington Park would host the 2016 Olympic Stadium.
Chicago 2016



Source: Chicago 2016
Bethany Vogelsberg/Staff

Both men love baseball. Both men love Washington Park. They work tirelessly in the community, using their favorite sport as a means to keep the youth of the neighborhood off the streets and out of trouble.

But there is one issue Billy Bean and Leroy Bowers couldn’t disagree on more: Chicago’s bid to host the 2016 Summer Olympics, an effort that has major implications for the historic park.

Bean, 67, wants nothing to do with the Olympics.

Bowers, vice president of the Washington Park Advisory Council, welcomes the chance for his community to shine.

“The sacrifice that we’re going to give up for a short period of time is well worth the world camaraderie and solidarity,” Bowers said.

That sacrifice is the very thing keeping Bean from supporting the games. If the International Olympic Committee picks Chicago, an 80,000-seat stadium would be built on land in the park where his beloved baseball fields now sit.

“See all this space here?” Bean said, pointing to the 100-acre open field in the northern portion of the park. “Kids can come out here and do anything. When the Olympics get here, then they can’t do it. Where are they going to go?”

Olympic stadiums tend to generate debate in every city vying for the games. They cost hundreds of millions of dollars to construct, and it’s not always easy to find use for them after the closing ceremonies.

Chicago’s proposal is unique. It plans to collapse the stadium into a 2,500-to 3,500-seat facility when the games finish. And though the idea of reducing the size of stadiums is far from new, nothing to this extent has been tried.

“I think it’s more dramatic than anything we’ve seen before,” said Jon Niemuth, an architect for the firm Ellerbe Becket, which designed Atlanta’s 1996 Olympic Stadium.

While proponents call Chicago’s plan a creative solution to a potentially huge stumbling block for hosting the games, others question whether the idea will take off. The Olympics no doubt raises a city’s global profile, but it comes at a price. In the case of the games, that price is primarily construction.

Chicago will find out if it has to pay that price come Oct. 2, when the IOC makes its choice for the 2016 games.

“Clearly one of the big problems with the Olympics is that you need a lot of facilities,” said Neil deMause, author of the book Field of Schemes, which explores the public cost of building athletic venues. A New York columnist, deMause has testified before Congress on the issue of stadium financing.

More than a quarter of the $3.8 billion Chicago 2016, the nonprofit group responsible for putting together the city’s Olympic bid, has budgeted for the games will go toward stadium construction.

No venue costs more than the Olympic Stadium. Of the nearly $1 billion set aside for sport facilities, 40 percent goes to that one structure.

Sinking so much money for something that’s used for only about a month can give cities stadium-sized headaches once the Olympics have concluded.

“We’re just seeing cities that do some really substantial investments in these kinds of buildings,” said Ron Turner, an architect who also helped design Atlanta’s Olympic Stadium in the mid-90s. “After the games, all the money that was spent doesn’t really have a sustainable legacy that makes sense.”

Beijing, host of the most recent Olympics, serves as a cautionary tale. China had so much trouble booking events in their Olympic Stadium after last year’s event that they plan to convert it into a shopping center.

That’s what makes Chicago’s proposal intriguing: it eliminates the need to find tenants for such a large facility.

Arnold Randall, liaison between Chicago 2016 and those communities the Olympics would affect the most, said stadium construction would begin late in 2014 while its deconstruction would be complete approximately one year after the games. He stressed the tentativeness of those plans.

The concept of collapsible stadiums excites Jerry Anderson, an architect for the international firm Populous, which is currently overseeing the design of London’s 2012 Olympic venues.

London’s stadium will also be reduced, but not to the extent of Chicago’s.

“I think this is an excellent, excellent idea for the Olympics,” said Anderson, who also consulted with 2016’s bid committee. “The plan helps manage the cost of major stadiums and doesn’t leave white elephants.”

He added he’s confident Chicago won’t go over their nearly $400 million budget.

Spending that much on something that will last less than a year may not sound like the best use of money, especially in the current economic climate.

Chicago could build a permanent structure for not much more. According to Niemuth, the construction involved in making a temporary stadium of that stature is effectively the same as what it takes to make a lasting structure.

“The materials, the weights of steel, the systems are still holding the kinds of capacities or weights that a permanent building would be designed for,” he said.



If costs are nearly identical, what’s the point of spending so much on something so fleeting?

Quite simply: the enormous long term savings.

“The cost of maintaining those kinds of buildings is huge,” Turner said. “You just extrapolate those costs over how many years you’re going to maintain it, and it becomes a nightmare.”

But other factors beside cost make the idea of temporary stadiums desirable. Both the sustainability movement and the green movement play a role as well.

For one, deconstructed material can be repurposed or recycled. For example, parts of Atlanta’s Olympic Stadium, later reduced in size and converted to a ballpark for the city’s Major League Baseball team, went to a local school’s football facility.

A temporary structure also will help the environment.

“It’s not the construction of buildings that consumes energy or expands the carbon footprint,” said stadium designer Niemuth. “It’s the operations and the maintenance of that facility over its lifetime.”

Should Chicago get the bid, it will testify to the shifting priorities in today’s world.

“This would be the first time that the IOC has selected a city that has really looked at this from a sustainability standpoint,” Turner said.



Questions still remain as to whether temporary stadiums will become the Olympic norm.

Historically, the International Olympic Committee pushed host cities to develop a legacy after the games, according to Allen R. Sanderson, an economics professor at the University of Chicago who has written extensively about Chicago’s bid.

“I can’t quite figure out at the moment exactly what the permanent legacy would be for Chicago,” he said. “Because it’s not going to be a 2,500-seat amphitheater. Tourists aren’t going to come just to see that.”

For some Chicago residents, though, even that is too permanent.

It’s not the idea of an amphitheater, but its location — in the Harold Washington Common Ground of Washington Park — that has Erma Tranter, president of Friends of the Parks, pushing the bid committee to leave nothing of the stadium behind.

“You don’t build buildings in areas where there’s an open meadow, and that open meadow has served us well for 120 years,” she said.

Designed in 1871 by Frederick Law Olmsted, the visionary behind New York City’s Central Park, Washington Park is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Historian Victoria Ranney said any type of structure left in the common ground would violate Olmsted’s vision for the park.

Instead of an amphitheater, she said she’d rather see the city take over the General Richard L. Jones Illinois National Guard Armory, already located in Washington Park, and turn it into an indoor track and field facility.

“It should accomplish the goals of the IOC to have a new facility because we don’t have an indoor track and field facility now,” Ranney said.

The city is in talks with the state to acquire that property.

Regardless of the legacy or what people think about the issue, Chicago’s stadium proposal is one-of-a-kind and would surely change the landscape of Washington Park — and with it, the status of all the baseball leagues that play there.

“This park will never look like this again,” Bean said. “Never.”

Whether that’s good or bad remains to be seen.


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