A Chicago Hospital Flatlines
Will city and county leaders raze or resuscitate the 1914 Beaux-Arts landmark?
By Salvatore Deluca | Online Only | July 18, 2003
Cook County Hospital, Chicago
Credit: Tomasz Szymanski, Landmarks Preservation Council of Illinois
Last month, the 1914 Cook County Hospital, often called Chicago's Statue of Liberty for its reputation for compassionate care for the poor, appeared ready to be razed by the county without a second opinion.
But after several Chicago Tribune editorials encouraged reuse of the 625,000-square-foot Beaux-Arts icon two miles west of the downtown Loop, the county commission's majority, which until then was implacably bent on demolition, voted unanimously to hear developers' renovation ideas at a September hearing.
Known simply as "County" to those who worked and were treated there until it closed last year, the eight-story structure with an ornate terra-cotta facade, baroque cartouches, granite brickwork, classical moldings and pediments, limestone trim, three-story Ionic columns, and cherubs, rams, and lions inspired the setting for NBC's hit series "ER," and appeared in the 1993 film "The Fugitive," starring Harrison Ford.
The Landmarks Preservation Council of Illinois named County one of the state's 10 most endangered historic places this year.
Credit: Tomasz Szymanski, LPCI
Once the nation's largest public hospital and surrounded by poor neighborhoods, Cook County Hospital now stands conspicuously in the middle of the 560-acre Illinois Medical District campus of gleaming medical research laboratories, four hospitals, and two universities.
Among the first to train black physicians, the hospital opened the nation's first trauma unit and was a pioneer in AIDS research, burn treatment, blood banking, laboratory work, and diagnosis of sickle-cell anemia. At its core, though, County has been a beacon to the city's poor immigrants and indigent people, who received treatment there despite their inability to pay for it.
"This is a people's palace," says Blair Kamin, the Chicago Tribune's Pulitzer-Prize-winning architecture critic. "It's a building that communicated, architecturally, that caring for the poorest, neediest members of society was a priority, and that it should not be carried out in some institutional warehouse of a building."
At a July 23 meeting, engineers will present the county's case for demolition, and developers will be able to walk through the building. The commissioners will make a final decision in September, after hearing developers' pitches.
"We all realize there's an intrinsic value [to the hospital], that people were born there, that people love it, but what is the cost-benefit of the place? That is the question nobody can answer," says Commissioner Jerry Butler, a leading demolition proponent.
The city of Chicago has deferred the verdict on the hospital's fate to Cook County, which lies within city limits. Pete Scales, spokesman for the city's department of planning and development, says the hospital is eligible for landmark protection, but because Cook County owns it, the city has decided to keep its distance.
Some believe the city, and specifically Mayor Richard M. Daley, wields near-absolute power over what gets demolished and built in Chicago.
"I'm not saying the mayor is an evil guy and has wrecked the city. He's done some good things," says Michael Moran, vice president of Preservation Chicago. "[But] the fate of this building is held jointly by the city and county governments. The time has come for the Daley administration to stop pushing this off as a Cook County issue."
Chicagoan Studs Terkel supported County at a rally
Credit: Bill Fischer, Preservation Chicago
Despite championing several high-profile downtown preservation efforts and winning a 2000 National Trust award for achievement in pubic policy, Daley has taken criticism lately for what preservationists see as a heavy-handed approach to urban planning.
Eight years ago, the city of Chicago completed a 12-year, $1.2 million survey of its buildings. Evaluators walked the streets, assigning color codes to more than 17,000 banks, theaters, row houses, warehouses, apartment buildings, department stores, churches, and taverns based on each structure's level of architectural or historical significance.
Yet in a Chicago Tribune investigation published in January, reporters who had visited hundreds of properties on the list discovered that 200 of them were gone—in 164 instances, with city approval. All but nine of these demolition permits were issued since Daley took office in the late 1980s. In April, the Tribune discovered that another 500 buildings on the list had been razed. "The new front line is not downtown," says Kamin, who co-authored the article. "In the neighborhoods, it's still laissez-faire."
In March, Daley authorized the destruction of the runway at the popular Meigs Field, a small downtown airport near Lake Michigan. Weeks later, the 1927 Chicago Mercantile Exchange building, owned by the wealthy Crown Family, also went down despite public outcry.
County lacks air conditioning, private bathrooms, and individual telephones for patients. It's also loaded with asbestos, lead, and mercury, which, regardless of County's fate, will have to be removed.
Preservationists say that instead of spending $30 million for an environmental cleanup and demolition, the city should eliminate the toxins, at a much smaller cost to taxpayers, and then turn the building over to a developer, who can use historic-tax credits to renovate it. "Here's an opportunity to save $18 million in demolition [and gain] $20 million in tax credits," says Commissioner Larry Suffredin, who sponsored the resolution to investigate reuse.
When the county sought the building permit in 1994 for the new $626 million John H. Stroger Jr. Hospital of Cook County, named after the current board president, an agreement stipulated demolition of the old structure to satisfy an open-space requirement around the new one, located nearby.
"This has been planned for nearly 10 years," says Caryn Stancik, a Stroger spokeswoman. "It was always part of the plan to demolish the existing structure. We aren't in the development business; we are in the healthcare business. Somebody could bring forward a plan, but don't put the onus on us. We can't hold this thing hostage until people get their act together."
Cook County Hospital occupies two city blocks.
Credit: Preservation Chicago
Because of zoning laws, it's unlikely that the hospital would be converted to housing, but a health clinic, assisted living, medical offices, stores, a pharmacy, or dormitory-style housing for doctors, nurses, students, and parents of sick children are all possibilities.
So far, two Chicago developers have expressed interest in renovating County, including Hal Lichterman, owner of Kenard Corp., which converted two south-side hospitals, Cabrini and Osteopathic, into condominiums and townhouses. "I have developed two hospital buildings that were old and in bad shape," Lichterman says. "[The county] should allow a developer to go through the building and say what could be done."
The other developer, Ron Shipka Sr., owner of the Enterprise Companies, has completed numerous adaptive-use projects throughout the city and says his interest in redeveloping County depends entirely on economics. "As my dad taught me long ago, 'You can't fall in love with the bricks and sticks; you're gonna get hurt.' There has to be a market there," Shipka says.
David Garrard Lowe, author of the 1993 book Lost Chicago, says it's difficult to put a price on something that not only tells people where they are, but also reminds them who they were.
"So many important buildings have been lost on the West Side," Lowe says. "Without any landmarks out there on the prairie, it's like being in Alaska on the tundra, not knowing where you're going."
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