Status Update: Northwestern Memorial Hospital Outpatient Care Pavilion
Northwestern Memorial Hospital’s latest construction project is moving along swiftly. The Outpatient Care Pavilion (240 East Ontario Street) will be a 25-story medical and office building that’s roughly 30% parking. It is scheduled to be completed by the end of 2014. Like all new Northwestern projects, it has the two thing people living in Streeterville hate: Skywalks that suck the life out of what is supposed to be a pedestrian-friendly street grid, and excessive parking which exacerbates the area’s daily traffic jams.
I don’t think swiftly is the right description. What’s up with all the wooden guardrail? I thought steel was mandated by the GC?
I’m not sure why the skywalks are so problematic. They are used for patient transport (gurneys, wheelchairs). They also are great for keeping those who are sick out of the cold, and those who are slower moving, like small children and the elderly who are receiving treatments or visiting family, out of the way of busy cabbies and rush hour gridlock. And for staff who have to carry things or transport carts full of supplies from one building to another, they are a godsend. Otherwise carts would be competing with tourists for space on the sidewalk. These are a very practical solution, I think.
Skywalks are problematic for the very reasons stated in the article above — they remove people from the street, which destroys the vibrancy of a city.
You are correct that moving sick patients and supplies between buildings is best done in an enclosed space, but most patients don’t travel very far. And Northwestern has traditionally done what most other hospitals have done — moved patients and supplies through limited access employee-only tunnels, or via ambulance or shuttle or taxi.
To use your example of the cabbies — Cabbies don’t stay busy if they don’t have customers. And they don’t have customers if everyone is locked into a fortress in the sky.
But I think your viewpoint illustrates why so many people think Northwestern is a terrible neighbor. It is focused solely on itself and its internal workings, and considers itself to be independent (and somehow above) the needs of the neighborhood in which it sits. What Northwestern appears to want is to have its employees live in the suburbs, drive to Streeterville in shiny SUVs, park in private parking garages, do work in Northwestern buildings, lunching at Northwestern eateries, then getting back in their SUVs and hightailing back to suburbia at the end of the day.
What the neighborhood wants, and what is good for the city is if Northwestern’s employees lived and worked in the neighborhood, walked to their jobs, had lunch at local restaurants, shopped at local stores, and generally made themselves a part of the community.
Perhaps that’s how it was years ago — I don’t know. But today, it seems with every infrastructure improvement, Northwestern takes another step toward isolating itself from the neighborhood.
If it wasn’t for the tens of thousands of well-off customers who live in the area, I wouldn’t be surprised to see Northwestern pack up and move out, since its administration has such an obvious disdain for the neighborhood it inhabits.
One can make the argument that skywalks on a city-wide scale like Minneapolis (or even the Pedway system here in Chicago) choke off street level retail, but the NMH’s skywalks serve a healthcare-related purpose as previously mentioned. You can argue that the parking is for rich suburbanites in shiny SUVs, but I have to ask based on your description, what is more offensive the skywalks or the rich folk in their shiny SUVs? And the neighborhood isn’t suffering. The Corner Bakery is the busiest in Chicago, the restaurants along Ontario and Ohio streets are busy, and I don’t know how you feel about hospital food but if I worked there and had to eat it every day I would be pretty sick of it. I agree that having a vibrant street life is important and compared to Michigan Ave., Superior Street is rather dull, but I don’t see a problem with the skywalks.