Two historic Chicago towers have sight lines into a federal courthouse. Is that a good enough reason to tear them down?
this year, and Illinois had quite the haul. Among the earmarks for the state in the latest federal budget, Illinois legislators notched $450,000 for a YWCA domestic violence center, $1 million for a Chicago El station, $660,000 for a project to study climate change and agriculture … and one item meant not to build but to destroy: $52 million to tear down a pair of century-old, terracotta-clad skyscrapers in Downtown Chicago.
That grant is the work of Sen. Dick Durbin, who scored the earmark to level a half-block of the Loop because the buildings there offer a dangerous vantage point onto the courthouse next door. At least, so says Durbin, the FBI, ATF, and the U.S. Marshals Service, which that the towers’ position on the same block as the Dirksen Federal Building creates “significant public safety vulnerabilities.”Never mind that the condemned towers were built in 1913 and 1915, and the courthouse in 1974, and all three have happily co-existed across 90 feet of sky ever since. Times have changed, and taxpayers are now set to fund what looks like an architectural, environmental, and economic debacle in the name of counterterrorism.
It’s not even clear the plan makes sense from a security perspective. The widespread application of this standard—that a tall building near a courthouse is a security risk—would require rigging American downtowns with thousands of pounds of TNT to liberate American government buildings from their contexts. Some experts think the reasoning doesn’t hold up. “There’s more to this than just a building too close.
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