Before architectural icon Raymond Hood was dreaming up Liz Lemon and Jack Donaghy's future (and now former) Manhattan stomping grounds in 1933, he envisioned a Rockefeller Center-esque "city within a city" on our own urban turf – a thicket of skyscrapers flanked by shorter blocks of office buildings and a broad mall east of Michigan Avenue between Randolph Street and the river.
Hood's 1929 plans for the "Terminal Park" development were thwarted by the stock market crash, but had the complex been realized, the space that's now home to Prudential Plaza, Lakeshore East, and the Aon Center would instead have featured four tall towers surrounding the intersection of the aforementioned mall and a cross street near the lakefront. One of two similar proposals considered for the land at the time, Hood's vision also included low-rise blocks framing the mall to the north and south.
When the architect, who first shot to fame in 1922 here in Chicago for his contest-winning Tribune Tower design, ditched the Terminal Park plan for greener (as in $greener$) pastures out east, the stretch of property that was meant to sprout the skyscrapers of the future remained vacant for another 30 years -- Nothing was constructed on the site until the late '60s.
·"Terminal City" Thread [SSP]
·Curbed's Could Have Been [Curbed Chicago]
—Gwendolyn Purdom
Loading comments...