Chicago landmark: Stimulus a promise

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Chicago landmark: Stimulus a promise

by Mark Silva

When they talk about "shovel-ready'' work for that $787-billion economic stimulus that President Barack Obama signed into law, they aren't talking about the landmark high-rise in Chicago where Obama staged his transition to the White House and where the senior senator from Illinois, Dick Durbin, maintains an office.

Our good friend John McCormick, who covered the presidential campaign and the transition, notes that the John C. Kluczynski Federal Building, which holds architectural significance as a Ludwig Mies van der Rohe skyscraper, is still waiting for more than $100 million of work promised by the federal goverment.

President-elect Obama had his transition offices there, on the 38th floor. And, as a state senator in Illinois, staged his 2002 speech against the U.S. invasion of Iraq from the plaza outside the building, notes McCormick, a Bloomberg News correspondent with a good memory as an erstwhile correspondent for the Chicago Tribune.

Seven months after the president signed the stimulus bill into law, the General Services Administration tells McCormick that they have let work on the $10.7-million design and construction management piece of the overhaul of the 43-story building. But he couldn't say when the rest of the $102.8-million project would get underway. The remodeling will generate 480 to 872 jobs.

"That's too long -- the economy is hurting now," says Karen Barnes, laid off this month as a health-care auditor and helping to set up the Berghoff Oktoberfest in the Kluczynski plaza for $10 an hour. "People need jobs."

(The Kluczynski Federal Building is pictured above, at a time when President-elect Barack Obama was holding meetings in his Chicago transition office there. (Photo by Charles Dharapak) / )

The 1975-vintage building is significant in a city renowned for architecture, McCormick notes, "because it's a prime example of Mies van der Rohe's mid-century modernist style. While the tower has amenities such as rapid elevators and motion sensors for restroom lighting, the renovation will boost its efficiency.

"The idea is to upgrade the stock of buildings in our inventory to better energy performance," says David Wilkinson, a spokesman for the GSA. "We are very conscious of the fact that things are not moving as quickly as people would like them to.''

Across the country, Bloomberg reports, only transportation projects have lived up to the stimulus package's promise, according to Stephen Sandherr, CEO of the Associated General Contractors of America, a trade association based in Arlington, Virginia. "The expectation was that these projects were going to hit the ground in short order," he says. "For various, sundry reasons, they haven't."

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