Chicago Olympic bid waits

CHICAGO – If Chicago lands the 2016 Summer Olympics, it won’t be the city’s first international party.

In 1893 and 1933, World’s Fairs drew tens of millions of spectators and thrust the city into the spotlight with grand displays of architecture, culture and technology.

The key day now is Saturday. That’s when the U.S. Olympic Committee decides if Chicago or Los Angeles will represent the country in the Olympic sweepstakes. The International Olympic Committee will select the host in 2009, with other bidders expected to include Madrid, Spain; Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Rome; and Tokyo.

The Worlds Fairs helped show that Chicago, a burgeoning city in the industrial heartland, was as advanced and sophisticated as any other.

Architect Daniel Burnham planned the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, and famously reminded Chicagoans: “Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men’s blood.” His words are now part of the city’s Olympic slogan: “Chicago 2016, Stir The Soul.”

If Chicago does get the games, athletes and spectators will walk in the footsteps of fairgoers. The games would be centered on the downtown lakefront and the South Side at some of the same spots used in the 1893 exposition and the 1933-34 Century of Progress.

Olympic hockey fields would be built in Jackson Park, where the “White City” was built for the Columbian Exposition. That fair’s carnivallike midway sported the world’s first Ferris wheel and stretched west from Jackson Park to Washington Park, where a temporary Olympic stadium would be built.

The Century of Progress, held on the lakefront just south of downtown, was built on a peninsula jutting into Lake Michigan and on nearby land where the city’s massive convention center now stands.

For the Olympics, a complex for cycling and beach volleyball would be built on the same peninsula. A $1.1 billion lakefront athletes’ village would be built above existing truck parking lots near the convention center, which also would host events.

“Our forefathers left us this incredible network of open spaces,” said Thomas Kerwin, a managing partner at Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, the architectural firm serving as master planner for the Chicago 2016 Olympic organizing committee.

The Chicago firm, which designed the Sears Tower, has its own link to the fairs. Two of its founders, Louis Skidmore and Nathaniel Owings, helped plan the 1933 fair, three years before they started their firm.

Not much survives from either fair. The Museum of Science and Industry is the only remaining building on the grounds of the Columbian Exposition.

Organizers insist that wouldn’t be the case with the Olympics. The athletes’ village could be sold afterward as condominiums, hotels and retail space. The temporary Olympic stadium in Washington Park would be scaled back into a smaller amphitheater for sports events.

Financing also would borrow a page from the World’s Fairs. Fair organizers counted on the city’s monied class to help pay for them, and they did – just as today’s civic leaders already have contributed more than $32 million to help finance the bid, said Patrick Ryan, who is leading the city’s Olympic bid.

Mayor Richard Daley chose Ryan, founder of the Aon insurance brokerage, to lead the Olympic effort. Other members of the organizing committee include billionaire businesswoman Penny Pritzker and McDonald’s Corp. board chairman Andrew McKenna.

“We did not get into this to fail,” Ryan said.

More than private dollars, however, are needed. The USOC wants the city to have a financial stake, too. The City Council overwhelmingly backed a $500 million guarantee that puts taxpayers on the hook if the games come to Chicago and lose money.

Erik Larson, who wrote “The Devil In the White City,” insists it won’t be a blow to the city if the Olympics go elsewhere.

“Chicago and Chicagoans don’t need the ego boost that they once felt they did need,” he said.

Even so, the Olympics would allow the city to again show the world what it’s got, said Donald Miller, a historian at Lafayette College in Pennsylvania. Miller, who wrote “City of the Century: The Epic of Chicago and the Making of America,” said the city’s first World’s Fair allowed Chicago to flaunt its evolution from mud hole to metropolis.

“It announced Chicago’s arrival as a great city,” he said.