The Big Con Closes: Northwestern Wins the Battle to Destroy Bertrand Goldberg's Prentice Hospital

click images for larger view

 Today, the National Trust for Historic Preservation and Landmarks Illinois moved for a voluntary dismissal of their complaint in Cook County Circuit Court, signaling the end of their legal challenge against the City of Chicago and the Commission on Chicago Landmarks. 

At the end, even the members of the Commission on Chicago Landmarks were coming to the realize they were just part of a scam.  “I have this suspicion,” said commissioner James Houlihan, “that Northwestern has placed before us a false question.”

The false question at the bottom of Northwestern University's Big Con was simply this:  that there were two - and only two - choices.  One, you could have a new billion dollar research lab, state-of-the-art science, thousands of jobs, and countless lives saved.  Or, you stop Northwestern from demolishing Bertrand Goldberg's landmark Prentice Hospital, and find all of that  - the billion dollars, the jobs, the science, the healed lives - “melted into air, into thin air.”

Or at least that's what Northwestern's Eugene Sunshine told Houlihan when he asked what the university would do if Goldberg's building were landmarked.  “We don't really have an alternative,” was Sunshine's reply.  That's right.  One of the most distinguished institutions of learning in the world, home to cutting edge research and some of the most brilliant people on the globe, just couldn't figure out a way to keep from demolishing Prentice to create a vacant lot across from another massive two-block lot that's been vacant for five years.  When it came to finding an alternative to wrecking Prentice, all that brain power turned to quivering jello.

Hard to believe, no?  Well here's the thing.  It's not important that you believe; it's only important to appear to believe, and act accordingly. The only true catechism was acceptance of Northwestern's position atop the foodchain of clout, and a droit du seigneur that can never be questioned, only rationalized. 

Seigneur to seignuer, this is the world which Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel inhabits and understands, so it's no surprise he found himself, almost as soon as he was inaugurated, counseling Northwestern on how to mount the kind of clever PR campaign that would provide cover to its actions.  When that campaign finally bubbled to maturity, Rahm went public with a thumbs-down  op-ed in the Tribune, and the game was over.

But not before the Save Prentice Coalition mounted one of the most active and creative public interest campaigns I have ever witnessed.  Yes, I know - the patient died, but the coalition kept Prentice's heartbeat going long after Rahm's heavy pillow would have sent it flatlining.  All recognition is due to the coalition's partners, including Landmarks Illinois, Preservation Chicago, the National Trust for Historic Preservation, AIA/Chicago, DoCoMoMo Midwest, The Chicago Architectural Club, and more, and to individuals such as Lisa DiChiera, Christina Morris, Jonathan Fine, Stacey Pfingsten, Gunny Harboe, Jim Peters, Eric Herman, Zurich Esposito, Brian Strawn, Karla Sierralta, Bonnie McDonald and so many others.

Lest this appreciation, given the final outcome, seem little more than sentimentality, we should keep in mind that Save Prentice did achieve: creating a textbook model of how to run a public advocacy campaign.   It appealed to excellence, in the way it brought many of the world's leading architects to lend their voice to saving Prentice.  It appealed to creativity and practicality, in how it enlisted the best of both established and young architects and engineers to come up with a dazzling array of compelling, thoroughly-researched alternatives in which Northwestern's needs could be met while preserving Prentice.  They went to court and got a judge to question whether the way the Landmarks Commission signed off on destroying Prentice really met legal standards of due process.  (When they lost, it was not the the merits, but matters of jurisdiction.)  They found a capable partner in ASKG Public Strategies, and engaged social media in a creative and compelling way.  They encouraged and organized a broad range and expert and citizen testimony at public hearings whose results had already been pre-scripted.

Even if Save Prentice was not successful in its ultimate goal of keeping an indispensable piece of Chicago's architectural legacy in place for future generations, it revealed clearly the mendacity beneath so much of Northwestern's efforts, and it set a new standard for advocacy in the architectural preservation realm.

Every few decades, Chicago allows the powerful and connected to destroy a great masterpiece - the Garrick Theater, The Stock Exchange, and now Prentice.  Every time we say, “We won't let this happen again.” and each time, we've been proven wrong.  The Save Prentice coalition has built a strong foundation that makes it more likely that the next time may be different.  And that is no small thing.

Read the full coalition statement after the break:



Statement from Save Prentice Coalition

Chicago – February 14, 2013 – Today, the National Trust for Historic Preservation and Landmarks Illinois moved for a voluntary dismissal of their complaint in Cook County Circuit Court, signaling the end of their legal challenge against the City of Chicago and the Commission on Chicago Landmarks. The Save Prentice Coalition issued the following statement:


Only months ago, it was uncertain whether the landmark status of historic Prentice Women’s Hospital would be considered in a public forum. Thousands of people in Chicago and around the globe helped bring the conversation about Bertrand Goldberg’s Modern masterpiece to Chicago’s Landmarks Commission, which unanimously declared Prentice worthy of landmark designation.

We continue to believe there were significant flaws with the process that granted and then removed landmark protection for Prentice. However, we feel that the landmarks process has run its course. When challenging issues come before the Landmarks Commission, all parties share an obligation to provide honest input, consider reuse alternatives and respect the ordinances and procedures. We continue to support the practical reuse options available to Northwestern University that will grow Chicago’s economy and preserve its world-class architectural and cultural heritage.

At its core, preservation helps cities grow and prosper. It creates jobs, boosts local economies, helps reduce our carbon footprint, and makes cities more dynamic, appealing and attractive. Members of the Save Prentice Coalition have a long history of working in partnership with the City of Chicago on a wide range of preservation issues, and we look forward to continuing this work.

Striking new images of Save Prentice's latest proposals and analysis to save Bertrand Goldberg landmark

click images for larger view

The Save Prentice Coalition is something like a cross between the Energizer Bunny and a reverse Joshua, intent on keeping Northwestern University from sending the walls of Bertrand Goldberg's landmark Prentice Hospital tumbling down.

They were at it again Thursday morning, with a press conference where architects and planners, led by former Chicago Deputy Planning Commissioner Jim Peters, refuted Northwestern's claims that - block upon block of adjacent vacant lots be damned - there was simply no alternative but reducing Goldberg's masterwork to rubble to create still another vacant lot for construction that it is - at minimum -  years away.

 “Northwestern's refusal,” said Peters, “to consider reuse alternatives for Prentice comes at a cost to the City of Chicago.  By reusing Prentice and building adjacent research space, Northwestern could support nearly 1,000 more permanent jobs and generate over $1 million in addiitional annual tax revenue for the citizens of Chicago.”

At the top of this post is a rendering presented by former Landmarks Commissioner Edward Torrez.  The BauerLatoza alternative would wrap Goldberg's structure in the curving embrace of a new, 25-story, million-square foot research lab building.   The old Prentice would provide offices and meeting spaces for the new facility.  The curve is the corridor that links the two structures.

 A second proposal, presented by Casmir Kujawa of Kujawa Architecture LLC . . .

. . . places a more angular research lab tower behind the current Prentice, to be be built in two phases to ultimately come up with the required 1.2 million square feet.  A bracket-like offset connects the new tower to the existing Lurie Research building.  Each floor includes the 25,000 square feet of space identified by Northwestern as an "intellectual critical mass" in size.  The 36-story would use air rights over Superior to provide a new visual marker for Northwestern's Streeterville campus.

Also on hand was Cyril Marsollier, to present the proposal he created with Wallo Villacorta that won the recent Future Prentice competition.  In this bold alternative, the two northernmost segments of Goldberg's structure are subsumed into a new research tower constructed behind it, but the entire building is made whole through reflection in the curtain wall of a new tower.

Common to all the schemes - and in stark contrast to Northwestern's own evasive statements - is the depth of analysis brought to both meeting Northwestern's stated requirements and envisioning Prentice as an integrated part of the Northwestern campus. In the case of David Urschel, Principal and Director of Healthcare Design at Loebl Schlossman and Hackl, this meant identifying a host of auxiliary functions that could be easily housed in a retrofitted Prentice . . .

. . . as well as coming up with a number of different planning schemes to integrate current buildings such as Prentice and the existing Lurie research building with needed new construction, both for labs, and for Northwestern Memorial's stated plans for expansion . . .

Lee Huang of the Philadelphia-based Econsolt Corporation presented an economic impact study documenting the potential benefits of saving Goldberg's Prentice in a way claimed to enhance property values of surrounding non-tax-exempt properties and increase property tax revenues by up to $820,000 per year.

You can download the study, as well as view all the other proposals and renderings presented Thursday, here.

It's no small irony that Northwestern's opponents seem to have put far more thought in meeting the university and hospital's future needs than the public evidence would suggest Northwestern has.  Ultimately, however, from Northwestern's perspective, this is not a battle about architecture or good planning, but about raw power, and about a bunch of good-old-boys at the top of the food chain bending the law to their own desires.

Marsollier and Villacorta alternative proposal

From the get-go, word on the street was that the fix was in and Prentice was toast.  But the Save Prentice coalition countered with a vigorous campaign that quickly enlisted many of the most respected architects - not just in Chicago but throughout the world - to decry Northwestern's civic vandalism.  Accustomed to their every whim being accepted without question, Northwestern was gobsmacked, turning to Mayor Rahm Emanuel for guidance.  The publicly neutral mayor had to show them how it was done, directing Northwestern to a Washington beltway lobbying firm whose Chicago office was run by a former Emanuel operative.

Known for covering over the misdeeds of Big Oil and Big Pharma, the lobbying firm came up with an aggressive - if meretricious  - counter-campaign that equated saving Prentice with throttling medical cures and killing jobs and patients.  And when their work was done, Emanuel was ready to pounce.  The issue of Prentice, which had been yanked from Landmarks Commission in June of 2011 and kept off for over a year, suddenly showed up on the November agenda for what Preservation Chicago's Jonathan Fine has aptly labeled a show trial.  Puppet-on-a-string commissioners dutifully followed a ludicrous but efficient Emanuel script in which Prentice was unanimously declared a landmark and then condemned for demolition, in the space of minutes within a single meeting.

floor plan, Marsollier and Villacorta alternative proposal

And that should have been that.  Instead, the Save Prentice Coalition went to court challenging the legality of the kangaroo court Commission meeting, and Cook County Judge Neil Cohen issued an injunction declaring that preliminary landmark designation remain in effect pending further consideration, a stay the judge continued in December.

With apologies to Monty Python, let us summarize the story so far . . .

City of Chicago, keeper of the demolition permits: Bring out your dead!
(a clover-leafed building is thrown on the cart)
Northwestern: here's one.
City of Chicago: that'll be ninepence.
Cloverleafed building on the cart:  I'm not dead.
City of Chicago: What?
Northwestern:  Nothing.  Here's your ninepence.
Cloverleafed building:  I'm not dead.
Circuit Court Judge:  'Ere - he say's he's not dead.
Northwestern:  Yes he is.
Save Prentice Coalition:  He isn't.
Northwestern:  Well, he will be soon, he's very ill.
Save Prentice Coalition:  He's getting better.
Cloverleafed building leaps off the cart:  Look: I can be repurposed good as new!
Northwestern:  No, you can't.  You'll be stone dead in a moment.
Circuit Court Judge:  I can't take him like that.  It's against regulations.
Northwestern:  (glances furtively about to see if anyone notices the club behind its back.)  Can you hang around for a couple minutes? 

Next court hearing:  January 11th.

Astroturf and shady polls - the latest in Northwestern's battle to destroy Prentice

click images for larger view

It may get an "F" for truthfulness, but Northwestern University certainly gets an "A" for industriousness in its increasingly mendacious PR campaign to keep Bertrand Goldberg's Prentice Hospital off the agenda of the Commission on Chicago Landmarks.

On Thursday, Northwestern issued a press release, Poll Shows Overwhelming Support for Northwestern's Plans to Build New Research Center, with 72% of the 507 respondents saying "a new medical research center on the site of the old Prentice Women's Hospital in Chicago".

Except, of course, that the poll was anything but unbiased.  The press release says respondants were polled "after hearing arguments from both sides."  From whom?  Northwestern?  The words "Bertrand Goldberg", "potential landmark", "Frank Gehry", "Jeanne Gang" (or the names of any of the other 60+ world class architects who have spoken out on the need to save Prentice) appear nowhere in the press release, so forgive me for suspecting that "argument from both sides" is anything other than a sham.

But wasn't this an independent poll?

Ah, no.  It was commissioned by an entity called Purple Strategies.  Who is Purple Strategies?

Purple Strategies is a PR/lobbying firm.  The "People" page on their website is full of Beltway political operatives, but, tellingly, a client list seems nowhere to be found.  Could Northwestern be the first entity willing to publish the fact that they're using them?

Let their website tell the story:

Our approach is to personalize the issue. When constituents feel connected to a movement, they will energize around an issue. But this doesn’t happen overnight. We work with our clients to create the right grassroots infrastructure before a fight arises.

Sounds pretty much like astroturf, the practice of fabricating grass roots support, doesn't it?

And the polling?  This is from the bio of Doug Usher, Managing Partner, Purple Insights . . .

At Purple, Usher has developed custom research methodologies that provide complete integration between opinion research and successful communications execution.

Complete integration?  As in, designing the research to insure a predetermined result?

Of course, I could be wrong.  If Purple Insights releases the methodology and its question list, I'll be glad to post it here in full, and if it shows that the questions were, in fact, not a stacked deck, (plus or minus 4.4 percent), I'll be happy to apologize.

Until then, this looks like just another phony brick in Northwestern's increasingly massive wall of deception.

The "coalition" of architects supporting destroying Prentice lists only three names:  Jeff Case, Principal, Holabird & Root (H&R's website lists four principals and three associates - was Case the only one they could get?), plus Dan Mitchell and Todd Halamaka of HOK.  Fine people, all, but a rather poor counterpoint to Jeanne Gang, John Ronan, William Baker, Frank Gehry, Doug Farr, Ron Krueck, Brad Lynch, Joe Valerio, Dan Wheeler, Ross Wimer, David Woodhouse, Mark Sexton, Donna Robertson, Robert Somol, Bjarke Ingels, and many more at the same level of accomplishment, who oppose the demolition.  (Strangely enough, Crain's reported earlier that Jim Goettsch had also signed on to the anti-Prentice efforts.  He's a true heavyweight, and it's a mystery why Northwestern didn't use his name in the press release.)

The rest is a "good old boys" coalition of Chicago's power insiders, operating behind closed doors, free from public scrutiny, united in subverting due process - fifteen months and counting -  to keep the discussion of whether or not Prentice deserves landmark protection out of the one forum where it legally belongs:  The Commission on Chicago Landmarks.

Herzog and de Meuron, Souto de Moura, Ando and Venturi add their voices to saving Bertrand Goldberg's Prentice Hospital

click images for larger view

The agenda for next Thursday's meeting has yet to be published, but the Save Prentice Coalition has again called for an end to the string of 14 consecutive monthly meetings where the Commission on Chicago Landmarks has deliberately suppressed discussion on the issue of providing Bertrand Goldberg's iconic Prentice Hospital official landmark designation to keep Northwestern University's from its  obsession with smashing it into dust.

In a letter to Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, released this morning, the coalition added the support of Pritzker-Prize winning architects Robert Venturi, Tadao Ando, Jacques Herzog, Pierre de Meuron and Eduardo Souto de Moura to the growing A-list of international architects, designers, and scholars stating that . . .

The legacy of Bertrand Goldberg’s Prentice Women’s Hospital is unmistakable. It stands as a testament to the Chicago-led architectural innovation that sets this city apart. Chicago’s global reputation as a nurturer of bold and innovative architecture will wither if the city cannot preserve its most important achievements.

As members of the architecture community, we believe Goldberg’s Prentice should be given a permanent place in Chicago’s cityscape. A building this significant – this unique in the world – should be preserved and reused.

The growing list - which already included another Pritzker Prize winner, Frank Gehry, has also added Denise Scott Brown, Bjarke Ingels, Jack Hartray, Dan Coffey and George Miller to the original  60+ signers of the original letter in July.   

image: Landmarks Illinois

You can find our own take on the subject, Northwestern, Grow Up:  Refuting Northwestern's desperate PR campaign to destroy Prentice, here.

You can read the full text of today's letter and see the current list of signatories after the break.

Northwestern, Grow Up: Refuting Northwestern's desperate PR campaign to Destroy Prentice.

click images for larger view

Northwestern - the hospital and university - is getting desperate. Faced with growing international opposition from architects, historians and activists to Northwestern's plan to demolish Bertrand Goldberg's iconic Prentice Hospital building, they're mounting a full-press PR effort whose basic tenets are so transparently absurd that they stand only to make Northwestern look brazenly cynical and ridiculous at the same time.

And so we have the op-ed in Crain's Chicago Business by Dean of the Feinberg School of Medicine Eric Neilson in which he contends with what looks to be a straight face that thousands of jobs, hundreds of millions of dollars - no make it $1.5 billion - will all vanish into thin air, and, apparently, thousands will die, if Northwestern isn't allowed to destroy Prentice.    It's like tax cuts for rich in Republican politics.  Demolishing Prentice has become the answer to every problem, the fulcrum on which the entire future of the Northwestern campus rests in the balance between a glorious future and complete disintegration.

This isn't an argument; it's a tantrum.  It's pretty much on the level of threatening to hold your breath until you die unless you get more bubble gum -and then won't you all be sorry.

And then, of course, there's the Chicago Tribune.  On August 12th, with its Pulitzer Prize winning architecture critic Blair Kamin safely packed away to a Nieman fellowing at Harvard, the Trib ran an editorial under the typically pompous headline, Let Northwestern build, shilling for the destruction of the building Kamin has called a "boldly sculptural, brilliantly engineered high-rise"

Chicago Tribune urban planning at work
Hedrich Blessing photography, courtesy the Chuckman Collection

It was full of the usual half-truths and evasions, which is what you expect from those wonderful people who gave you McCormick Place on what should of remained open lakefront.  It was the Tribune we have to thank for what was essentially a vanity project of the paper's isolationist, red-baiting, labor-hating editor Robert R. McCormick, who dispatched political reporter George Tagge to Springfield to lobby legislators to rubber-stamp the project.  Although the original eyesore mercifully burned down in the 1960's, it's much better successor by Gene Summers still crowds what today would have been open lakefront, for all the people.

Thanks, Chicago Tribune.  Please don't hold it against us if we don't have much use for your new "gift" of destroying Prentice.

Northwestern would like you to not notice the letter to Mayor Emanuel supporting saving Prentice from 60 major architects from all across the world.  Frank Gehry?  Jeanne Gang? Who are they?  What trees to they plant?  What bankers do they have on retainer?

Enter Paul Beitler.  He isn't some building-hugging goo-goo, but one of Chicago's successful developers.  In a conversation with Crain Chicago's's Business Shia Kapos, he says, in Kapos' words, that "he's had enough of the 'out with the old' mentality."  Beitler calls Northwestern's bluff. "There are a lot of things in nature that don't fit, but we find ways to work around them and with them.  This building is so unusual that regardless of the its designer it deserves to stand the test of time. If allowed to remain it will be the only building that stands out from the blocks of architectural mediocrity . . . "  You can't kid a kidder, and Beitler isn't buying Northwestern's protests that they have alternative to destroying Prentice.  He's been in the business and done enough deals to know that's pure B.S.

Today, the Save Prentice Coalition issued an eloquent refutation of Northwestern's arguments.  Read the full text after the break.

Speaking from someone who saw its excellence first-hand when I was in the emergency room a couple weeks ago, Northwestern Hospital is one of Chicago's great institutions.  Why is it dealing with the issue of Prentice like the really bad doctor who patronizes his patients with baby talk?

Northwestern, grow up.  

Stop insulting our intelligence with your puerile arguments and false alternatives.   Prentice doesn't work for you?  Fine.  There are a lot of developers for whom it would work out just fine.  There are other places to build your state-of-the-art laboratory.  You already have a lot bridges.  Make more, longer if you have to.  As Paul Beitler says, Prentice is the only distinctive building in a sea of architectural mediocrity that demeans your brand.  Don't destroy it.  Use it in building that brand.  There are a lot of people who want to help.  Let them.

Don't be deluded in thinking that once you destroy Prentice, it will be forgotten.  As the legacy of Bertrand Goldberg's work grows in time - and it will - Northwestern, whatever else its achievements, will be forever known that as the vandal that destroyed a key piece of Chicago's cultural legacy.

You're better than that.  You're all about healing, and healing is about a lot more than what goes on in surgery.  Your campus is a forbidding, unwelcoming physical presence.   It misrepresents you as a mere repository of great corporate power.

Make your campus human scaled. Heal it, as you continue to build.  Start by agreeing to find an alternative that saves Prentice, perhaps the only place on campus where the soaring grace truly expresses the aspirations of your mission.   With just a portion of the same brilliant thinking you bring to the practice and teaching of medicine, you can find a solution to saving Prentice that will let you do everything you want, while making you a true hero in the definition of Chicago's character, past, present and future.


Read the Save Prentice press release after the break.



TO: Chicago Reporters
FROM: Save Prentice Coalition
RE: Northwestern’s New Public Relations Campaign

This week, Northwestern University started making some big promises to Chicago. On
Monday, August 13 in response to pressure from the preservation community, they
launched the “Finding Tomorrow’s Cures” campaign to convince Chicagoans that jobs,
investment, and cures for diseases are on the horizon but can only be realized by
building on the site of the historic Prentice Women’s Hospital at 333 E. Superior Street
in Streeterville.

Here are three things to know about their new campaign:

Northwestern Is Offering A False Choice

• Northwestern wants us to believe that Chicago needs to choose between
saving lives and saving Prentice, but it is a false choice. We can and
should do both.

• None of the benefits Northwestern promises are tied to placing their new
research facility on the site of the historic Prentice Women’s Hospital.
• In fact, the intimately intertwined partners of the McGraw Medical Center

consortium – including Northwestern University and Northwestern
Memorial Hospital – could designate an alternate site to build a medical
research facility and invest in the reuse of Prentice for other institutional or
commercial needs. This would deliver all of the same benefits
Northwestern promises – and create even more jobs and economic activity.

Northwestern Still Doesn’t Have A Plan for the Prentice Site

• Northwestern wants us to believe that there is an urgent need to demolish
historic Prentice Women’s Hospital, but construction isn’t scheduled to
start until 2015. This provides more than two years to find a solution that
builds for our future while preserving our past.

• The only specific fact Northwestern provides about the initial construction
is that it will be “300,000 to 500,000 square feet.” There are no land-use
plans, renderings, massing studies, environmental impact analyses, traffic
and parking studies, financing plans, etc.

 Northwestern Isn’t Living Up To The Standards It Sets For Others 

• As part of their campaign, Northwestern is calling on the city to
demonstrate leadership and a commitment to innovation. Meanwhile, their
campaign is designed to convince Chicagoans that finding a reuse for
historic Prentice and an alternate site for research is simply not feasible.

 • However, just across the street sits a massive vacant lot owned by
Northwestern University’s long-term strategic partner Northwestern
Memorial HealthCare. These two institutions have a long history of
cooperating on development in Streeterville, millions of dollars in shared
real estate and facility leases, and a joint strategic plan that includes
investment in facilities and infrastructure among its objectives.

 • Northwestern has more than enough resources to find a solution. What
they are lacking is will and creativity. As Northwestern University
spokesperson Al Cubbage recently stated when asked how they would
fund a new building, "We have the money. There's no question about that.
Northwestern University has an endowment of $7 billion. That's billion with
a b."

To Commission on Chicago Landmarks, Bertrand Goldberg's Prentice Hospital Still Dead

click images for larger view

The above post has two events for today, Thursday, August 2nd.   The most important thing happening today, however, is what's not happening.
 
 At 12:45 p.m. at City Hall, the agenda of this month's meeting on the Commission on Chicago Landmarks is once again uncontaminated by any acknowledgement of the grave threat to Bertrand Goldberg's Prentice Hospital.

Last week the Save Prentice Coalition released a open letter to Mayor Rahm Emanuel signed by an international roster of 60 of the world's most accomplished architects and academics, from Frank Gehry to Jeanne Gang, Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, to Dan Wheeler to Dirk Lohan, Ron Krueck and Mark Sexton, to John Ronan, to Donna Robertson and Bob Somol, and more, with signatories from Chicago, to Berlin, to Shanghai.  The letter bears a simple message:  Bertrand Goldberg's Prentice Hospital is a building of international importance and it deserves landmark protection to keep Northwestern from its intention of smashing the structure into rubble for still another vacant lot on its sprawling Streeterville campus.

Over a year ago, the Landmarks Commission listed the landmarking of Prentice as a item on its June, 2011 agenda.  On the morning of the meeting, after a who's-who of forces rallied in support of the action, Prentice was removed from the agenda at the request of Northwestern, for what a university spokesman referred to as "further discussion with the city."

The rest is silence.

In fact, the only non-silent party in the Prentice controversy is Northwestern.  Although it has, for four years, left a full block to the south of Prentice a gravel filled empty lot since Lakeside Veterans Hospital was demolished, it has been consistent in its public statements that it intends to destroy Prentice Hospital, no matter what.  As a hospital and as a university, Northwestern is one of Chicago's greatest institutions.  As custodian of one of the largest tracts of land in Streeterville, it is a chronic enabler of architectural mediocrity.  The architecture of the Northwestern Hospital campus veers towards the bland, faceless and dispiriting.  It is not surprising they would want to destroy Goldberg's Prentice.  It will lower the curve.

No, it's only those who we would expect to represent the rest of us who are silent.

The Commission on Chicago Landmarks is silent.

42nd ward alderman Brendan Reilly, who engineered a 60-day demolition moratorium for Prentice in April of 2011, is silent.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel is silent.

The City of Chicago, its departments, and its commissions are not private clubs.  The public has the right to know:  What exactly is being talked about in those "further discussion"(s)? Over these intervening 14 months, how many discussions have taken place?  Have there actually been any?

Or is the strategy to simply ignore Prentice, hoping those pushing to save it will simply tire and disappear, so the bulldozers can be brought in the Meigs Field way, and Prentice Hospital maimed beyond saving when no one is looking?  Or will it be done the Michael Reese Hospital way?  An empty promise to save the original 1907 Schmidt, Garden building while failing to do anything to secure the building from weather or vandals, followed by the city's nearly drowning in its own crocodile tears as it announced the structure had deteriorated so gravely that there was now no alternative to demolition.

If, indeed, Northwestern's strategy was just to wait out the exhaustion of its opponents, it seems a losing bet.  Last week's letter from 60 architects was accompanied by a strong editorial in the Sun-Times in support of preserving Prentice, and an op-ed piece, Save Prentice from the wrecking ball, by AIA Chicago's Zurich Esposito and Landmarks Illinois' Bonnie McDonald, eloquently refuting the Trib's previous endorsement of destroying the building.  Landmarks Illinois has issued a compelling re-use study for the building.

The Save Prentice Coalition isn't tiring out; it's getting smarter and more savvy.  Support for saving Prentice is gaining momentum, and spreading globally.  Mr. Reilly, it's time to tell us where you stand.  Mr. Mayor, it's time to end the official omerta over Prentice.  The public has a right to know what has been going in those closed-door discussions.  And we need to know your vision for the city's future:  Still another vacant lot? Or saving one of Chicago's most significant and distinctive buildings for future generations?