London Eye designers Marks Barfield Architects and Davis Brody Bond have created a new aerial cable car for Chicago. The plans, which are being sponsored by Lou Raizin and Laurence Geller CBE, have yet to gain approval from any official city agency, but in the meantime here are a few renderings of the gleaming cars gliding to and fro across the cityscape:
By cruising over the Navy Pier, the Chicago Lakefront, the Riverwalk running alongside the Chicago River, and downtown Chicago, the cable cars would "showcase an aerial vista of Chicago and its architectural heritage to the eyes of the world." The full video can be seen at the 26:42 mark of this much longer tourism presentation spiel:
3 Comments
would be a fun gimmick, though entirely unnecessary from a transit perspective. But how well do cable cars handle strong crosswinds? That stretch of the river is like a wind tunnel channeled between all the towers.
No way this gets approval. Mayor Rahm's legacy project is the Chicago Riverwalk, which this thing cruises over (articles says "crushing," but I wager that's a typo). He wants people down on the walk, not up in air bypassing it. And then there's the occasional pylon plopped down onto the Riverwalk, negatively impacting its design. All adds up to a detriment rather than a plus.
That said, I think it has transit value, if it's able to connect the Loop to Navy Pier. The latter is so hard to get to; the trolley and buses servicing it don't do a good job. If it happened, this would better connect the Navy Pier tourist draw with the Loop. Like other projects proposed in the past (remember The Loop Connector?) the cable car idea will most likely just fade away.
I like the River taxi to Navy Pier, but it has to be a little faster to make sense, this is a nice tourist ride like Disney land. maybe the millions can be spent on a homeless shelter so they don't have to camp out on the EL. But I would support a skylight on the Brown line as there is a lot of interesting architecture if you could only look up when it is running through the loop.
Over and OUT
Peter N
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