Chicago to relocate city maintenance garage

Posts Tagged Chicago to relocate city maintenance garage

Chicago Fire Department news

Aug 28

Posted by Admin in Fire Department News | 3 Comments

Mayor Rahm Emanuel plans to sell a prime piece of property near Goose Island to try to spur development in an economically depressed South Side neighborhood by relocating the city’s largest maintenance garage to Englewood.

Under the plan, the Chicago Department of Fleet and Facility Management’s headquarters would move from an 18-acre site along the North Branch of the Chicago River on Throop Street to a similarly-sized parcel that served as the old Kennedy-King College campus at Marquette Road and South Wentworth Avenue.

The riverside parcel would be sold to a developer, who not only would redevelop the current garage site, but would be required to build the new maintenance headquarters on the South Side, according to the mayor’s office.

The Emanuel administration didn’t offer an estimate of how much the city expects to fetch for the Goose Island site, which is in an area where developers have been anxious to build residential, retail and high-tech space. But the mayor’s office did say the new fleet facility for Englewood would cost between $25 million and $30 million to build.

The site has about 1,200 feet of frontage along the river, and any future development would have to include public river access. The move to sell the parcel comes as city hall re-evaluates its master planning for the long industrial corridor wedged between the river and Kennedy Expressway — including the likely redevelopment of the old A. Finkl & Sons steel mill, a 28-acre site just north of the current city garage.

In an interview, Fleet and Facility Management Commissioner David Reynolds said the current garage near Goose Island is a massive and obsolete facility that costs the city more than $1 million per year to heat and cool. He said the department doesn’t fully utilize the space, some of which is used for storage, and the tall ceiling heights and an awkward design make the space inefficient.

The place was not built to be a garage, but a steel facility that dates to at least the 1930s, Reynolds said. The city moved its main garage there in the early 1990s after the previous one was demolished to make way for a parking lot at the new Comiskey Park.

At the garage, workers maintain fire department apparatus and repair some of the city’s snowplows, tow trucks, and garbage trucks. The new shop, Reynolds said, would be modern, purpose-built, more efficient, and a good neighbor for Englewood. He noted how The Hideout, a longtime West Town dive bar near the current garage, long has appreciated the stability of city workers coming in for a beer.