Talk of a new Chicago Bears stadium on the Arlington Park racetrack site in suburban Arlington Heights had died down after that flurry of articles back in February, but it came roaring back with a vengeance in the last few days after Arlington Heights Mayor Tom Hayes said a football stadium was “on the table for me.” Not long after that, Fox 32 Chicago asked Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot what she thought of all this, and here’s what resulted:
Mayor Lightfoot admits she did have a conversation with Bears ownership over the last couple weeks, during which the team inquired about changes to Soldier Field.
“It’s a great, iconic site,” Lightfoot said. “But it’s a challenging site, and I think it’s incumbent on us as a city to step up and look at ways in which we can make sure that the Bears fans, but also the Bears as an organization, have the best opportunities to maximize the fan experience and, of course, maximize revenues.”
Soldier Field is the oldest stadium in the NFL, having been built in 1922, and also one of the newest stadiums in the NFL, having been gutted by the city and entirely rebuilt within its exterior facade in 2002, in a $632 million move that was declared an “abomination” and that got the stadium removed from the National Register of Historic Places. Still, it’s no longer unusual for NFL team owners to demand a new stadium every 20 years if they think they can get away with it, so with an opportunity to at least pretend they have a bidding war going between Arlington Heights and Chicago, it’s no surprise that the Halas McCaskey family is at least trying to gin something up.
What happens next could be pretty much anything, but Lightfoot certainly opened the door to the city paying for another round of upgrades. Seven years ago, then-mayor Rahm Emanuel floated the idea of adding 5,000 seats to Soldier Field in order to get the Super Bowl or something like that, so maybe that’s what the Bears owners would like? Or maybe they just want whatever they can get, which is why they’re being so coy about whether they’d consider moving the Arlington Heights. It’s savvy negotiators all the way down.
Let the NFL pay for it. No Games Chicago activists will need to rise up again and stop this waste of taxpayer money.
The NFL needs to pay for the places they do business, not the taxpayers.
One of the funny comments in the press has been complaints that Soldier Field is too hard to reach by public transport. It is a 15 to 20 walk (and a nice one) from Roosevelt L to the stadium with a suburban train stop in between.
The Arlington Heights site is 25 miles outside the city with a METRA suburban stop.
Super Bowl in Chicago? Brrrrrr.
There’s nothing much to negotiate right now.
The current negotiations with the city simply involve Covid capacity and signage, which is what the Chicago mayor was referring to as far as accommodating the team. Pretty mundane stuff.
“Knowledgeable sources say the Bears would like more signage and other revenue-producing rights at Soldier Field, but it is not clear whether the team is willing to stay indefinitely”
In the long term, the City of Chicago is aware that the Bears absolutely do not want to renew the Soldier Field lease, and that the team has been scouting locations for a new stadium for 2033. I know of a visit in 2019 by team representatives to examine the Tribune River District site on Chicago and Halsted.
However, the city does not own any parcels of land that could fit a stadium and remains skeptical that the team owners qualify for financing without the backing of a separate development/investment group.
The mayor of Arlington Heights knows his suburb of 30,000 households would get laughed out of the stadium bond market, so he’s trying to drum up developer interest with a media blitz.
Overall just a big sense that Arlington Heights and the Northwest suburban media jumped the gun on a process that’s nowhere close to the negotiating phase.
On a soccer board discussing this (the Fire would then be the main tenant if the Bears move) it was noted that the Bears looked at the old Tribune printing plant site on the river. Would that be big enough? The negative part (which strikes me as a positive) is that it would not have much parking, so people would need to park remotely and take the Brown / Purple lines to Chicago or the Blue line to Milwaukee. It would also be over the rails, so I suppose METRA could run game day specials more easily.
The Bears would lose the sweet, sweet parking fees though
Just from eyeballing it, the Trib printing plant site is maybe barely big enough if you can build over the railroad tracks. That sound like some tricky engineering, though, so they’d be talking big money — and the Trib could likely avoid decking over the tracks if they went with development that didn’t involve one giant stadium. (Apartment buildings, say.) So it doesn’t seem real likely, though it is certainly possible the Bears are doing due diligence.
No need to deck. The tracks are abandoned. Historically, they were built to deliver cars of raw material to the Tribune and former Sun-Times printing plants.
They cross the infamous Kinzie St. Railroad Bridge that’s always in the upright position except for one day a year.
Union Pacific just didn’t want to pay to remove the tracks.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-2002-06-23-0206230060-story,amp.html
If you’re talking about the empty Trib properties at Chicago and Halsted, along the river, yeah there’s no way, unless the NFL lets them go to a 70 yard field. Also, that’s a tech and residential area now. No one’s looking for a football team as a new neighbor.
Looking it over again it does seem like it would be tight but if they cover the tracks they could fit it in. (As noted by Sam, those tracks are not used). Metra’s UP line is easy walking distance though a game day station would be needed.
But they would lose the sweet parking money. And you are right, other development makes more sense there. With the Lincoln Yards project further up Clybourn and the proposed Goose Island project, I’d think other things might be better. Lately I am into the idea of medium density mixed use.
Arlington Heights is the new Schaumberg, then. Sure, different league. Same story. I doubt the team has any intention of moving there no matter what sort of sweetheart deal they are offered.
The really great part of this is that you just know that the moment the Bears did leave their current appalling stadium, the Fire will be looking for public money to “right size” it (which I assume would mean knocking most of it down and building something smaller for them).
And we used to criticize the Soviet bloc for paying people to dig holes and then paying other people to fill them in again…
They need to display the championships and the retired numbers in a bigger better way then just on a couple padded walls on the visitors sideline.
If Arlington Heights has money to throw around, it seems like trying to keep the track and get a Race-casino might be a better investment. More dates and more semi-permanent jobs than a football stadium.