This week I sat down with the guy who helped build Millennium Park. Lou Raizin wants to treat all of downtown as one cultural district. He calls it the Cultural Stadium. A billion-dollar bet that downtown can be everyone's downtown again. Also in this issue: a private plan to get you from the Loop to O'Hare in 15 minutes.

Let's dive in:

Lou Raizin has spent his career betting on Chicago. As president and founder of Broadway in Chicago, he helped make the city the third most important commercial theater market in the world, behind only New York and London. He also helped bring Millennium Park to life. Now he is chasing his boldest idea yet: the cultural stadium, a plan to reimagine downtown Chicago as one world-class cultural district.

As of now, the Cultural Stadium includes alleys as mini museums, Lower Wacker as a concert hall, a glass canopy down LaSalle, art on parking-garage roofs, and a floating farmers market on the river.

Here’s a bit of our conversation:

LR: Yes, it can get done. Things get more difficult, not easier, over time. When you’re as crazy and as adventurous as I have been in my career, you have to focus. You have to believe in yourself more than anything else in order to get anything good done.

A Millennium Park, or things as big as what we’re touching now, take philanthropic, corporate, and civic all to align. If you don’t have one of those pieces, it gets really tough. The corporate side is in a different place right now. There’s been a huge flight from Chicago to Florida. That blue and red split, those weren’t issues we had to deal with at the time. We’re getting close.

LR: First you have to understand the name. The name is just a name. The concept of a stadium is, I don’t care what sports you like. You go to your stadium and it doesn’t matter where you live. That’s your stadium.

I look at what I call the moat that was built around the city in the sixties, our expressways. You stay on your side of the moat, we stay on ours. It’s time to blow up the moat, not just literally, in all the ways it impacts us. Downtown is not seen as everyone’s downtown. We have neighborhood kids that are afraid to come downtown. People look at me sideways when I say that, but it’s the truth. How do you make downtown everyone’s downtown? That’s the Cultural Stadium.

We’re a force multiplier. We are not about creating a new competitive anything. We’re about understanding our downtown as a world-class cultural district. We’ve never called it that. Just giving it a name, that’s transformational. Not defined by a border, but by your ability to walk from one location to another.

LR: We pilot every project. We have six pilots running now. We learn from every one of those before we go big. Three alleyways are on the drawing board. Poetry Way, Joffrey Ballet and the Poetry Foundation. Theater Alley with the Goodman, Broadway In Chicago, Paterno’s. And Labor Way. Chicago gave the country the eight-hour workweek. It’s time to celebrate that.

Google is coming in with 3,000 people. The sense is they go to 6,000 if they feel the energy. Our welcome is a large-scale koi pond, a trompe-l’œil mural on the building next to them. When they look out the window they’re going to say, only in Chicago.

One of the pinnacle projects is The Trove, the art warehouse. In Rotterdam they opened the depot to the public. We’re doing a warehouse of warehouses. Works from Pilsen, from Mexico, from the Lincoln Museum in Springfield, in a facility that’s open to the public. It’s oil and water when you try to bring everybody together. Each of these museums operate by themselves. Our objective is everybody wins if downtown is seen as everyone’s downtown.

There is never the right time. A city doesn’t stop. It’s either moving forward or moving backward. If we don’t do something now, we have one word we focus on. Bandwidth. How do we keep the city moving forward.

This is not a me. This is a we. That’s how you get things done.

Last week a Chicago team shared a privately funded plan to get downtown to O'Hare in 15 minutes.

It’s called the O’Hare Flyer and the vision is a station by the Old Post Office to Terminal 2, trains every 15 minutes from 4am to 10pm, battery-electric, $2.25B in private money.

They have a letter of intent with CSX. Canadian National and Union Pacific haven’t signed, and the city still has to approve tracks under Canal and into the airport.

Dave Lundy, the CEO, says it could move 2,000 people each way every hour.

The Blue Line already goes to O'Hare. Chicago has tried to build a downtown express before and didn’t finish it. Plus there was a plan to bring Elon Musk’s hyperloop to Chicago pre-covid.

This one is worth watching because the money is private and the tracks are already there.

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