Huge score for DePaul
NO DISSENT | City planners OK new music, theater schools in Lincoln Park
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November 20, 2009
BY FRAN SPIELMAN City Hall Reporter
fspielman@suntimes.com
DePaul University's schools of theater and music would finally have the world-class facilities to match their top-notch talent, thanks to a 10-year master plan for the Lincoln Park campus approved Thursday.
Without a word of dissent, the Chicago Plan Commission signed off on DePaul's ambitious plan to build new schools for theater and music, a new academic center, and to redevelop Fullerton Avenue with a hotel, student housing and market-rate housing.
DePaul University's schools of theater and music would finally have the world-class facilities to match their top-notch talent, thanks to a 10-year master plan for the Lincoln Park campus approved Thursday.
The project -- with a price tag in the hundreds of millions of dollars -- calls for closing Kenmore Avenue to vehicles between Fullerton and Belden to improve student safety, add landscaping and create a greater "campus feel." Spectator stands, new dugouts and press box facilities also are planned for Wish Field.
"Those two schools have some of the finest faculty in the world and some of the finest students in the country. And they're literally performing in spaces with dropped ceilings and walls that bleed sound," said the Rev. Dennis Holtschneider, DePaul's president.
"It's not where you learn how to play an instrument. It's not where you learn how to sing. We need a space where musicians [and actors] can be properly trained."
The new music school won't come soon enough for clarinet performance major Philip Espe. But it's still a dream come true.
"I walk into the practice rooms at 10 a.m. any morning. There's no place for me to practice. I'm sometimes in rehearsal for six hours a day, and there's no space. It's incredibly small. The practice rooms are not acoustically sound," Espe said.
Holtschneider assured the Plan Commission that there would be no influx of students at the already-cramped Lincoln Park campus.
"Both those schools -- music and theater -- are capped. Students compete for those seats from all over the United States and sometimes the world. These are very expensive schools to run. We're not going to increase the number of seats," he said.
The new 112,000-square-foot Music Center will be in the 2300 block of North Halsted. It will include a 535-seat concert hall, a 176-seat opera hall, a pair of recital halls with 150 and 80 seats and a 100-space subterranean parking garage.
The 37,696-square-foot new home for the Midwest's oldest theater conservatory will be built on the southwest corner of Fullerton and Racine. It will include a 250-seat theater auditorium, a 100-seat "flexible theater" and stages integrated with classrooms on every level.
The new academic buildings are planned for the northeast corner of Belden and Kenmore and the southwest corner of Belden and Seminary. The Kenmore building will be the first new construction, replacing classroom space lost when McGaw Hall is torn down to make way for the new music school.
The master plan ultimately envisions construction of a mixed-use development on the blocklong stretch of Fullerton between Sheffield and Seminary that serves as the "main street" of the Lincoln Park campus.
But Holtschneider vowed to return to the Plan Commission before proceeding with construction of a five-story hotel with 140 rooms and a "car court," new housing for 333 students, market-rate housing and university space that includes a welcome center, visitor courtyard and conference rooms.
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