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Advocates for Bird-Friendly Design Fear Chicago Casino Could Cause Mass Casualties
The latest rendering of Bally’s planned Chicago casino on the Chicago River. (Courtesy of HSK)
Advocates for bird-friendly building construction in Chicago are cautiously optimistic new mitigations at McCormick Place Lakeside Center — including the installation of patterned window film — will prevent the sort of mass casualty event that happened last fall, with 1,000 birds killed in a single day after crashing into the convention center.
But there’s been no huge sigh of relief or celebration among members of Bird Friendly Chicago, a coalition that includes Chicago Ornithological Society, Chicago Bird Alliance and Chicago Bird Collision Monitors.
Because there’s always another dangerous building around the corner.
The latest cause for concern is the recently released “refreshed site plan” for the Bally’s Chicago casino development at Chicago Avenue and Halsted Street. The 30-acre property was formerly home to the Chicago Tribune’s printing plant.
“The new design shows a 500-room glass hotel tower directly on the river, and that area has as high a potential for killing birds as McCormick Place Lakeside does,” said Annette Prince, director of Chicago Bird Collision Monitors.
Much like the lakefront, the Chicago River is a magnet for birds.
A glass building “sitting on a major migratory route, on a major body of water, is the equation that makes it so dangerous,” Prince said.
Bird collision monitors pick up at least 600 birds a year within a half-mile of the casino site, a number that likely only represents a fraction of the true toll.
“That’s just an estimate,” Prince said. “That’s in our limited times that we’ve stopped there, what we’ve found. They say multiply it by 10 to find out what really happened. People don’t understand the cumulative effect. (The mass casualty at) McCormick Place got people’s attention ... but it’s not just a one-time tragedy, it is an ongoing tragedy.”
If the casino and hotel aren’t built with birds in mind, the question isn’t whether collisions will occur, but how many.
“It could rival the carnage at McCormick Place,” Prince warned.
“Another city, another place, perhaps you don’t have to take these things into consideration, but ... we know there is a concentration of birds in that area,” Prince continued. “This is not like ‘maybe a bird will hit this building.’ We know a bird will hit this building. What we know from our data about that area, it is unquestionable that birds will come into harm’s way there.”
A rendering of the planned Bally’s casino, with the towering 500-room hotel rising over the Chicago River. (Courtesy of HSK)
Back in 2022, during the bidding process for Chicago’s sole casino license, finalists including Bally’s presented their proposals at a series of public meetings.
The question of bird-friendly construction came up at each forum and in response, Soo Kim, chairman of Rhode Island-based Bally’s, revealed the company initially had no intention of building a brightly lit tower on the river.
“Our original design was much more of a low-slung building,” Kim said, “But frankly the city’s architects looked at it and said, ‘Hey, this is Chicago, you’ve got to build something more exciting than this. We have 60 million tourists that we want to come check this new building out. You better spice this thing up.’”
“So we actually didn’t have this bird magnet prior to that comment and now we do,” he said. “Now we have to figure out a way to address that.”
Prince recalls her jaw dropping, hearing the city was actively encouraging a glass tower at the same time Bird Friendly Chicago was in the middle of negotiating sustainability guidelines that would promote bird-friendly construction.
“I remember thinking, ‘This is so tone deaf’” on the city’s part, she said.
Kim promised to “look to see what’s possible” in terms of bird-friendly glass, but added, “not everything that we do is going to please everyone.”
After Bally’s was selected as the winning bidder, company representatives assured advocates they were committed to meeting bird-friendly status, according to Prince.
That was two years ago. In the interim, many of the key players have changed, including Chicago’s mayor and the heads of key departments like Planning and Development. Bally’s went quiet while working out the casino’s financing and dealing with an unanticipated construction obstacle, having to relocate the planned site of the hotel tower due to the discovery of city water pipes.
With the “refreshed site plan” now released, Bird Friendly Chicago wants to hold Bally’s to its word, and restart conversations with the company to get a clearer sense of what exactly is being planned for the hotel tower.
“We would just really like to know what standards they’re going to hold themselves to,” Prince said. “They’re building Chicago’s next landmark building, and why shouldn’t it be as good as it could be? We’d love to see them really step up and do a gold standard of saying, ‘We’re going to treat the whole building. We’re going to make this 100% safe.’”
In response to a request for comment from WTTW News, Bally’s sent a prepared statement from Christopher Jewett, senior vice president of corporate development.
“We are committed to being good neighbors in River West, which includes being good stewards of our riverfront property and the wildlife that calls it home,” Jewett said in the statement.
“The Bally’s Chicago casino permanent location will feature bird protection measures such as bird-safe glass,” he said. “We will continue to follow city guidelines and will look to our partners at HKS (architecture and design firm) for their expert guidance on bird-friendly design.”
According to Prince and other advocates, those “city guidelines” are part of the problem.
Some of the birds gathered by the Field Museum that were killed in October 2023 after colliding with McCormick Place Lakeside Center. (Courtesy of Taylor Hains)
Nothing in Chicago’s building code mandates bird-friendly design. Instead, bird-friendly options — like patterned glass, which provides birds with a visual cue of an obstacle — are among a menu of choices laid out in the city’s sustainable development guidelines.
“It’s too little, it’s insufficient,” Prince said, with the menu essentially treating bird-friendly design as “icing on the cake” rather than a necessity.
“If a zoning ordinance was in place, we wouldn’t even have to be worried about addressing Bally’s about this,” Prince said. “The zoning ordinance would simply require it, and that would be the end of it.”
Bird Friendly Chicago is talking with various alderpeople, she said, to see if any would be willing to sponsor a bird-friendly ordinance — a road the group has been down before, with only the sustainability menu option to show for it.
In the absence of the force of law, advocates remain reliant on the whims of builders, Prince said, and Bird Friendly Chicago lacks the resources to essentially go door to door, persuading developers one building at a time of the value of bird-friendly design.
“There’s not enough life and time for that,” Prince said. “Doing this one by one will never accomplish the scope of the problem that we need to address.”
The result is constant uncertainty. Each new project — be it the Bally’s casino or a lakefront football stadium or a riverfront apartment tower — has the potential to prioritize birds or become the kind of building advocates will be fighting to retrofit decades from now.
“McCormick Place was a black eye to Chicago,” Prince said. “The whole world saw what happened there.”
“This is our face to the world,” Prince said. “This is what we’re showing people. These are birds from around the world that come here and die. With what we do with our buildings, we’re trashing citizens of the world that are critical to the environment. Everyone has a stake in these birds being protected and Chicago should say, ‘We’re the stewards, and we’re stepping up.’”
Contact Patty Wetli: @pattywetli | (773) 509-5623 | [email protected]
