Plan for new music venue at former Morton Salt site clears key hurdle
Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s plan to create an “outdoor entertainment venue liquor license” in time for live music this summer at the Morton Salt Shed cleared a key hurdle Wednesday, amid concern that it would pave the way for more of the same at Lincoln Yards and the River West site of a Chicago casino.
The City Council’s License Committee advanced the mayor’s plan 13-2, over strenuous objections from neighboring Ald. Michele Smith (43rd), downtown Ald. Brendan Reilly (42nd), and Friends of the Chicago River.
Smith’s motion to postpone the vote for at least a month to work out the kinks failed by a closer vote, 8 to 5.
Smith is the mayoral ally who chairs the City Council’s Committee on Ethics and Government Oversight.
During a surprisingly lengthy debate on an outdoor music venue project years in the making, Smith argued the planned development of the Morton Salt facility, 1357 N. Elston Ave., never contemplated an outdoor music venue, let alone an arena with 3,000 seats located just 125 feet from residential buildings.
Of even greater concern to Smith is that the mayor’s ordinance would open the door to similarly large outdoor riverfront music venues at two nearby sites: the proposed Bally’s casino at Chicago Avenue and Halsted Street in River West, and the massive mixeduse development known as Lincoln Yards.
“This is a dramatic U-turn. Even if this is a great project — I mean, it’s a beautiful project. But this ordinance allows large-scale venues in ways that will dramatically impact the entire area. We are now trumpeting the Chicago River as a new entertainment corridor,” Smith said.
Smith branded the ordinance a “new turn against” Chicago’s plan to “spread entertainment into the neighborhoods.” She noted the city has made “substantial investments” in the Uptown Theater, the Congress Theater and “many venues” on the South Side.
“I am very concerned that this will bring a level of, once again, downtown-centered, white-people-oriented kinds of entertainment that will really hurt smaller venues and other large venues that intend to compete,” she said.
Prior to the final vote, Smith read directly from a letter from Friends of the Chicago River strongly opposing the Morton Salt music venue and the potential for a similar concert space at a Bally’s Chicago casino.
Those guidelines are “incompatible” with the city’s own river design guidelines, which called for a “connected greenway along the river that overlooks public parks and natural habitats” thereby offering a “peaceful, natural contrast to the urban environment,” the letter states.
Reilly cited his notorious struggles with what he called “bad liquor license owners” downtown.
“Say we have a venue that opens. They’ve invested these millions and millions of dollars in it. And they become a chronic source of nuisance complaints. Imagine families with young children, babies. … And multiple nights a week, their windows are shaking because, unfortunately for them, they have speakers facing across a river at them,” Reilly said.
Noting that he struggled with abuses at Bottled Blonde for years before shutting that bar down, Reilly said: “This is a venue on steroids.”
Local Liquor Control Commissioner Shannon Trotter said the new venue will have a liquor license as well as a public place of amusement license.
“All of those are subject to all of the regular disciplinary or public nuisance processes that we have,” Trotter said.