In the Sun-Times last week: “Orland Park-based Edwards Realty Co. announced Wednesday that it purchased Block 37 for $30 million, with plans to revamp the consumer experience at the Loop shopping mall.”
True enough, though I would have gone with something along the lines of:
“You bought Block 37?!?!?! Bwahaha! Are you INSANE?”
A matter of tone, of course. The news routinely does — and very often should — reflect the dry facts set before the general public: leases and payments, business plans and company announcements.
But there is such a thing as karma. As juju. We could debate whether curses are real and whether certain physical places can be cursed for all time. The Bible endorses that notion, in Genesis: “Cursed is the ground for thy sake,” God tells Adam, ejecting him from the Garden of Eden for, in his own way, failing to follow market imperatives.
How bad is it?
In the long history of urban development failure, there is really only one city block in the country that can be described as truly infamous: the block immediately east of Daley Plaza. Otherwise prime downtown property that has been known since before the city’s founding as Block 37, it has also been called not only “cursed” but a “fiasco” and “a boondoggle.”
In 1996, a book was published chronicling earlier doomed efforts to make something take hold there. Ross Miller’s “Here’s the Deal,” cataloging years of lawsuits and protests over what he called a “gold-plated hole in the ground.”
Since then, a chain of false starts, bankruptcies, failures and foreclosures. Along with, to be fair, several modest successes: the studios of a once-respected television network, CBS on the southern half of the block. A popular restaurant, The Dearborn, on its northwest corner. Some offices and apartments.
And yet. One hopes Edwards Realty of Orland Park did their due diligence. But if not, buckle up guys, and sorry (psst: note to regular readers. Not really sorry. In fact, I kinda dig it) to be the one to have to tell you.
In 1830, Block 37’s tale begins
Like a good campfire story, the tale of Block 37 starts a long, long time ago, in 1830, and might indeed involve a Native American curse. Not because of the usual disturbed sacred burial ground,. But close. On the original map of Chicago, the ancestral land of the Council of the Three Fires, the Potawatomi, the Ojibwe and the Odawa, was platted up into 58 blocks so it could be sold off by New York real estate speculators to pay for the I & M Canal, thus permanently ripping off and disenfranchising the defrauded Indigenous peoples, who no doubt resented it. On that fateful document, the block delineated by Randolph, Washington, Dearborn and the edge of the map where State would someday run is designated with a number, and that number is 37.
It might be argued that Block 37 had a good 19th century. Office buildings. Theaters. A YMCA. Even the first half of the 20th century passed unstricken. There was a Stop & Shop. Maybe the curse was placed in 1989, when newly elected Mayor Richard M. Daley, hot to top his father as Rich the Builder, allowed the block to be razed, including the landmark McCarthy Building, a dear little five-story structure built the year after the Great Chicago Fire. Maybe that was the original sin, hubris: rejection of the past, clearing the entire block before its replacement was firmly set.
The site sat mostly empty for 20 years, poorly masked by various dismal half-efforts to hide its yawning vacancy in the heart of the Loop: a little-patronized ice skating rink; an underfunded arts and crafts festival, held in tents.
Starting in 2005, the CTA poured nearly half a billion dollars into the basement of Block 37, hoping to construct some sort of subterranean mega station tying the Blue and Red lines together. Instead, they only managed to create a really expensive cavern.
Finally, in 2009, a four-story mall opened that its owners called, with either laudable Chicago cheek or foolish strike-me-dead hubris, “Block Thirty Seven.” That is what Edwards Realty of Orland Park boldly, or rashly, bought for $30 million.
For years, the place had a 70% vacancy rate. Though I worked nearby and passed frequently, I never considered going inside until one day in 2013 — this is how I described the experience:
“It says something about the outer Neptune orbital ring of Chicago consciousness” of the location that “the idea of actually stepping into an establishment on Block 37 never crossed my mind until Monday, after I noticed the Doughnut Vault’s distinctive cornflower-blue 1957 van parked on the sidewalk directly under the Dearborn entrance to what is boldly (or foolishly) called ‘Block Thirty Seven Shops on State.’ If Block 37 exerts a repulsive force on profits and customers, the Doughnut Vault is the opposite, exerting a magnetic, indeed, mesmeric, power. I bought a doughnut even though I wasn’t hungry and didn’t want one.
“I was chatting with Derek, the guy in the van, when a frantic publicist, seeing my notebook, waylaid me, insisting on personally escorting me that instant into Block 37. It all happened so quickly, it was a little discombobulating, as if a hatch opened in the Bean and a gnome yanked me inside. I would have preferred a bit of ceremony, the way buses entering Jerusalem will pause to let the occupants weep and sing and pray. The mall has been open four years, but the second floor has the raw feel of a space opening next month. There is one store.”
I did my best to promote the desperate pop-up stores found inside, noting, “If you do go, after eating your fill, make sure you wander up to the third floor to gaze respectfully on the expanse of closed stores, noting the brave, sad mural showing the busy, successful food court that isn’t there.”
‘Busy Rich Folks Underground Express’
In 2018, then-mayor and now potential presidential candidate Rahm Emanuel held a press conference in the half-billion-dollar grotto carved deep below Block 37 with then car and space mogul and future poster boy for ethno-fascism Elon Musk, to announce their $1 billion pipe dream of boring a maglev train line to O’Hare Airport. What one wag — OK, me — immediately dubbed the “Busy Rich Folks Underground Express.”
Almost needless to say, not a tablespoon of earth was ever turned over for that one.
Jumping to today: Is there no hope for the new owners of Block 37?
Seafarer Olivier Le Carrer, in his diverting “Atlas of Cursed Places” — which somehow overlooks Block 37 — divided such forlorn lands into three realms: those actually damned by specific spells or for being the loci of supernatural events; those blighted by nature — horrible climates, unquenchable fires, masses of sky-darkening bats, angry volcanoes.
And the third class, such as Block 37, places “rendered uninhabitable by human activity” of such an extreme nature as to bring “no real hope of change, the perenniality of the problem sadly being a key characteristic.”
So is there no hope? In 2013, I didn’t think so, writing:
“There is no reason to assume the block’s woes are over. One expects a sulfurous hell mouth to open up next, sucking the building down, or a meteor to hit, or some other kind of strange, nowhere-else-but-here calamity. Nothing should be surprising at this point.”
Edwards Realty of Orland Park say they are changing Block 37’s name — hopefully not to something like “Gehenna” — a smart step when trying to expunge a nightmarish past. An exorcism might also help.
Heck, were I in their unfortunate position, I would hire a Catholic priest, a feng shui expert, and maybe track down some Potawatomi to perform a ghost dance, to sweep away evil spirits and cleanse the area of whatever malevolent force holds Block 37 in its grip to this very day. Because it sure needs something.