Bally's Chicago casino project finds support from river advocates as it could improve the riverfront development

Bally’s Corporation, which filed its application to build Chicago’s first casino with the Illinois Gaming Board last month, could find local support for its project from river advocates and ecological preservationists.

The Bally’s project to replace the Chicago Tribune printing plant in River West is seen by them as a potentially positive step in the ongoing makeover of the city’s riverfront, as reported by WBEZ. While the casino plan is still unfolding, it will join an urban landscape in mid-transformation. 

For instance, the mostly unfenced waterside pathway of the Riverwalk downtown has become a local icon for social activities. “The Riverwalk has shown that people aren’t going to fall in, and that we want to have that connection to the water,” Jen Masengarb, executive director of the American Institute of Architects Chicago, told WBEZ, noting that in earlier phases of river development, protective fences were the norm. But now that centerpiece is mostly done, and the riverfront beautification is expanding up the North Branch and down the South. 

In between them, the new Bally’s Casino represents an opportunity to do riverfront development the right way, advocates say, with green space and easy public access, whether by canoe, Divvy or shoe leather, and a land-use plan that embraces the waterway rather than tolerates it.

Many of the details are still being sorted out in the pre-final approval process between developers, interest groups and the city. But advocates feel enough safeguards are in place to ensure that what happens at the casino site will improve the river, too. “I’m stating the obvious here, but the transformation of that stretch of the river between Function A, what it was, and Function B, what it will be, is going to be one of the most dramatic switches that we’ve seen in the river,” said Masengarb.

The printing plant known as Freedom Center shrugs off the river with its stark brick wall. “The Freedom Center was just awful,” Blair Kamin, the Pulitzer Prize-winning former architecture critic for the Chicago Tribune, told WBEZ. “It had no connection with the river other than, I guess, receiving paper for the presses.”

“Great public works are multi-generational projects,” Kamin said. “It’s taken generations to get where we are today so the riverfront is like a 50-year, 30-year, 20-year timeline. But the casino is a huge piece and an important one of connecting the downtown” to points north.

The city agrees: “The casino district now creates a destination,” said Maurice Cox, commissioner of the Department of Planning and Development. “So for me, I feel like that’s the next thing: Let’s establish a green agenda and character of the casino district. And that will then inform the way the rest of the river should develop.”

Bally's said it would spend $70 million to open a temporary casino at Medinah Temple by next June while constructing the $1.7 billion permanent hotel-casino at the former Chicago Tribune site downtown along the Chicago River, which could require an accelerated process at the gaming board. The $1.74 billion resort is expected to open in 2026.

Next required steps to meet that timeline are to win license approval from the state and finalize its proposal with the city’s planning department. 

In May, the full Chicago City Council voted 41 to 7 to approve Bally's casino project, which was also backed by Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, defeating the other two finalists, Hard Rock and Rush Street Gaming.