Why the Bears believe their new stadium plan will succeed on the lakefront where George Lucas failed

Dazzling drawings, a cheerleader in the mayor’s office, and a possible new crown jewel for a lakefront already known as the “glory of Chicago.”

It sounds a lot like the last few weeks, when the Chicago Bears proposed a new, publicly owned $4.7 billion lakefront development south of Soldier Field. It also describes Chicago in 2014, when there were big plans for another major tourist attraction in that same general location: The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, known by many as the “Star Wars Museum.”

It never happened — not here, anyway. Movie mogul George Lucas is building his museum in Los Angeles instead. But obvious comparisons have been drawn to the court battle that dashed Lucas’ Chicago vision.

The Bears reject them.

That’s not to say the team is ignoring the fight over the Lucas Museum, which effectively ended with a preliminary — but far from final — victory for the advocacy group known as Friends of the Parks. Rather, sources familiar with the proposal say the team has evaluated three developments that have sparked the most notable lakefront legal battles since 2000, which they think bolster their case for a Museum Campus dome.

They include the expansion of Soldier Field in the early 2000s and the Obama Presidential Center now under construction in Jackson Park, in addition to the Lucas Museum.

The Bears already face deep skepticism in Springfield over their pitch to extend a hotel tax to cover $900 million in stadium funding, not to mention $1.5 billion in additional public dollars for infrastructure upgrades. A lawsuit would just add to the team’s challenges despite the flashy unveiling of its stadium plans in April and enthusiastic support from Mayor Brandon Johnson.

Experts have said a challenge could come from any Illinois taxpayer, at least in state court.

But eyes are on the Friends of the Parks. Acting Executive Director Gin Kilgore recently told the Chicago Sun-Times the group is “prepared to fight for the lakefront” but stopped short of promising a lawsuit.

“We’re still waiting to hear much more in detail from the Bears, and hopefully hear them say they’re ready for some kind of meaningful public dialogue on what they should do and what the location should be and what the … various contributions should be,” board member Fred Bates told the Sun-Times Thursday.

In addition to building a new stadium, the team’s plan calls for most of Soldier Field to be demolished. The historic colonnades would be preserved and become the focal point of 14 acres of new parkland, playing fields and other recreational space.

The replacement of Soldier Field is a crucial difference in the Bears’ plan as compared to Lucas’ bid to add a facility to the lakefront a decade ago, according to the sources.

But judges who considered the three cases also looked closely at “control” of property as they grappled with a legal concept known as the “public trust doctrine.” It dates to Chicago’s formative years in the late nineteenth century.

It’s too early to know how much control the Bears would have over the new development, though.

The public trust doctrine and the many legal battles that shaped Chicago’s shoreline are explored in the book “Lakefront: Public Trust and Private Rights in Chicago,” by Marquette University Law School Dean Joseph D. Kearney and Columbia Law School professor Thomas W. Merrill.

Kearney and Merrill spoke with the Sun-Times this week about the legal issues on the lakeshore. One conclusion they drew from their research, Merrill said, is that the public trust doctrine — which could govern the future home of the Bears — is “very unpredictable.”

Merrill also said that, if the Bears could draw any lesson from Lucas’ unfulfilled vision for Chicago’s lakefront, it’s that “patience is necessary.”

Jabba’s ‘Palace’

Chicago got its first look at what Lucas had in mind when drawings were released in November 2014. It didn’t go well. Members of the City Council derided the massive flowing white building as “a spaceship out of ‘Star Wars’” and “a palace for Jabba the Hutt.”

The plans called for an education center, a library, an observation deck and nearly five acres of new parkland. Ma Yansong, the principal designer behind the plans, said his idea was “to make the whole building as a part of [the] landscape” and “create this floating public plaza.”

Then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel called it a “win-win” for the city and for Lucas.

But threats of a lawsuit lurked, and Friends of the Parks followed through. The group alleged in federal court that Lucas aimed to build his museum on land once submerged under Lake Michigan — in violation of the public trust doctrine.

That doctrine has evolved over time and has come to encompass certain land even if it had not once been under Lake Michigan’s waters, according to the judges who have ruled on it and the research in Kearney and Merrill’s book.

U.S. District Judge John Darrah noted in the Lucas Museum case that it means the state cannot “abdicate its trust over property in which the whole people are interested … so as to leave them entirely under the use and control of private parties.”

But in the more recent Obama Center fight, U.S. District Judge John Blakey wrote that the trust is violated only when a conveyance is not authorized by the legislature and primarily benefits a private entity “with no corresponding public benefit.”

The Lucas Museum litigation lasted nearly two years — but never produced a conclusive, final ruling. Instead, Darrah twice refused to throw the case out, siding with the Friends of the Parks in March 2015 and February 2016.

Darrah’s rulings addressed various legal technicalities — including the role of the Illinois General Assembly — but also took on the public trust doctrine. In doing so, he notably turned to the earlier lakefront legal battle involving the Chicago Bears, the expansion of Soldier Field and other improvements to the lakefront that came with it.

Friends of the Parks also challenged that project, arguing that the Bears would be allowed to control Soldier Field to the team’s primary advantage, with no corresponding public benefits, in violation of the public trust doctrine.

The Illinois Supreme Court rejected that argument in 2003. It found that the Chicago Park District would remain Soldier Field’s owner, with “no abdication of control of the property to the Bears.” The opinion made note of the Bears’ limited access to the stadium, first opened in 1924 as Municipal Grant Park Stadium.

“The public will now enjoy a fully renovated, multiuse stadium, instead of a deteriorating 78-year-old facility,” the state’s high court found. “These results do not violate the public trust doctrine even though the Bears will also benefit from the completed project.”

Darrah saw a different situation when he considered the Lucas Museum in 2016. He pointed to a ground lease between the Chicago Park District and the Lucas Museum that said the facility, upon completion, “shall be owned by Lucas Museum of Narrative Art for the term of the lease.” That term lasted 99 years, with options to renew for two additional 99-year terms.

City attorneys argued the land would be owned by the Chicago Park District and the museum would be open to the public. But the Friends of the Parks called the lengthy lease “a legal subterfuge, to disguise a transfer of ownership.”

Ruling on a motion to dismiss, Darrah said the Friends of the Parks had made a sufficient-enough case that the Lucas Museum lease “effectively surrenders control of the museum site … and places the public-trust land ‘entirely beyond the direction and control of the state.’”

Additionally, he saw evidence that “the proposed museum is not for the benefit of the public but will impair public interest in the land and benefit the [Lucas Museum] and promote private and/or commercial interests.”

Unlike the definitive rulings that addressed Soldier Field and later the Obama Center, Darrah’s ruling amounted only to a green light allowing the lawsuit to move forward. Too much time had passed, though, and Lucas eventually had enough.

“Lucas … lost his patience and said, ‘To hell with you guys, I’m going to take my museum to someplace that actually wants to build it,” recalled Merrill, the Charles Evans Hughes professor at Columbia.

Obama Center prevails

A different advocacy group, Protect Our Parks, took on the Obama Center in Jackson Park. The litigation there produced multiple rulings from Blakey and the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

Judge Amy Coney Barrett authored one of those appellate court rulings, one month before then-President Donald Trump nominated her to the Supreme Court in 2020.

The rulings, including the most recent from Blakey in 2022, acknowledge the Obama Center is not being built on land that was once submerged under Lake Michigan. Rather, Blakey wrote that the land became subject to the public trust through an act of the state legislature.

That meant less scrutiny was required, Blakey said.

He went on to rule that a use agreement governing the project “unambiguously provides that the city retains ownership over the [Obama Center] site.” And unlike the Lucas Museum, “the Obama Foundation will bear the cost to construct the [Obama Center] facilities, and then must give the city ownership over the facilities upon completion. … Clearly, the city also does not give up control over the [Obama Center] site.”

Blakey then went on — and imagined the land in Jackson Park had once been under Lake Michigan. Again, he pointed to the Illinois Supreme Court’s 2003 Soldier Field ruling which found no violation of the public trust doctrine despite the benefit to the Bears.

“The same holds true here as a matter of law,” Blakey wrote. He found that “the City did not abdicate control or ownership of the [Obama Center] site to the Obama Foundation,” and an act by the General Assembly showed “clear legislative intent” for the development.

Blakey’s ruling followed the 2020 opinion by Barrett, who added her own twist to lakefront law in Chicago. Barrett rejected the notion that any taxpayer has the right to sue in federal court over a public trust doctrine violation.

That’s all well and good in state court, Barrett wrote, but a federal court plaintiff must show a “concrete injury.”

It’s unclear what that might mean for any legal challenge against the Bears. Protect Our Parks followed up with another federal lawsuit from plaintiffs who claimed they had “used and enjoyed Jackson Park and the surrounding public areas and intend to continue using them for recreation,” Blakey noted in a later ruling.

But Barrett’s opinion could also steer any legal challenge out of federal court and into state court. That might change the dynamics, Kearney and Merrill said.

“State court judges, I think, are pretty sensitive to what the dominant political forces in the city want to do,” Merrill said. “And federal court judges are more unpredictable because they’re a little bit more insulated.”

Mila Marshall, an urban ecologist and staffer for the Sierra Club environmental organization, told the Sun-Times she was initially hesitant about the Bears’ grandiose lakefront vision. But she was sold by its expansion of park space and public restrooms that are lacking along much of the lakefront, especially near mostly Black South Side neighborhoods.

“This investment isn’t just for the fiscal health of the Bears,” said Marshall, who served on the Friends of the Park board from 2022-23. “It’s an opportunity for the city — there’s no space for us downtown.”

Marshall, who is Black, said it could be time to rethink Chicago’s long-held lakefront values.

“I would not have been invited to the table for the Burnham Plan,” Marshall said, referring to the 1909 vision of Chicago published by architect Daniel Burnham. “We as a city have never acknowledged the planning of our environment was done without us, and to keep us out of it: low-income, people of color, immigrants.”

Meanwhile, Merrill has his own separate concerns about the unpredictability of the public trust doctrine in the hands of judges — and whether the future of Chicago’s most important real estate even belongs in the courtroom.

“This doesn’t seem to be the right way to decide the future of the lakefront,” Merrill said. “It really should be subject to some kind of more popular, democratic control.”

Contributing: Fran Spielman