Editorial: Ten more years of Lollapalooza? An economic boon but a parent and environmentalist’s nightmare

The Lightfoot administration has been struggling to keep its big news under wraps. Bally’s Chairman Soohyung Kim blabbed about his successful Chicago casino bid ahead of the official news conference. And, on Thursday, Lollapalooza founder Perry Farrell told WGN’s Dean Richards that the Grant Park festival, running through Sunday, had already come to terms on a long-term deal with City Hall.

“The mayor has given us a 10-year extension in the park,” Farrell said. “So we’ll be around here for another decade.”

The definitive nature of that likely improvised comment no doubt caused some heads to explode inside City Hall — given the likely lack of prior notification to all of the stakeholders — and C3 Presents, the company that actually promotes the music festival, immediately started walking it back.

By the end of the day, the done deal was variously being reported as a nearly done deal, or a likely deal, or even a deal with a few snags yet to be worked out. But let’s say the odds of another decade of the July bacchanal are looking pretty darn good.

Is this a desirable thing for Chicago?

If you are a worrying parent of a teenager, or even a tween, you might not be celebrating, given the festival’s youthful target demographic and its multiday cost, its tacit fashion requirement of wearing as little as possible, its party atmosphere and general ability to give parents fits.

We heard in our family rooms of phones and wallets being stolen, scratched torsos from invasive wristbands, body parts leaving marks on other bodies and various other tawdry ills. Emergency room staffers have told us this is far from their favorite weekend of the year. Plenty of parents get little or no sleep, and spend a lot of their precious July weekend circling around the exit and entrance area in traffic jams, even as they try to extract their amped-up offspring from the crowd.

Other Lolla detractors include those who care for Grant Park.

“The Park District does not require these major park users to repair the damage that they do to the park every year,” Leslie Recht, head of the Grant Park Advisory Council, told us. Recht’s group has been lobbying to force the promoters to pay for better cleaning of the streets and alleys in and around Grant Park each day of Lolla “to reduce the amount of urine, defecation and people throwing up around the park.” The council is arguing for reduced decibel levels (good luck with that) and also that the city better monitor “all damage to Grant Park and require Lolla to pay all repair costs. This includes damage to the streets, sidewalks, Fountain table and tennis courts, as well as the grass.”

“Every year many Lolla attendees are taken to hospitals,” the group has noted. “Clearly there is a need for more proactive protection of Lolla attendees, many of whom are young and vulnerable.”

Incontrovertibly.

Lolla should be a leave-no-trace event, restoring the park to its previous condition and caring for all the young people (as many as 400,000 admissions) who attend its big weekend. Many peer festivals are in rural areas where all of these things can be more easily controlled, Lolla is in the middle of downtown and very close to where a large number of Chicagoans live. The generally well-organized festival does take security seriously but whatever long-term deal is being hatched should ensure that the promoters bear the full costs of returning the park to the people. Preferably in better shape than before.

Downtown residents have had a lot to deal with lately. Aside from all the crime issues, they were also recently told their neighborhood would become a NASCAR track, potentially leading to many days of street closures and other hassles for the benefit of a private business. All of these mega-events attract massive crowds and inevitable quality-of-life issues.

If Lolla is here for the long term, C3 Presents had better start thinking more like the operator of a permanent facility (such as Wrigley Field) than a temporary event promoter. For all their flaws, the Ricketts family has made significant improvements to the Wrigleyville neighborhood, providing a year-round, family-friendly gathering space, a new hotel and restaurants, free neighborhood security patrols, giveaways and other ways of thanking the folks who deal with baseball fans for so many dates on the calendar.

Lightfoot should hold C3 responsible for some of those goodies for downtown residents, building on its existing support of arts education programs in the city. Many millions of dollars will flow to C3 during that upcoming decade. The company needs a year-round neighborhood relations presence and it should be making nice with the people who care about Grant Park, which is, after all, the home of the festival.

The reason for the city to go along with all this, of course, is money. Lollapalooza has an economic impact of at least $300 million a year. That’s $3 billion, just at today’s prices, over 10 years. Lolla kids eat out, shop, stay in hotels, buy from retail outlets and pack buses, trains and planes. Some of them stick around and patronize clubs and other events and festivals. Others decide they like Chicago so much they want to move here. After they graduate high school.

Chicago is having to face hotel bankruptcies, the drop-off in business travel and the painful new reality that its lucrative convention business may take years to return, if it ever fully comes back at all.

The city needs Lollapalooza more than vice versa. And, given all our complaints and worries about the lack of pedestrians on downtown streets, we checked things out and we cheer the crowds of visitors to be found in Chicago this weekend.

But there is a price, paid mostly by the festival’s neighbors and the park infrastructure.

C3 and the Lightfoot administration must do everything they can to make that better.

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