Marina City

This guide to Marina City opens in a Cook County courtroom in 1992, where a judge warned the towers were going to fall into the Chicago River, and traces the decay behind that warning: rusting ramps, a closed riverside walkway, asbestos, and a federal agency that foreclosed and then abandoned twenty-three million dollars in liens. It goes back to architect Bertrand Goldberg's original pitch, which talked a janitors' union into betting its members' pension fund on sixty-five stories of apartments, a marina, a theater and a bowling alley under one roof. You'll hear how the financing itself was flawed from the start, and how renters finally came to own their apartments in 1977. Look up at the scalloped balconies Chicagoans still call the corncob.