Lois Wille looked like a deer caught in a car’s headlights.

Wille, an icon in the lakefront preservation community, had just announced at a press conference her support of the proposed controversial move of the Chicago Children’s Museum to Grant Park.

Rich Samuels, a reporter for WTTW Channel 11’s Chicago Tonight, had asked if she was “selling out.” Pause. “Selling out?” Wille asked. I’m trying to remember her exact response, as I was taken aback as much as she appeared to be. Her answer, as I recall, was calm and reasonable, even persuasive for someone (me) who has opposed the move. Certainly reasonable enough to wonder where the “sell out” question came from.

Wille’s credentials are unrivaled: editorial page editor at the Chicago Tribune, Sun-Times and Daily News, twice Pulitzer Prize winner, and, most relevant to the Grant Park debate, author of Forever Open Free and Clear: The Struggle for Chicago’s Lakefront, the lakefront preservationists’ bible. She also is a giant in Chicago journalism, one of the best I’ve ever worked for and with, and, I hope, a friend. At the press conference, she repeated her long-standing abhorrence of violations of the open, free and clear principle, including the original McCormick Place. So, her participation in a high profile, organized public relations campaign was for some admirers something of a bolt.

But not as much as it was for someone to question her integrity.

It’s where we have come, to a point where we seemingly can’t debate serious public policy issues without falling into dark cynicism about the motives of the participants. I suppose you can’t necessarily blame Samuels, one of the city’s finer television reporters, for asking the question that I’d guess was on the minds of some Chicagoans knowledgeable enough to know the city’s important players.

But there should not be any doubts about the intelligence and honesty of her arguments. She laid them out thusly in a Chicago Tribune op-ed:

o 
The Children’s Museum “fits seamlessly into Millennium Park’s cluster of cultural and entertainment venues along East Randolph Street. But those are for grown-ups and older children;” where are the attractions for the younger children.
o The facility will be built underground and thus complement, not steal from, the park’s green space.
o The park location is more accessible by car and bus than the museum’s present location on Navy Pier.
o The site itself will be instructive about the relationship of the lake to the city’s existence and growth.

My objections to the museum being plunked into Grant Park actually relate to Wille’s last reason about how the new site provides young children with a unique opportunity “to connect young children to the history of their city.” I don’t think the museum need by on the lakefront to accomplish that. As I’ve said previously, what goes into a lakefront park ought to have a substantial connection with it being a park and on the lakefront. The burgeoning Art Institute fails that standard (heresy, I know), but Millennium Park does not. (The former could go anywhere, but the magic of Millennium Park is the view of the magnificent Chicago skyline on a summer evening, a view unobtainable from anywhere else.

The Children’s Museum also fails in this regard. Its existence does not depend on it being near grass or the lakefront. It can expand in a variety of other spots that are more accessible and probably a good deal cheaper, without it being diminished as a museum.

This is an issue that has drawn more heat than it probably deserves. If the museum goes into Grant Park, the lakefront will survive; it’s not like putting a steel mill or a refinery there. If it doesn’t go there, I’m sure that the civic-minded people who are pushing for the Grant Park site will find another perfectly acceptable location. But wherever it goes should not be decided on the basis of who’s motives are the purist, who “likes children more” or who—as Mayor Richard M. Daley suggests—loathes black or poor children more.