Quote:
Originally Posted by Nowhereman1280
They should blow out the back wall of the stage along Lawrence and make a cantilevered extension over the street/sidewalk to accommodate the back stage facilities and then take everything that is there for backstage now and expand the stage into it...
Since they are working with the city they don't exactly have to treat any border of the site as concrete...
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I'd prefer they did this at the Chicago Theatre - it makes sense to have a coherent theatre district instead of one big outlier in Uptown. The Uptown Theatre is a better match for music and comedy, which are less likely to draw people from out of town than a Broadway show.
It's not like Lake St is the world's greatest pedestrian experience, anyway, and the parking lane is awful because of the L structure. I don't know how much extra depth is required, though - if it's more than 12' or so, you would run into the L columns. But practically, either cantilever over the sidewalk if possible or close the parking lane and re-route the sidewalk around the building extension.
The other option is to encourage construction of a new theater downtown. There aren't very many vacant sites available that would be large enough, but there are a small handful. The Goodman was deliberately built with small auditoriums so Broadway shows would go somewhere else. Merle Reskin is an option, though.