I went out to the lakefront on Thursday, to the spot where George Lucas wants to build his museum, prepared to be alarmed and appalled.

My expectations were quickly met.


Twenty-two dollars to park even if you're staying for only an hour?

Appalling. Or an argument for public transportation.


From the dark parking garage, I walked out into the summer sun, in search of the site of the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art.

I instantly saw trees, grass, and, just to the east, the sparkle of that great blue lake.

I saw a few other things too.

A giant football stadium, a giant museum, a giant planetarium, a giant aquarium, buses, bicycles, Segways, cars, hordes of adults, packs of kids, dogs, motorcycles and a police motorcade, a carnival of activity accompanied by a buzzing helicopter, a hooting train and the roar of Lake Shore Drive.

Pleasant, all in all.

But not what you visualize when you hear the words "forever open, clear and free."

That phrase originally referred only to the area that's now Grant Park, but "forever open, clear and free" has become a philosophy for the lakefront. It's Chicago's First Commandment, guiding how we live in this congested city.

Our collective commitment to keeping the coast of Lake Michigan free of clutter and commerce is a big part of what makes this city extraordinary.

While other cities — think New York — struggle to retrofit their waterfronts as peaceful public places, we've managed to preserve most of ours, thanks to early visionaries who understood the civilizing, tranquilizing force of nature.

So when someone — in this case, George Lucas, creator of "Star Wars" — wants to construct a huge building by the lake — in this case, a museum dedicated to the art of visual storytelling — it's only right that believers in the First Commandment loudly ask:

What would that do to our precious lakefront?

It was with that question in my head that I walked along the well-groomed paths of the museum campus Thursday, past Soldier Field and the surrounding concrete, past the rows of portable toilets set up for the Disco Dash fun run, and eventually arrived at the two parking lots where Lucas hopes to build.

The lots, popular among tailgaters at Bears games, stretch like vast asphalt plains between silvery Soldier Field to the north and big, black McCormick Place to the south, both of them, it should be noted, violations of the spirit of "forever open, clear and free."

I stood for a while in the lot next to the McCormick convention center, expecting to be appalled by the vision of the Lucas museum. I wasn't.

If there is such a thing as a beautiful parking lot, this is not it. It's a field of battered black pavement, ornamented by blue trash vats.

It's not on the lake.

From the parking lot, you can glimpse boats in the harbor, and beyond the harbor, Northerly Island, the 91-acre peninsula where a sophisticated new nature park is replacing the old Meigs airfield. But it's not on the lakefront in the way that, say, the planetarium and aquarium are.

The longer I stood in the parking lot, the more the Lucas museum made sense.

The museum campus is already part theme park as well as nature park. A fourth museum, in walking distance from the others, linked by grass and trees and winding walkways, makes aesthetic sense.

As Mayor Rahm Emanuel puts it, the new museum is a way to "complete" the campus.

Lucas' plan would create more greenery. Parking would go underground. He plans to finance the building himself. The mayor claims the museum will bring jobs, tourists and millions of dollars to the city.

There are still questions to be answered about the Lucas project.

After he invests hundreds of millions of dollars into it, is he really, as the mayor's representative has said, going to turn it over to the Chicago Park District? Where will the tailgaters go? What will the building look like?

In the spirit of the First Commandment, there would be no football stadium looming over the lakefront, no convention center squatting at the shore, no music pavilion blaring music on Northerly Island.

But the commandment has already been broken on this bit of lakefront, and the Lucas museum wouldn't make it worse. It could make it better.


Twitter @maryschmich