Millennium Park Closed Yesterday For the First Time Ever

By Rachelle Bowden in News on Sep 9, 2005 12:06PM

If you were visiting the city yesterday and hoped to see Millennium Park you were SOL. From 6am to 11pm, Large portions of the park were closed for a private party thrown by Toyota Motor Sales USA.

Toyota paid $300k in rent and $500k towards the Millennium Park fund (does this money go towards the debt of building the park? or maybe towards maintenance?). They used the park to host a conference of car dealers and corporate employees. Awesome. We don't know about you, but Chicagoist's "real job" can barely scrape together the dough to treat us to a holiday celebration, let alone drop almost a million bucks on a conference! Our conferences always look like the inside of a convention center or a hotel meeting room. zzzzz.

This was the first time the park has ever been closed to the public and some tourists bitched.. of course, we would too. Millennium Park is The Shit and if you're visiting Chicago, we think it's a "must see". Still, Chicagoist kind of likes the idea of a half million dollars going toward the park fund. Maybe it will save some people a tax hike. Still, the party wasn't until the evening.. did the park really need to be closed all day?

Also, while the park was closed the geniuses at GM took advantage of the opportunity to make themselves look better than Toyota. They reminded visitors that Chicago is for everyone by standing in front of the park and handing out souvenir slide viewers with images of the Bean and Pritzker Pavillion. They also had about 40 GM cars down there and gave about 1,500 grumpy tourists free rides and free admission to other Chicago attractions like the Field Museum, the Aquarium, and MCA.