The West Tower Crane Is Up At McDonald's Park

The first of two tower cranes for McDonald’s Park, the new soccer stadium under construction by and for the Chicago Fire Football Club, has been erected at The 78 in the South Loop. Permits for the West Crane and the East Crane both hit the Chicago Data Portal on April 14; the West Crane came through on April 21, with the other still pending.

We got a photo from our friend Alex on May 22, showing the base for the first crane had been planted on the west side of the stadium site, along the Wells Street Connector. Then Twitter photos started coming in Monday of this week, showing full assembly underway. By Wednesday, the crane looked just about functional, with one worker perched out on the end of the jib attending to final details. Once that’s finished, West Crane will start doing about half of the heavy lifting.

On May 13, the Fire announced a partnership with McDonald’s for the naming rights to the 22,000-seat, $750 million soccer stadium and entertainment venue. As yet there has been no confirmation that Kickin’ McNuggets will be one of the food items available to fans when the stadium opens in 2028.

This is the second time there have been a pair of tower cranes on a recent McDonald’s project. In 2017, two Peiner SK-415 rigs were permitted to build the new McDonald’s corporate office on the former site of Oprah Winfrey’s Harpo Studios at 110 North Carpenter Street in the West Loop. One of those same Peiner models is now erected for the soccer stadium. The East Crane will be a yellow Liebherr 316 EC-H12 model.

As for construction leading up to tower crane assembly, pile driving appears to be finished, with no rigs still on site for driving steel into the soil. There is, however, a pending permit as of May 12 for revisions to the pile permit, which includes additional piles, pile-type changes, and lowering of pile caps.

We will update you in the next couple of days on non-crane activity on the site. For now, here are a whole lot of photos of Chicago’s newest tower crane:

Photo of the west stub courtesy of MrSouthLoop on Instagram, who sent it to us on May 22.

Photo by Daniel Schell

400 lake Shore’s crane, which will be dismantled starting late next week, in the background. Photo by Daniel Schell

Photo by Daniel Schell

Here are a couple shots of a sea of piles, and a perfectly level playing surface.

Photo by Daniel Schell

Permits for piles, shallow foundations, and superstructure have all been issued. We still await the full building permit.

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The West Tower Crane Is Up At McDonald’s Park

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