We have an appeal and a cross-appeal from an injunction that restricts the right of the Metropolitan Pier and Exposition Authority (MPEA) — the Illinois' governmental unit that owns Navy Pier in Chicago — -to limit the exercise of free speech by people who frequent the pier. The plaintiffs want to engage in a range of expressive activities there — leafletting, soliciting signatures on petitions, carrying signs and banners, wearing clothing festooned with symbols and slo *698 gans, chanting, speechifying — all to the end of advocating an increase in the minimum wage. They wanted to do these things during the Democratic National Convention in 1996, when the MPEA rented the entire pier to the Democrats for $1 for a party, and they were turned away, and brought this suit.
Navy Pier, in downtown Chicago, juts out 3,000 feet into Lake Michigan and is more than 400 feet wide at its widest point. Formerly a naval facility, by the 1980s it was little used and in 1989 the Illinois legislature handed it over to the MPEA (at the time known as the Metropolitan Fair and Exposition Authority) and appropriated $200 million for the pier’s renovation. The pier was to be transformed into a recreational and commercial center — part park, part meeting and exhibition facility, part shopping emporium, part amusement park. The reconstruction was completed in 1995.
The stylized map at the end of this opinion will give the reader a rough sense of the pier’s current design. For our purposes, the design has four elements. The first consists of outdoor strolling areas, mainly sidewalks. The principal sidewalk — the pier’s thoroughfare — is Dock Street (misnamed — it is not a street; except for parking, the pier is closed to vehicles other than service vehicles). It runs the length of the pier on its south side. It is broad, abuts the lake, and is more like a boardwalk than a conventional sidewalk. Tourist boats are moored on the lake side of the street, and the other side is lined with shops (the Arcade Shops) and restaurants. Dock Street ends, at the eastern end of the pier, in a plaza in which sculpture is sometimes exhibited. There is a sidewalk on the north side of the pier as well, between the lake and the service street, but it is narrow and little used. The district court treated what we are calling the first design element as a traditional public forum, which means (as we shall see) that the MPEA must open it up to the full range of First Amendment expressive activities, subject however to reasonable restrictions as to the time, place, and manner of expression.
The second design element is a tiny amusement park, consisting of a ferris wheel, carousel, reflecting pool, and small indoor park, called Crystal Gardens, which has fountains that squirt columns of water to each other, surmounted by a glass dome. The second element, too, the district judge deemed a traditional public forum. The third element, consisting mainly of the Family Pavilion at the western end of the pier and the Arcade Shops, which lead off from the Family Pavilion, is an indoor shopping mall. The district judge treated this as a nonpublie forum in which the plaintiffs have no right to engage in expressive activity. The fourth element, which includes the Grand Ballroom and Festival Hall, consists of large meeting rooms suitable for trade and other conventions (such as the trade association of candy manufacturers, which held its annual convention recently in Festival Hall), weddings and other parties (in the Grand Ballroom), and exhibitions (for example the annual Chicago Art Fair, which is also held in the Grand Ballroom). The fourth element the district judge held was a designated public forum, which she equated to a traditional public forum.
The sidewalk, park, and mall sections of the pier are open to the public without charge, except that they are closed from 2 a.m. to 6 a.m., the same hours that the parks owned by the Chicago Park District are closed. The MPEA’s suggestion that only a facility that is open 24 hours a day can be classified as a public forum for First Amendment purposes does not merit discussion.
The injunction entered by the district court (and in this court challenged by both sides) gives the plaintiffs no rights in the indoor shopping mall but full First Amendment rights in the rest of the pier, though subject to reasonable time, place, and manner restrictions.
All the buildings on the pier, as well as the pier itself, are owned by the MPEA; and because the legislature has appropriated no operating funds for the pier, the MPEA must defray the cost of running the pier out of the lease rentals that it receives from the shops and other concessions and the fees that it receives for renting out the meeting rooms. Since Navy Pier is, thus, essentially a commercial enterprise, the MPEA is naturally highly sensitive to the spillover effects, *699 whether positive or negative, of each activity on the pier on every other activity on the pier. The positive effects are illustrated by the MPEA’s sponsorship of fireworks displays for which there is no charge. The displays are a form of advertising; they publicize the pier and attract people who buy goods or services from the shops and restaurants on the pier. So while the displays generate no revenue directly, their cost is recouped in the greater sales that they generate for the MPEA’s lessees. The act of largesse that set off this suit — the rental of the entire pier to the Democratic Party for $1 — was motivated, we are assured by the MPEA, not by any fealty to the Democrats but by the enormous and on the whole favorable publicity that the event was expected to generate for the pier. When we asked the MPEA’s lawyer at argument whether her client would rent the pier to the American Nazi Party for $1, we received an emphatic negative answer; there would be enormous publicity, but of the wrong kind. The MPEA ■ refuses to waive fees for the plaintiffs, who like to hold a rally in the Grand Ballroom in support of their proposal for a higher minimum wage.
If the MPEA were a private entity, it would have a free hand in deciding whom to admit to its property and on what terms, provided that it did not violate certain anti-discrimination laws that are of no moment to this suit. The pier if privately owned would not fall within the “company town” exception of
Marsh v. Alabama,
We doubt that the MPEA has to allow its meeting rooms to be used for political events at all, for we disagree with the district judge’s ruling that these rooms constitute a public forum. Unlike public streets or the speakers’ corner in London’s Hyde Park, the exhibition, convention, and meeting facilities of Navy Pier are not traditional sites for public assembly, demonstrations, or debate. They thus are not what in the jargon of free-speech law are called “traditional public forums.”
United States v. Grace,
Navy Pier’s meeting rooms are rented to organizations for use by their members and guests rather than by the public at large unless the lessee decides to admit the public. In deciding whom to rent to and at what price, the MPEA seeks to maximize positive spillovers and minimize negative ones, since as we have said the spillovers affect the MPEA’s revenues from its other customers. It’s not as if the MPEA owned a theater at which any member of the public was welcome who could pay the admission price, as in the
Southeastern Promotions
case. Selectivity and restriction are of the essence of the commercial strategy that informs the MPEA’s management of the pier. Cf.
Lehman v. City of Shaker Heights,
The MPEA could, therefore, as the
Lehman
and
Cornelius
cases make clear, adopt a blanket rule barring the use of its meeting rooms for political events, if it reasonably believed that such events, because of their eontroversiality, would drive customers from the pier and reduce the MPEA’s revenues. Government is not required to subsidize the market in ideas and opinions by throwing open its nonpublic meeting facilities to politicians. And by the same token, if it does allow such facilities to be used for such events, it does not have to waive its normal fee just because a particular applicant can’t afford the fee; that is, it does not have to subsidize marginal or unpopular political causes. The recent
Forbes
case makes this clear (more on
Forbes
shortly), as do
Stonewall Union v. City of Columbus,
It is only a small step to the conclusion that the MPEA may not discriminate in the terms of access to these facilities in favor of established parties and popular politicians on the ground that, being established, being popular, they generate favorable publicity. Such a policy would be a form of the heckler’s veto; it would be the equivalent of charging a higher permit fee for a march or other demonstration by an unpopular group on the ground that the onlookers are likely to be hostile, thus necessitating increased security; and that is forbidden.
Forsyth County v. Nationalist Movement,
At argument the MPEA pressed on us the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Arkansas Educational Television Commission v. Forbes, supra, which holds that a publicly owned television station may use “editorial discretion” to exclude an independent candidate who has little public support from a debate among the candidates for a public office. Forbes might be read to endorse the same form of heckler’s veto to which the MPEA is appealing in this case. But to read Forbes so broadly would be to place it on a collision course with Forsyth, which Forbes did not even cite and we doubt meant to overrule. A debate cannot be staged without deciding who may participate in it, and given the inescapable need to choose, the criterion of choice that the television station used was as good as any. Speech values were on both sides of the equation in Forbes. If, to avoid restricting speech, the station invited all the candidates to participate in the debate, the time available to the frontrunners would be curtailed, yet what frontrunners have to say is probably more valuable to the audience than what the fringe candidates have to say — probably, not certainly. Major parties can originate as fringe parties, and fringe parties can contribute ideas that are later picked up by major parties. Still, restricting the speech opportunity of the fringe candidates may increase the speech benefits of the debate overall No such necessity of making tradeoffs faced the MPEA when asked to waive fees for the plaintiffs, having done so for the Democrats. It’s not as if the plaintiffs had wanted to crash the Democrats’ party, in the way that Forbes wanted to crash the debate of the frontrunners.
Forbes
may, however, rest on a broader ground. Whenever the government is in the business of speech, whether it is producing television programs or operating a museum or making grants or running schools, the exercise of editorial judgment is inescapable. If there is any political or ideological resonance to the expressive activity involved, the good-faith exercise of that judgment may have unavoidable political or ideological consequences; and so (because they are unavoidable) these consequences do not condemn the judgment. See, e.g.,
National Endowment for the Arts v. Finley,
— U.S. —,
What we have said so far shows that the district judge was right to require the *702 MPEA to formulate criteria for the renting out of the Grand Ballroom and other meeting facilities that will prevent the direct or indirect use of politics to determine whether to waive the normal fees. If the MPEA waives fees for one political group, it must waive fees for other political groups, without favoritism.
We must next decide whether the district judge was also right to classify the sidewalks, the plaza, and Crystal Gardens as traditional public forums.
Capitol Square Review & Advisory Board v. Pinette,
Yet while holding that the airport was not a traditional public forum, the Court also held that the Krishnas were entitled to hand out leaflets in the public areas of the airport. See
International Society for Krishna Consciousness, Inc. v. Lee, supra,
Not only are the costs of intrusive, noisy, or menacing demonstrations greater on Navy Pier than on State Street, but the benefits in dissemination of ideas and opinions are less because of the geography of the pier. It is rather out of the way, and is so configured that everyone entering it either on foot or by car must enter through a narrow bottleneck, appropriately named Gateway Park, which the MPEA also controls and which it concedes is a traditional public forum. By demonstrating in Gateway Park, persons wishing to exercise their First Amendment right of expression can communicate with every single person who enters Navy Pier. Cf.
International Society for Krishna Consciousness, Inc. v. Lee, supra,
We do not quite know, and need not at this stage of the litigation decide, just how broadly or narrowly the right of leafletting carved in
ISKCON
should be interpreted in the setting of Navy Pier. What is particularly interesting about Justice O’Connor’s swing opinion is that it blurs the line between the public and nonpublic forum, suggesting a sliding-scale approach — a standard versus a rule or categories — in which the benefits and costs of free speech are balanced in particular settings. See also
Heffron v. International Society for Krishna Consciousness, Inc.,
We come last to the plaintiffs’ cross-appeal, which attacks the district judge’s ruling that the indoor mall areas of Navy Pier are nonpublic forums so that the MPEA is free to exclude all expressive activity from them. If, to repeat an earlier point, these were private shopping malls, the owner could impose such a ban; and this would be equally true of O’Hare Airport if it were privately owned. But as Navy Pier is publicly owned, it seems to us to come within the rule of the
ISKCON
case, and leafletting must be allowed, just as the First Circuit held, in reliance on
ISKCON,
with reference to the Boston subway in
Jews for Jesus, Inc. v. Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority,
To summarize, although we agree with the district judge that the MPEA has violated the First Amendment rights of these plaintiffs and should be enjoined, we think that the injunction that she entered must be vacated. It is at once too broad in treating the open areas, the amusement park, and the meeting rooms as public forums, and too narrow in denying ISKCON status to the interior walkways. But it is correct in requiring that fee waivers for the meeting rooms not be granted on discriminatory terms, though this is not because, as the district judge believed, the rooms are public forums; they are not; but government may not discriminate on political grounds in the terms of access to the nonpublic forums that it owns. The case must be remanded for the drafting and entry of a new injunction in conformity with the analysis in this opinion.
We are guardedly optimistic that on remand the parties will be able to agree on an appropriate injunction, for we sensed by the close of the oral argument that they are not as far apart as their briefs had suggested. We doubt that the plaintiffs want to destroy the amenities or impair the commercial viability of Navy Pier. What good would it do them? It would accelerate what is now a nationwide trend toward the privatization of public property. If the First Amendment handcuffs the effective exploitation of commercially valuable public property, the government will have an incentive to sell it to a private company, which will not be cabined by the First Amendment. We doubt that a private owner of Navy Pier would allow the plaintiffs even the limited rights of expression that we hold the Constitution entitles them to engage in there.
We wish in closing to commend the counsel for both parties for their excellent briefs and oral arguments.
VACATED AND REMANDED WITH INSTRUCTIONS.
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