Not long ago, I had a chance to visit some old friends here in Chicago when I took the family down to a few of the Chicago museums on the east edge of downtown. Having survived 12 years of the Chicago Public School system, I know the former field-trip destination pretty well. The museum campus, as they call it nowadays, is the central stop for visitors to the Adler Planetarium, the Field Museum and the Shedd Aquarium … and a small local park at Northerly Island edged right up to the lakefront near the McCormick Place Convention Center.
The Chicago Field Museum last week also happened to be the site of a Chicago Tribune forum on the Future of Chicago. The Tribune’s editorial director Bruce Dold sat down for an hour-long chat with Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, President Obama’s former Chief of Staff. Always the big mouth, I managed to ask an aviation question at the session about Northerly Island and the airport that used to sit there, Chicago Meigs Field (CGX).
A Little History — But first a few facts for those of you too young to remember Meigs.
Despite having grown up in the Second City, I never realized Northerly Island was the site of the 1933 World’s Fair, called the Century of Progress, to celebrate Chicago’s hundred-year birthday. The name became a little more famous to me in the early 80’s when I worked as an air traffic controller at Meigs Field. I also remember one of my early charter pilot landings there in a Citation on runway 18 scaring the cr** out of me, but I’ll save that story for another day.
But it really wasn’t til 1995 when I met another local pilot — Steve Whitney — at an aviation event in one of Chicago’s north suburbs that the impact of Northerly Island really took hold. I saw Steve sitting alone behind a little table with a few photos and a sign that said, “Save Meigs Field.” He’d formed an organization called, “The Friends of Meigs Field (FOM),” which I’d never heard of at the time. But I listened to his pitch. He spoke passionately and politically about how the City of Chicago wanted to close the airport to build a park, which as a city resident I found pretty odd. The city had miles of lakefront parks already. I learned that the Chicago Park District actually owned Northerly Island … and they wanted it back from the biz jet pilots. I learned Chicago Mayor Richard Daley had a thing about aviation. He just didn’t care. He didn’t like little airplanes messing up his skyline views. Only later did I realize that he really didn’t even care about the airlines or business aviation either … just the money they contributed to his city coffers. But Daley was also a powerful Democrat not just locally, but nationally. He was not to be fooled with.
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