Now, from the mayor who wanted to plunk a huge airport down on top of stinky, half-dead Lake Calumet, comes another airport idea that’s for the birds. This time in only the most positive way.
The Chicago Park District owns the ground under Meigs, but has been leasing it to the city for 48 years. The lease is up in 1996, and Daley says he won’t renew. With support from him and the city’s parks, aviation, and environmental overlords, Meigs’s yield looks like a sure thing. The biggest obstacle is a familiar one: money. Another is the airport’s uncanny staying power; in the past few decades it has survived repeated attempts to shut it down.
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“When 1996 comes, if we don’t have a game plan ready, nothing will happen,” says Eleanor Roemer, staff attorney for the Lake Michigan Federation, an organization dedicated to the health of the lake. “The idea is to get the public thinking about visions for that land. If anything, you need to start planning for the cost, so you need to start talking about it early.” Last winter and earlier this spring Roemer’s group and Friends of the Parks hosted a batch of discussion sessions and presentations by architects on replacing Meigs with a park. Then came a contest sponsored by the Chicago Architectural Club that asked for ideas from civilians. In the meantime Daley and his commissioner of the environment, Henry Henderson, have been hitting up state and federal parks agencies for possible help with funding.
“This is the most important decision for the lakefront for our generation,” says John McManus, the Park District’s planning supervisor. “In Chicago it’s always Burnham, Burnham, Burnham. Let’s see if this generation can answer his call.” In the now-holy Plan of Chicago he cowrote in 1909, Daniel Burnham specified that a series of natural looking recreation islands were to be built in the lake between downtown and Jackson Park. The only one that ever materialized, Northerly Island, was built in the early 1920s and later turned into the peninsula that is now the site of the Adler Planetarium, the Burnham Harbor Yacht Club, and Meigs Field. Of the three, the airport least matches Burnham’s vision for Northerly Island.
Not to mention the mayor; the parks chief and his boss, Park Board president John Rogers; and even the city’s top airport guy, aviation commissioner David Mosena. “Some aviation people don’t want to give up any concrete, but we’ve never heard a compelling case for continuing to keep Meigs open,” Mosena says, effectively closing the buffalo ring of city administrators surrounding Northerly Island. Mosena and his deputy commissioner, David Suomi, both believe the traffic load at Meigs can be easily shifted to Midway, O’Hare, and the region’s little airports, in places like Gary and Aurora.
Meigs doesn’t make any money either. The city spends $760,000 to operate the airport each year and gets about $395,000 back. The $365,000 deficit is covered by revenues from the other airports and by taxes. Yet Mosena says the city’s financial loss isn’t a major issue. “The mayor’s vision of parkland on that site is what’s driving the decision.”
A nutty one by Walter Netsch that takes advantage of the much-discussed rerouting of Lake Shore Drive. He suggests, among other things, roofing over Soldier Field to create a massive waterfall and creating wetlands on Northerly Island. Using William Cronon’s Nature’s Metropolis as his guide, he would also create a new museum that focuses on Chicago’s natural history.
