To the editor:
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Despite significant opportunities before Meigs’ construction, there was never a park developed on Northerly Island. Neither during the 5 years preceding nor in the 12 years following the 1933-’34 Century of Progress World’s Fair was the land ever deemed accessible enough to make it valuable as park land. This very inaccessibility is exactly why the Park District has already rejected Northerly Island as a permanent festival site.
The myth that the airport is “almost unusable for two or three months of the year” is simply untrue. The best indicator of the reliability of the airport is the frequency with which aircraft must divert to other airports because of weather. In a recent one-year period, Great Lakes Aviation/United Express had to divert its scheduled flights to Midway only 5.6 percent of the time. In contrast, a park would go virtually unused from October until April.
Fortunately there is an elegant win-win compromise that would benefit all parties: reinventing Meigs Field as the city’s “skypark,” combining landscaped park and observation areas with an aviation museum to complement the new museum campus while retaining the beauty and vitality of an operating downtown airport adjacent to the business district. It is frustrating that our opposition has not shown the vision to examine this option yet.
