By Michael Miner
The Sun-Times was already on board. “It should be a park, as Mayor Daley is urging,” said a ’93 editorial. “That’s how it was meant to be when it was conceived as part of Daniel H. Burnham’s 1909 great plan for Chicago.
By journalism’s normal lights the contest could mean only one thing: not mere support for the idea of replacing Meigs but the kind of wholehearted identification with it required for civic grandstanding.
In mid-June one of those “airport enthusiasts” the Sun-Times had made fun of back in 1993 came calling on Wade. Steven Whitney, a pilot and businessman who founded Friends of Meigs Field a year ago, says he read the Sun-Times’s March 1 editorial supporting Mayor Daley’s plans for Northerly Island and thought, “Oh my God, this is terrible.” Whitney’s first reaction was to salvage what he could. He called the Tribune and pleaded, “Would you guys please not weigh in until you’ve heard the other side?”
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“We have previously endorsed replacing Meigs with a park, but the way the city has gone about it is an affront,” the Sun-Times thundered. “The land belongs to taxpayers, who should not have to be subjected to a decision that is handed down, as if from on high, by Mayor Daley.”
Much of the July 23 Sun-Times editorial was a regurgitation of Bobby Rush’s complaints on July 21, when he held a press conference at the tumbledown, sealed-off beach house on 64th Street. “This building is symbolic of the condition of the south-side lakefront,” said the congressman. Denouncing the $27 million conversion of Meigs Field, he made the point that the mayor’s neighborhood was already blessed with open space.
