On the night of 31 March 2003, construction crews rolled onto a quiet single-runway airport on a man-made peninsula in Lake Michigan and gouged six giant X-shaped trenches into the runway. By morning, Merrill C. Meigs Field — once the busiest single-runway airport in the United States — was dead. No public notice, no warning to the FAA or the governor. Just Mayor Richard M. Daley deciding, after years of wrangling, that Chicago's lakefront should belong to people, not planes.

Meigs had operated since 1948, offering general aviation pilots an unusually close hop to downtown Chicago. But traffic was fading (61,000 movements in 1990, just 32,000 by 2002), and Daley had wanted the land back as parkland since the mid-1990s. A 2001 deal to keep the airport open until 2006 collapsed after 9/11, when Daley began framing closure as a security matter for the Loop. Fresh off a 79% re-election win, and worried regulators would move too slowly, he acted alone.

Sixteen private planes were stranded until the FAA worked out a plan to fly them out via an intact taxiway over the following days. The on-duty air traffic controller learned of his shutdown from the radio on his drive to work. The FAA fined Chicago $33,000 — the maximum at the time — and the city repaid $1 million in federal improvement funds. Courts ultimately sided with the mayor.

So what's there now? Northerly Island Park, opened in 2015, covers the southern half of the old airfield, where much of the runway has become a lagoon. It hasn't exactly thrived: advocates say the $10 million-plus transformation never matched the original vision, and a 2026 allocation of $600,000 funds only modest upgrades like pathways, native plantings and a pavilion.

For travellers, the island is an easy add-on to a Museum Campus day. The old 1961 terminal, designed by Consoer & Morgan, now serves as the park's visitor centre — it survived a 2023 fire and reopened in April 2025 after restoration — and the shut-down control tower still stands, the clearest ghost of the airport. Nearby you'll find the Adler Planetarium, the artificial 12th Street Beach and the Huntington Bank Pavilion concert venue, which sits oddly beside the protected habitat. Pilots and aviation buffs, meanwhile, will find it a strange pilgrimage: an airport-shaped island where geese now outnumber visitors.