Northerly Island is actually a man-made peninsula that has a long Chicago history. It was first built as the site of the 1934 Century of Progress Worlds Fair, and then in 1948 it became the site of Chicago's single-runway lakefront airfield, Meigs Field which operated until 2003, primarily used to shuttle politicians between Chicago and the state capitol in Springfield. Meigs Field was also well known outside of Chicago as the default takeoff field in many early versions of the popular Microsoft Flight Simulator software program.
The airport achieved international notoriety when Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley ordered city crews to bulldoze the runway immediately after midnight on Sunday March 30th, 2003 and without the 30-day advance warning required by FAA regulations, cutting large X-shaped gouges into the runway surface.
The required notice was not given to the Federal Aviation Administration or the owners of airplanes tied down at the field, and as a result sixteen planes were left stranded at an airport with no operating runway, and an inbound flight had to be diverted by Air Traffic Control, because of equipment scattered on the runway. The stranded aircraft were later allowed to depart from Meigs' 3,000-foot (910 m) taxiway.
"To do this any other way would have been needlessly contentious," Daley explained at a news conference Monday morning, March 31.
Mayor Daley defended his actions, described as "appalling" by general aviation interest groups, by claiming it would save the City of Chicago the effort of further court battles before the airport could close. He claimed that safety concerns required the closure, due to the post-September 11 risk of terrorist-controlled aircraft attacking the downtown waterfront near Meigs Field. In reality, closing the airport made the airspace less restrictive and therefore more of a security risk. When the airport was open, downtown Chicago was within Meigs Field's Class D airspace, requiring all aircraft to have two-way radio communication with the tower at Meigs in order to fly. With Meigs destroyed, the buildings in downtown Chicago are now in Class E/G airspace, which allows any airplane to legally fly as close as 1,000 feet (300 m) from these buildings with no radio communication at all. Daley later acknowledged that he destroyed the runway because he wanted the land to be turned into a park.
"The issue is Daley's increasingly authoritarian style that brooks no disagreements, legal challenges, negotiations, compromise or any of that messy give-and-take normally associated with democratic government," the Chicago Tribune editorialized. "The signature act of Richard Daley's 22 years in office was the midnight bulldozing of Meigs Field," according to Chicago Tribune columnist Eric Zorn. "He ruined Meigs because he wanted to, because he could," columnist John Kass wrote of Daley in the Chicago Tribune.
Twelve years later, in September 2015 the completed park was opened to the public. Designed by landscape architects SmithGroupJJR and Chicago's Studio Gang, the new park features a five acre lagoon, a row of man-made hills and a bicycle/pedestrian trail. Not to be confused with the northern section of the island that features an outdoor concert venue, the southern section offers Chicagoans a glimpse into several different micro-ecosystems featuring native plants and some wildlife. One of the highlights of the new park's programming will be camping retreats for those looking to escape the downtown hustle but remain close by. The new Northerly Island won't feature a ring of man-made reefs as originally proposed, but instead the eastern edge of the island has been reinforced with rock mounds to prevent erosion. Burnham Harbor is directly west of the peninsula.
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