The prairie grass ahead of you is a runway. Northerly Island was a working downtown airport until a mayor decided, in the middle of one night, that it wasn't going to be one anymore.
Start with the name, which is wrong in two directions. Daniel Burnham's nineteen oh nine plan for Chicago called for a chain of FIVE artificial islands strung along the lakefront, a homemade archipelago protecting a series of lagoons. Chicago built one. This one. It got called Northerly Island because it was meant to be the northernmost of five, and the other four never happened, so the name is a monument to a plan that stalled. And it isn't an island either. A causeway tied it to the mainland in the thirties. It's a peninsula with an island's name and a permanent identity problem.
For two years it was the most exciting place in America. The nineteen thirty-three World's Fair, the Century of Progress, was staged right here. The headline attraction was the Sky Ride. Two towers over six hundred feet tall,
with rocket-shaped cars running on cables strung between them, carrying passengers across the lagoon at a height nobody would approve today.
The fair also had the greatest opening ceremony ever attempted, and it happened on this ground. Instead of a mayor throwing a switch, the organizers turned the lights on using a star. Four observatories aimed telescopes at Arcturus and caught the light in ph
