Northerly Island at 100

Jerry Adelman
Northerly Island: A Hundred Year History Still Unfolding

Grand visions rarely move forward at the speed of light, if ever at all. When they do, they often take far longer than imagined. Northerly Island is no exception. Though its future is still unfolding, we should not forget its founding promise: to be a place where people connect with nature and the lake at the heart of a great city.

Originally conceived in Daniel Burnham’s 1909 Plan of Chicago as part of a chain of islands extending from Grant Park, Northerly Island was created through landfill by 1925. The Adler Planetarium opened five years later, but the Great Depression halted further park development. Over the decades, the island hosted the 1933–1934 World’s Fair and later became Meigs Field Airport. When the airport closed, the city revived Burnham’s vision through ecological restoration, turning the site once again toward nature.

In recent years, civic efforts have continued to shape Northerly Island’s future. In 2021, Mayor Lori Lightfoot convened a blue-ribbon Museum Campus Working Group whose report, “Where Worlds Meet: A Vision for a Reimagined Museum Campus,” advocates for the entire campus and Northerly Island as a unified cultural and natural landscape. I was honored to serve as one of the co-chairs of the Museum Campus Visioning Committee, leading discussions on open space and recreation. The report calls for native landscaping to restore habitat, improve access, and expand outdoor learning opportunities. Home to the Field Museum, Shedd Aquarium, and Adler Planetarium—each focused on land, water, and sky—the campus and Northerly Island together could form an extraordinary outdoor classroom. The report also envisions Northerly Island as a “Great Lakes Climate and Biodiversity Lab,” connecting research, education, and public engagement around urban nature.

For more than sixty years, Openlands’ history has unfolded in parallel with Northerly Island’s story. In the long tradition of lakefront champions, Openlands remains steadfast in protecting this shared shoreline and ensuring that people and nature continue to thrive along the Chicago lakefront.

Giovanni Aloi

Northerly Island stretches into Lake Michigan like a gesture of reconciliation between city and nature. Just beyond the towers of downtown Chicago, it unfolds as a living proof that regeneration is possible, as a reimagining of what might be. Where once concrete and jet fuel ruled, tall grasses now sway in the wind. The land breathes again; its wetlands pooling with light and life, its meadows echoing with the calls of birds and the hum of pollinators.

Here, nature does not simply recover; plants, animals, and fungi collaborate in the weaving of a new ecological tapestry. Native prairie plants like big bluestem, milkweed, and blazing star root themselves into the disturbed land, finding vitality in the rubbles of human hubris. The topography feels deliberate, not wild in the romantic sense but honestly grounded in the geological and commercial history of the soil: a new kind of landscape born from anthropogenic entanglements. Northerly Island demonstrates that healing is not about erasing our presence but learning to live within the ecological stories we have rewritten.

Each season, the island performs a rehearsal for the future: a place where human design and ecological agency intertwine. It is an experiment in humility, a reminder that even the most wounded terrains hold the potential for renewal. On Northerly Island, the future of nature is not deferred to some distant wilderness: it rises, quietly and insistently, from the cracks in our own foundations.

In the distance, the city’s glass and steel towers, austere and sleek, gleam with arrogance; mirages of unsustainable autonomy, indifferent to the fragile ecosystem upon which they ultimately depend.

Brandon Biederman

My experiences of Northerly Island have evolved over the years, beginning with attending concerts at the Charter One Pavilion in the mid-2000s, and a decade later, strolling through the newly opened nature preserve. These varied activities capture something quintessentially Chicago: our ability to constantly remake the edge between city and lake.

In 2016, I revisited Northerly Island while working on the Chicago Architecture Foundation’s (now the Chicago Architecture Center) Reimagining the Wacker Manual competition, this time as a site of inquiry. Our team imagined a story where a young Jean Baptiste Point du Sable, Daniel Burnham, and Gwendolyn Brooks travel through Chicago’s history to understand how the city continually reinvents itself. For our concept, Northerly Island served as an example of that evolution—a place that embodies both the ambitions and contradictions of the lakefront’s design legacy. Researching its transformation—from Burnham’s vision of a “great playground” to Meigs Field’s decades of use and its reemergence as open parkland—revealed just how deeply the city’s values are inscribed along its shoreline.

Northerly Island remains a testing ground for those ideals—an ever-shifting edge where each generation redefines what progress looks like. And it’s still a kickass place to see a concert.

Maya Bird-Murphy

As high-energy kids growing up in an urban environment, I have many distinct memories of my mother driving my little brother and me around to Chicago Area landmarks, finding ways to entertain us in educational ways. We spent a lot of time at the Children’s Museum at Navy Pier, the Museum of Science and Industry, and the National Museum of Mexican Art. When we ventured to the Field Museum, we drove down McFetridge Drive looking for free parking, but I don’t remember ever following that road further into the peninsula. My wish for Northerly Island is that we grant the prairie permission to continue replacing swaths of turf and asphalt, that we create more access to the shore of Lake Michigan, and offer opportunities for Chicago kids to experience nature that feels almost untouched by humans. Although the island’s mass is man-made, a re-wilding of land created for human habitation and consumerism is fitting. I can imagine that if Northerly Island looked like this when my brother and I were young, we would have felt like we were transported to a magical place. A place so connected to the city, yet free of vehicular traffic, filled with wildlife, where we could run and swim. And at night on a camping trip, we could catch a glimpse of the stars.

Elizabeth Blasius

The impact of World’s Fairs on the spatial nature of cities is substantial. Land and water were manipulated, and purpose-built infrastructure and architecture was designed to accommodate thousands of visitors and workers who would inhabit a fairground for just a few short months. On the occasion of its hundredth year of incorporation, Chicago gathered trash and debris and created a hundred-acre peninsula to house the 1933 Century of Progress International Exposition—its second World’s Fair after the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition.

The goal of the Century of Progress was to envision a glorious, technologically advanced future—one so optimistic that it would counter the almost universal experience of hardship brought on by the Great Depression.

The Century of Progress Exposition was an expression of what Chicago wanted out of the twentieth century. Colorful, ultramodern pavilions and attractions conveyed the optimism and technology of the coming age. Yet, nothing was designed to last beyond the present. By 1936, all the buildings had been demolished or moved, as if the fair never existed. In 1948, the peninsula was widened to accommodate Meigs Field, a single runway airport that by the turn of the twenty-first century was increasingly incongruous with the reimagining of Chicago’s lakefront as public parkland. In 2001, the September 11 attacks gave then Mayor Richard J. Daley the reason he needed to close Meigs Field without discussion or approval. On April 1, 2003—April Fool’s Day—Chicago awoke to find a row of X shaped trenches into the runway at Meigs Field, signifying its dramatic end.

Now in its third iteration, the southern portion of Northerly Island, a place not of the wild, but of habitation, has found itself rewilded. It is the home of prairie grasses, wildflowers, and migratory birds, thriving amongst the revetments and discarded slabs of concrete used to build and rebuild the peninsula. Piles of mortared brick and bleached stone elbow the imagination. In the haste to demolish the Century of Progress International Exposition and then Meigs Field, what remains underfoot? A curved metal railing from the Administration Building? The spolia of Chicago politics and powerful mayors? It’s an exciting inquiry that the untamed nature of this tamed part of Lake Michigan, of Chicago, makes possible.

Clarissa Bonet

I’ve always known Northerly Island as a park. I discovered it soon after moving to Chicago in 2009, unaware of its storied history at the time. I remember visiting often back then with a camera in hand, climbing over concrete boulders along the shore, and wandering among the low, hills covered in prairie grass. I loved visiting in the hour before sunset, when the sun is low, the shadows are long, and the light turns the landscape gold.

When invited to contribute to this piece, I returned to Northerly Island to see if it had changed, bringing my son, who is just shy of two. As we passed the beach, I saw familiar concrete boulders emerging from the water’s edge. With a stroller and a small child, reaching them wasn’t possible, so we headed toward the hills—a place I remember exploring freely so many years before. My son collected pebbles in the bottom of the stroller as we walked.

I was saddened to see much of the park fenced off, either under reconstruction or lost to erosion. The Northerly Island I remember had shifted, as sites within cities inevitably do. Still, I felt grateful to have experienced that earlier version and to be making new memories now.

In the evening light, we explored together. He couldn’t roam the prairie grasses as I once did, cordoned off as it is now, but he found joy in his own way—collecting rocks, watching geese, playing in the sand. As the sun slipped lower, he kept running back to the beach, reluctant to leave. Driving home, I knew this was a place we’d return to—his Northerly Island layered over mine.

Rebekah Coffman

To me, Northerly Island serves as a powerful case study for questioning who has the right to shape public space, memory, and use. Originally envisioned by Daniel Burnham in his 1909 Plan of Chicago as one of several manmade islands, its plan reflected how the language of beauty can be a colonial tool for control over land and water. Though not realized within Burnham’s lifetime, a portion of his vision for progress materialized in the 1920s. As the spatial backdrop for the Century of Progress of 1933–34, it cradled a colorful architectural optimism and futurism at a time of deep economic and social uncertainty. Yet, like its antecedent the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893, the Century of Progress failed to reconcile how this progress equitably served diverse identities and communities, continuing patterns of stereotyping, othering, and erasure. This erasure becomes a through-thread as the fair’s buildings are themselves dismantled and the land repurposed as an airport. Erasure rises again when Mayor Richard M. Daley turns longstanding public debate into a spontaneous assertion of control through overnight demolition of its runway in 2003. This is followed by another rewriting of the land as a new pavilion now facilitates its own cultural programming and recent rewilding efforts act as a form of false-positive restoration. To walk Northerly Island today can be an opportunity to find a moment of peaceful sanctuary and reprieve. And yet, it is in many ways to walk in the shadows of these layers, caught between subconscious dispossession of the past and an evolving yet unrealized possibility for the future.

Odile Compagnon

According to the US Army Corps of Engineers, Lake Michigan has experienced notable fluctuations in water levels since records began in 1860. Between 1925—when Northerly Island was created—and 2025, there have been three major peaks: 1929, 1987, and 2020, and three significant lows: 1926, 1965, and 2013. The total variation spans approximately 2 meters, or 6 feet 6 inches. Interestingly, in 1925, the lake was at an historic low. Could this have influenced the elevation of the landfill used to create Northerly Island?

Linking Chicago’s history to the ever-shifting shoreline is appealing. The highs and lows of Lake Michigan have shaped the city’s beaches and waterfront contours year after year and certainly impacted Northerly Island. These natural shifts make a strong case for repurposing the old terminal into a Great Lakes Climate Lab, while leaving the rest of the island open to community dreams, evolving uses, and the weather-driven changes that shape its landscape.

In 2007, my daughter Sophie explored the island’s open-ended future in her high school history fair project, calling Northerly Island “historically significant for the lesson it teaches us about how things don’t always have to be completed to be useful.”

Reflecting on my own visits: a 2006 winter walk with the skyline background felt like a scene from dystopian sci-fi. In 2009, we brought injured birds to the Flint Creek Wildlife annex. In 2014, we snowshoed across a frozen landscape. In 2015, we watched Redmoon Theater’s final spectacle beside Studio Gang’s new project. In 2016, we witnessed the aftermath of a very big storm.

And in 1985, in a moment less environmentally conscious, I flew from Meigs Field in a private jet to visit a window manufacturer near Pittsburgh—something I feel compelled to balance out with many future walks and bike rides around this never-finished island.

Alison Cuddy

12^th Street Beach is lovely slip of sand, a thin crescent moon slung between the Adler Planetarium on the north and a small rocky outcrop on the south. It offers choice views of iconic Chicago architecture and lakefront infrastructure in all directions, from the Sears Tower in the west to the Chicago Harbor Lighthouse offshore.

The idea for a beach at Northerly Island emerged in 1920, when Progressive-era groups, likely including the Woman’s City Club of Chicago (WCCC), suggested one be built in place of a proposed airstrip. The club’s members were well prepared to make it happen. Jennie Franklin Purvin (1873–1958), who chaired the Club’s “Bathing Beaches Committee” for almost thirty years, had already spent decades advocating for safe, swimmable beaches in Chicago.

Purvin and her colleagues, including Jane Addams, were astute lobbyists and hands-on activists, regularly inspecting beaches on foot and raising funds for changing stations and other amenities. Over the years their efforts transformed what had been a patchwork of private beaches and derelict waterfront into the miles of public beachfront we enjoy today, from marquee beaches like North Avenue to gems like 12^th Street.

In their 1929 annual report the Club imagined that 12^th Street Beach, “unique in its situation in the heart of the city,” would be a “fairy island of comfort, amusement and pleasure.” When the beach officially opened a year later, it did prove a popular destination for sun bathers, swimmers, and sandcastle builders.

The beach played a role in other Chicago history. From 1933–34 it hosted the Century of Progress World’s Fair and in 1939, on the eve of World War II, the Illinois National Guard brought a trio of antiaircraft guns to the beach for a live demonstration of American airpower.

In August 1962, thirteen swimmers, including Chicago’s open water legend Ted Eriksen and local lifeguard Carol D. Urist, entered the water at 12^th Street Beach and swam 50 miles to Kenosha, Wisconsin. That same year, work on what would become the Dan Ryan Expressway uncovered a massive deposit of sand, which was used to restore erosion at 12^th Street and other South Side beaches, finally returning to the lake what a glacier had stolen away thousands of years before.

Aneesha Dharwadker

Because our urban condition is so heavily influenced by real estate instincts, preferences, and vocabulary, it is difficult to think of “development” as anything other than buildings. Even in a landscape-forward urban condition like Chicago’s, open lots are considered vacant until filled with architecture. Zoning envelopes are maximized in new construction projects to capture the most marketable square footage. Enclosed, conditioned space holds the most value.

Using ecology as the backbone of urban design flips this narrative, giving us a path through and possibly out of the climate change abyss. Is its current iteration, Northerly Island offers the most futuristic Home of Tomorrow: a multi-species habitat that is decidedly anti-architectural. This is not to say it is not heavily engineered, but its surface layer, the experiential layer, is made of water, soil, and robust native plants. The island is now part of a distinct lineage of prominent infrastructure-turned-leisure spaces in the US, including Brooklyn Bridge Park, The High Line, Millennium Park, and the 606, that demonstrate what landscape can yield when given the assignment of adaptive reuse.

Not building requires restraint. Daniel Burnham was acutely aware of this in the early twentieth century, weaving openness and accessibility requirements into his plan for the lakescape. Northerly Island’s continuation of that legacy, centering the insect, the bird, the mammal, and the fish as crucial urban dwellers, offers an understated and complex prototype for development without architecture.

Jenna Dezinski
Hidden in Plain Sight

One hundred and nineteen acres of urban wilderness remain hidden in plain sight to visitors and residents of Chicago. Accessed by a land bridge through the museum campus, beyond the city’s event destinations, an extended journey to Northerly Island Park conjures a sense of remoteness underpinning its position largely out of sight.

A manufactured landscape perpetually subject to adaptive reuse, the island has been shaped by visions of the last century, providing a glimpse into the aspirations and ideals projected onto the city. As with remnants of antiquity, pursuits of each generation are concealed by a patina of the natural world: the northernmost extent of an unrealized circuit of islands proposed by Burnham and Bennett’s 1909 Plan of Chicago; the 1933 Century of Progress World’s Fair; a burgeoning jetset era housed by Meigs Field; unrealized plans for the 2016 Summer Olympics; an unconstructed extension to the lost Lucas Museum of Narrative Art; and an unfinished coastal park proposed by Studio Gang. Located along the city’s edge, the island has served as a testing ground for dreams just within or without reach.

Perhaps most relevant and timely is the island’s current function as a nature preserve. Its synthetic history obscured by an immersive landscape burgeoned over the last decade, the recreational parkscape reproduces the vast prairie of the American plains, providing access and making legible the cycles, forces, and patterns of ecosystems and wildlife within and around the city, more critical than ever during an era of shifting climates and ecological change.

Phil Enquist
Northerly Island and The Extinction Crises

Let’s forget about humans for just the next few minutes….

According to Dave Foreman, the most important scientific discovery of the twentieth century has been the identification of the ongoing extinction crises, as defined in his book Rewilding North America. He states that during the 1970s, field biologists grew worried by population drops in thousands of species and by the loss of ecosystems around the world. Foreman concludes that planetary life faces the sixth great extinction event in earth’s history due to the human impacts.

Our challenge today is to reestablish a wildlands network which can also dramatically change the way we build cities.

We should not just focus on the edge lands of urban regions but introduce tentacles of nature meandering through the heart of cities, along shorelines, through brownfields and landfills, on rooftops and in our backyards. Northerly Island is an example of this proactive effort as it now connects the Midwestern prairies and the Great Lakes back together and provides feeding and nesting grounds for migrating birds along the Mississippi Flyway.

This reintroduced prairie landscape is a dramatic example of what we are capable of doing in partnership with nature. Now, over 250 bird species have been identified here when thirty years ago there was just a handful. But it took deliberate action.

This is a success story, and it is just the beginning. Burnham Sanctuary, the South Pond of Lincoln Park, Big Marsh, and the Wild Mile are all examples of innovative rewilding efforts within the urban lands of Chicago.

What is next? The city and surrounding communities should continue to rewild their river shorelines, their lakefront park systems, their brownfields and landfills. Rewilding Chicago incrementally, acre by acre, should be one of our highest priorities.

Peter Exley
A more inclusive, interactive island

Stevie Wonder, cycling with friends, birdwatching with family, exploring and discussing a “future game-changing project” with a client; the varied stuff I've seen and done on Northerly Island. I expect in reading my list you have your own massively personal multiple experiences on this lakefront geography.

Three decades plus of research, teaching, and practice creating interactive and relevant public spaces has been my advocacy and focus—well before experiential became a deliberate thing in the built environment, and in our green spaces.

Current writing by architects and spatial design types makes observations of the impact of invitational, accessible public spaces, as well as expensive lovable “theme park experiences” like those popping up on Michigan Avenue filling our supposed boredom with retail.

These reads recommend more epidemiological design of public spaces. Great! I do enjoy assortments of stratified material doubling as curvy seating—it’s everywhere—and public art, inside and out—please keep up with that. But let’s measure it to determine broad and inclusive impacts.

As we all generate lists of what to do with and on Northerly Island, please delve into Howard Gardner’s 1983 Frames of Mind. It is a catalyst for resilience and equity that helps provide a framework we need within challenging times.

Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences suggests we all have a bit of each curiosity and skill set—verbal-linguistic, logical-mathematical, visual-spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, musical, interpersonal, intrapersonal, naturalistic, existential (added in the second edition)—and everyone has a brilliant focus on two or three. Word smart. Logic smart. Art and space smart. Body smart. Music smart. People smart. Self smart. And Nature smart.

The off-the-shelf playground seen in every school-yard and park across the country is a wonderful experience for the interpersonal and bodily kinesthetic among us. But it doesn’t prioritize or intentionally attract those who are intrapersonal, musical or logical-mathematical. I assert elevating the breadth of experience for everyone is straightforward for design-types to envision via community brainstorms.

This is why the Museum of Ice Cream and Harry Potter, to mention two new Michigan Avenue mini attractions, are well loved (and borrow a lot from interactive museum exhibits). Northerly Island is obviously appealing to the naturalistic of us (ask those birdwatchers) and the musically intelligent are always accommodated via a separated secure concert venue. Let’s overlap more, be thoughtful, and intersect all nine of these experiences/intelligences in our treasured, evolving and needy accessible environments. That would be the power of play.

Oh, I’ve seen Cheap Trick on Northerly Island too, reinforcing my musical smarts, and the island’s potential.

Eve Fineman

Chicago is renowned for its first World’s Fair, The World’s Columbian Exposition, with its polished “White City” paying tribute to opulent Beaux-Arts classicism. Forty years later, the city would again host a World’s Fair, a lesser known but equally impactful attraction called the Century of Progress International Exposition, located on Northerly Island. This fair deliberately took a different approach, billing itself as a futuristic Rainbow City full of optimism and fortune. Rather than celebrating ornate styles borrowed from other cultures, the 1933–34 fair focused on new design concepts, technology, and futurism. Conceived of during the prosperous 1920s, the fair opened amid a very different social and political climate—during the height of the Great Depression. But rather than feeling misplaced, it served to provide a hopeful glimpse toward positivity and a brighter future.

Northerly Island—completed in 1925 as part of Burnham’s 1909 Plan of Chicago—was state-owned and thus free from Chicago’s stringent building codes, allowing for formal experimentation. Built in the Streamline Moderne style and painted in a wide array of saturated colors, the buildings and structures of the fair represented a new way of experiencing design that was full of promise, progress, and the unknown. Where the first Columbian Exposition unveiled the Ferris Wheel as its crown jewel, this fair’s showstopper was the Sky Ride, an aerial tramway that transported people from the mainland to the island in rocket-shaped cars emitting steam from their tails.

Despite its shorter-lived legacy in our collective memory, many lasting elements from The Century of Progress remain with us: the Pioneer Zephyr at the Griffin Museum of Science and Industry, a red star added to the Chicago flag (then the third, now the fourth), and the dazzling pink Florida Tropical House designed by Robert Law Weed, relocated to the Beverly Shores lakefront. These remnants are physical reminders of a moment when architecture and design served to point us toward a brighter future—a tactic that might well serve us again in the present climate.

Brian Gladstein

It has been over twenty years since the city closed Meigs Field under more than questionable circumstances and gave way to what we see today. Despite this history, the future of Northerly Island can still be one that benefits all of Chicago. Friends of the Parks works to ensure that all our lakeshore is how our city’s founders intended it to be: “forever open, clear, and free.” It is time for Northerly Island to become an asset for all the city to enjoy. It is our hope to see a framework plan for Northerly Island that makes it a natural wonder and a place for all Chicagoans to enjoy.

Geoff Goldberg

A treasured piece of land in the heart of the city, on the front lawn of the city, Northerly Island has a long and honored history, even as part of the 1933–34 Century of Progress Exposition. Many of us still have memories of small planes taking off and landing, an enduring romantic image. These little planes flying in and out of the city seemed like a bit of fantasy brought true. When the airport was closed, it was abrupt and shocked and angered many. Yet, in principle, the change was a good one, from its elite private or corporate use to a more public place. And yet…. something was lost in the change.

In the 1990s, Northerly Island was considered by Disney as an ideal location for their first urban entertainment center, but they were denied by the city, holding firm to its idea of public land and a nature park. Many years later, and after many efforts, this vision has eluded public interest. The site languishes, but why? Is it the memory and shock of change from a fun small airport still lingering—perhaps it’s the loss of fantasy? What would it take to push this site forward, to make such a special place a more vibrant place in the city, and once again, part of our imagination?

Kevin Harrington

Northerly Island first entered my awareness in graduate school when studies of Chicago introduced me to The Burnham Plan—offshore islands, similar to those in Toronto; the 1933 World’s Fair—the Sky Ride from the mainland to the island; and Meigs Field—a site of elite privilege.

When we moved here, Northerly Island became exhibit A for why Burnham’s offshore islands were a bad idea. For me, the contrast between the shore and the lake was sublime. Too much would be lost if pesky little islands, even if they were pretty, interrupted the stark difference between the mountain range of tall buildings in the city and the limitless expanse of the lake.

Later, I admired the Meigs Field Terminal by Consoer & Morgan, and after the airport was closed visited the island itself. The view of the first McCormick Place, Gene Summers and Helmut Jahn’s masterpiece, was the most satisfying view of the building’s spectacular cantilevers. More recently, the island is even more difficult to access. Prior activity has become passive enjoyment. Even though it is a peninsula, not an island, and southerly not northerly, it is always present in our attention.

Tom Harris

Chicago is quietly one of the world’s great salmon fisheries, and Northerly Island is uniquely positioned to give those in the city who don’t have access to a boat the opportunity to take advantage of these fish. In March and April, you’ll find dozens of people with trotlines set, the ends of these lines fixed to bells so when the young Coho Salmon find their hooks the jingle of the bells sends them running to hand line them in. In the fall, when the staging King Salmon arrive, you’ll find people out from dusk to dawn, casting their lures into the darkness with the glittering city behind them, hoping to tie into one of these twenty-pound goliaths. In the winter thousands of Lake Trout, our only native salmonid, find their way to the deeper sea walls of Chicago to partner up and spawn. They use the gravel around these walls as an artificial reef, digging their redds in their shelter. I have often found myself wondering how in a city of millions, I can find myself directly adjacent to downtown, fishing for beautiful salmon with a prairie behind me. I see night herons and foxes and coyotes; I hear the singing of birds and the chirping of crickets. The history of this place is long and varied, and I don’t know what the future holds, but right now it feels like a quiet and sometimes undiscovered gem, and for many of us, a fisherperson’s paradise.

Jenny Kendler

In 2017, as part of the public programming of our air collective Deep Time Chicago, I helped organize one of our “walkabouts” on Northerly Island, accompanied by historian Julia Bachrach and Studio Gang Design Director Claire Cahan. Northerly Island seemed a perfect site for one of our artist-guided tours intended to “peel back” the layers of Chicago sites, sharing with the public a deep time perspective intended to situate us within the Anthropocene.

This palimpsestic lake-park-airport-park, can be seen as a micro-narrative about evolving cultural views on land and nature—once wild water, the newly created land signaled dominance over nature, situating it within the Romantic view of nature as a space for the renewal or urban-dwellers. This was soon to be replaced by the cultural forces of the Industrial era, where land was to be bent to its “best use” for utility and profit and the park concept became an airport.

Today, through efforts of many players in the mayor’s office, Park District, and the vision of Studio Gang architects, the island is being allowed to become something new, a space for humans and the more-than-human world to commingle right at the border between one of the country’s largest cities and the wilds of Lake Michigan. One can sit on this edge and watch the big bluestem blow while skyscraper shadows creep slowly towards the hooded mergansers sailing by. This is what I wish for the island; to be a place where we can relax our grip and see what evolves for us all. And I hear tell of coyote dens…

Susan King

Northerly Island represents, for me, a conceptual and evolving space rather than a frequent physical destination. I perceive it in three distinct ways, two rooted in its historical significance:

First, I recall Northerly Island as it was when I arrived in Chicago nearly forty years ago—an operational airstrip. Known as Meigs Field (1948–2003), it was a landmark that signified my entry into a visionary city where air travel was, or might soon become, accessible for everyday use. While I understood the security concerns in the wake of 9/11, I was definitely disappointed in the way the airstrip was closed.

Second, I associate the site with the Century of Progress Exposition of 1933. Both of my parents were born during the Great Depression, and their stories shaped much of my upbringing. It was a revelation to discover, after making Chicago my home, that my mother had visited the city as an infant. In 1934, my maternal grandmother and her sisters traveled by train from northeastern Ohio to attend the exposition. This event must have brought considerable optimism to many. I continue to find inspiration in its legacy along with my grandmother’s adventurous spirit.

Some may view Northerly Island’s current status as a park as enduring, and I recognize the value of open space and access to nature for the well-being of Chicago’s residents. Nonetheless, I would not be surprised if this man-made island assumes another innovative purpose in the future.

Francesco Marullo
Northerly Island: Foresight for Longing

Conceived within Daniel Burnham’s 1909 Plan as the first in a projected arc of artificial islands linking Grant and Jackson Parks, Northerly Island was intended as a measured frontier: a geometry of lagoons, harbors, and playfields mediating between the grid and the lake. Yet, only one island was ever built, and the others remained on paper—possibilities suspended between engineering and desire—the lone fragment of a design that was never realized.

If, for Rem Koolhaas, Coney Island contained the seeds of Manhattanism, we might say that Northerly Island is its inversion—Chicago’s counter-image: a zone of reversal and speculation, where the city attempts to discipline its own imagination. Where Coney Island anticipated the metropolis through excess, Northerly Island distilled it through order, translating each new wave of architectural thought into form.

Across the decades, the island absorbed shifting dialects of urban optimism. The Adler Planetarium turned its gaze outward, toward the atmosphere. The Century of Progress exposition of 1933 turned it inward, transforming the site into an urban and social laboratory—an alliance between science, business, and modernist architecture envisioning a future of shared prosperity. After the war, the site was offered to the United Nations—a platform for planetary diplomacy—before becoming an airfield, and later, through an act of civic revision, a park.

Northerly Island endures as both artifact and instrument—a place where Chicago rehearses its ideals in material form, then lets them fade, leaving only the outline of what it once believed possible. Each transformation condensed a distinct vision of the future—scientific, modernist, diplomatic, technological, ecological—layered like faint strata beneath the prairie grass, a ruin in reverse. Together they form not a monument but a section through time: a record of Chicago’s evolving self-image.

Seen from above, the island now feels as though time has looped back to that early aerial view of 1930, when the Adler Planetarium—the first of its kind in the United States—stood alone at the edge of the lake, surrounded by open, unclaimed ground. Perhaps the next step is not another intervention but a smaller act of trust—to let the island itself continue its slow, entropic work of adjustment and reclamation, to open its edges, and to make it simply more accessible to the city that first imagined it. After a hundred years of making big plans, as Burnham would say, perhaps this time we should just make none at all.

Spencer McNeil

Growing up downstate, the city felt simultaneously far away and inevitable. Trips to Chicago were highlight tours to museums and ball games. I heard stories from grandparents about their childhoods in the old neighborhoods, now told around suburban dinner tables. Longing to explore the city streets on our visits, I was resigned to wander nursing home hallways. Improbably, Meigs Field became my portal to explore Chicago solo. Hoping, I think, to inspire a love of aviation, my father introduced me to Microsoft Flight Simulator for Windows 95, and though I have never felt drawn to flight, it was indeed formative. This edition was the first in the genre to feature satellite imagery and texture mapping–and importantly for me, I could fly from Northerly Island. Eight-year-old me was now free to roam, but my flights never left the city, a digital flaneur delighting in the sparsely built simulacrum of Chicago. Chicago became my home, but not before the airfield was infamously decommissioned, so I was never able to realize that experience of taking off from Meigs. I wander the city on my own now, but I’m still flying through the virtual city, planning ways to leave marks on the real one.

Zach Mortice

Northerly Island is a singular place for the city to see itself. Its modest hills (less modest compared to the rest of Chicago’s steamrolled topography) are for taking in views that sweep from the marching line of high-rise soldiers hugging the lakeshore that culminate in an exclamation point at the Loop, to the steel and refinery interests in the distant southeast that generated these vistas. And while we can’t build a building east of DuSable-Lake Shore Drive, we’ve dropped a bit of Urbs in Horto there, to help us understand what’s at stake. From Northerly Island, the city seems unmistakable, eternal, and yet still distant, framing a photo of something we all love.

Conor O’Shea

In landscape terms, Northerly Island’s redesign is a failure of the highest proportion.

It comes down to the fundamental ingredients of large urban park making: namely, topography, layout, circulation, materiality, ecology, and maintenance. At Northerly Island, professional expertise and execution of these basic aspects range from entirely absent to heavy-handed.

For example, the decision to scoop up the existing airport runway up and dump it on the perimeter of the peninsula, creating a lagoon from what could have been an appealing recreational amenity, was a misguided and costly blunder. This is toddler-in-a-sandbox park making: a blunt, formal gesture insensitive to ecology and opportunity. Examples of better alternatives abound. At Berlin’s Tempelhof Airport, the former runways were simply opened up to the public for biking, walking, and running. No heavy machinery was required; everything was made clear by a sign at the park entrance. Meigs Field’s notorious Mayor Daley Xs could have been left, not only as cultural artifacts, but also as moments where nature could begin to take over on its own terms, with seeds, plants, and soil accumulating in the cracks.

The planting design, while comprising native species, is ill-considered and illegible. It’s a fantasy of pre-European-settlement habitat restoration realized on constructed ground, reinforcing a false duality of city and nature. And it’s a far cry from the groundbreaking New Naturalism of the Lurie Garden in Millennium Park. Instead, smaller moments, up to a half-acre in size, could–and should–be carved out and redesigned as cutting edge gardens appealing to locals and tourists alike.

And it goes without saying that the new music venue is an easy, uncreative intervention aimed solely at generating income and foot traffic. Its garish lights and polluting sounds are at odds with any redeeming ecological value of this so-called park.

Chicago’s design impulses have always been rooted in engineering out and building up, acting in spite of and against natural systems and forces. That pattern has been blind to the vast potentials of landscape-driven approaches and their less egotistical methods: sowing seeds for future change, setting the stage for ecological succession, and choreographing urban areas for multispecies interaction. Cloaked in a veneer of “nature,” Northerly Island exemplifies Chicago’s continued, unimaginative dependence on design and planning rooted in the obdurate, resistant ideals of engineering and architecture, as opposed to the resilient methods of contemporary landscape architecture, which embrace and engage natural systems.

Ben Shulman

What and where is Northerly Island?

We know the contours of its history. An imaginary island in a constellation of imaginaries of Daniel Burnham’s 1909 island visions. None of those islands except this one, the northernmost one, became real.

It played host to the 1933 World's Fair. For most of its life, it was Meigs Field, a small airport for private planes. Like the rail yard that was once Millennium Park, Northerly Island as Meigs Field was an infrastructural fissure that severed access, and therefore, the idea of Downtown as a complete core. And like Millennium Park being willed into being by the strongarm of Mayor Daley, it took his clout to carve out the runways and resurrect the imagination of the island as a place of Chicago and not simply in, to, or providing proximity to Chicago.

My first concrete memory of Northerly Island was at a Halloween party in 2003, where a woman dressed up as the X’d out Meigs Field. She won the costume contest. Still new to Chicago, it gave me insight into how much the city was felt through its people. How architecture and design were spectator sports here, like any of its teams.

Northerly Island now exists as a sort of manicured wilderness. In one direction, there is endless horizon. In another, a horizontal pull. The island defines a boundary and borderless state, and decisions have to be made.

Is the city growing in intensity out from and beyond the lake, or is the opposite true and is the city retreating, growing wild, dissolving back into Lake Michigan? Which way will the city, will you, will we go?

We’ll find out in another 100 years.

Camila Simas
Northerly Island: From Urbs in Horto to Civitas Hortorum?

Chicago was incorporated as a city in 1837, adopting the Latin motto Urbs in Horto (City in a Garden). Decades later, the 1909 Plan of Chicago expanded on that ideal, imagining a metropolis where access to nature was inseparable from urban life, expressed through a continuous network of parks along the lakefront. Northerly Island, the only island realized from the original plan, has since undergone many transformations, from parkland and exhibition grounds to an urban airport, and more recently, returning to parkland, this time shaped by a new landscape paradigm.

Today, the park is not something to be passively accessed, as envisioned in the Plan, but a living organism that mediates between worlds, one that understands the city as a dynamic web of relationships, inseparable from nature, of which we are an integral part. At the city’s edge, Northerly Island does not act as a limit dividing environments, but as a boundary where forces and systems intersect, a porous environment that enables encounters and transformation. The design intervention allows the island to evolve not through a deterministic blueprint, but through a set of conditions that invite an open-ended process shaped by natural forces and interspecies symbiotic interactions. It’s about redefining urban life as part of an ecological continuum.

To move from Urbs in Horto (City in a Garden) to Civitas Hortorum (City as a Garden) is to recognize that city and garden are not opposites but co-creators of a shared world that is alive and interdependent. As philosopher Emanuele Coccia reminds us, cities emerge as “a story of mutual domestication, where humans and plants shape one another over time.” Northerly Island is a living testament to the idea that, in order to re-signify our world, we must reshape what endures and disrupt the dominance of the norm, allowing new ways of inhabiting the planet to emerge.

Michael Skowlund
A Vision for Northerly Island’s Second Century

Northerly Island stands as a rare urban canvas—a place where Chicago’s future can be as vibrant and unexpected as its past. As a landscape architect who’s called this city home for nearly two decades, I reflect on our “Third Nature,” a concept adapted from William Cronon’s Nature’s Metropolis. We now have the chance to creatively merge Chicago’s “First Nature”—pre-settlement prairies and wetlands—with its “Second Nature,” marked by human ambition and invention. The peninsula invites us to blend history and modernity to create something entirely new at the water’s edge.

Honoring Daniel Burnham’s 1909 vision for public lakefront parks—and making the shoreline both resilient and relevant—means designing spaces where kids, Chicagoans, and curious newcomers can run hands through prairie grasses, smell the lake winds, or watch turtles slip into wetland shallows. It’s not only about restoring habitat for birds and aquatic life, but also about inviting people to experience nature up close. The “2010 Park District Framework Plan” envisioned prairie restoration, open access, and a city welcomed in. Yet, much of that vision to activate remains unrealized. Chicago’s new “Central Area Plan 2045” recommends expanding access, including a bike and pedestrian bridge across Burnham Harbor, better connecting the island to green corridors and the city.

Today, Northerly Island remains underutilized, isolated by its foreboding armored eastern edge and limited entry to the city. It calls to be better connected—to Chicago and to the lake. Growing up on these shores, I collected cobbles and swung from bluffside trees; my earliest memories are rooted in this landscape. My hope is for every Chicagoan and visitor to discover those same essential joys, because the future of a great city lies in daily, democratic, unforgettable encounters with living nature. That’s the promise Northerly Island can fulfill for another century.

Donna Speigel

On the bitterly cold, snowy morning of January 30, 1980, while I was bundled up on the 151 bus headed to work at the Leo Burnett ad agency in the Prudential Building, four Kellogg’s marketing executives uneventfully landed in their company plane at Meigs Field. They too were headed to Burnett for a day of meetings.

That afternoon, they boarded the same aircraft to fly home to Battle Creek, Michigan.

The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) report stated visibility was one mile in light snow showers and that the crew had cleared the aircraft of light snow and slush. On takeoff, the plane’s nose came up sluggishly and speed decreased. With poor visibility, no one at Meigs saw the plane dive nose-first into the lake. Within minutes, it submerged 25 feet.

The copilot died from impact trauma. The pilot and Kellogg’s team escaped and stayed afloat by treading water, standing on ice, and using cushions as flotation devices. A Chicago Fire Department helicopter was on the scene within three minutes. The pilot and three passengers were rescued and hospitalized. The fourth passenger had begun to struggle in the frigid water. The fire department captain jumped in but was unable to reach him in time. As I recall, a day or two passed until his body was found.

The NTSB determined the probable cause to be a parking brake that was not released for takeoff. They also believed the aircrew checklist was inadequately prepared by a company and contributed to the oversight.

My memory of the event, which remains as clear today as forty-five years ago, is of the loud hush of shock and the incomprehensible sadness that filled the Leo Burnett hallways, and of the haunting vision that still appears when I hear mention of Northerly Island—that of a man in his mid 40s who I knew only briefly across a conference room, who went to work attired in a business suit one fateful day and slipped away in our great Lake Michigan.

Cory Stevenson
Before Northerly. After Northerly. Twenty Years Later.

The area known as Museum Campus has a scenic view of the lake and the skyline in the City.

It’s always been that way. However, before Northerly, it was beyond magical, well, beyond magical to two 5-year-old black boys from the South Side of Chicago. Our mother, a newly single mother, had this ritual; she’d drive us to the Museum Campus. We find free parking (imagine the concept) and watch private airplanes take off at Meigs Field, metal cranes soaring away to unknown destinations in the sugar cookie yellows, macaroon golds, and coral reds over the azure blue lake—the majesty of Chicago Lakefront dawn.

You had one task: Dream. And, like there could be no small plans for Burnham, there could be no small dreams. You had to have the biggest dreams. The museums may not be free, and Bears games may not be free, but it’s free to dream, and to dream is to be free. Lack wasn’t a limitation. Dreams manifest. And well, Lake Michigan might as well be one big wishing well. Because, like DuSable, the city’s black Haitian immigrant father, or its original people and stewards, the Potawatomi, Ojibwe, and Odawa, once you see the lake, you know deep in your core, all things are possible.

Many years later, Mayor Daley would end our ritual, citing security concerns, and making good on an original 1909 plan to transform this lakefront space into an area where the public can enjoy wetlands and walking trails, and in Daley fashion, adding a concert venue. How many people since then have walked along trails or sat near the water, casting their dreams into the lake? How many people have enjoyed a concert at Northerly, where the music transforms, and just for a couple of hours, concert goers can be totally themselves, they can be totally free, free to dream?

I’d be remiss if I didn’t put this into context about freedom and dreams twenty years later. It took a special woman to show us the possibility and majesty that is present at what’s now, Northerly. It took a Gansta of a Mayor to pull the trigger, but it was collective planning and collective effort, and of course, the People to make Northerly the public space it is today, a place to dream. However, there are many of us at the moment who cannot travel freely; in their own city, they can’t make the trek, they are scared to work, and they are afraid to get groceries. It will take all of us to keep our public spaces, our Northerly Islands, our city, our country, a place where people feel free, a place where people can Dream.

Craig Stevenson
Daley Bishop

“You gotta snap some collars and let them motherfuckers know you there to take them out anytime you feel like it. You gotta get the ground beneath your feet, partner, get the wind behind your back and go out in a blaze if you got to!”
—Bishop, Juice 1993.

in classic bridgeport stoicism,
the Prince revealed another Machiavelian hand
filled with calculated disregard for elite opposition,
calling on World Fair of 1839 beginnings,
and Burnham and Bennet plans for a city, neva too small
to build family legacy, a comprehensive visionary
treatment of the Chicago Lakefront
armed with a readied excuse for the groupings of public buildings
and materials advancement - in need of protection
synonymous with disinvestment of south and west sides
are the coupling of the tendencies to great city life,
the protocols for wealth and satisfaction,
wealth created by the growth of population on record
[and multitude influx of ethnicities performing invisible labor]
both practical and beautifying.
and, forget the call for additional parks, gardens, commons, and public square
necessary to physical & mental well-being
design & arrangement for the betterment of urban conditions
preparing for extensive, expansion of public imaginaries
“F” your policy debate and widening the knowledgeable proposals
“F’ better solutions, more drawings, constant reviews, and more hearings!
it really didn’t matter…Blago, and the Dems had both houses,
a vital and dominant checkmate!
in which more than 20 years later
traumatized
opponents still claim vile political overreach.
six “Xs”,
Marked another Commercial Club(ing) of Chicago
However, those with big shoulders from Lawndale, Back of the Yards, Humboldt Park, Englewood, Roseland, and Altgeld Gardens
barely blinked, some cackled and smiled
in pure recognition of moves played before on them
shugging off the front-page drama,
featuring the private beek of thos who have and those who have more…
charming. commanding. crazed…celebrated
beyond closure,
anyone could get it
like Bishop, there needed to be a Daley reminder of who had Juice.

“There is no agreement. There is no Federal Legislation.”
—Mayor Richard Daley, 2003.

Ernie Wong

Looking out of the station wagon window on our family trips downtown and seeing the airplanes take off and land at Meigs Field was always met with wonderment.

Cold mornings watching the smelt fishing along the lakeshore by the Planetarium and watching the control tower lit up and the flashing red and blue lights identifying the runways was both eerie and calming.

Waking up on Monday morning March 31, 2003, to the news that the airport was closed due to Mayor Daley’s demo crew brought cynicism to city politics.

Northerly Island is an opportunity for restoring Chicago’s natural ecological world as well as providing another amazing Chicago destination. Its current state of a wind-swept, dilapidated, and wave-battered peninsula begs for help. Protecting its eastern shoreline, planting trees to buffer the wind and provide habitats for wildlife would enhance and define areas of refuge and create smaller areas for programming and recreation.

When you identify other lakefront gems, from Promontory Point in Hyde Park, 31^st Street Harbor in Bronzeville, and the scheduled DuSable Park in Streeterville, the opportunity for Northerly Island as a destination dwarfs those projects. The political will to provide better access, protect its edges, and create a natural and spectacular lakefront park could forever change Chicago’s lakefront.

I hope that happens in my lifetime.