Meigs Field: History, Midnight Raid, and Legal Aftermath

The Meigs Field demolition was Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley’s decision to send bulldozers onto a working lakefront airport in the middle of the night on March 30, 2003, carving six enormous X-shaped gashes into the single runway and shutting the facility down without notice to the FAA, the City Council, the state of Illinois, or the pilots whose 16 aircraft were parked on the field.¹² By sunrise, the airport was finished, and the legal machinery that might have kept it open had nothing left to protect.

What Meigs Field Was

Meigs Field sat on Northerly Island, a 91-acre artificial peninsula in Lake Michigan just south of downtown Chicago. The land was originally built as landfill in the late 1920s and was meant, in Daniel Burnham’s 1909 Plan of Chicago, to be public parkland.³ The airport opened in 1948 and was renamed the following year for newspaper publisher and aviation advocate Merrill C. Meigs.⁴

By 1955 it was the busiest single-runway airport in the country, and its 3,900-foot strip handled general aviation, corporate jets, air ambulances, helicopter shuttles to O’Hare and Midway, and eventually scheduled commercial flights on carriers such as Air Illinois and United Express.⁴⁵ The Chicago Park District owned the land; the city ran the airport on a lease. That ownership arrangement is what made everything that followed politically possible.

The Midnight Raid of March 30, 2003

Late on a Sunday night, city crews rolled backhoes and bulldozers onto the runway and cut six X-shaped trenches through the pavement, rendering it permanently unusable.¹ No one outside the mayor’s circle had been warned. Sixteen aircraft were stranded on the field, unable to take off. It took several days of negotiations among the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association, the FAA, and the city before those planes were cleared, on April 2, to depart using an adjacent taxiway as an improvised runway.⁶

Steve Whitney, president of Friends of Meigs Field, later said the demolition “was basically done by both lying and cheating,” and critics used the phrase “storm-trooper tactics” to describe the operation.⁷ Former Alderman Dick Simpson called it a “dictatorial ploy” and an example of “autocratic” behavior.⁸

Daley’s Reason, and Why It Didn’t Hold Up

At a news conference on April 1, 2003, Daley defended the demolition as a matter of national security, saying the airport’s proximity to downtown skyscrapers created an unacceptable post-9/11 risk. “I am not willing to wait for a tragedy… before making a very difficult and tough decision,” he said, while also acknowledging “there has been no specific threat” against Meigs.¹

That justification did not survive scrutiny. In September 2003, Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge said publicly that his department had never been consulted about any threat at Meigs, and that Daley’s impulse to close the airport “predated the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.” Asked whether Chicago was safer without it, Ridge replied only, “From the mayor’s point of view, they are.” Daley eventually conceded the airport was bulldozed to create a park, not for security reasons.⁹

Why a Midnight Raid Instead of a Vote

Daley had tried to close Meigs before, and the ordinary route had never worked. When the city’s lease with the Park District expired on September 30, 1996, the City Council voted to shut the airport down. AOPA and other aviation groups were denied a federal restraining order, and Meigs closed on schedule.¹⁰

Then the state fought back. The Illinois Department of Transportation threatened to seize the facility, and in December 1996 the legislature passed the “Meigs Act” authorizing a state takeover. Daley cut a deal with Governor Jim Edgar: the state would drop its suit and repeal the Meigs Act, and the city would reopen and run the airport for five years. Meigs reopened on February 11, 1997.¹⁰

In 2001, Daley and Governor George Ryan struck another deal: keep Meigs open for 25 years in exchange for state support of a major O’Hare expansion. The arrangement depended on federal legislation that never cleared the U.S. Senate, and when the O’Hare bill stalled, Daley declared the Meigs deal “off.”⁸ With the 1997 operating agreement also running out, aviation groups, state officials, and business interests were positioned to block or delay any orderly closure. Destroying the runway overnight left them nothing to litigate over.

The Legal Aftermath

Lawsuits followed within days. None reopened the airport.

AOPA’s Federal Case

On April 3, 2003, AOPA filed a formal complaint with the FAA, alleging the city violated federal aviation regulations by failing to give the required 30-day notice before closing an airport with a charted instrument approach.¹¹ It then sued in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, seeking a permanent injunction against further destruction and arguing the city had prevented the FAA from conducting a required aeronautical study.¹² A federal judge denied a temporary restraining order on May 23, 2003, and the case did not produce a reopening.¹³

Friends of Meigs in State Court

Friends of Meigs Field sued in Cook County Circuit Court, alleging the city violated the state’s open meetings law, failed to give proper notice to the state, and misused public land. A judge granted an initial temporary restraining order, but on May 23, 2003, Judge William Maki dismissed the case, ruling it lacked the merit to proceed to trial.¹⁴

The FAA Fine

The FAA acknowledged the notice complaint had “merit” but concluded it could not force the airport to reopen. In 2005, the agency fined Chicago $33,000, the statutory maximum at the time, based on $1,100 per day. The city fought the fine for more than a year before dropping its appeals in September 2006 and paying the $33,000 penalty plus $1 million to reimburse federal Airport Improvement Program grants that had been spent on the site.¹⁵

One structural problem hobbled every challenger: the federal grants tied to Meigs had already expired. That meant the FAA’s main enforcement tool, the grant assurance obligations that require federally funded airports to stay open, did not apply here.¹³

The Meigs Legacy Provision

AOPA President Phil Boyer took the fight to Congress. In April 2003, he testified before the U.S. House Aviation Subcommittee during FAA reauthorization hearings, urging Congress to “work to restore flight operations at Meigs Field” and to “reaffirm its authority over security matters” so local officials could not invoke national security as a pretext for closing airports.¹⁶ An amendment in the Illinois legislature to require the city to restore and reopen Meigs failed.¹³

At the federal level, the episode did leave a mark. A subsequent FAA reauthorization bill included the “Meigs Legacy Provision,” raising the maximum daily penalty for an illegal airport closure from $1,100 to $10,000.¹⁵ The fine will hurt more next time. The rule that airports with expired federal grants can effectively be destroyed by their operator did not change.

What Stands There Now

Northerly Island is now a 119.7-acre park managed by the Chicago Park District, with a five-acre pond, prairies, walking paths, a sailing center, and the 12th Street Beach on its eastern shore.¹⁷ The old control tower still stands, closed to the public, and the former terminal serves as the park’s visitor center.¹⁸ Burnham’s 1909 vision of lakefront parkland was realized, by the route no one planned.

1
New York Times. Chicago Mayor Bulldozes a Small Downtown Airport
2
WTTW News. How Did Meigs Field Become Northerly Island Park
3
University of Chicago Library. Plan of Chicago Booklet
4
Transportation History. The Grand Opening of a Single-Runway Airport in Chicago
5
Simple Flying. Meigs Field
6
Crain’s Chicago Business. FAA Clears Way for Meigs Takeoffs
7
CBS News Chicago. Ten Years Later: Daley’s Midnight Raid to Bulldoze Meigs Field
8
Chicago Sun-Times. Meigs Field Airport: Mayor Richard Daley Bulldozed Northerly Island
9
AOPA. Homeland Security Chief Says Meigs Not a Threat
10
AOPA. Chicago Firm Gets Contract to Demolish Meigs
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AOPA. AOPA Unveils 12-Point Plan for Meigs
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AOPA. AOPA Files Suit Against Chicago in Federal Court
13
AOPA. Mayor Daley Bulldozes Chicago’s Meigs Field
14
Chicago Tribune. Meigs Friends Post 1 Tiny Win, 2 Losses
15
Flying Magazine. Looking Back at the Overnight Destruction of Meigs Field
16
AOPA. AOPA’s Boyer Puts Meigs Closure Center Stage at Congressional Hearing
17
Chicago Park District. Northerly Island Park
18
Atlas Obscura. Meigs Field Tower and Terminal