Northerly Island, Chicago IL - 10-12-14

 This is Northerly Island in Chicago. There's a lot of history here both for the place itself and for me personally. This man made island near downtown was originally planned as a park. Then even before construction began, the plan become to make it an airport instead.

Construction began in 1920 and was completed in 1925. Because of the depression going on at the time, the airport plans were not carried out and the island did end up being a park.

Then in 1946, it was converted to an airport and Meigs Field was born. Many years later, Microsoft selected Meigs Field to be the default airport for their Flight Simulator program. 

So Meigs field is where I ended up learning to take off and land in Flight Simulator. I spend countless hours trying unsuccessfully to land all kinds of flight sim aircraft there.  My flight sim adventures eventually led me to finding a flight school and getting a private pilot certificate. Which led to a commercial pilot certificate which led to working as a pilot for many years.

 As luck would have it, I got to actually land at Meigs once. It was an impromptu unplanned stop on our way to the flyin at Oshkosh. We landed, saw the police fishing a body out of the water on the west side of the island, had an expensive cheese burger at the yacht club and continued on our way North. Fun times.

Then Mayor Daley who had been unsuccessfully close the airport for many years, decided to take the airport by force and had city crews bull doze the runways in the middle of the night.

Technically it was an act of terrorism but we're Americans so we can overlook that sort of thing apparently. After that Northerly Island returned to being the park it was originally intended to be.

We tried to get shots here once before, but the Bears game that was going on at that time had different plans so that shoot never happened. This time around we arrived to find the park almost completely empty. And also almost completely gone. City planners have decided they didn't built it good enough the first time so they're digging it up and doing it again. This plot of land just can't seem to decide what it wants to be.

WWII Bunker, Cape May Point, NJ 11-29-13

This is the beach in Cape May Point, NJ near where I grew up. This concrete bunker was built in 1942 to protect the coast from German U-boats. When it was originally built, it was about 900' inland from the water on a patch of high ground. It was covered in sod to help it blend with the surroundings and there were round concrete turrets in front of the structure that held 6" guns.

The ocean is powerful thing and it changes the coast line over time. So by the time I was growing up in the early 70's, the ocean had moved the beach inland to erase the high ground from the landscape and leave the bunker planted firmly on the beach. At that time, the remains of the concrete gun turrets could still be seen. Those turrets are now long gone, washed out to sea.

For most of my life the bunker did not sit on the beach as it does now. But rather it sat about 15' above the beach supported on a collection of wood pilings that were sunk into the soil during its construction.  The pilings were used to keep the structure from sinking into the ground. But they were never intended to hold the entire structure up in mid-air with the tides and storm surges washing in and out below. So the structure always had signs posted which essentially said this thing could fall down at any minute so don't come crying to us if it falls on you and kills you.

But the ocean is fickle and can sometimes change its mind. And over the last ten years or so, the ocean has been dumping sand on the beach rather than taking it away. And as a result. the bunker once again sits on solid ground.

So this past Thanksgiving while we were in town visiting family, we took advantage of some terrific light and good winds and got some nice shots of the bunker as it sat in the fall of 2013. The ocean being what it is, I fully expect the bunker and the beach surrounding it will continue to change for many years to come until eventually, the sand buries it again or the water carries out to sea bit by bit leaving no trace that it was ever there.