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.
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