The next time you’re cruising on Lake Shore Drive south of McCormick Place, look to the lake and try to imagine how different your commute might have been if Mayor Richard J. Daley had pulled off his most audacious public works plan—a major airport built in Lake Michigan, five miles from shore.
Unlike a “Chicago” airport built in adjoining unincorporated DuPage or Will Counties, Chicagoans would take the lion’s share of the jobs generated by an airport on the south side. The communities closest to the airport would see dramatic investments in the form of hotels, restaurants, and other facilities to service airline traffic. Moreover, an airport in Lake Michigan would be the kind of make-no-small-plans enterprise that Chicago mayors and their constituents love—an awe-inspiring public works project that would pump tens of millions of dollars into the construction trades and leave a heroic monument to the city’s technical ingenuity.
Although Pikarsky claimed fog wouldn’t be an issue because takeoffs and landings would be automated, air controllers and pilots contended that the airport would be vulnerable to icing and low visibility, and judged its location too close to O’Hare and Midway’s crowded airspace for it to be efficient. Nor did City Hall adequately address a 1969 Federal Aviation Administration-commissioned report that warned that catastrophic dike failure was still a modern phenomenon. The barrier protecting the airport could be put under stress by severe events involving weather, leakage, sabotage, or accidents.
