If it wasn’t there, you wouldn’t build it.
But it is there, and the city would be foolish to tear it up.
Trouble is, Mayor Richard M. Daley is getting into the habit of doing foolish things. Things like tearing up Merrill C. Meigs Field, the corporate airport on the Near South lakefront, to make room for a “nature” preserve.
Somehow the civic greens–the well-bred folks who offed the Lincoln Park Gun Club and a fish-cleaning station at Diversey Harbor–have convinced Daley that the city needs an instant wetland and bird sanctuary on Northerly Island, the peninsula across from Soldier Field. The mayor is so sold on the idea that he has put his wife, Maggie, on the steering committee.
Maggie is a smart lady, to be sure. But with all due respect, the poor woman is being sent on a fool’s errand.
For one thing, the city and its park district already operate 15 lineal miles of recreational lakefront, much of it in a sorry state of repair. The south lakefront, especially the long stretch from 31st Street to Jackson Park, is a disgrace. The step-stone sea wall is crumbling into the lake and neither the city nor the federal government appears ready to pay for a multimillion dollar replacement. The park land protected by the dissolving wall consists mainly of scrawny saplings rising from patches of crab grass flecked with broken glass.
But let us say, for the sake of argument, that the city and the Chicago Park District did have sufficient money and manpower to maintain what they already have. And let us say that they seek, admirably, to add to the public’s recreational domain.
They’d still be foolish to close Meigs Field.
That’s because the little airport is an economic jewel. In a world where cities must compete with their own suburbs as well as other cities for jobs and economic development, Meigs is one of Chicago’s most misunderstood and underappreciated assets because the general public rarely uses the little, single-strip airport. The only scheduled service nowadays is a United Express shuttle to Springfield. Little-appreciated because the many companies that use Meigs–companies that account for 80 percent of the 51,000 annual takeoffs and landings, are scattered all over the Midwest. Meigs puts these companies within easy reach of Chicago’s mighty collection of professional services–its law firms, advertising agencies, consultants, banks and bonding houses. Meigs lets a brand manager from, say, S.C. Johnson & Son in Wisconsin, fly in for a 9 a.m. meeting with his or her account executive at a Michigan Avenue ad agency, and be back in Racine for lunch. Meigs lets a corporate counsel from Michigan’s Kellogg Co. close a deal at Harris Bank and be back at his or her desk in Battle Creek that afternoon.
If it weren’t for Meigs–if the time-is-money “suits” had to fight their way in from Midway Airport along Cicero Avenue and the Stevenson Expressway, a good many of them likely would take their business to Milwaukee, Detroit or Cincinnati. That’s why competitive cities like Cleveland and Toronto are spending millions to upgrade small, business-oriented airports near their downtowns. That’s why suburban airport authorities from nearby DuPage County to Southern California’s Orange County are expanding their aviation facilities.
To which some readers might respond: “So what?” Maybe you’ve bought into the notion (being quietly spread by the Daley administration and the civic greens) that Meigs-users are either state bureaucrats or fat cats who can wait in the cab line at O’Hare like everybody else. Or maybe you don’t like the idea that a piece of our publicly-owned lakefront is being used for the convenience of profit-grubbing private companies.
It is, after all, a matter of priorities. It’s hard to argue against the hiss of wind-blown marsh grasses and the honking of Canada geese (assuming either can be supported on a man-made landfill.)
But remember this: When the company that signs your paycheck decides it’s easier to do business in Atlanta; or when your client switches to a competing vendor in Kansas City, Mo. (where they recently upgraded their downtown jetport), don’t say you weren’t warned. Don’t say you didn’t know that more than 300 of the Fortune 500 companies maintain their own corporate aircraft.
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Great cities serve many interests. Not everybody goes to the Lyric Opera or dines at the Union League Club. Not everybody trades futures at the Mercantile Exchange or sells group insurance from CNA Plaza. Yet the people who do those things, and the companies they run, are a wellspring to the rest of us. I wouldn’t sell my birthright to keep those companies happy, but neither would I grab their little airport to build an artificial “nature” preserve.
Gov. Jim Edgar, whom I’ve criticized several times in this space, is dead-on right to oppose Mayor Daley’s plan to tear up Meigs. He’s also right to support a domed stadium at McCormick Place, another business-generator our mayor says Chicago can do without.
Good to know somebody is looking out for the city’s economic future. Too bad it’s not the guy we elected to do the job.