Sanctuary Point Bike Path

From December 1948 until March 2003, Meigs Field Airport was a single-runway airport on Northerly Island in Chicago.
On the night of Sunday, March 30, 2003, Mayor Richie Daley ordered city crews to make the runway unusable by bulldozing large X-shaped gouges into the runway surface in the middle of the night. The stranded aircraft were later allowed to depart from Meigs' 3,000-foot taxiway.
"To do this any other way would have been needlessly contentious," Mayor Daley claimed at a news conference on March 31. Daley defended his actions by claiming it would save the City of Chicago the effort of further court battles before the airport could close. He claimed that safety concerns required the closure, due to the post-September 11 risk of terrorist-controlled aircraft attacking the downtown waterfront near Meigs Field.
"The signature act of Richard Daley's 22 years in office was the midnight bulldozing of Meigs Field," according to Chicago Tribune columnist Eric Zorn.[20] "He ruined Meigs because he wanted to, because he could," columnist John Kass wrote of Daley in the Chicago Tribune.
While aviation interests and commentators decried the move, supporters of the park believe it is for the city's best interest for the land to be a park. For example, the Lake Michigan Federation released in February 2001 an urban wilderness plan for the site. Instead of calling it "Northerly Island" a reference to the northernmost landmass of four others that were never built under the 1909 Plan of Chicago, "Sanctuary Point" would allow access for many more people than the fairly exclusive use as an airstrip.
On September 17, 2006, the city dropped all legal appeals and agreed to pay a $33,000 fine as well as repay $1 million in FAA Airport Improvement Program funds that it used to demolish the airfield and build Northerly Island Park.
-----------
While I never flew in or out of Meigs, I really enjoyed riding my ebike on
Sanctuary Point.
Excerpted from
en.wikipedia.o...