Chicago Midway Airport: From World's Busiest to Empty and Back Again

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Chicago Midway began in 1923 as Chicago Air Park, a 320-acre field with one cinder runway used mostly for airmail. The city leased it in 1926, renamed it Chicago Municipal Airport in 1927, and by 1928 had 12 hangars, four runways and night lighting. A 1930 hangar fire destroyed 27 aircraft, including 12 trimotor airliners, but by 1932 the airport handled more than 100,000 passengers on about 60,000 flights and claimed the title of world's busiest. A $1 million WPA grant filled out a full square mile, it passed LaGuardia in 1948 as the busiest U.S. airport, and in 1949 it was renamed for the Battle of Midway. By the late 1950s it handled about 10 million passengers a year, boxed in by 55th Street, 63rd Street, Cicero Avenue and Central Avenue in the Clearing and Garfield Ridge neighborhoods.

Jets like the Boeing 707 and Douglas DC-8 needed more than Midway's roughly 5,700-foot longest runway, and O'Hare's new terminal in 1962 drew the airlines away; from 1962 to 1964 the only scheduled carrier left was Chicago Helicopter. Shorter-field jets like the 727, DC-9 and 737 brought it back after a $10 million renovation in 1968. ATA Airlines made Midway its hub for over 16 years until its 2008 collapse, and Southwest, which arrived in 1985, now carries more than 90 percent of its passengers. Mayor Richard M. Daley's terminal program, then the largest public works project in Illinois history, put the terminal and concourses on opposite sides of Cicero Avenue, linked by a bridge over the traffic. A 99-year lease valued at $2.5 billion collapsed in 2009, and Mayor Rahm Emanuel ended a $2 billion privatization effort in 2013.

• Until 1982 the land belonged to the Chicago Board of Education; the city bought it for $16 million.
• The CTA Orange Line, completed in 1993, runs from the airport to the Loop in about 25 minutes.
• Displaced thresholds move the touchdown point hundreds of feet down the runway so landing jets clear homes and streetlights.
• In December 2005 Southwest Flight 1248 slid off the runway in snow into 55th Street and Central Avenue, killing a six-year-old boy in a car.
• United Flight 553 crashed near Midway in 1972; passenger Dorothy Hunt, wife of Watergate figure E. Howard Hunt, was carrying $10,000 in cash.