Zorn rightly takes issue with Time ignoring the downside of Daley’s reign other than the fetishization of wrought iron, but Meigs isn’t a scandal!
Meigs was always planned to be closed going back to Burnham’s plan and the public discussion had gone on forever–Peter Fitzgerald blocked the compromise and so Daley closed it.
One might think Hired Trucks might have generated it’s own paragraph, but not Meigs.
Meigs isn’t a scandal? Perhaps the closing itself isn’t, but the method sure was.
In the dark of night, bulldozers traveled down the Kennedy from O’Hare. They shined a light at a surveilance camera to blind it. They carved giant X shapes into the runway, making it permanently unusable. They left 10+ planes just sitting on the tarmac without a plan to get them out.
All this without warning, public hearing, a consensus at the state or federal level or even a courtesy call to the FAA.
I’ve got no problem with the airport being gone, but I’d say that’s worse than renting an SUV for the Mayor’s wife (Detroit, as described in the same article).
It’s a little hard to take seriously that the move was a surprise or hadn’t gone through the public process–it had been in the plan for over 50 years, the Mayor had been having a public fight for 10 years over the very issue and the planes got out of there when the weather permitted (the funniest part of the whole deal).
The nighttime move was obnoxious, but it’s hard to say that the move wasn’t a public process other than that–in fact, it was a pretty obvious case of federal and state involvement in what should have been a city decision.
Except for that little part where it was a gross violation of federal law.
And yes, there were aircraft in flight that night that would have expected to find Meigs available for an emergency landing. Crossing Lake Michigan in a small plane is always a bit of a pucker situation; thinking there is an emergency landing site when there isn’t (and worse – that you wouldn’t know there wasn’t an emergency landing site until you were committed to land on a runway that now had holes in it) would have been murder.
Please look up the Federal Aviationl Regulations (FARs) and the concept of Notice to Airmen (NOTAM) – you will see that aside from the funding aspects what Daley did was in fact illegal.
Cranky
Murder? Uh, no. Given the weather conditions why would anyone try and land there and not at Midway? Remember, the planes couldn’t leave for a few days because of the weather.
The FAA didn’t pursue the ‘violation’ so it would appear that it isn’t as serious as some like to pretend.
I remember being a little uncomfortable with the tactic at first.
But you have to admit, it’s become another of the great stories about our city. And it has precedents in Chicago history.
According to http://www.chipublib.org/digital/sewers/history4.html, which has a writeup of the river reversal, the last dam separating the Chicago river from the sanitary channel was accompilshed at dawn without the knowledge of the Governor or Mayor because the state of Missouri was trying to get an injunction against the river reversal.
If people want to blame Meigs loss on anyone, I suggest they look at Fitzgerald. He’s the one that kept the preserve Meigs folks from upholding their end of the deal.