Lowell Airport

Pullman was America's first planned model industrial community. George Pullman, the railroad-car magnate whose sleeping cars revolutionized long-distance travel, founded it in 1880 on what was then farmland 13 miles south of Chicago. He hired architect Solon Spencer Beman and landscape architect Nathan F. Barrett to design a complete town — factory, row houses, hotel, church, library, school, parks — and rented every building to his workers. Pullman believed that good housing and amenities would produce loyal, productive employees. The experiment ran for fourteen years. In 1894, after a national depression cut demand for sleeping cars, Pullman slashed wages without lowering rents. The Pullman Strike that followed shut down rail traffic across the country and ended only when President Cleveland sent in federal troops. Thirty workers died. The 1894 strike is the reason Labor Day became a federal holiday — Congress passed it days after the troops withdrew, hoping to mollify the labor movement. The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, organized by A. Philip Randolph in 1925 from the ranks of Pullman's Black porter workforce, became the first Black-led labor union to win a collective bargaining agreement with a major American corporation. Michelle Obama's grandfather was a Pullman porter. President Obama designated Pullman a National Monument in 2015 — the first National Park Service unit in Chicago. President Biden signed legislation redesignating it Pullman National Historical Park on December 29, 2022. The 1880-era street grid, more than 1,300 row houses, the Hotel Florence (named for Pullman's daughter), the Administration Clock Tower Building, and the Greenstone Church are nearly all intact.

Indiana's only national park (designated 2019, formerly a national lakeshore). 15 miles of Lake Michigan shoreline with dunes towering over 200 feet — Mount Baldy is the most famous, an actively migrating dune that moves up to 4 feet per year. From the air, the dunes are a stunning ribbon of golden sand against blue water. On clear days the Chicago skyline is visible 35 miles to the west — a postcard moment from the pattern at KVPZ. The park is one of the most biodiverse units in the National Park Service — over 1,100 plant species (more than the Everglades). Pair with a low-altitude lakeshore tour from Gary east to Michigan City.

Out of Midway (KMDW), the Museum of Science and Industry is in the only building left from the 1893 World's Fair, a Beaux-Arts pile on the lakefront (renamed the Griffin Museum in 2024, though locals still say MSI). The thing to see is the U-505, the only German submarine the US Navy ever captured intact. On June 4, 1944, two days before Normandy, a task group cornered it off West Africa; a boarding party from the USS Pillsbury jumped aboard while it was still under power, the first US Navy boarding of an enemy warship since 1815, and saved it before the German crew's scuttling charges blew. They took codebooks and Enigma cipher rotors. The capture was kept secret: the German crew was held in Louisiana for the rest of the war and their families were told they had died. They came home in 1946 to families that had buried them. The boat, 252 feet, was barged up through the Great Lakes in 1954 and sat outdoors for fifty years before being moved into an underground hall in 2005.

Northerly Island was envisioned by Daniel Burnham in his 1909 Plan of Chicago as the first of five offshore islands in a chain of lakefront parks. Only one was ever built — and it was built as a peninsula in 1925, not an island, despite the name. The site hosted the 1933-34 Century of Progress World's Fair. In 1948 it became Merrill C. Meigs Field, a single-runway downtown airport projecting into Lake Michigan three minutes from the Loop. For 55 years Meigs was a working downtown airport — corporate jets, executive turboprops, presidential trips, GA traffic. It was the closest civilian field to downtown Chicago of any US city. In the middle of the night on March 30, 2003, Mayor Richard M. Daley ordered city crews to bulldoze giant X-shaped trenches into the runway. There was no notice to the FAA, no notice to the airport's tenants, and no warning to 16 aircraft that were tied down on the ramp — those aircraft were trapped on the field for weeks before they could be disassembled and trucked out. Daley justified it as a post-9/11 security measure (Meigs sat across the lake from the Sears Tower). The FAA later fined the City $33,000. The Department of Justice declined to prosecute. AOPA and pilot groups sued unsuccessfully. The destruction has been on the AOPA bumper-sticker for two decades: "Don't Bulldoze My Airport." The site has been Northerly Island Park since 2005 — prairie restoration, a concert pavilion, hiking trails. The runway scar was visible from the air for years and is still partly traceable today. The adjacent Museum Campus — three institutions all opened within months of each other around 1930 — is what most visitors come for now. The Adler Planetarium (1930) was the first planetarium in the Western Hemisphere; donor Max Adler funded it after seeing the Zeiss projector in Munich. Field Museum of Natural History (current building 1921) is one of the largest natural history museums in the world; its star is Sue the T. rex, the most complete specimen ever found. Shedd Aquarium (1930) was the largest indoor aquarium in the world when it opened. Soldier Field, the 1924 colonnaded stadium with the controversial 2003 spaceship-style modernization, sits immediately west.