A federal land grant from 1785, set aside for a one-room school, became the busiest airport on Earth. Then the jets came, and for two years its only airline was a helicopter.
A Pirep featured story · KMDW Chicago Midway International, Chicago, IL
In 1785, two years after the Revolutionary War ended, the new United States government drew up a land system for the western territories. Every township laid out by the surveyors was thirty-six square miles, and one square mile out of every thirty-six, Section 16, was set aside for public education, to be leased or sold for the benefit of local schools. That grant gave the Chicago Board of Education a one-square-mile parcel on what would become the city's southwest side, bounded today by 55th Street, 63rd Street, Cicero Avenue, and Central Avenue.
For decades the land was farmed, with a small grammar school on one corner. In 1923 the City of Chicago leased the section from the school board, laid a cinder runway, and called the place Chicago Air Park. In 1927 it became Chicago Municipal Airport.
By 1929 it was the busiest airport in the United States. By 1932 it was claiming the busiest in the world, over 100,000 passengers on more than 60,000 flights that year. New York's airports took the American title some years in the thirties and forties, but from about 1950 nobody argued, and the world title held until 1961. The school-section constraint that had defined the land grant now defined the airfield: every runway had to fit inside one square mile, and the city had built solid to the fence.
In 1949 the City Council renamed the airport Midway, for the 1942 Pacific battle that turned the war. By 1959 it was handling ten million passengers a year.
Then the jets arrived, and they needed more runway than the square mile could give. O'Hare had opened to the airlines in 1955, twenty miles northwest with room to grow; when its big new terminal opened in 1962 the airlines consolidated almost overnight. United, the first airline ever to serve the field, was the last to leave, its final flight departing for Toledo in 1962. For the next two years the only scheduled airline at the former busiest airport on Earth was a helicopter service, and by the summer of 1966 the schedule was down to four fixed-wing arrivals a day.
The comeback took decades and came from the budget carriers. Today Midway handles more than twenty million passengers a year, most of them on Southwest, and bills itself as the world's busiest square mile. The runways are still inside the school section. They still are.