Chicago's Midway Airport: The First seventy-five Years by Christopher Lynch Lake Claremont Press Phone: 773/583-7800 www.lakeclaremont.com

Midway Airport's geography tells alot about the history of transportation in Chicago. Even though it is one squire mile, in a aircraft at an elevation of five thousand ft in semi-darkness, it is very difficult to even pick out the field visually, let alone land there. One pilot taught me the Archer Avenue trick, a navigational technique. Midway can be detected visually if one looks for Archer avenue, which from the air looks like a six mile long "Y". Archer avenue begins at the stem of the "Y" and continues on as the left prong of the "Y's pitchfork shape. The dark patch to the right of the "Y" is Midway itself.

And this visual guideline works, from the air, Archer avenue does indeed resemble a letter of the alphabet, as the incandescent street lights glow in a long line towards the lake. It's ironic that pilots would use Archer Avenue as a guidepost for visual navigation, since the history of Archer avenue is the story of Chicago itself, and why the city was destined to become a transportation Hub.

Archer Avenue would get its name from the first Commissioner of the Illinois and Michigan Canal, William Archer. This Indian trail ran along the general direction of the Chicago River. The river excited early visitors to this regions like the geographer and explorer Joliet the idea to write to the Provisional Governor of Quebec to argue that this area, "La prairie de la portage." should be settled by New France, for it was transportation wonder, a continental divide. Water to the East of the divide, would run into the Lake and the Saint Lawrence Seaway, and water to the West of the divide ran into the Gulf of Mexico. To people in the 17th Century, when canoes were the main transportation through the prairie, this land of the portage was an ideal transportation hub.

The trail that would become Archer Avenue was also the site of the Fort Dearborn Massacre, where troops and settlers stationed at Fort Dearborn, on the Chicago river, were forced to march out of the fort on August 15, 1812 and to the South for about a mile. When they reached the beginning of the path that would later become Archer avenue, the Pottawatomi Indians began to turn and walk Southeast down the trail. This was part of a trap, and the settlers were massacred by waiting warriors, as their blood ran in the sand dunes, at what is now 18th and Prairie Avenue.

And 200 years after the era of La Salle and Marquette, men were talking about building the canal that had intrigued Joliet. They did so in 1847 with the construction of the Illinois and Michigan Canal, which became the highway of commerce. The Canal's role would diminish due to the emergence of railroads, but even though it would become the dominant mode of transport for a century, the railroads would run along the low lying ground of the canal, flattened by glaciers thousands of years before, creating uniform land ideal for tracks.

And not so coincidentally, Midway Airport, which became the hub of air transportation for half of the Twentieth Century, replaced the modes of transpiration it sits so close to, from ancient Indian footpaths, to the era of canals and railroad Might.