November 2025 - Mas Context shared a retrospective on Northerly Island, reimagining the site for it's 100th birthday. Hoerr Schaudt Principal, Michael Skowlund, shares his thoughts for the next 100 years of Northly Island.
"2025 marks the centenary of the opening of Northerly Island, a human-made peninsula and park located on Chicago’s Lake Michigan lakefront. Over its existence, it has played multiple roles, from the former site of the Century of Progress World’s Fair and Meigs Field airport to a recreational area, concert venue, and park. To commemorate this significant date, we asked architects, landscape architects, urban designers, planners, historians, journalists, photographers, educators, artists, and advocates—all residents of Chicago—to share their thoughts, memories, and visions for this unique place in the city.
A Vision for Northerly Island’s Second Century
Northerly Island stands as a rare urban canvas—a place where Chicago’s future can be as vibrant and unexpected as its past. As a landscape architect who’s called this city home for nearly two decades, I reflect on our “Third Nature,” a concept adapted from William Cronon’s Nature’s Metropolis. We now have the chance to creatively merge Chicago’s “First Nature”—pre-settlement prairies and wetlands—with its “Second Nature,” marked by human ambition and invention. The peninsula invites us to blend history and modernity to create something entirely new at the water’s edge.
Honoring Daniel Burnham’s 1909 vision for public lakefront parks—and making the shoreline both resilient and relevant—means designing spaces where kids, Chicagoans, and curious newcomers can run hands through prairie grasses, smell the lake winds, or watch turtles slip into wetland shallows. It’s not only about restoring habitat for birds and aquatic life, but also about inviting people to experience nature up close. The “2010 Park District Framework Plan” envisioned prairie restoration, open access, and a city welcomed in. Yet, much of that vision to activate remains unrealized. Chicago’s new “Central Area Plan 2045” recommends expanding access, including a bike and pedestrian bridge across Burnham Harbor, better connecting the island to green corridors and the city.
Today, Northerly Island remains underutilized, isolated by its foreboding armored eastern edge and limited entry to the city. It calls to be better connected—to Chicago and to the lake. Growing up on these shores, I collected cobbles and swung from bluffside trees; my earliest memories are rooted in this landscape. My hope is for every Chicagoan and visitor to discover those same essential joys, because the future of a great city lies in daily, democratic, unforgettable encounters with living nature. That’s the promise Northerly Island can fulfill for another century."
Check out the full story here!
