1985 Midway Airlines Pictorial View of Chicago, Midway Airport

The World from Midway Airport.

This is a 1985 Midway Airlines promotional pictorial view of Chicago, done in the style of Saul Steinberg's New Yorker covers, such as The World from 9th Avenue. Though Midway Airlines went bankrupt in 1991, it is credited with reviving the fortunes of Midway Airport, which was underutilized until the airline began operating.

A Closer Look

This view is oriented roughly towards the northwest, with Midway Airport and a fleet of Midway Airlines jets in the foreground. Behind it is Downtown Chicago, linked to the airport by Cicero Avenue. In the background, other cities and lands are passingly referred to, including Milwaukee, the Twin Cities, and Wisconsin. Far in the background, located in Canada towards Siberia, is Midway's rival, O'Hare International Airport, surrounded by planes circling and waiting for their turn to land.

The World from Midway Airport

This view is a riff on Saul Steinberg's famous drawing The World from 9th Avenue, a 1976 cover for the The New Yorker. Similar to earlier 'brags' maps (see California-ornearnold-1947, NewYorker-wallingford-1939-2, and TexasBrags-randolph-1948-4, all recently listed by us), in a genre sometimes known as perception cartography, Steinberg's view humorously exaggerated a New Yorker's perspective of the world as diminutive compared to New York City, depicting Manhattan's 9th Avenue in great detail in the foreground, while the rest of the United States and the world appear as a simplified, distant landscape with only a few labels (such as 'China,' 'Japan,' and 'Russia') far off on the horizon. It plays with scale and perception, emphasizing New Yorkers' tendency to see their city as the center of everything, with the rest of the world as an afterthought. Steinberg's view spawned many imitators and, in the tradition of brags maps, other cities produced their own (mostly) good-natured responses ribbing New York City in return. While many of Steinberg's imitators sought to poke fun at New York City, the maker(s) of this view have a closer target in mind: Chicago's other 'great airport,' O'Hare. Still, the ribbing of O'Hare is relatively gentle, perhaps a reflection of 'Midwest Nice'.

Midway Airport and Midway Airlines

Opened in 1927 as Chicago Municipal Airport, some 12 miles southwest of downtown, the airport quickly became one of the world's busiest airfields during the 1930s and 1940s, serving as a major hub for early commercial aviation and mail routes. It was renamed Midway in 1949 to honor the World War II Battle of Midway, and reached its peak in the late 1940s, handling more than 10,000,000 passengers annually. But its facilities soon proved inadequate for the new generation of larger jet aircraft, leading to the rise of O'Hare International Airport (opened in 1944 for military use, operating passenger flights from 1955). Midway experienced a decline and handled very few flights until a major revitalization beginning in the 1980s, which modernized terminals and infrastructure.

The revival of the airport's fortunes was largely tied to Midway Airlines. Though incorporated in 1976, Midway Airlines began operations in 1979 and is therefore considered the first new airline to appear following the important Airline Deregulation Act of 1978. Many of the other new airlines created in the wake of the Act failed quickly amid fierce competition but Midway Airlines was instead a victim of its own success, expanding too quickly and suffering from a recession and high fuel prices in 1990, filing bankruptcy in 1991 (a group of investors including one of Midway Airlines' founders launched a new Midway Airlines in 1993, but it also went bankrupt in 2003). Nevertheless, the airline had demonstrated how smaller carriers (or at least smaller planes) could take advantage of the overcrowding at O'Hare to carve out a niche for Midway Airport. Today, the airport is heavily used by Southwest Airlines and handles over 22 million passengers annually.

Publication History and Census

This view was drawn by an unknown artist for Midway Airlines in 1985. An example is held by the David Rumsey Historical Map Collection, and the view appears on the market from time to time, but is not listed among institutional collections in the OCLC.

Condition

Excellent.

References

Rumsey 16444.000.