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Lessons From Chicago · The Charlotte Optimist

• 0:01
  Twenty years is like twenty minutes. What Chicago can teach Charlotte in a hurry. Chicago's great park opened four years late, and everyone forgot about the delay.
• 0:12
  Charlotte's council is arguing over six weeks for its airport. A morning walk, a bridge, and the faceless they who build cities. October 18, 2026 by Michael Graff. Chicago, three Wednesdays ago.
• 0:30
  On a misty morning, 750 miles from home, my walk is haphazard. I start by finding water, because water always goes somewhere, and then I follow it toward the fuzzy gray sunrise.
• 0:43
  The street dead ends at an elevated pocket neighborhood, where a sidewalk steers to a pocket park that cascades down a 50-foot slope, dumping me out under a highway and into the lakefront park.
• 0:56
  It's about 6.30 a.m., and my time is short, so I jog for a bit, around a yacht club and dozens of moored bloat boats, before turning back toward the Chicago skyscrapers.
• 1:08
  I join runners in crossing a busy intersection, then see a sign for another park and wander into it, because why not? The park's path turns into a bridge. I've never seen anything like this bridge.
• 1:24
  It's a sculpture, and it's a footbridge, and it's a sound barrier, all at once.
• 1:29
  It's more than 900 feet long, stainless steel on both sides, and it feels kind of like the hull of a boat when I'm inside of it, with a long wooden deck under my feet.
• 1:40
  I follow the winding path to the top, where it swings over six lanes of traffic, which I can barely hear. What luck, I think.
• 1:50
  An accidental stroll, following a series of hints to turn this way or that, and now this bridge. I snap a few pictures and keep walking, wondering how, quote, they did that.
• 2:03
  You know them, the faceless they who build everything and make every decision we like or hate. They, the ones who raise the skyscrapers and map the roads.
• 2:11
  We cuss them and we praise them, depending on our mood, and then we move on.
• 2:16
  To a visitor like me, the BP Pedestrian Bridge seems like it's always been there, as if created by the same glaciers that carved out Lake Michigan thousands of years ago.
• 2:26
  But great things, and great cities, aren't built by accident. Back home in Charlotte, this past Monday night. The mayor looks at the clock.
• 2:38
  We're at 6.24, Rob Harrington says, reminding city council that they need to be in the chamber in six minutes.
• 2:44
  We're upstairs at Charlotte's government center, in a high-profile dinner meeting where council is previewing one of its most important decisions, a 10.5-year lease agreement with the major carriers at Charlotte Douglas International Airport.
• 2:57
  If they approve it, the airport will see an estimated $2.1 billion in capital improvements to the seventh-busiest airfield in the world over the next decade.
• 3:07
  It'll also see new gates and a tunnel and a customs hall, all paid for by the airlines through fees they paid to use the airport.
• 3:14
  City staff has spent two years on this lease, and the plan is for it to take effect January 1, 2027.
• 3:22
  Council members have spent about an hour asking questions, some of them pointed, and airport leadership has agreed to make the lease public.
• 3:30
  Council member Dimple Ajmera makes a motion to give council, quote, at least 45 days to review the lease. A few council members catch the at least. If they go beyond 45 days, the January 1 start date creeps closer.
• 3:48
  They talk over each other a little about the procedure. Finally, they settle on making the motion six weeks, with a vote set for November 23rd. Harrington calls the vote. Six hands go up for it, five go up against.
• 4:03
  It passes. Then Harrington, 103 days into the job after being appointed to replace Vi Lyles in July, does something no Charlotte mayor has done in at least a dozen years.
• 4:16
  With some trepidation, Harrington says, I'm going to veto that motion. People around the room toss wide eyes at each other. Someone behind me says, I've never seen that before.
• 4:29
  And that's what they looks like, boring and mind-numbingly procedural. And for some reason, I always leave their meetings parched. I'm not sure what they do to the air in those meeting rooms.
• 4:42
  Back in Chicago, after the walk. Robert McCutcheon, who runs the Charlotte Regional Business Alliance, looks out over a room of 140 of us who've come here to see how Chicago works and how it was built.
• 4:54
  The attendees include city and county staff, business leaders, foundation presidents, sports and entertainment executives, and local elected officials from the county and city and school board.
• 5:06
  I joined by invitation and said yes because it seemed like a more efficient way to foster relationships than scheduling 139 coffees.
• 5:14
  Full disclosure, I paid for the flight and travel expenses and the Alliance covered my room. In the 1850s, McCutcheon tells us, Chicago had a drainage problem, so they raised the streets and buildings four or five feet.
• 5:29
  In the late 1800s, the booming city was dumping its raw sewage into the Chicago River, which was polluting Lake Michigan, the city's primary drinking water source.
• 5:40
  So they spent a decade building canals to reverse the river to flow away from the lake. Great cities don't just happen, McCutcheon says. Someone has to decide that the problem will be solved.
• 5:52
  Someone has to find the money. Someone has to build the partnership. Someone has to be willing to look beyond the next budget cycle.
• 6:00
  After breakfast, we head to a post office that someone spent nearly a billion dollars on to turn it into offices.
• 6:06
  And sure enough, in one of the two panel discussions is someone from the they who built the bridge I marveled at earlier in the morning.
• 6:15
  Christine Zrynski retired last month as the executive director of the Millennium Park Foundation. She tells the story of how the park was born because Mayor Richard M.
• 6:25
  Daley used to sit in his dentist's chair, which overlooked the lakefront and the rail yards that separated it from the pedestrians, and he'd say, that is our front yard. We've got to do something.
• 6:36
  Millennium Park cost more than $500 million, half from the city and about half from 125 people and companies who each put in more than a million dollars each.
• 6:47
  John Bryan, a Mississippi native who spent years as CEO of the Sarah Lee Corporation, was the lead fundraiser for the private money. They hired some of the world's top architects and designers to shape the park.
• 7:00
  One was architect Frank Gehry, who just completed his masterpiece, the Guggenheim Museum in Spain. Chicago wanted Gehry to design the concert pavilion.
• 7:12
  He'd never drawn up a bridge before, so city leaders offered him the opportunity.
• 7:16
  In other words, the bridge I walked across was, quote, the carrot they dangled in front of Gehry to keep him involved in the larger project, as Zrynski puts it.
• 7:26
  Gehry created a bridge with sides that throw the noise from the road below up and away from the pavilion where people sit on the lawn for free concerts. BP paid $5 million for naming rights to the bridge.
• 7:39
  Millennium Park was scheduled to open in 2000. It ran over budget and was delayed four years, making it a source of discontent and national punchlines about government mismanagement.
• 7:51
  But it opened all at once in July 2004. Nearly everything that happens at the park is still free to the public, and the neighborhood around it is now the fastest growing in Chicago.
• 8:02
  Zrynski remembers when someone said people would forget the delays in 20 years, and a reporter fired back that 20 years in the life of a city is like 20 minutes. Section break.
• 8:17
  Back in Charlotte at the Marriott City Center this past Thursday. Charlotte's bridge these days is its airport.
• 8:25
  Several presenters we saw in Chicago, from the CEO of Kraft Heinz to the CEO of TTX, which moved its headquarters to Charlotte two years ago, mentioned a good airport as the first thing a great city needs.
• 8:37
  Chicago is three times our size in terms of people and economy, but Charlotte's growing faster, and the question underneath the whole trip was how long we have before we get there, if we ever do.
• 8:48
  Alliance board chair Dave Katz answered in passing on the first night, Charlotte's growing so fast that we are going to be a city of 9 million people as well.
• 8:58
  We're at about 3 million now in the region, and that happened fast. In 1950, Mecklenburg County had about 197,000 people, and that was about the same as Guilford County's 191,000.
• 9:10
  Today, Mecklenburg has 1.2 million and Guilford's at 560,000. If the next 75 years look anything like the past 75, Katz isn't wrong. The airport will have a lot to say about our future growth,
• 9:27
  and the man who has decided where American Airlines planes go since 2020 was in our city for lunch Thursday to speak on the airport's potential. Brian Snuttons,
• 9:38
  the chief network planner for American, told the World Affairs Council at the Marriott in Uptown that American's hubs are like its kids, and Charlotte is my favorite kid, he said.
• 9:51
  Note, American announced Snutton's forthcoming retirement the same day he was in Charlotte. We'll have to see if his replacement, Nick Anderson, feels the same way about the airline's kids.
• 10:03
  Snuttons put up a slide that showed San Antonio's airport, which serves a metro area about the size of Charlotte's, has 130 departures a day compared to our 650, and San Antonio has 45 nonstop destinations to our 188.
• 10:19
  The difference, the American executive said, is that San Antonio isn't a hub city for any airline, and Charlotte has American. And the reason Charlotte's airport is attractive, he said, is simple money.
• 10:32
  We charge airlines about $2 per passenger to use the airport, while Dulles in Northern Virginia charges about $18.
• 10:39
  Two weeks before Thursday's luncheon, I was in Chicago listening to Snutton's boss, American Chief Commercial Officer Nat Piper, who put the future of Charlotte's airport a little bit more bluntly.
• 10:50
  The company will soon order 60 to 80 new wide-body jets. And Piper said, one of my responsibilities will be to figure out where do I put those airplanes?
• 10:59
  I want to put some of them in Charlotte, but we've got to have a facility. We've got to have long-term commitment on both sides
• 11:07
  so that we know we'll be able to have the framework, have the background, and have the infrastructure to be able to support those routes. The next months to come are super critical for the future of us together.
• 11:20
  From this perspective, the airport is a no-brainer. Sign the lease, sign it now, sign another one in a decade, forever and ever. But there's another perspective.
• 11:30
  On September 17th, 55-year-old Colleen Coates showed up at her job as a cabin cleaner for contractor ABM, despite not feeling well, her colleagues said later.
• 11:42
  She died after collapsing on a hot jet bridge while waiting to clean an airplane, the Observer reported. Several council members brought up Coates at Monday's dinner meeting.
• 11:53
  The success of our airport, Ajmera said, must also be measured by how we treat our employees. Luana Mayfield said she wanted more medic stations at the airport.
• 12:03
  Haley Gentry, the airport's CEO, said that medic responded to Coates in one minute and that she was transported to a hospital in 25 to 28 minutes.
• 12:12
  Gentry added the airport department has created a partnership committee for workforce development. It's complicated.
• 12:20
  While the city owns the airport, state laws limit what it can do in negotiations with private partners like airlines and contractors.
• 12:28
  But Gentry said her team is working with the city's workforce development office and looking at potential partnerships to establish a community health worker and other health care-related services for airport workers.
• 12:42
  It's not my job to be the referee, but it's true that the airlines that serve our airport want to make it better, and they want to invest billions of dollars in our city's perpetual quest to become world-class.
• 12:55
  It's also true, though, that the workers who help move 118,000 people through the airport every day deserve to come home from the job. Both are right, and the good news is nobody seems to be arguing about that.
• 13:11
  After this story published,
• 13:13
  City Council didn't vote to override the veto, and Harrington put it on the calendar for a vote on November 9th, which splits the difference between the October 26th meeting staff suggested and the November 23rd meeting the six council members voted for.
• 13:30
  Hovering over all this is the fact that the state legislature, which has attempted to take over Charlotte's airport before, convenes for a short session beginning on October 26th, with more scheduled after the election.
• 13:41
  Section break. Chicago. One last night. I barely make the bus for dinner after FaceTiming with my kids in the hotel room. I sit in the back and look out the window, then hear a voice. Can I sit here?
• 13:59
  It's Mayor Rob Harrington. We've not met, at least not one-on-one, until now. But he says he knows who I am and asks, So where do you think our city is right now? How do you think we're doing? What a big question.
• 14:14
  And what a refreshing one coming from the mayor.
• 14:17
  But sitting on a bus in a city that's three times Charlotte's size, which has done big things that seem almost impossible for our city at the moment, only makes the answer more complicated.
• 14:27
  I tell him that my biggest concern is not actually with the city right now, but the school board, given all the chaos there over the past few months.
• 14:34
  And then I suggest to him that his job, from my perspective, is to be a bridge.
• 14:39
  Between the political ambitions of council and the policy decisions our citizens need, between previous generations of Charlotte leaders and future ones, and on and on.
• 14:49
  He works at the same law firm, after all, as former mayor Richard Vinroot, whom I'd recently interviewed for our 8 Over 80 project.
• 14:58
  Vinroot, a Republican, is from the generation of Charlotte leaders who worked across differences to make big things happen, from landing an NFL franchise to building a transportation center to growing the skyline into what we see today.
• 15:11
  We get off the bus and head to the top of Willis Tower, formerly Sears Tower, for dinner. From up here, we have 360-degree views of Chicago out the windows.
• 15:23
  Somewhere out there, 16 miles in the distance, is O'Hare Airport. Earlier in the day, we'd heard from Dave Lundy, whose company is the latest in 30 years of attempts to build a decent train to the airport.
• 15:36
  The current Blue Line ride from the airport to downtown takes about 45 minutes. Lundy's O'Hare Flyer project would use abandoned tracks and make the trip 15 minutes.
• 15:48
  We just don't build these in America, Lundy told us, and it's time we start. Here we are in a city of more than 9 million people, only about 2 million fewer than in all of North Carolina.
• 15:59
  And probably the most comforting thing I've learned over the three days is that, in spite of Chicago's success and status, people are still fighting over its future.
• 16:08
  I think we're at an interesting time, I told our mayor on the bus. And then I rambled on about the bridge that's also a sculpture that's also a sound wall. And how the people who cross it today only notice the view.