Now Arriving: Traveling To And From Chicago By Air,90 Years of Flight

As Chicago grew into a metropolitan area during the 1800s and 1900s, and as air travel developed along with rail travel, the city's main airport, Municipal Airport, located on the city's South Side along Cicero Avenue, eventually became known as Midway Airport. With the advent of jet travel by 1960, Chicago expanded O'Hare Airport, named for Edward Butch O'Hare, a naval aviator, first dedicated in 1949. This airport had long enough runways that could handle the jet airplane traffic. This new book, which will include in its 200+ pages more than 200 black and white photographs along with a variety of interviews with a cross section of people, will tell the story about air travel into and out of Chicago over the past ninety years, and is the first publication to provide many of these rare photos. A major part of the photo collection provided in this book includes negatives recently discovered in an attic that were taken by Mike Rotunno, a well known photographer who spent much time from the 1930s until the 1960s photographing famous people arriving in the city. These stunning images have not been seen in many years. In addition the book includes a collection of rare autographed photos of the famous people who traveled through Midway Airport from Amelia Earhart to J. Edgar Hoover, Will Rogers, the Three Stooges, and Cary Grant. These signatures were collected by a teenager named Johnny Latoza, who sold newspapers at the airport in the 1930s, and whose charm and persistence always got the stars to sign this book. In addition, this new volume includes stunning photographs by United Airlines which document the construction of O'Hare Airport as well as the new terminal built by United in 1980s. Overall, there has never been a book quite like Now Arriving ever done about air travel into and out of the metropolis of Chicago. From trails to rails, sails to wings, Chicago has been the crossroads of America and the world, and this book documents the city's continued importance to not only this region as a vital transportation hub, but to the world.