June 4, 1998

It wasn’t the first time the city had fiddled with its most famous ribbon of asphalt — a realignment in the mid-1980s smoothed out the deadly S-curve — but it was certainly the most auspicious. By moving the northbound lanes to the west of Soldier Field and the Field Museum, which had languished on a sort of island between the roadways, the $110 million project freed up land and united the Field Museum with the Shedd Aquarium and the Adler Planetarium, creating a protected 56-acre waterfront campus. Daniel Burnham would’ve smiled.