Midway Airport Layover: Chicago's Chinatown

Chicago’s Chinatown sits about half an hour from Midway International Airport on the CTA’s Orange and Red line trains, and the three things worth walking to when you get there, the 1975 Chinatown Gate at Wentworth and Cermak, the glazed tile Nine Dragon Wall beside it and the riverside pagoda in Ping Tom Memorial Park, all cost nothing.

The Chinatown Gate and the shops on Wentworth Avenue

The gate stands over Wentworth Avenue where it meets Cermak Road, three minutes from the Cermak-Chinatown platform. Peter Fung, a Chinese American structural engineer, designed it in 1975; he told the Tribune at the time that he had wanted to build something contemporary and was talked out of it. The four gold characters across the top are a phrase of Sun Yat-sen’s, usually given in English as “the world is for all.”

Next door is the building people photograph second. The Pui Tak Center went up between 1926 and 1928 for the On Leong Merchants Association and served for decades as Chinatown’s unofficial city hall. Its architects, the Norwegians Christian Michaelsen and Sigurd Rognstad, wrapped an ordinary commercial block in green tile roofs, corner pagoda towers and terracotta panels full of dragons, and the city landmarked it in 1993. It is a working community center now rather than a museum, so the facade is the part you visit.

South of the gate, Wentworth is the neighborhood’s old commercial spine: bakeries selling egg tarts and barbecue pork buns, herbal medicine shops with the drawers still behind the counter, and dim sum rooms that fill up around one in the afternoon.

The Nine Dragon Wall on Cermak Road

The Chinatown Chamber of Commerce dedicated this in September 2003, on the corner just west of the Red Line entrance. The tiles were fired in China and the design follows the wall built in 1402 in Beihai Park in Beijing: nine large dragons in gold, red and blue across the face, with several hundred smaller ones worked into the water and cloud pattern behind them.

It stands in the open next to the sidewalk, which means no hours, no ticket and no line. Five minutes is enough, and it happens to sit between the train and everything else on this page.

Ping Tom Memorial Park’s pagoda over the river

Ten minutes north of the gate the neighborhood runs out at the South Branch of the Chicago River, and seventeen acres of former Santa Fe railroad yard take over. The park was dedicated in 1999 and named for a Chinatown business leader who spent years arguing that the area needed green space at all; the Park District added five more acres on the northeast side in 2002.

The pavilion near the western edge is the reason most people come: red columns and a tiled Chinese roof, modeled on a structure in Suzhou, on a lawn with a disused railroad lift bridge standing over the water behind it. The riverbank below has stone benches, a boathouse renting kayaks in season, and barges and tour boats going past close enough to read.

From March to December a water taxi docks in the park, and $10 buys a one-way ride up the river to Michigan Avenue, 25 to 45 minutes depending on the stops. That is a better use of a spare hour than riding the same train back, and it lands you a few minutes from Millennium Park and the Riverwalk; the boat also calls beside Union Station on the way.

Getting out here and back means crossing the 1,200-foot enclosed walkway between Midway’s terminal and the Orange Line platform twice, and it is glazed and covered but not heated.

Sue the T. rex at the Field Museum

With more hours than Chinatown needs, the Field Museum is one Red Line stop north at Roosevelt and then about fifteen minutes east on foot. Sue is the most complete Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton ever excavated, 40-odd feet of it, and moved out of the museum’s main hall and upstairs into the Griffin Halls of Evolving Planet in 2018.

The museum opens at 9am daily and stops letting people in at 4pm, which is the number to work backwards from if your flight is in the evening. Basic admission is around $30 for an out-of-state adult and shifts with the date, and a timed admission ticket bought ahead is the difference between walking in and standing in the line at the north door.

No overnight trains on the Orange Line back to Midway

The Blue Line out to O’Hare runs around the clock. This one does not: Orange Line trains leave Midway from about 3:30am to 1:05am, and head back out from the Loop from about 3:50am to 1:25am. A connection at either end of the night means a bus or a taxi.

From Chinatown the return is the Red Line one stop to Roosevelt, then the Orange Line, roughly 30 minutes to the Midway platform before you add the walkway and security. The fare boarding at Midway is the standard $2.50, in both directions; the $5 airport fare is an O’Hare rule and never applies here.

Once you are back through security, walk down toward Concourse A instead of straight to your gate. A Douglas SBD Dauntless dive bomber hangs from the ceiling in that hall, beside panels on the 1942 battle the airport was renamed for in 1949. That aircraft went into Lake Michigan during carrier training in 1944, sat on the bottom for half a century, and came up to be restored in the markings its type wore at Midway.

Chinatown is four or five flat blocks end to end, and the walking there is the easy part of the day. What costs time is the airport end of it, which is the argument for making that crossing without the suitcase.