The Chicago Journal

O’Hare Concourse D Beam Signing Marks Start of Chicago’s $8.2B Airport Expansion

The Chicago Journal Staff 2 on April 23, 2026

On the morning of April 22, Mayor Brandon Johnson joined the Chicago Department of Aviation and construction crews at 7344 N. Paulina St. for a ceremony that carries more weight than most ribbon-cuttings allow. The first beam signing for the new Concourse D at O’Hare International Airport marked the visible transition of a years-long infrastructure program from underground foundation work into the steel-and-glass phase that Chicagoans will eventually see rising on the airfield.

The event is one of several being held across the city as part of Construction Season 2026 and Mayor Johnson’s Build Better Together initiative, a week-long series of events highlighting infrastructure projects across Chicago departments and sister agencies. The Concourse D beam signing was among the most consequential stops on the schedule.

Thirty Years in the Making

Concourse D is the first major concourse built at O’Hare in more than 30 years. The $1.3 billion satellite structure will add 19 new gates designed for narrow-body aircraft, with the flexibility to adapt 18 of those gates into nine larger ports capable of accommodating wide-body planes.

After months of demolition, excavation, and underground foundation work, the project is now entering its vertical construction phase — the milestone that puts thousands of workers visibly on site and begins reshaping the airport’s footprint one structural column at a time. The project team, joint venture AECOM Hunt Clayco Bowa, has secured every permit needed to carry the work through completion, including caisson, foundation, tower crane, and a full building permit issued in early 2026. Structural steel is already being installed on site.

Site preparation for Concourse D began back in 2023, when crews constructed temporary taxiways, built a new grade-separated roadway, reconfigured Taxiway B, and added three temporary gates to Concourse C to maintain uninterrupted airline operations throughout the prep phase. Major construction launched in mid-2025 with demolition of existing taxiways, followed by several months of excavation and foundation work.

The Architecture of Orchard Field

The concourse has a design story embedded in its structure. Designed by Chicago-based Skidmore, Owings & Merrill in collaboration with Ross Barney Architects, Juan Gabriel Moreno Architects, and Arup, the concourse draws its design language directly from O’Hare’s original name — Orchard Field, a reference to the apple orchards that once occupied the site. That history is expressed through a series of dramatic tree-like structural columns that branch outward to support a 150-foot-wide long-span roof. The structural system reduces interior columns by nearly half, opening the floor plan to improve gate flexibility and ease passenger circulation.

At the northern end of the 590,000-square-foot building is a 40-foot-high atrium-like space connecting the structure’s three levels, marked by an oculus that directs daylight into the levels below. At the south end, a double-height glazed wall frames views of the airfield and the downtown Chicago skyline.

SOM Design Partner Scott Duncan described the intent: “From the skylit-tunnel connection to the orchard-inspired columns, the new concourse will offer bright, soaring spaces for passengers and enable world-class operations for airlines. We’re proud to be leading this bold new vision for O’Hare and to deliver such a complex project on budget for the City of Chicago.”

Planned amenities include more than 20,000 square feet of lounge space, 30,000 square feet of commercial space with restaurants and retail, and a 450-square-foot children’s play area. As one of Chicago’s first domestic-international codeshare concourses, Concourse D is designed for adaptability — built to accommodate a wide range of aircraft types while improving efficiency for both carriers and passengers. The international arrivals corridor will be suspended above the concourse floor, allowing arriving and departing travelers to move securely without crossing paths.

Jobs, Equity, and the Construction Workforce

CDA Commissioner Michael McMurray has put the economic stakes plainly: “Airport planning is not for the next year, it’s for the next generation.”

The Concourse D project and its associated infrastructure work are anticipated to create more than 3,800 construction jobs. Under Mayor Johnson’s leadership, the O’Hare 21 capital program carries a combined minority- and women-owned business participation rate of 37%.

The longer-term economic picture is substantial. A policy analysis of the full O’Hare 21 modernization program projects that completing the expansion will increase the number of passengers flying through O’Hare by 20%, generate $553 million annually from increased passenger travel relative to a no-build scenario, add $280 million in annual operating revenues after 2033, and increase state tax revenues by $39 million per year and local tax revenues by $24 million per year.

ORDNext: The Broader Plan

Concourse D is the opening chapter of a much larger program. The full ORDNext plan — the terminal expansion component of the $8.2 billion O’Hare 21 capital program — includes a second satellite concourse designated Concourse E with 24 gates, a replacement of Terminal 2 with the O’Hare Global Terminal, and a new underground tunnel system to connect passengers, airport employees, and baggage operations across the expanded facilities. Together, ORDNext will deliver 43 new gates across Concourses D and E.

The expansion arrives at a pivotal moment in O’Hare’s traffic history. O’Hare recently reclaimed the title of the nation’s busiest airport by aircraft movements, recording 857,300 total operations in 2025. That demand pressure underpins the urgency of the expansion, with United and American Airlines both recently purchasing gates from Spirit to deepen their Chicago presence.

Official figures released in April confirmed that in 2025, O’Hare recorded 860,015 aircraft operations — the equivalent of one takeoff or landing every 37 seconds, around the clock, every day of the year. The airport also ranked sixth globally by passengers, with 84.8 million travelers passing through its terminals, a 6% increase from 2024.

Commissioner McMurray was direct about what those numbers require: “O’Hare’s airfield leads the world in capacity, and now we must ensure our terminals, technology, and passenger experience rise to meet that standard. Continued investment is not optional — it is essential to maintaining Chicago’s global competitiveness.”

A Civic Milestone, Measured in Steel

A first beam signing is a construction tradition with symbolic weight. It is the moment a project moves from something that exists in contracts, permits, and architectural renderings to something that takes physical form against the skyline. For O’Hare — an airport that defined Chicago’s postwar growth, that held the title of the world’s busiest airport from 1963 to 1998, and that has carried the regional economy on its runways through decades of change — the steel going up on Concourse D is a statement about what the city expects of itself.

Mayor Johnson framed the investment in terms that reach beyond the terminal gates: “To maintain Chicago’s global leadership in the 21st century, we must continue investing in O’Hare, our region’s most powerful economic engine.”

Concourse D is scheduled for completion in late 2028. The rest of ORDNext will follow through the early 2030s. For a city that built its identity around being the place where everything connects, the work underway on the northwest side of the city is more than a construction project. It is, in the most literal sense, an infrastructure for Chicago’s next chapter.

Seth Panitch Explores Reinvention and Self-Worth in Antique

The Chicago Journal Staff on April 23, 2026

By: Sarah Wallace

Seth Panitch has spent decades telling stories in many forms, from Shakespearean performance and directing to filmmaking and playwriting. After receiving his MFA from the University of Washington’s Professional Actors Training Program, he built a wide-ranging career at Shakespeare festivals across the country, including Colorado, Utah, Texas, Seattle, and Pasadena. In 2005, he joined the University of Alabama as a Professor of Theatre and head of the MFA Acting Program. In 2008, he became the first U.S. director to collaborate with the Cuban National Office of Scenic Arts when he directed The Merchant of Venice in Havana, Cuba. He has also written, directed, and starred in two feature films, Service to Man and The Coming, while his plays have enjoyed successful Off-Broadway productions. Now, with his novel Antique, Panitch turns his attention to a story about reinvention, resilience, and the question that haunts so many people when life falls apart: What am I worth?

That question sits at the very center of the story. The novel follows Grace Schaffer, a former star appraiser on an Antiques Roadshow-style television show who suddenly finds herself stripped of the life she thought defined her. Her husband’s affair destroys her marriage. Her career collapses. Her father, a giant in the art history world, has died. The identity Grace spent years building is gone, and she is left facing not only public humiliation but a deeply private kind of uncertainty.

Panitch captures that emotional premise succinctly. “If you’ve ever seen Antiques Roadshow before, you know that people bring these incredible, cherished heirlooms to the appraisers to ask how much they’re worth, but if you look closer, you realize they’re asking, ‘What am I worth?’” he says. “Grace Schaffer has lost the answer to that question.”

That line reveals why the novel resonates beyond its unusual setting. On one level, it is about appraisals, auctions, and beautiful old objects. On another, it is about the fragile ways people measure themselves. So much of modern life encourages external valuation, including career status, relationship status, acclaim, money, and relevance. Grace has lost all of those markers, and in the wake of that loss, she has to decide whether she can rebuild a sense of worth from the inside out.

Her unexpected opportunity comes through a humbler venue: a much smaller Antique Roadshow, where she begins again. There, Grace encounters a tarnished necklace and makes a seemingly reckless choice, inflating its value because of what it means emotionally to the mother and daughter who own it. But the necklace appears to hold a strange power. Once Grace begins assigning prices based on emotional value rather than strict market logic, those values come true at auction. What follows is both magical and deeply human, as Grace is pulled back into the art world and into a search that may redeem her career, or consume her.

What makes the novel especially compelling is the way Panitch connects Grace’s external comeback to an internal reckoning. This is not just a story about reentering a profession. It is a story about learning to see value differently. In Grace’s world, the worth of an object is never only financial. It carries memory, family, longing, and grief. That same principle gradually turns back on Grace herself. If objects can mean more than the market says they should, perhaps people can too.

Panitch has said the novel grew out of a pandemic-era moment while watching a rerun of Antiques Roadshow. A man brought in an old piece of fabric he assumed was worth very little and learned it was, in fact, an extraordinarily valuable Navajo Ute Chief’s blanket. The man wept, repeating that his grandmother and mother “were just poor farmers.” Panitch recalls, “It was as if the world had told him that his family was worth that much.” At once moved and troubled by the moment, he realized how often people rely on outside authorities to affirm their value. “I also thought, how sad it was, that we need someone else to give us that value, that we can’t find it within ourselves. In that, Antique was born.”

That idea gives the novel its emotional force. Grace’s journey is dramatic and enchanted, but its heart is familiar. Many readers will recognize the fear of becoming irrelevant, the pain of being left behind, or the disorientation that follows a major life change. Panitch is particularly interested in what happens when people are made to feel discarded. The title itself points to that tension. He opens the book with the dual definition of “antique” as something rare and valuable, but also, pejoratively, something washed up or out of fashion. That contradiction becomes a lens through which the novel examines age, experience, and cultural ideas about usefulness.

Yet the novel is not bleak. It is ultimately a story of second chances. Grace may begin the story broken, but she is not finished. Panitch clearly believes that reinvention remains possible, even after loss. In discussing his own creative path, he notes that writing novels was in some ways a return to his earliest dream, delayed but not abandoned. That spirit of return and rediscovery runs throughout the book.

Panitch hopes readers come away encouraged by that possibility. “I hope they can take away a little of my experience in writing the book: that there are hidden parts of themselves that deserve to be uncovered, dusted off, and celebrated,” he says. “That there is magic within us—if we dare to use it.”

That may be the deepest appeal of Antique. Beneath the auction drama, the art-world intrigue, and the shimmer of magical realism, it offers something readers are always searching for: hope that life can be rebuilt, that value can be reclaimed, and that even after heartbreak, something precious remains. Grace Schaffer’s journey asks what survives when the old labels fall away. Seth Panitch’s answer is both tender and inspiring: perhaps the truest worth was there all along.

To get more information about Antique, you can visit Antique: A Novel: Panitch, Seth: 9781538772942: Amazon.com: Books