Insomniac’s Beyond Wonderland returned to the Huntington Bank Pavilion at Northerly Island on June 6 and 7, bringing its Alice-in-Wonderland staging to the peninsula with arguably the best view of the Chicago skyline available from any music venue in the city.

That combination is the whole subject. Northerly Island is a genuinely strange and specific place. Beyond Wonderland is a national franchise that runs in several markets with the same visual language in each.

A Template on a Peninsula

Insomniac is very good at what it does, and what it does is build an environment that photographs identically in Chicago, Washington and Southern California. Production values are high, the theming is committed, and an attendee blindfolded on the way in would struggle to name the city from inside the gates.

Northerly Island is a landfill peninsula that was Meigs Field until the runway was bulldozed in the middle of the night in 2003. It is now part nature preserve and part concert venue, jutting into Lake Michigan with downtown stacked behind it. There is nowhere else like it in American live music, and when the sun goes down the skyline does something no production designer can buy.

Whether a festival built on an English children’s book from 1865 knows what to do with that is a fair question. The honest answer is that the sightline gets treated as a backdrop rather than a subject, which is what franchises do.

The Preserve and the Rave

The other thing about Northerly Island is its double life. Large parts were restored as prairie and wetland and are managed as natural area by the Park District. The rest is a commercial amphitheater. Migratory birds and a bass-heavy two-day dance festival share an address, and nobody has fully defended that arrangement in public.

This is not an argument for cancelling anything. It is an observation that Chicago has a habit of finding its most unusual ground and renting it for events that would work equally well in a parking lot — the same instinct that put Summer Smash in a Bridgeview stadium and Windy City Smokeout in the United Center lot, running in reverse. Douglass Park residents spent this summer asking for exactly that swap. Northerly Island shows what the trade costs when nobody asks.

Insomniac deserves credit on one practical count: the company maintains extensive official galleries and is unusually generous with press access, which makes this one of the few events of the Chicago summer an independent outlet can actually illustrate. Commons also holds solid Northerly Island venue photography.

Two nights on a peninsula, and a view that was there before the festival and will be there after it.

Cover image: Via chicago.beyondwonderland.com