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A few days later, according to the Chicago Record, “Water that was actually blue in color and had blocks of ice of a transparent green hue floating in it…caused people who crossed bridges over the Chicago River…to stop and stare in amazement.” St. Louis filed an injunction against the reversal on January 17.
May 27, 2015 · In 1871, during a period of particularly low water, the city pumped water from the Chicago River into the Illinois and Michigan Canal to maintain its level, which led Chicago’s sewage to float away from Lake Michigan.
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- Part One: The New Frontier
- The First Settlers
- Fort Dearborn and The First Channels
- Wolf Point
- Part Two: An Industrial Boomtown
- Part Three: Regeneration
- The Chicago River's Most Deadly Disaster
- River Wards
- Part Four: Rebirth
Native American peoples traversed Chicago’s waterways for hundreds of years before the arrival of the first Europeans. Among them were Woodland, Archaic, and Upper Mississippian peoples and later the Miami and Potawatomi. Back then, the area teemed with beaver, black bear, fox, and deer. The Algonquian people called the slow and meandering river th...
Sometime in the late 1770s, Jean Baptiste Point DuSable, a black man of French and African descent, and his wife, a Potawatomi woman named Kittahawa, became the first known settlers to build a permanent home and raise a family on the banks of the Chicago River. Leveraging Kittahawa’s kin networks, they opened what became a highly successful trading...
In 1795, as part of the Treaty of Greenville, a confederation of Native American tribes granted the United States rights to a six-mile parcel of land at the mouth of the Chicago River. Soon after, in 1803, the U.S. military built — and after a devastating battle with the Potawatomi, rebuilt an outpost. Fort Dearborn was erected across the river fro...
By the 1830s, Chicago had become a raucous frontier village with a mix of French Canadians, Yankees and Native Americans. The social center of that village was Wolf Point. Located at the junction of the Main Stem and the North and South Branches, Wolf Point provided the perfect stopping place for explorers and traders en route to and from the Chica...
It took only a few decades for Chicago to completely transform from a small, rowdy, frontier settlement to a bustling, industrial boomtown full of builders, hustlers, and businessmen. One of the few people to witness that transformation in its entirety was Gurdon S. Hubbard. He grew up in Vermont and Montreal and first arrived in Chicago in 1818 as...
Much was lost in the Great Chicago Fire: some 250 lives, 17,000 buildings, and thousands of pages of Chicago’s early history. But the monument that stands today on the southeast corner of the bridge that spans the Chicago River at Michigan Avenue is a testament to what came next: Before the ashes had cooled, Chicago had vowed to rebuild. Three days...
As Chicago’s downtown riverfront and lakefront were being reimagined and redesigned, tour boats increasingly sailed alongside freighters and other industrial vessels. In 1915, one such vessel tipped over, resulting in one of Chicago’s great tragedies. More than 800 people lost their lives on the SS Eastlandon July 24, 1915, fewer than 20 feet from ...
Elsewhere along the river, further from the lakefront, the river remained something to be tolerated rather than enjoyed. The opening of Chicago’s first wastewater treatment plant in 1928 reduced the amount of raw sewage, but the river remained laden with industrial chemicals and byproducts. Riverside real estate was cheap, and river wards, dominate...
In recent years, the relationship between Chicago’s river and people has entered an entirely new chapter. Aided by the deindustrialization of the mid-twentieth century, a growing sense of environmental stewardship, federal regulations such as the Clean Water Act of 1972, and yet another round of monumental public works projects, the Chicago River c...
The Chicago River is a system of rivers and canals with a combined length of 156 miles (251 km) [1] that runs through the city of Chicago, including its center (the Chicago Loop ). [2] Though not especially long, the river is notable because it is one of the reasons for Chicago's geographic importance: the related Chicago Portage is a link ...
Dec 24, 2019 · While the idea was relatively simple – using gravity to make water flow from the river into the continually deepening canal and then into another river – the construction was not. Beginning in 1892, the main channel (the first phase) of the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal took eight years to complete, and nearly 40 million cubic yards of ...
Jun 3, 2015 · Chicago was booming in the late 1800s, but like many cities of the day it lacked proper sewer infrastructure. As a result the city was choking on its own waste.
The Race to Reverse the River. From its earliest days, Chicago residents and businesses alike dumped their waste directly into the Chicago River, which flowed into Lake Michigan and contaminated the city’s drinking water. Chicago Stories explores the various methods tried to combat the problem, and one engineer’s bold solution.
