The Chicago River on St. Patrick's Day
The Most Endangered River: The Environmental Effects of the Chicago Sanitary & Ship Canal and its Future
A City on a Swamp
The City of Chicago was built on a swamp and later incorporated as a city in 1833. Since then, its inhabitants have been battling against muck and murky water ever since: “Chicagoans had to wade knee deep in mud to get around the town,” (Pacyga 22). Infrastructural challenges in the developing city gave birth to great vision and innovations in engineering, testing the limits of human’s dominion over nature.
Why Reverse the Chicago River?
Chicago: the Sick City
Public health was a major challenge for the rapidly growing city: throughout the 1840s and 50s, thousands of Chicagoans suffered from cholera, smallpox, and dysentery outbreaks. In 1854, cholera killed nearly 6% of Chicagoans, which lead to the creation of the Chicago Board of Sewerage Commissioners (Hill 98).
In an effort to transform Chicago from a place plagued with sewage-filled streets to a sanitary metropolis, ES Chesbrough constructed a drainage network to dump sewage into the Chicago and Calumet Rivers.
Raising the Streets
The only problem at the time was that the city streets were just 5 feet higher than the lake, on average. This failed to provide the correct slope so that sewage and storm water could enter the river. To solve this issue, ES Chesbrough united workers in an effort to raise the city streets anywhere from 2 to 8 feet higher! George Pullman designed huge jacks that raised the buildings with little disturbance to their inhabitants.
Raising of Lake Street, 1860
Chicago: Still Sick
Now that Chicago’s sewer system poured waste into the Chicago River, it subsequently flowed into Lake Michigan, contaminating Chicagoan’s drinking water. The Chicago River became notoriously smelly and offensive: by 1862, the North Branch of the river had become “putrid” (Hill101). The South Fork of the South Branch became a cesspool, nicknamed “Bubbly Creek” because it received animal wastes from the stockyards and slaughterhouses
Chicago’s Sanitation History