The easy portage between the lake and the mid-continent’s
river system made his new home the linchpin of a trading network that could one
day cover thousands of square miles. The location was good, but the land was
not all it could be. Most of it was swampland, and that was going to make it
difficult to build a city.
But Chicago had always attracted its share of dreamers,
people with visions of a huge metropolis rising skyward and spreading outward,
bringing in thousands and maybe one day millions of residents and visitors. By
the 1830s city leaders were racing ahead, building as fast as materials could
be procured. A decade later Chicago was among the fastest-growing cities in the
nation.
This fast growth brought problems, of course, but city
leaders were confident they could solve them. More housing was needed, and more
was built. Bridges over the river were needed, and they too were built. Then
came the question that stymied those at the helm of the bustling metropolis,
and which endangered the lives of the city’s residents year after year.
What to do with all the waste?
Chicago had not developed a plan for disposing of human and
animal waste, and by the 1850s the city was paying the price. Backyard ditches
contaminated nearby wells and open sewers flowed into the Chicago River, except
when they backed up and left standing pools of stagnant filth throughout the
city. Slaughterhouses, distilleries and other industrial sites only made
matters worse.
Sometimes this pollution would flow through the river into
the lake, from which the city drew its drinking water. Cholera broke out in the
city several years in a row, with an 1854 outbreak killing one out of every 20
residents. Something had to be done.
In response to overwhelming public outcry, a Board of
Sewerage Commissioners was created in 1855 to tackle the problem. To save
Chicago from further calamities they hired Ellis Chesbrough, who had worked on
railroads in Pennsylvania and been Boston’s chief engineer.
Chesbrough came up with an ingenious solution that he hoped
would address the sewage issues and also lift the city out of the mud.
Underground sewage pipes were out of the question in the
swampy ground beneath many of the city’s neighborhoods. Chesbrough’s disposal
system would be constructed above ground with a network of pipes all leading to
a single main line to deposit waste and storm runoff into the river. These
pipes would be laid above ground through the streets.
Commissioners might have been skeptical of this initial
plan, however, as it would seem to obstruct the streets and still dump waste
into the river, where it would continue to accumulate and spread disease. But
Chesbrough continued.
To carry the wastewater away, he explained, the river would
have to be deepened. It would be dredged out to improve its flow, clearing out
the stagnating waste with its attendant problems. The dredged soil would then
be used to cover the pipes, thus raising the level of the streets, sometimes by
as high as ten feet above the previous location.
The audacious plan was approved and the dredging, building
and raising soon began.
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| Raising a block of buildings on Lake Street, Chicago. |
While the raising of the city was a success, the water problem had not been fully solved. The problem of open sewers throughout the city had been diminished, but waste was still making its way into the lake and polluting the drinking water. In 1863 Chesbrough put forward an even more ambitious plan – dig a brick-lined tunnel beneath the swampland and out under lake to a new water intake two miles offshore, much farther out than anyone believed the waste could travel.
A massive caisson was towed out into the lake and sunk to
the bottom. Water was then pumped out so that tunneling could begin from the
lake side. Teams of laborers worked long days in terrible conditions to
complete the tunnel in 1866. Water was pulled through the tunnel to a new
pumping station from which it was distributed to the city.
Still during times of heavy rain the filth was making its
way into the city’s drinking water. It was time for an extreme step which
Chesbrough had first considered years earlier when he arrived in Chicago: he
would have to reverse the flow of the river to carry the waste away from the
lake.
The idea of reversing the flow of a river appealed to
Chicago’s boosters: it would be the kind of engineering feat that would be
heralded in cities all over the world, the latest miracle in a city which was
accomplishing amazing things every year. The plan was quickly embraced and a $3
million bond issue was approved for its execution.
By this time the Illinois
and Michigan Canal had been completed, linking the Illinois River with Lake
Michigan and opening up a deep water passageway out away from the city. It was
just a matter of hooking the city’s waste flowage up to this waterway and all
the problems would be solved.
Except of course for the downstream communities who looked
upon this plan with horror. Early on, their fears seemed to be confirmed.
Chesbrough moved forward with his plan, further dredging the
river and canal so that water would flow downhill, away from Chicago. Pumps
were installed near the Bridgeport neighborhood where so many of the canal’s
laborers had lived. These pumps helped pull the water away from downtown and
through the canal. On July 18, 1871, the gates were opened and the river began
to flow backwards.
Even this did not solve the problem. The river’s current
proved to be too slow to diffuse the waste enough to render it harmless, and
the natural buildup of silt in the waterway further slowed its flow. Cholera
broke out again just two years later. Chesbrough at last had to admit defeat.
It would take another two decades before Chicago developed what Theodore
Dreiser described as “the greatest feat of sanitary engineering in the world.”
Downstream communities referred to the river as Chicago’s
“monster sewer” and terrible smells were reported as far away as LaSalle. So
severe was the opposition downstream that Joliet’s city leaders demanded a fix
or they would physically block the canal and force it to back up into Chicago.
Weeks of heavy rain in 1879 accomplished the task for them, and refuse once
again found its way out into the lake and into the city’s water. Action had to
be taken, and soon.
A group of Chicago businessmen formed the Civic Association
and suggested supersizing Chesbrough’s original plan. Their judgment was
ratified by the city’s Commission on Drainage and Water Supply in 1887, the
year after Chesbrough’s death. The I&M needed improvements to accommodate
larger ships, so the solution to both problems seemed to be a much larger,
wider and faster-flowing canal.
In 1889 the General Assembly created the Sanitary District
of Chicago (now known as the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District) to
address both problems. Spurred along by yet another typhoid outbreak in 1890
which hit the city as plans were being made for the upcoming World’s Fair, work
began on the waterway. It came to be known as the Chicago Sanitary and Ship
Canal.
The project’s chief engineer, Isham Randolph, a former
railroad engineer, sketched out a route which would generally follow the existing
I&M, extending 28 miles from downtown Chicago to the junction of the Des
Plaines and Illinois Rivers near Joliet. To overcome the problems of sufficient
water flow to dilute the waste, the project included the deepening of the
Chicago River so that it would draw in more water from Lake Michigan.
In total, more than 8000 laborers would dig and blast
through more land than would be moved just a few years later in the construction
of the Panama Canal, a project on which Randolph would serve as a consultant. Chicago’s
canal would be 30 feet deep and 160 feet wide, more than enough space to
accommodate the ships that would travel through it. Water flow would be
regulated by a dam near Lockport and gates at the entrance from the lake.
Just when construction was almost finished and victory
seemed assured at long last, a new problem arose: the state of Missouri.
Disturbed by the idea of Chicago’s waste flowing in their direction, Missouri
prepared to take Illinois to court late in 1899 to prevent the opening of the
canal.
Trustees acted quickly. On January 2, 1900, accompanied by a
pair of reporters, they rang in the new century by sneaking out to the site of
the dam which held back the river from the new canal. They brought dynamite
with them, and after a few false starts the dam was opened and the water began
to flow.
This time it finally worked.
Best of all, the faster-flowing water did the job it was
expected to do by cleansing the waste. When Missouri filed its lawsuit, tests
determined that the waste was sufficiently rinsed out of the water by the time
it reached Joliet, which it now seemed would not have to plow obstructions into
the route of the canal after all.
Lawsuits were filed by other states, this time from the
north. Some of them reached the U.S. Supreme Court
in the 1920s. States along the Great Lakes sued Illinois claiming the project
was draining so much water out of the lakes that it was depleting the water
level for their communities. The result was a reduction in the amount of water
Illinois could withdraw, which in turn made the dilution less effective,
requiring the installation of water purification systems along the canal.
Chicago began chlorinating its water in 1912.
A century after its completion the American Society of Civil
Engineers named the project a “Civil Engineering monument of the Millennium.”
It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2011, not long
after federal courts rejected a Michigan
lawsuit calling for the closing of the canal to keep Asian carp out of the
Great Lakes.
The canal and the reverse of the river were just another of the many triumphs which helped make Chicago and Illinois the commercial center of North America.