River Fish Provided with New Home in Tough Neighborhood
One of the defining features of downtown Chicago is the river which bears its name. The Chicago River has been inextricably linked to the growth of the city–Chicago became a transportation hub in the 19th century because of shipping routes from the Great Lakes into the Midwest and points beyond. In fact, Chicago is home to more movable bridges, 38 currently, than any other city in the country, and they all span one of the three branches of this river.
But the river which made the rise of this metropolis possible endured an incredible amount of abuse as the city grew up around it. For most of the last 200 years, the river was treated essentially as an open sewer, where household and industrial waste was dumped with abandon. (One particularly rancid part of the river earned the nickname “Bubbly Creek” because of methane buildup due to decomposing animal remains dumped by the Chicago stockyards, famously depicted in Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle.) The contamination led to many outbreaks of cholera, typhoid, and other diseases in the 1800s because the sewage flowed out into Lake Michigan, the source of the city’s drinking water. In 1900, a massive engineering project succeeded in using locks to reverse the flow of the river so that the pollution was sent southwest through the newly completed Chicago Sanitary and Ship canal and into the Missippi River watershed, away from Lake Michigan. When Chicagoans weren’t trying to ignore the stench of the river or actively abusing it, they seriously messed with the natural hydrology. Not much respect.
This human disrespect for the Chicago River continued up through the 1980s, when the river was often still clogged with garbage. But beginning in the 1990s, things started turning around for this urban waterway. Pollution levels started to drop (due in no small part to enforcement of Clear Water Act legislation) and people began to notice that the river, no longer smelly and unsightly, could actually be an enhancement to city life, a corridor of somewhat natural green space in an urban setting. People began using the river for recreational activities that put them in closer contact with the water, such as canoeing and kayaking, in addition to the larger pleasure boats and sightseeing ferries. New buildings along the river are now built so that people can walk along the shore and appreciate this natural asset, rather than being sited facing away from the river, as much architecture did in the 20th century.
