Edward Mendel – Chicago Historical Society
Guest essay by Eric Worrall
In the 1800s the City of Chicago had a problem. The city rests on low lying marshlands, on the shore of Lake Michigan. Floods were frequent, mud was everywhere, and poor sanitation created ideal conditions for frequent lethal cholera epidemics.
According to the Chicago Tribune;
As Chicago boomed in the 1850s, growing into a major lake port and industrial center, mud became a major problem. The lakeshore marsh on which the city was being built seemed bottomless. A popular story of the time had it that a passerby came upon a man whose head and shoulders protruded from the muck in the middle of the street. “Can I help?” asked the passerby. “No, thank you,” replied the man. “I have a fine horse under me.”
The situation was deadly. The muddy, waterlogged conditions were a perfect breeding ground for cholera. The Chicago Tribune reports that in 1854, a cholera epidemic killed 5% of the population.
A solution had to be found. A sanitation system would mitigate the cholera problem – but much of the city was within 3-4 ft of the waterline of Lake Michigan. The sanitation pipes would not have enough of a downhill gradient to carry the waste away.
So the city fathers embarked on a project of breathtaking engineering ambition. They decided to lift the low lying areas of the city up to 14ft out of the mud, to give the sanitation pipes the downhill gradient they needed to function, and to protect the city from flooding.
Over a period of almost two decades, Chicago’s buildings were jacked up 4 to 14 feet, higher foundations were built beneath them, the storm sewers were placed on top of the streets, and the streets were then filled up to the level of the front doors of the raised buildings. To raise larger buildings, an enterprising newcomer to the city named George Pullman perfected a method involving hundreds of men turning thousands of large jackscrews at the same time. Many smaller structures, especially houses, were simply moved to new locations. “Never a day passed,” noted a visitor at the time, “that I did not meet one or more houses shifting their quarters. One day I met nine.”
Many of the buildings which were raised were large – according to Wikipedia, one of the larger buildings which was elevated, the Robbins Building, weighed an estimated 27,000 tons.
Next time someone tells you that a sea level rise of a few ft might force us to abandon coastal cities, tell them about the raising of Chicago. Even if the worst fears of climate alarmists were realised, which seems a deeply unlikely prospect, it is inconceivable that we couldn’t do today, what the American people using 1850s technology achieved, while working on a foundation of muddy marshland.
Seattle’s waterfront streets and buildings underwent similar transformations. If you visit Seattle, the Underground tour is quite interesting.
http://www.seattle.gov/tour/underground.htm
God help them though when The Big One hits and sends it all sliding into the Sound.
Coincidence: Was just remarking to my spouse how so many of my Illinois genealogy families seemed to get sick and die, the latest one I was looking at this morning was 1854.
Chicago’s work..on drainage, is never ending! See this: http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/367.html
But, it’s good. However, back about 10 years ago, there was a phenomenal rain storm. Having CONTROL over drainage, the sewer district opted to allow homes to flood (basements), rather than flood O’hare. This is an interesting study. The damages to the homes was about $500,000,000 (Five Hundred Million!) My Brother had about $20K of work to be done. However, the conservative estimates were that flooding Ohare would cost 10 BILLION plus! So we have a 20:1 exchange. The decision was made…(my Brother’s basement flooded! But he actually AGREES it was the right decision overall.) Ergo, there are always trade offs, but in the long run “we” always survive. NOTHING IS COMPLETELY DEVASTATING!
London, which I thought had it’s sewage problem “licked” is now building a super sewer that follows the river Thames. This super sewer connects all London sewers and “transports” the “product” to a massive sewer treatment plant. Looking at some of the images recently I can see there is a real sewage problem in London (Again) now as it was in the 50’s and before. I guess building 2500 80+ storey buildings with at least two dunnies (Toilets) and only one place to flush. It’s a shame as there was so much work done to improve water quality on the Thames. Look at any wharf or pier these days, see that “green sea weed”. It’s there for a reason, now.
I guess that explains why Chicago originally had the ‘L’ (elevated train) and not a subway transit system although subways have come downtown in later years.
Where did all the fill come from? Boston filled in the south end with the earth
From a razed hill in boston.
This is only viable with the right ground conditions and the right architecture. It couldn’t possibly be done here in London. Dykes and flood barriers could protect many cities though.
Difficult to see how the marshy mudflats on which London is built could be worse than the marshy mudflats on which Chicago is built.
Not quite mudflats for London, but very dense clay that compresses very well and ideal for tunneling. The South East and London area was covered in a sea. Over time the deposits were compressed (And possibly why oil has been found underneath Gatwick airport). The Romans found their ideal material for foundations right under their feet. It is still used today and is called Felton, or London Brick.
Chicago’s largest and latest buildings are dug down to the limestone bedrock, it really ain’t that deep.
In fact it is nearly at the surface in some of the suburbs.
they would have trouble jacking up the new skyscrapers now , but I don,t think it will worry us for eons
Seriously, the real disaster for Chicago is a return of the old normal: Ice Ages.
This event will crush the entire city and all of Canada under a mile of ice.
Too bad about Canada. ;-p
Sea Levels have been rising for the past 20,000 years and man adapted just fine.
Recent global tide data shows that for the past 200+ years, sea levels have only been rising at a constant rate of 6 INCHES per CENTURY, with absolutely NO empirical evidence showing an increasing trend.
Moreover, sea level rise has actually been FLAT for the past decade, despite record amounts of manmade CO2 emissions…
BTW, flat sea levels over the past decade doesn’t help alarmists’ claims that the “missing heat” is being buried in the oceans, because if this were true, oceans would have risen through hydro-thermal expansion.
Things are certainly not looking good for the alarmists. All their dire predictions are simply not supported by observations…
If B. Obama has been alive in Chicago in the 19th century, as a community organiser & then Senator, he would have worked to stop the elevation of the city, because he would claim the development could warm the globe.
In the realms of literature, early Chicago was trumped by Ankh Morpork. Ankh-Morpork is built on black loam, broadly, but is mostly built on itself; pragmatic citizens simply built on top of the existing buildings when the sediment grew too high as the river flooded, rather than excavate them out.
There are many unknown basements, including an entire “cave network” below Ankh-Morpork made up of old streets and abandoned sewers (it has been continuously stated that anyone with a pickaxe and a good sense of direction could reach anywhere in Ankh-Morpork by knocking walls down in a straight line). Recently, the underground regions have been extended by the city’s dwarf population to get around unimpeded. It has recently been made municipal property.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ankh-Morpork#Geography
Bill Illis
April 25, 2015 at 7:52 am
“Chicago was built right where Lake Michigan used to drain south into the Mississippi River during the ice ages and until about 9,000 years ago when outflow to the ocean became possible through the St. Lawrence River or through Hudson Bay”.
Nice post Bill. Now we are talking about real climate change!!! I’m sure much of this is totally unknown to the confident stewards of Climate Change.
In the early 60s as a fresh new engineer, I was doing a hydrology study of south west Manitoba near the North Dakota border for town water supply to Souris and other small towns and for stock watering in this dry country. The holes we drilled went down 30 to 40 feet and we had to seal off a salt water aquifer that was well known in the district. Actually most of the area’s well water was significantly above the maximum allowable for salt and one of the objectives was to replace this with sweet water.
While drilling across this flat land, we began to find bedrock considerably deeper than expected and at one point, at about 100 feet depth, we lost the drill string while adding in a drill rod section. The bit had hit good gravel and without turning had washed itself down deeper. We sent for the drilling company’s expert with “fishing tools” for recovering the string and moved to a new site nearby. This new hole washed down through coarse gravel to a depth of about 300feet. The gravel turned out to be Tertiary aged (a term not used now) (age after extinction of the Dinosaurs) and contained opalized wood (fossil wood pebbles replaced with opal) and yellow rounded quartz pebbles. I had heard of such aquifers in Saskatchewan having been found only a few years before, but this was the first one discovered in Manitoba. This was a channel of the former Missouri River when it flowed north. The Pleistocene Ice Age blocked this river off and caused it to reverse its flow. Another river with headwaters to the south ‘captured’ this reversed river and cut a channel to join the Mississippit as the modern Missouri. Just now, I found a paper on it with everybody’s name but mine on it. Like I said, I was a fresh new engineer!
http://www.gov.mb.ca/waterstewardship/reports/groundwater/resources2/virginia_valley_aquifers.pdf
Sacramento, California was also raised. About 14 ft IIRC, after frequent floods during heavy rains in the 1800s.