The Chicago River: A Natural and Unnatural History

by Libby Hill

Overview

In this social and ecological account of the Chicago River, Libby Hill tells the story of how a sluggish waterway emptying into Lake Michigan became central to the creation of Chicago as a major metropolis and transportation hub. 

This widely acclaimed volume weaves the perspectives of science, engineering, commerce, politics, economics, and the natural world into a chronicle of the river from its earliest geologic history through its repeated adaptations to the city that grew up around it. While explaining the river’s role in massive public works, such as drainage and straightening, designed to address the infrastructure needs of a growing population, Hill focuses on the synergy between the river and the people of greater Chicago, whether they be the tribal cultures that occupied the land after glacial retreat, the first European inhabitants, or more recent residents.

In the first edition, Hill brought together years of original research and the contributions of dozens of experts to tell the Chicago River’s story up until 2000. This revised edition features discussions of disinfection, Asian carp, green strategies, the evolution of the Chicago Riverwalk, and the river’s rejuvenation. It also explores how earlier solutions to problems challenge today’s engineers, architects, environmentalists, and public policy agencies as they address contemporary issues. 

Revealing the river to be a microcosm of the uneasy relationship between nature and civilization, The Chicago River offers the tools and knowledge for the city’s residents to be champions on the river’s behalf.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780809337071
Publisher:	Southern Illinois University Press
Publication date:	02/21/2019
Edition description:	Revised, Revised
Pages:	328
Sales rank:	356,457
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Libby Hill is an environmentalist and educator who has worked as a librarian and a college instructor. She can be found in the woods or on the beach volunteering for ecological restoration projects, writing for her local newspaper, or working with others on regional environmental issues. 
 

Read an Excerpt

INTRODUCTION
 
Rivers are a metaphor of time, of change and immutability, of spiritual ritual and connection. Rivers are magical. People are drawn to them as steel to a magnet. But rivers are also treated as dumps, places where trash and sewage are swept away and become invisible or pile up elsewhere. 
 
The Chicago River’s landscape has a long ancestry of gradual evolution from the formation of ages-old bedrock to the glacial and postglacial events that formed the river, the Chicago Lake Plain, and Lake Michigan. There were no natural waterfalls or merrily tumbling brooks, no bubbling spring that could be identified as the single source. Up in Lake County, the “river” was more a series of sloughs that settlers drained and ditched. Downstream in Cook County, where the river’s branches combined, it drained ever so slowly into the lake. 
 
How did the sleepy little stream, flowing over land so flat that it could hardly ever carve its own valley, end up in an artificial canyon approximately 12 feet below a major city or cramped into skinny ditches secreted behind thick lanes of shrubby growth in Chicago’s northern suburbs? By midcentury, hardly a reach of the original Chicago River was left untouched. The “river” had expanded to become a connected “system” of artificial channels that were either created afresh, straightened, or walled in. The many changes to the river were influenced by the needs of a growing, sprawling metropolis. This rising transportation and trading hub of the United States was affected by public health and drainage problems that were addressed by methods unencumbered by ecological concerns not yet part of the civic consciousness. 
 
In Chicago-style “I Will” projects to save the city’s health, first the city was raised and sewers laid draining to the river, and then the river was reversed into a new Sanitary and Ship Canal. The Illinois and Michigan Canal and then its larger sibling, the Sanitary and Ship Canal, put Chicago into two watersheds, the Great Lakes and the Mississippi, and onto a collision course with downstream states in both. These local canals, in conjunction with the St. Lawrence Seaway, created a continental highway for aquatic nuisance species. 
 
In the early 1920s, with the river dredged and widened and a gleaming new Michigan Avenue Bridge spanning the water, businessmen began to commission dignified buildings facing the river. The South Branch was straightened, and little by little its offensive forks filled in, leaving only “Bubbly Creek,” the South Fork of the South Branch, to remind us of the Union Stock Yards and that Chicago was once Carl Sandburg’s “Hog Butcher for the World.”
 
The turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century ushered in a new attitude toward the river and a new aesthetic toward civic projects. The evolving science of ecology, the growing sophistication concerning public health, and the emerging ideal of civic beauty impacted the growth of river improvements. As the century matured and environmental concerns moved to the forefront of the nation, an enormous challenge confronted Chicago and its suburbs: how to undo much of what had been done to the river, but within the confines of the metropolitan setting that the river had done so much to make possible.
 
In 1992, as if to remind downtown businesses that the original river was below the current grade level and that Chicago was built on a marsh, a construction misstep allowed the river to flow down an opening along timber pile that had been installed for bridge protection. It spilled into an old freight tunnel system that had been installed 42 feet beneath the city’s surface 100 years earlier for delivering materials among the downtown buildings. To the casual observer above ground, the river looked exactly the same as it had the day before: business as usual. But companies in towers with basements connected to the old tunnels knew otherwise. This “silent flood” took millions of dollars and what seemed like as many days to fix by isolating the damaged portion under the river, plugging the hole with concrete, and dewatering the flooded tunnels and basements. 
 
The challenges of the twenty-first century are rooted in actions of the preceding century as well as in new visions for recreation and “greening” the river. Projects for cleaner water and storm water management in the first 17 years of the new century share the popular vocabulary of the turn-of-the-twenty-first century environmental concerns: green infrastructure, sustainability, diversity, habitat renewal, nutrient recovery, ecological integrity, environmental justice, aquatic nuisance species, and global warming, to name a few. The effect of climate change on the river and on Lake Michigan is too large a topic for this book, but the increasing number and ferocity of storms is considered by many to be a result of global warming. Today, the river that was treated as the city’s dump has become a recreational hotspot. It is approaching the ideal of Daniel Burnham’s 1909 Plan of Chicago: a sedate European-like stream, flanked by walkways, flowing through a glistening city. 
 
Upscale residential and mixed developments with public river frontage are in place or planned. Kayaks and other pleasure craft and tour boats dominate the river, replacing the barges of yesteryear. Riverwalks are appearing not only in downtown Chicago but also in suburbs like Glenview and Northbrook. Lake County is bringing its ditched streams out of the shadows of culverts and into daylight. 
 
And not only humans are returning to the river. Fish have been moving into the Chicago Area Waterway System (CAWS), which includes the Chicago River, following major water quality improvements in the 1980s and 1990s. In 1974, the district collected only ten fish species from the CAWS. Since then, 76 species of fish have been documented in these waterways, 60 of which have been native.
 
This book is written for the general reader. It tells the story of the synergy between the river and the people of greater Chicago. In relating the story of the major changes in the river, the book places those changes in the context of their times: contemporary visions of need and possibility and the contemporary state of scientific understanding. As for today’s vast number and variety of river restoration projects, there is space for only a few examples. The stories of the architecture along the river and the bridges that cross it are told in many fine books and websites listed in a section titled “For Further Reference” and on the book’s Facebook page. 
 
Finally, for all its local particularity, the Chicago River’s story is a microcosm of the uneasy relation between nature and civilization.
 

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations and Tables xi

Preface xv

Chronology xix

Introduction 1

Part I Prehistory through the Eighteenth Century

1 Location, Location, Location 7

2 Geological Foundations: Bedrock and Ice 14

3 Branches and Forks 21

4 The Natural Chicago River: Animal, Vegetable, and Mineral 28

5 Tribal Land 33

6 Passages and Treaties: On the Path to a Canal 38

Part II The Nineteenth Century

7 The Illinois and Michigan Canal 47

8 Redesigning the Harbor 54

9 Early Commerce and the River 64

10 North Branch Settlement 71

11 Clean Stream to Open Sewer 78

12 The I&M Canal: Shipping Channel to Open Sewer 86

13 Toward the Sanitary and Ship Canal: From 1880 to Shovel Day 91

14 Building the Channel That Saved Chicago 104

Part III The Twentieth Century

15 Reconnecting the City and the River 117

16 The North Shore Channel and the North Branch 121

17 The Ascendance of Federal Authority 138

18 Straightening the South Branch 150

19 Transforming the Skokie Marsh 158

20 The Metropolitan Water Reclamation District, Modern Sewage Treatment, and the Tunnel and Reservoir Project 168

21 Citizens and Their River 177

Part IV Early Years of the Twenty-First Century

22 The MWRD and Disinfection 191

23 Invasive Asian Carp: The Case of the Sanitary and Ship Canal 201

24 Greening the Watershed 213

25 The Evolution of a Riverwalk 226

Retrospective 239

Acknowledgments 249

Appendixes

A Organizations 257

B On the Water 258

C Fish Species Collected by the MWRD in the Chicago Area Waterway System since 1974 263

Glossary 265

Notes 271

For Further Reference 289

Index 291

Editorial Reviews

"An impressively researched and expertly presented study, "The Chicago River: A Natural and Unnatural History" is an extraordinary and unreservedly recommended addition to both community and academic library collections."—Helen Dumont, Midwest Book Review

“Who wrote the book on the Chicago River? That was Libby Hill when The Chicago River: A Natural and Unnatural History was first published. Now—like the river—that book has been updated and rejuvenated, and is more important than ever.”—Richard Cahan, coauthor of The Lost Panoramas: When Chicago Changed Its River and the Land Beyond

“Hill infuses the rigorous research of an academic with the lively storytelling of a writer who clearly has a deep affection for her subject. Hill’s work has long been the definitive resource for anyone interested in the history of the Chicago River. But as Hill writes, ‘Rivers are a continuum over space and time.’ This revised edition brings the story up to date. The once-unloved Chicago River is lucky to have a voice in Libby Hill.”—Geoffrey Baer, WTTW (PBS), Chicago
 
“What a spectacular story! From bridges to boating, from portages to canals, from tribal lands to river walks, from marshes to channels, Libby Hill provides us with a lively and provocative history of the Chicago River. By focusing on the river, Hill interweaves the environmental, economic, and political history of the region.”—Ann Durkin Keating, North Central College
 
“Hill’s revised edition of The Chicago River: A Natural and Unnatural History weaves a practical account of the river’s workhorse history with the details of the decades-long effort to undo the damage done. Highlighting the complications the river faced and still faces, this fascinating account will open readers’ eyes.”—Margaret Frisbie, executive director, Friends of the Chicago River

“To read the story of the Chicago River—from thriving ecosystem to open sewer and back again—is to grapple with the meandering, complex values of our changing society. In this essential revised edition, Libby Hill masterfully narrates the river’s history in a comprehensive account as clear-eyed as it is hopeful.”—Debra Shore, former editor of Chicago Wilderness Magazine, commissioner of the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago

 “An odyssey of personal discovery, Hill’s revised edition is alive and fresh. More than an update of the first edition, it contains new topics reflecting the dynamic river. By casting aside unessential details and infusing new topics, Libby’s words will ignite your interest and grab your hand to go along with her on an urban river adventure.”—Richard Lanyon, author of Building the Canal to Save Chicago

From the Publisher