Cheap Seats 2023 By Rich Trzupek

The Chicago Way - 11/22

By Rich Trzupek
  In the late 19th century, canal building was booming. Like railroads and paved roads, canals were primarily built to get goods and people from point A to point B more quickly and efficiently. But there was one particular canal built in 19th-century America that served a purpose unique in world history: To reverse the flow of a river.
  By the middle of the 19th century, the city of Chicago, positioned as it is at the crossroads of America’s transportation network, was growing swiftly. In that era before sewage-treatment plants, Lake Michigan served as both the city’s water supply and as the final destination for its sewage. As the city grew, it became clear that the lake could not continue in both roles.
  At the time, the Chicago River drained a relatively small, shallow watershed that, prior to construction of the city, had included a good deal of swampland. The Chicago River emptied into Lake Michigan, thus any sewage dumped into the Chicago River, ended up in the city’s source of drinking water. Twelve miles to the west, the Des Plaines River drained a separate watershed, before emptying its waters into the Illinois River, which is in turn a tributary of the Mississippi. Twelve miles wasn’t all that much of challenge, given the technology and equipment available at the time, and the ridge separating the Des Plaines from the Chicago wasn’t all that high. Accordingly, the decision was made to connect the two rivers via a canal. Since water flows downhill, that meant that the Chicago River would no longer drain into Lake Michigan, it would drain into the Gulf of Mexico, via the canal, the Des Plaines, the Illinois and Mississippi.
  Construction of what would become known as the Sanitary and Ship Canal began in 1889. The plan was for the canal to provide navigation between Lake Michigan and the Gulf, which it eventually did, but the waterway was more about sanitation than shipping.  That was obvious to residents of St. Louis, who could read a map as well as any Chicago alderman, and who quickly and correctly surmised that Chicago was solving its sewage-treatment woes by sending the smelly problem downriver. The attorney-general of Missouri ultimately petitioned the United States Supreme Court to issue an injunction forbidding Chicago from opening the canal.
  A little over a 100 years after the Sanitary and Ship Canal opened, Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley preemptively rendered unusable the runway at Chicago’s lakefront airport, Meigs Field, by ordering city crews to gouge a huge “X” in the runway in the dead of night. By doing so, Daley violated FAA rules that required 30 days’ notice before taking such an action. The mayor was thus another in a long parade of American politicians who have essentially argued that the ends justify the means when elected officials are involved, while private citizens must obey the strict letter – not the intent – of the law in all cases.
  History does not record whether Daley’s decision to defy the law and close Meigs of his own accord was influenced by the events surrounding the opening of the Sanitary and Ship Canal, but the parallels are unmistakable. On a cold morning on Jan. 2, 1900 trustees of the Sanitary District of Chicago (predecessor of today’s Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago) quietly assembled to break the temporary dam separating the Chicago River from the main channel of the new canal. Fifteen days later, gates in the dam connecting the canal to the Des Plaines River were opened on orders from the Sanitary District trustees. Water, and sewage, that originated in the Chicago River basin headed south toward the Gulf of Mexico for the first time, the threatened Supreme Court injunction having been rendered moot, as city fathers’ had intended.
  It’s hard to imagine anyone proposing a project like the reversal of a river today and if anyone were so foolish as to make such a proposal, environmental laws and angry environmental activists would ensure that not even a single spade of dirt would ever be turned in its construction. But, 19th-century America viewed this kind of project in a different light. It was innovative. It applied new technologies and new ideas in ways that made for a better standard of living. And indeed, many of the men who built the Sanitary and Ship Canal and the lessons learned while building it proved invaluable in the next century when the Panama Canal was constructed.
  Email: richtrzupek@gmail.com