The Chicago River: A Civic Trick and the Century It Built

The Chicago River is not natural infrastructure. It is the country's most ambitious piece of nineteenth-century municipal hydraulic engineering, and almost everything visible along its banks today is what that engineering made possible. Lean over the south railing of the DuSable Bridge at noon on a clear day and look down at the water. The current is moving west. Up the river, away from the lake, into the channel that runs through the western Loop and on out toward the Des Plaines River and the Mississippi watershed. Almost every other river on the Great Lakes side of the continental divide flows the other way. Chicago's does not, because on January 2, 1900, the city opened a canal at Lockport that dropped its river twenty-six vertical feet and pulled the current backward.

That sentence is the load-bearing engineering fact of the city. It is older than every building on the corridor. It explains why those buildings could be built at all.

Why the river had to be moved

Chicago in 1850 had about 30,000 people, no sewer system, and a river that drained into Lake Michigan a few miles north of the city's drinking water intakes. By 1870 the city had 300,000 people, a sewer system designed by Boston engineer Ellis Chesbrough (appointed to the city's Sewerage Commission in 1855), and a river that carried the sewage of all of them directly into the same lake the city was drinking from. Cholera and typhoid outbreaks in the 1870s and 1880s made the connection visible.

Chesbrough's first move had been to raise the city. Between roughly 1856 and 1870 Chicago physically lifted entire downtown blocks by four to six feet (on jackscrews, brick by brick, with the buildings often occupied) to install a gravity sewer system that drained into the river. The water solution was a separate problem. In 1867 Chesbrough designed a two-mile tunnel out into the lake to a crib offshore, far enough from the river's mouth that the drinking water intake would be cleaner than the lake's near shore. The tunnel opened that year. By the 1880s the cribs had to be moved further out as the population grew. By the 1890s it was clear that moving the cribs was a delaying tactic. The sewage in the river was reaching them no matter how far out they went.

The only remaining option was to send the river the other way. The Illinois legislature created the Sanitary District of Chicago in 1889 to do it. The chief engineer was Isham Randolph. The plan was to dig a canal twenty-eight miles long, three hundred feet wide, twenty-four feet deep, from the South Branch of the Chicago River through the low continental divide between the Great Lakes and Mississippi watersheds, into the Des Plaines River near Lockport. A controlling works at Lockport would drop the water about twenty-six feet, the gravity head that would pull the current upstream from the lake. Construction ran from 1892 to 1900. The Metropolitan Water Reclamation District, the agency that absorbed the Sanitary District, has called the project the largest earth-moving operation that had been undertaken in North America up to that time. About forty-two million cubic yards of rock and earth were removed.

The canal opened January 2, 1900. The current reversed. Saint Louis, downstream on the Mississippi, sued: Chicago was now sending its sewage south to a different city's drinking water. The case went to the Supreme Court of the United States. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., writing for the majority in 1906, ruled for Illinois. The reversal stood. The Great Lakes watershed and the Mississippi watershed, divided by a low continental ridge for fifteen thousand years, would remain artificially joined by Chicago's canal for the foreseeable future.

The water in the river is still managed today. The Lockport controlling works set the flow. Locks at the river's mouth in the lake regulate exchange. After heavy storms a separate deep-tunnel system (the TARP project, in construction since 1975 and still being completed) catches the overflow that would otherwise return sewage to the lake. The river is engineered every minute of every day. It is the most actively managed major waterway in any American city.

What the reversal made possible

The architectural showcase along the river is the consequence of the engineering. Before 1900 the river was an industrial sewer. Lumber yards, grain elevators, tanneries on the north branch, freight rail yards along the banks. The buildings that face the river today either came after the reversal made the corridor habitable, or had to wait for it.

The Wrigley Building, finished in two stages in 1921 and 1924 by Charles Beersman of Graham, Anderson, Probst and White, is the first major commercial structure built north of the river. The south tower opened in September 1921. The north tower in May 1924. The building's cream-colored terra cotta sheath, washed by floodlights at night, gave the corner a postcard identity it had never had before. Chicago's first air-conditioned office building. The tower's four clock faces, nineteen feet seven inches across, became one of the city's signature silhouettes.

The Tribune Tower across the street, finished in 1925 by John Mead Howells and Raymond M. Hood, came out of an international competition launched by Colonel Robert R. McCormick in 1922. According to the Skyscraper Museum, the competition drew 263 entries from 23 countries. Eliel Saarinen's second-place entry, a stepped tower of unadorned stone, became one of the most influential lost competitions in architectural history; American architects would borrow its silhouette for the next decade. The Tribune's winning Gothic Revival design, with its embedded fragments of other historic buildings in the lower exterior walls, sits at the bridgehead like a frozen argument. The two buildings together (Wrigley's white terra cotta, Tribune's gray Gothic stone) made the bridgehead the symbolic gateway of a city that had not previously had a center.

The river kept producing buildings. Marina City, finished in 1968 by Bertrand Goldberg, was a pair of sixty-five-story residential cylinders, financed by the Building Service Employees Union. At 587 feet they were, when completed, the tallest reinforced concrete structures in the world. The form (an exposed concrete column at the center, the floor plates spiraling outward, the lower nineteen floors a corkscrewed garage in the open air) was unlike anything in American urban housing. Mies's IBM Building next door, now called AMA Plaza, was dedicated on September 20, 1972. It was the last office building Mies designed in the United States. He had died in 1969. Construction was completed by C. F. Murphy Associates from his drawings. Black steel, bronze glass, the canonical Miesian curtain wall executed at fifty-two stories, three years after his death.

333 West Wacker, finished in 1983 by William Pedersen of Kohn Pedersen Fox, is the postmodern moment. A reflective green-glass curve that follows the bend of the river. The building solved a difficult triangular lot by treating the river-facing side as a continuous arc and the street-facing sides as a more regular grid. It is one of the most-cited postmodern American towers and one of the few that has aged into the city without irony.

150 North Riverside, finished in 2017 by Goettsch Partners with structural engineer Magnusson Klemencic Associates, is the contemporary specimen. The tower sits on a base just thirty-nine feet wide at grade because the rail leads from Union Station passed directly under the site. The structural engineers used a massive tuned liquid sloshing damper at the top of the building to control the sway that the unusually narrow base would otherwise produce. The damper is a tank of water tuned to slosh in counter-rhythm with the building's natural sway frequency. Several other contemporary supertall towers along the river (most prominently Jeanne Gang's Aqua at 225 North Columbus and her St. Regis Chicago at 363 East Wacker) carry their own versions of the same engineering. St. Regis Chicago, finished in 2020, is the tallest building in the world designed by a woman. The damping technology is the descendant, executed in liquid form, of the steel-mass dampers on West 57th Street in Manhattan that came two decades earlier.

The corridor as text

What the river teaches, walked end to end from the DuSable Bridge to Wolf Point, is that an engineering decision and an architectural decision are usually the same decision separated by a generation. The river had to be reversed before the bridgehead could become a real estate proposition. The reversal had to hold before the riverwalk could be designed (Sasaki Associates and Ross Barney Architects, Phases 2 and 3, 2015 to 2016) as a continuous public promenade rather than a service back. The damper technology that lets 150 North Riverside stand on a thirty-nine-foot base above a rail bed was developed because lower Manhattan in the 2010s needed it for the same reasons Chicago needed the canal in the 1890s. Cities solve their problems with infrastructure. The architecture is what gets built on top of the infrastructure, once the problem is solved.

The river was the first decision. Every building you can see from its banks is downstream of it, in the literal hydrological sense and in the financial one. Read the corridor as one engineered system with a century of architectural answers attached and the buildings stop being a museum. They start being a record.