Both Public, Private Efforts Resuscitate Chicago’s Long-Suffering River

Chicago has done just about everything to its river, most of it bad.

The Chicago River has been dredged, extended, moved, polluted and dyed green every St. Patrick’s Day. It was an industrial thoroughfare and an open sewer. It was the scene of one of the worst maritime disasters in U.S. history, and it leaked into Loop basements during a bizarre underground flood.

This river was destined to be somehow different. Just consider, for instance, the astonishing feat of engineering that reversed its flow a century ago to keep sewage out of Lake Michigan, the city’s drinking supply.

But now, after a history of false steps and failures, the city appears to be making progress on an elusive goal: to treat the river like, well, a river. An ambitious public-private partnership has been launched to return its greenish-gray waters to a more natural state--a place where tourists will visit and Chicagoans will play.

“The river’s coming back to life,” says Laurene von Klan of Friends of the Chicago River. “It’s got a lot going on; it’s an economic resource, a cultural resource, a recreational resource, and it’s a living thing.”

The two arms of the river, South Branch and North Branch, flow across about 15 miles of municipal Chicago before feeding into a canal network that leads to the Mississippi. Though it may lack the cachet of the Thames or the Seine or even the Hudson, it’ll do for Richard M. Daley. The mayor, not content with having one of the world’s biggest lakes on his doorstep, wants Chicago to have a respectable river too.

“It makes a city more livable,” says Daley, who has invested a huge effort in beautifying Chicago. “It helps people relax and appreciate the world beyond the walls of their homes and offices.”

The Chicago River has always been overshadowed by Lake Michigan and its more than 20 miles of coastline, but the river provides a perspective that the lakefront can’t, says Patti Gallagher, of the city’s department of planning and development.

“The river extends through all the different kinds of neighborhoods in Chicago,” she says. “You really see the character of Chicago along the river.”

It’s a character that’s being reshaped. The city and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers have announced a multimillion-dollar project to restore the riverbank at four sites and to toughen regulations against polluters. Other projects envisage parks, trails and canoe launches.

A city ordinance now requires that all new development be set back at least 30 feet from the water’s edge.

The river could use some rest and relaxation. From serving the early settlers as a frontier trading post, it became a receptacle for garbage, sewage and industrial waste of the burgeoning metropolis. It served as the punch line for jokes about the city’s days of Al Capone (dumped bodies) and political chicanery (dumped ballot slips). A stretch near the old stockyards and slaughterhouses was a noxious stew that foamed and bubbled--hence the nickname, Bubbly Creek.

“Many times an unwary stranger has started to stroll across, and vanished temporarily,” Upton Sinclair wrote of the river in his novel “The Jungle,” about life in and around the stockyards.

In 1915, a steamer loaded with Western Electric Co. employees bound for a picnic rolled over in the river, killing more than 800. In 1992, river water poured into an abandoned tunnel system, flooded basements of office buildings and paralyzed the Loop business district for days.

And even now, Bubbly Creek still bubbles with gases rising from contaminated sediment on the riverbed.

But the stockyards closed in the early 1970s, and as environmental controls kick in, apartment buildings and condominiums are rising, all facing the water. Buildings once faced away from the river because of the stench.

Today, cafes and restaurants tout their proximity to the river. Two upscale housing complexes are in the works downtown where the river branches. Several units have boat slips.

About three miles north, the restaurant and jazz club Green Dolphin Street has built a riverfront patio and a 200-foot dock for customers arriving by boat. General manager Richard Glass says riverside business was slow at first, but people seem to be warming to the river’s charms.

“A lot of people walk out on our back patio and want to know what that water is out there,” he says. “I think they’re amazed that’s the Chicago River all the way up here. I’m not sure people know what happens to the river after it leaves downtown.”

The river’s greatest boon is Deep Tunnel, Chicago’s multibillion-dollar flood control project that stores sewage-tainted storm water until it can be treated.

Naturalists say some 60 species of fish now live in the river, from carp to smallmouth bass to bluegill.

Mayor Richard J. Daley, the incumbent’s father, imagined a future of downtown office workers dropping a line in the water, catching their lunch and grilling it on the spot. Von Klan says the river is clean enough for fishing, “but it’s not clean enough that we recommend you eat the fish.”

Pete Leki has lived near the North Branch for almost two decades and has seen an extraordinary turnaround. He says it used to be “a scary place” of waste-tainted water, haunted by drunks and drug addicts. Now he’s seeing snapping turtles, birds and the occasional beaver.

“It’s pretty enchanting,” Leki says. “As damaged as the river is, it’s a pretty powerful place to be.”