A small group of young people stood on the south bank of the Chicago River early Sunday morning, a couple of these six people red-faced from a previous day in the sun and sounds a few blocks south at Lollapalooza.
Four of these people were, they said proudly, from Duke University in North Carolina, and the other two came here from Denver. They were drinking coffee and eating donuts.
Walking by, I said hello, and soon enough we were talking about the river.
“You are so lucky to have something like this,” one of them said, and the others nodded in agreement and so did I.
We are, aren’t we, even if we don’t always appreciate it?
As the kids headed back to the music, I watched a couple of tourist boats start to fill with, well, tourists, and I started thinking about this river, cut by ancient waters and first discovered by the people native to this place and I realized, not for the first time, that without the river (and the lake) we would be Nebraska.
Still, the river was not always respected. It was used, to be frank, as a toilet. It was a poor people’s neighborhood, starting in the 1840s when the poorest huddled along its banks, as the wealthy preferred to live elsewhere. You might think lakefront but you’d be wrong. For a time, few homes were built near the lake, since it was believed that the often chilly lake air was bad for their health.
And it got worse, much worse. After the opening of the Union Stock Yards in the 1860s, a portion of the river became known as Bubbly Creek because it was filled with animal carcasses and waste that would bubble to the surface.
During the Great Depression, people moved into houseboats on the river, thereby avoiding having to pay rent or property taxes.
Things began to improve, sort of, when Marina City opened in 1964 but dead bodies and even a few cars made their way into the river.
In April 1992, as if the river screamed “enough is enough,” it sprung a leak and poured 250 million gallons of water into the Loop, flooding basements, closing buildings, eventually causing $2 billion in damages.
Some days later, a fellow named Steve Coppola of Oak Park wrote a letter to Tribune columnist Mike Royko: “The next time the Chicago River leaks, plug up the hole with aldermen.”
Royko responded, “Too light. They’d float away. But we could try tossing their wallets and pinky rings.”
We paid attention then and always do when it turns green for a certain holiday but you could do yourself a favor and read “The Chicago River: A Natural and Unnatural History” by Libby Hill. First published by Lake Claremont Press in 2000 and updated and expanded for a new 2016 edition, it is a great book.
In it, Hill writes about how she first found the river. She is from the suburbs of Baltimore and soon after graduating from college she and her new husband, Win, moved to Evanston where they raised two daughters.
“When we moved to Chicago in 1957, my husband, who had lived here earlier, introduced me to Lake Michigan in the hope that I would share his pleasure at living near this inland sea. But the lake seemed flat and featureless to me, except on those days when an east wind kicked up dramatic waves. … I craved the excitement and the vitality of a river, of water running in a groove in the earth, an ever-changing drama of ripples and calm. … When I found the Chicago River, I felt at home.”
You may have heard about some big plans for the river. “A Long Swim,” an open-water swimming event, was to take place between State Street and Wolf Point. Planned for Sept. 22, it was intended to raise money for ALS research and other causes. But the city’s Department of Transportation denied the permit, which the organizers are now appealing.
More than 1,000 people applied to participate, with some 500 accepted. So, we shall see.
One of the other financial beneficiaries of this event was funding swimming lessons for children. That’s nice.
Many years ago, I was told a story by Tom Kastle, a sailor, musical performer and historian, with a focus on and love for waters. “I was doing a residency with the Friends of the Chicago River and found that over half the audience of about 400 students at a school near the North Branch of the Chicago River did not know where the river was,” he said.
That story has stayed with me. There are many reasons why, poverty or violence among the most likely, and not seeing the river might be the least of the troubles kids in some neighborhoods have to confront.
Sitting on the banks of the river Sunday as morning came to noon, I remembered the lines that ended a book written by Norman Maclean, the great Chicago writer: “Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world’s great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs.”