Raising Chicago

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For the first twenty years of the city’s history the streets became impassable in wet weather, water stood in stagnant pools and basements flooded with every rain. At best the lack of drainage constituted an intolerable nuisance, at worst a serious menace to health.

There were many jokes about the muddy situation in Chicago. Here are a few of them:

A sign found on wagon abandoned in one of early Chicago’s muddy streets:
The shortest route to China.

And another sign:
No bottom here

A gentleman who, passing by a street, discovers a man buried up to his shoulders in mud. The gentleman asks the man, “Can I help you?”

“No, thank you,” the man replies, “I have a good horse under me.”

In 1855 the city council decided that the streets should be raised to a level of four to fourteen feet above the lake. This meant adding several feet of earth under the existing structures. The process took more than 20 years to complete and was accomplished by literally raising the city. Buildings were lifted up by “dozens of men turning dozens of jacks in unison so that new foundations could be built underneath.”

The task of raising Chicago was best reported by the Chicago Press & Tribune in their 20 March 1860 issue:

The entire front of first-class buildings on the north side of Lake Street between La Salle and Clark streets is now rising to grade at the rate of about twelve inches per day. It will be at its full height by tomorrow night, when it will constitute a spectacle not many of our citizens may see again, if ever, a business block covering nearly one acre, and weighing over twenty-five thousand tons resting on six thousand screws, upon which it has made an upward journey of four feet and ten inches. Probably its parallel enterprise cannot be be found the world over. It will be worth seeing tomorrow, and the contractors are, we learn, preparing to accomodate the public and give them an opportunity of looking and passing in among the forest of iron screws.

Raising buildings to the new street level became a major occupation. Visitors found the operation as fascinating as the packing houses and grain elevators, their usual subjects of interest.

David McCrae, a Scotish traveler, wrote a two-volume work, The Americans at Home, after his 1867 visit to North America. He wrote:

Great blocks of masonry in some parts of the city have been lifted up from four to fourteen feet. The Brigg’s House, a gigantic hotel, was rasied four and a half feet, and new foundation built below. The people were in it all the time, coming and going, eating and sleeping–the whole business of the hotel preceeding without interruption. The Tremont House, another large hotel, was lifted the same way.