The Raising of Chicago

Chicago didn't fuck around when it came to ambitious 19th century engineering: http://99percentinvisible.org/post/57747785222/episode-86-re... (reversing the Chicago river--this has a lot of great old pictures). Although, see: http://chicagoist.com/2013/04/19/photos_what_re-reversing_th... (reversing it back temporarily this year to account for flooding). In school we used to say "aerospace engineers make bombs; civil engineers make targets." But in fact civil engineering is really cool, especially in terms of…

On a related note for anyone who has walked around both Manhattan and downtown Chicago... Ever notice how downtown Chicago has much less noise of honking cars than downtown New York City? A friend pointed out it's because of Chicago's lower-level streets[0] that a lot of service vehicles use for loading/unloading. That's in contrast to Manhattan where everybody has to share the same street level. E.g. a brown UPS truck that stops for a mere 20 seconds is enough for…

I don't know if this was during the same time period or not, but in some parts of the city (mostly residential or smaller commercial areas) they didn't bother raising the buildings, they just built the streets up higher and added flying walkways from the new sidewalk height to the new front entrances on the second story of the houses. Many of them had stairs that went down to the old ground level and I think in most of them…

> During the 1850s and 1860s, engineers carried out a piecemeal raising of the level of central Chicago to lift it out of low-lying swampy ground. Buildings and sidewalks were physically raised on jackscrews. The work was funded by private property owners and public funds.