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If
you lived in Chicago
in the mid-nineteenth century, you had to put up with a lot of crap. Literally.
The city was overrun by sewage and filth; it had sprouted and grown so
suddenly that it couldn't keep up with its waste. So in 1855 the city beckoned
Ellis Chesbrough from Boston, where he had designed a water distribution
system. A self-taught engineer, Chesbrough designed the country's first
major sewer system in Chicago. The city truly stood taller when he was
done; he ordered large brick sewers to be built above the existing streets
and then paved over, raising the city's base by ten feet. Over the next
several years, Chicago painstakingly pulled itself out of the muck, hoisting
buildings or building new doors on them to match the new height of the
ground. Chesbrough also designed a two-mile tunnel that burrowed 60 feet
under Lake Michigan and siphoned clean water into the city, and lay the
groundwork for plans to reverse the Chicago River. He lived here on LaSalle
Street in 1874.
- More
about Chesbrough from ChicagoTribute.org
- More
about Chesbrough from the Chicago Public Library |
