A Liftbridge Tells The Story of Chicago

By Pat Brennan.

CHICAGO – This city has more lift bridges than any other place on earth, other than Amsterdam.

But, does Amsterdam have a bridge museum? Chicago does – a museum inside a bridge – a famous bridge.

Four monumental towers stand on each corner of Chicago's DuSable Bridge – also known as the Michigan Avenue Bridge - that stretches across the Chicago River.

A museum has been created in one of those towers, called a bridgehouse, to tell the story of Chicago's 29 lift bridges and the history of the Chicago River – a river that had its flow reversed.

Only 79 people can squeeze into the five-storey museum at one time and on some floors there's room for only five visitors.

Chicago is world-renowned for its museums, but in late fall the hottest ticket in town is to be inside the McCormick Bridgehouse & Chicago River Museum when the bridge lifts to allow an armada of sail boats to leave Lake Michigan and return inland to their winter berths.

More than 50,000 sailboats are currently moored at those winter berths waiting to sail through the heart of Chicago on the Chicago River to their summer playgrounds on Lake Michigan.

They'll need to pass under 29 different lift bridges in the city's core to reach the big lake and were supposed to start that impressive parade in mid April. However, Covid-19 has kept them tied to their docks.

Despite the virus, the city celebrated the 100th anniversary of the most famous of those 29 lift bridges. Traffic started rolling across the double-deck DuSable bridge on May 14, 1920. Mayor Lori Lightfoot and other city dignitaries saluted the anniversary, but at a distance on a Zoomer broadcast.

When the quarantine regulations allow the boats to sail, the 29 lift bridges will raise into the air for an hour two days a week during non-rush-hour to let the sail boats follow the river out to the lake.

There are particular times on particular days when the boats return in the fall and that's when the museum sells tickets to be in the bridgehouse to watch a small 108-horsepower engine operate the gears that raise the 200-ton double-deck iron bridge.

The exterior walls on the four corner towers of the DuSable are decorated with concrete carvings that tell the history of Chicago – such as the great Chicago fire in 1871.

Until 2010 the bridge was known as the Michigan Avenue Bridge as it carries Chicago's main business street across the Chicago River. The name was changed to salute Jean Baptiste Point duSable, Chicago's first non-indigenous settler, who in 1780 built a cabin and trading post on the river bank where the bridge stands today.

The upper deck of the bridge carries mostly cars and the lower deck handles truck traffic delivering goods to stores in the neighbourhood. About 30,000 pedestrians use both levels of the bridge daily.

In the museum you can learn how engineers reversed the flow of the Chicago River that used to empty into Lake Michigan. In the late 1800s residents and city leaders were concerned about how much sewage was being dumped into the lake by the river.

Chicago gets its drinking water from Lake Michigan.

Engineers dug out 40 million cubic yards of material from the river bottom in 1900 – the biggest excavation in world history at the time – to make the river level 0.6 metres (two feet) lower than the lake level, thus causing lake water to flow into the river.

A lock at the mouth of the river controls the flow of water, plus lets pleasure craft move from the river to the lake. The Chicago River now flows south into the Des Plaines River, which empties into the Illinois River, which in turn feeds the Mississippi River.

As a young tour guide on one of the many Chicago River tour boats told this writer, “now our sewage flows the other way into the Mississippi and down to St. Louis. But they get even with us by bottling that river water and sending it back here as Budweiser Beer.”

After reversing the Chicago River the engineers headed south and helped build the Panama Canal.

Great Lakes Dredge and Dock, a Chicago construction firm still busy throughout the world, built the DuSable Bridge, starting in 1918.

At the same time the Chicago company started a small job of removing debris from a water intake pipe to a power plant on the Niagara River near Buffalo. That job resulted in an incident that historians are still taking about today, 102 years later.

Millions of visitors to Niagara Falls over the years have marvelled at a construction barge sitting in the Niagara River just above the Horseshoe Falls.

It arrived there on Aug. 8, 1918 with two Great Lakes Dredge and Dock construction workers on board. The two men were terrified they were about to plunge over the falls with their barge after it broke away from its accompanying tugboat 28.9 kilometres (18 miles) up stream near Buffalo.

Various efforts were made along the river to catch and secure the runaway barge, but all failed. It was only 760 metres from the brink when the construction scow ran aground on some rocks in the rapids.

It was 260 metres from the Canadian shore and efforts were made to get a line out to the men on the stranded barge. The two men, Gustave Loftberg and James Harris, both 51, spent the night staring at the brink as it took two days to get a sturdy rope out to their barge. William “Red” Hill, a legend in Niagara Falls even before this event, was just back from the trenches of W.W. 1 where he had been wounded. Twice he shimmed out to the barge hand-over-hand on the rope to tell the workers how to secure the rope and use a bosun's chair that would carry them to safety on the shore.

Thousands of vacationers watched the rescue by day and at night as large floodlights had been installed to watch for any movement of the barge. Both men eventually reached safety on shore.

Then the betting started on how long before the barge plunged over the falls. Despite being encouraged by the fast-moving rapids and bumped each winter by chunks of ice from Lake Erie the barge is still there today 102 years later.