I just saw a great picture of this from 1885: http://calumet412.com/post/58699298036/street-grade-elevatio...
The Raising of Chicago
41–50 of 76 posts
Re: The Raising of Chicago
#42North American cities used to be enormously ambitious (see also, for example, Boston's Back Bay). Contrast the fear, trepidation and status-quo obstructionism that characterizes municipal affairs today.
I'm particularly struck by the contrast between a great city undergoing a decades-long project to raise everything above the local water level and modern-day insanity such as North Carolina making it illegal to base public policy on scientific reports about sea level rise.
One wonders if those lawmakers, teleported back to 19th-century Chicago, would deny that drainage is a problem and forbid basic public policy on any scientific report linking sewage to disease.
Re: The Raising of Chicago
#43So Undertown does exist?
Kinda. While Butcher fictionalizes is, and expands on the truth, there are many tunnels throughout the city, and it's possible to traverse most of the loop underground.
Plus there's good ole Wacker drive...
Re: The Raising of Chicago
#44Anyone know why Venice, Italy hasn't undertaken a similar plan?
Venice is built largely on wood pylons. They are in many cases over a thousand years old.
Re: The Raising of Chicago
#45North American cities used to be enormously ambitious (see also, for example, Boston's Back Bay). Contrast the fear, trepidation and status-quo obstructionism that characterizes municipal affairs today.
Here's a gif of the land reclaimed by Boston over time: http://wp.streetwise.co/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/filling_i... Can you imagine anything of this scale happening today?
Today's Boston can't even build a traffic tunnel. The Big Dig was a disaster-- took decades, costs billions more than planned, and was so shoddy the finished roof fell and killed someone. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Dig
Re: The Raising of Chicago
#46North American cities used to be enormously ambitious (see also, for example, Boston's Back Bay). Contrast the fear, trepidation and status-quo obstructionism that characterizes municipal affairs today.
You build infrastructure when you expect to grow, because that's when infrastructure creates the most value. Chicago during the late 19th and early 20th century wast he fastest growing city in the world, and was becoming wealthy from its central location in transcontinental trade. Today, nearly all traditional American cities are on the tail end of a long decline (save a small handful, like New York, San Francisco, a…
Actually most U.S. cities are in a huge rebound...from better policing and the memory of the 1960s riots is fading. Houston is our new Chicago.
Re: The Raising of Chicago
#47This practice was not unique to the City of Chicago.
The city of Naples was rebuilt at great expense after the a terrible cholera epidemic in 1884 carried off a large number of victims. In response the government funded major effort to raise the city's streets as proscribed by the then current Miasmatic Theory of Disease. The thinking was along of the lines of low lying 'bad air' caused illnesses and thus the raising of the city's infrastructure would improve the general health.
Details: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miasma_theory_of_disease
Re: The Raising of Chicago
#48North American cities used to be enormously ambitious (see also, for example, Boston's Back Bay). Contrast the fear, trepidation and status-quo obstructionism that characterizes municipal affairs today.
My impression is that project overages have scared cities quite a bit. To use your Boston example, the Big Dig certainly has scared many other municipalities thinking of something like that. The Denver Airport fiasco most certainly scared away people from building new airports for decades. Moving into speculation... I believe that society values lives a lot more. It would be very hard to cost effectively build anothe…
Re: The Raising of Chicago
#49North American cities used to be enormously ambitious (see also, for example, Boston's Back Bay). Contrast the fear, trepidation and status-quo obstructionism that characterizes municipal affairs today.
You can take a cynical view of it if you want to, but you also have to remember the economic aspects in play. At the time the US was experiencing unprecedented growth. There was abundant amount of capital to throw around. That just isn't the case today. Contrast that to Southern China. Lots of insanely ambitious city projects, driven once again by tons of growth.
It's not about abundant capital - it's actually easier for American cities to leverage the bond market to raise capital now than it was in the 19th century. The bigger issue is labor and regulation. The people working to raise Chicago were frequently immigrants, either from other countries or from farms, working long hours, with little pay, and with questionable safety standards. Thanks to regulation and labor organization, workers on civil engineering projects are much less likely to fall off a building or have one collapse on them, and can afford to live much more comfortably. But that means it's much more expensive and difficult to undertake a large project.
Same goes for regulation. Notice that the whole reason Chicago needed to be raised was so they could drain run-off. So where do they drain it into? The Chicago River and Lake Michigan, which became toxic cesspools until very recently. And those shop owners didn't have much of a say while they were hoisted into the air. Regulation and democratic involvement are really annoying when you want a large capital project to go through, but they're really important to you when that large capital project is something that's being done to you.
Re: The Raising of Chicago
#50Chicago 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; civi…
It wasn't just infrastructure, it's in the attitude of the city. Someone once told me "in New York they build skyscrapers because they have to, in Chicago they build skyscrapers because they can."