Chicago After Dark: The River That Flows Backwards
We are in Chicago. We did not come to Chicago to see a skyline. We came to see an idea made in steel and water. There are cities that were given a harbour. There are cities that were given a river. And then there is Chicago, which was given a swamp of wild onions called Checagou by the indigenous Miami and Potawatomi tribes , a low portage between two great watersheds, and it decided to make itself the centre of America anyway. It laid rail where there was mud. It raised its streets eight feet out of the muck with jackscrews and kept living in them while . That is the reason you find two levels in downtown .It burned to the ground in 1871 and built the first skyscraper from the ash. It looked at Lake Michigan, its drinking water, being poisoned by its own river, and it did what no city had ever dared. It made the river flow backwards.
O'Hare to the Loop: The Blue Line Welcome
We arrived in Chicago today from O'Hare and we took the Blue Line train straight to our downtown hotel. The train station below the airport is something you do not forget. It is hot with no air conditioning, just huge ceiling fans on a very high ceiling that give no relief at all. The air sits still and heavy and damp. You stand there with your suitcases and you sweat. Then the train comes, loud and shaking, and it does not get better inside. America has such repetitive names for towns, and we watched them roll past on the electronic board : Harlem, California, Western, Damen, Division, places that sound like they belong in three different states but here they are stops on one line.
The Blue Line is not a quiet ride. It shakes you awake and tells you, without any romance, that this city is built on work, on steel, on grind. By the time we got off at Clark and Lake in the Loop, our ears were still ringing .
The Chicago Riverwalk And Architecture Tour
We walked down to the Chicago Riverwalk, a scenic pedestrian path lined with restaurants, bars, public art and kayak rentals. We had the option to take an architecture boat tour to learn about the city's storied skyline, but we chose to simply enjoy a sunset stroll along the water. We found the Riverwalk connects several neighbourhoods and is a lively spot for both residents and visitors, especially during summer evenings. We followed it north, watching kayaks and tour boats pass beneath Marina City, and it brought us straight back to Hotel AC.
8.30 PM: We Board The River
At 8.30 PM we boarded the Shoreline Sightseeing boat, the Cityview, for the 75 minute architecture tour, and we were back at the dock at 9.45 PM. The late night river is a completely different city from the day river. In daylight you see detail. At night you hear it and you feel it.
Chicago has more movable bridges than any other city in the world, 43 of them in the downtown alone, and we heard every one of them. Cars thump over the open metal grating of the State Street Bridge and the Dearborn Street Bridge with a hollow drumming sound. The Clark Street Bridge hums when heavy traffic crosses. The LaSalle Street Bridge rattles. The Wells Street Bridge clangs, the bells ring and the barriers come down with a crash when a sailboat needs to pass. The Franklin Street Bridge groans. And the great Michigan Avenue Bridge, now officially the DuSable Bridge, glows amber and groans under buses.
Even when no bridge is lifting, the river is a corridor of sound. Water slaps the seawall, tour boats call to each other across the water, music drifts from the Riverwalk bars, an elevated L train rumbles overhead on the Loop tracks, and a fireboat hoots somewhere near the lake. The city never goes silent. It just changes frequency.
What The River Shows At Night: Sears and Tribune
From the water at night the skyline performs, and two buildings on the riverfront held us more than all the rest. First, 'Chicago Tribune Tower' at 435 North Michigan Avenue, right where the river turns. We came around the bend and it was there, lit like a lantern. Built in 1925 after Colonel Robert McCormick of the Chicago Tribune announced an international competition for the most beautiful office building in the world, it is pure theatre. The winning architects, Raymond Hood and John Mead Howells, gave him not an office but a Gothic cathedral for newspapers. Indiana limestone carved like lace, flying buttresses, gargoyles, a crown that could belong to a cathedral in Rouen. And then the most eccentric and most Chicago thing about it, embedded into its lower walls are 120 fragments of the world's great buildings, collected by Tribune correspondents. From the boat our guide pointed the spotlight and we saw them, a stone from the Taj Mahal, a piece of the Parthenon, a brick from the Great Wall of China, stones from Westminster Abbey, the Alamo, the Colosseum, the Berlin Wall, even a fragment from the Moon brought back by astronauts. It is a newspaper that tried to literally collect the world and cement it into its walls.
Second, the tower that owns the entire western sky, and we saw it from every single bend of the river. Willis Tower, still Sears Tower to every Chicagoan, and we will always call it Sears Tower because that is what it was when it taught the world how to be tall. Completed in 1973, designed by Bruce Graham and Fazlur Rahman Khan, it is 110 stories, 1,450 feet to the roof, 1,730 feet with its two great antennas that blink red for aircraft over Lake Michigan. It was the tallest building on earth for 25 years. Khan invented the bundled tube system here. Nine square steel tubes of different heights are bundled together and stitched, then they stop at different levels as they rise, so the building steps back and shifts. It weighs 222,500 tons and sways up to three feet in high winds. On this night we did not go up to its Skydeck. We stayed on the water and let it hold the sky down for us.
Around those two anchors, the rest of the cast glittered. The Wrigley Building, 1924, white terracotta. 333 West Wacker Drive, 1983, curved green glass that disappears into the water. Marina City, 1964, twin corn cobs. Merchandise Mart, 1930, once the largest building on earth. Aqua Tower, 2009, Jeanne Gang's liquid tower.
Why The River Flows Backwards
Then the boat turned east toward the mouth and Lake Michigan opened up and we finally understood why this river flows backwards.Originally the Chicago River flowed naturally into Lake Michigan. It was sluggish and swampy. And Chicago used it as an open sewer. By the 1880s Chicago had grown to nearly 800,000. All the sewage, all the waste from the Union Stock Yards went straight into the river, and the river carried it straight into Lake Michigan, which was also Chicago's drinking water. The result was cholera, typhoid, dysentery. In 1885 a storm flushed so much sewage into the lake that the city had to move its water intake cribs two miles out.The city's Sanitary District decided to reverse the river. Between 1892 and 1900, 8,500 men dug the 28 mile Sanitary and Ship Canal from Chicago to Lockport. On 2 January 1900 they cut the final dam. By lowering the water level at Lockport, water now flowed downhill away from the lake. The river reversed, flowing out of Lake Michigan, down the canal, into the Des Plaines, then the Illinois, then the Mississippi.
St Louis sued in Missouri v Illinois in 1906. The Supreme Court allowed the reversal to stay. What we floated on at 8.30 PM is the only river in America that was turned inside out by a city to save itself.
From the hotel, we As we munched the much-publicised Chicago popcorn, that celebrated emblem of the city's culinary identity, we were confronted by an unsettling paradox of urban prosperity and profound deprivation. The city, for all its architectural grandeur and cultural effervescence, bears its tragic share of homelessness. Individuals were observed sleeping in placements never intended for human habitation - beneath bridges, in doorways, and upon pavements.
9.45 PM: The Walk Back - A City That Sleeps Late
We docked at 9.45 PM but the night was not over. We walked back through well lit roads of Chicago, and that is when we saw the other Chicago.
Wacker Drive and Michigan Avenue were still awake, bathed in amber light. Bars were full, not loud and drunken but happy, glasses clinking on patios. Restaurants had spilled onto the pavements, Riverwalk still serving, couples sharing fries, friends laughing. Cyclists rolled past on the river paths, joggers with headphones, a saxophonist playing near State Street, tourists taking long exposures of Sears Tower behind them. Families were still out eating ice cream at 10 PM. This city possibly sleeps late. Or perhaps it does not believe in wasting its light.
Walking there among those happy people in bars and restaurants and on paths, I was reminded of a poem by Zubair Rizvi that seemed written for exactly this kind of night.
The poem in Roman:
(Zindagi Tujh Se Mil kar zamaanaa hua)
zindagi Tujh se mil kar zamaanaa hua,
Aa tujhe Aaj ham maikade le chalein
Raat ke naam honthhon ke saagar likhein
Apani Aankhon me kuchh rat-jage le chalein
kyaa Haseen log hain
in kii Aaraa-ish-e-Khal-o-Khat ke liye
Apani ankhon ke ham Aaiine le chalein
Ajanabi chehare me dost banate nahin
Riishte-naaton ki chaandi barastii nahin
Qurbatein sohabatein jin kii yaad aayengi
Aise kuchh doston ke pate le chalein
Un ki aankhon ne jalate sulagate hue
Manzaron ke siva kuchh bhi dekha nahin
Phuul-o-Khushbu saba zam-zamein le chalein
Zindagi tujh se mil kar zamaana hua
(Zubair Rizvi)
My improved translation:
(Life, it has been an age since I last met you,
Come, let me take you to the tavern tonight.
Let us write the night in goblets upon our lips,
Let us carry a little wakefulness of night in our eyes.
How beautiful are the people around,
To adorn their beauty,
Let us carry mirrors in our own eyes.
Strangers do not turn into friends just like that,
Nor does the silver of kinship just fall from the sky.
Those whose closeness and company will be remembered,
Let us take the addresses of a few such friends tonight.
Those eyes which have seen nothing except
Scenes burning and smouldering,
Let us carry to them flowers, fragrance, morning breeze and some peace of earth.
Life, it has been an age since I met you.)
I carried that thought back with me, through the lit roads, past the bars and the happy faces, with Sears Tower blinking red above me, and I returned to my hotel near the river, the AC Hotel by Marriott, with the sound of bridges still thumping in my ears. New York says look at me. Chicago says come and make, and stay a little late.
(Avtar Mota )
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