In the drizzle of Easter Sunday morning, Chicagoans Robert and Gayle Hoppe silently watched the activity unfold around the Kinzie Street bridge, where two tunnel shafts, some heavy construction equipment and a few toiling workers constituted the only visible elements of the Great Chicago Flood.
Manholes never attracted such attention.
For a week, a steady stream of city residents, suburbanites and even out- of-town tourists has come to gawk at the place where the river leaked.
In the way that an earlier generation surely checked out the site of Mrs. O`Leary`s barn, they have meandered by in twos and threes and sometimes larger groups just so that one day they`ll be able to say that they were there.
The problem this time for spectators, of course, is that there really isn`t that much to see. The real action is underground, with the surface view about as exciting as a highway construction site. An occasional glimpse of a diver, or perhaps of Mayor Richard Daley, is the most that most have seen.
”I just came down to see what was going on, but you can`t see much,”
said a disappointed James Kleichs, 27, of the city`s Edgewater neighborhood, as he stood on tiptoe from the side steps of the East Bank Club looking at the construction site below.
”I think I saw a diver, but I didn`t see him go down into the tunnel.”
About midnight Thursday, with temperatures in the upper 30s, Bill Juarez made some friends spend more than half an hour at the site as he detailed his own idea for fixing the leak-it involved hot plastic-while struggling to get a good view.
”I`m here because I`m interested,” said the 27-year-old Juarez, a used- car sales manager from Chicago. ”I`ve been wanting to come here since it happened.”
Charles Sandler, 62, a public relations executive who lives on the Northwest Side, couldn`t see anything, but like all good tourists, he took photographs-not only of the Kinzie Street bridge and diving shafts, but of City Hall, where signs proclaimed the building closed and a City Council meeting postponed.
”It`s an historic event,” Sandler pointed out. ”They`ll probably add another star to the Chicago flag.
”There are two stars on the flag, one for the fire and one for the Ft. Dearborn massacre,” he continued. ”The other two stars are for the world`s fairs. Most of the stars are for disasters, and this is certainly going to be a memorable one.”
Scott Mayer, 36, and Richard Lange, 41, both elementary school teachers in Prospect Heights, said they planned to incorporate the flood into their lesson plans.
”This will definitely add to the history of Chicago,” said Mayer, who teaches gifted students in grades 3 through 5. ”There`s been a Great Fire, a great snowstorm and now a flood.”
Lange, who teaches first grade, said his students already have diagrams of the tunnel system as part of a map lesson.
Not everyone showed as much interest, however.
Throughout the week, members of the healthy set at the East Bank Club flowed in and out of the facility, hardly paying attention to the loud noise of generators and the construction work going on less then 100 feet from the club`s entrance.
”I`ve been here every day,” said Robert Jaffee, 35, a trader who works out of his home. ”It`s interesting, but there`s not much to see,” as he rushed into the club for his workout.
”Simply put, it`s a disaster,” said Art Sheck, owner of a printing firm, as he left the club Friday afternoon, complaining that because many of his customers are located in the Loop, ”what work we have done we`ve had to hand deliver.”
But the flood that has attracted so much attention locally has had virtually no effect on tourism, according to travel agents around the nation. ”The impact of the Chicago flood has been zero,” said Richard Copland, who operates Hillside Travel, with seven offices in New York City.
”Thank God, from a travel point of view and money, I`ve not heard of a single person changing their travel plans, and I`m pretty well plugged in,”
he said.
On Sunday, Bob Danon and his 10-year-old daughter Katie had to come only as far as from the Edgewater neighborhood. Katie had numerous questions about the flood, Danon explained, and he thought it would be easier to explain things to her with a first-hand look.
”It`s neato,” Katie exclaimed, before realizing that maybe that wasn`t the proper way to describe a disaster of such proportions. ”It`s bad,” she said, correcting herself, ”but it`s interesting.”
Eric Brod drove in from Aurora to take photographs for a friend who lives in Cleveland.
”This is going to be history,” he proclaimed. Besides, he added,
”What else is there to do on Easter morning, besides go to church?”
