As the Mercury cruise boat pulled away from the dock in the foggy rain and plodded up the steel and glass canyon that flanks the Chicago River, University of Illinois geographer David Solzman began to turn back the clock: There in the mist, across the street from the terra cotta mountain we call the Wrigley Building, Jean Baptiste Point Du Sable`s rude cabin once stood. He was Chicago`s first permanent resident and subsisted by trading in furs between the Potawatomi Indians and the British in Canada.
And the south end of the Michigan Avenue Bridge rests on the site of Ft. Dearborn. It was built to protect the obscure Portage Chicagou, the only place where a canoe could be dragged easily between the tributaries of the Mississippi River and the Great Lakes.
In an instant, Solzman turned the clock forward several decades. Du Sable`s cabin became Cyrus McCormick`s reaper factory. That was one of the machines that tamed the prairie and turned agriculture into an industry.
The river, Solzman told the boatload of curious who had paid the University of Chicago for an expertly guided tour of Chicago`s port and canals, was once lined with masted schooners loading grain for Europe and unloading lumber from Michigan. Sidewheeled steamboats choked the river, carrying immigrants to a new life on the prairie.
For a few hours on July 24, 1915, the Chicago River was choked with human bodies. The cruise ship Eastland overturned, drowning 835 in what remains as the worst disaster in Great Lakes history.
These days, most of the bodies on the Chicago River look healthy as they lounge on the pleasure boats that crowd the stream in warm weather. Maritime commerce, the industry around which Chicago was built, has faded, taking with it the promise of the Port of Chicago.
Recreation is the focus now, Solzman noted as he directed the cruise through the locks into the lake and past Navy Pier, abandoned by everything but cruise boats. ”The lock is too small for the salties,” he said in explaining why there are no ocean freighters tied up along the Chicago River. Twelve miles and 50 years south, the boat passed an old lighthouse into the mouth of the Calumet River, Chicago`s existing port.
It was a different scene. The skeletons of abandoned steel mills and rusting foundries formed the backdrop, and towboats pushed barges up and down the river. The only big ship there was a Russian freighter tied up at Iroquois Landing. Few American flags were flying on ships on the Calumet River.
The dock to which the Russian ship was tied represented more than a century of the history of Chicago`s port and possibly its last gasp. The Calumet River gradually replaced the Chicago River as the city`s principal port after the 1880s, when the steel industry moved to the South Side. Downtown Chicago became a commercial center, its land too expensive to be used for factories. It became home to the grain exchanges, and the elevators that had made Chicago the greatest grain port in the world, even before the Civil War, also moved south to Calumet.
”The center of the city has gotten into the post-industrial age and become a commercial center,” said Solzman. ”Communications has been substituted for transportation.” The grain in the downtown markets moves on slips of paper or electronically.
Long before that happened, the city invested mightily in its new port. A canal (the Calumet-Sag Channel) was dug inland to connect the new port with the Mississippi River tributaries; Lake Calumet was dredged to handle ships in anticipation of the opening of the St. Lawrence Seaway in 1959 and in the late 1970s Iroquois Landing was built to handle a revolutionary method of moving freight that was sweeping the maritime industry-containerization, the shipment of goods in railcar-sized containers instead of in bulk. ”The industry went to containerization because it reduced pilferage and damage,” said Al Ames, regional director of the U.S. Maritime Administration, or MarAd, the federal agency that promotes shipping. ”Containerization was a neat solution.”
But what happened at Iroquois Landing in the 12 years since it was built was not on anybody`s agenda. When the Russian freighter Novopolotsk docked there in July it carried a partial load of 2,239 tons of British steel, not containers.
The newest container ships had grown too big for the Seaway, and the railroads had captured most of the rest of the business.
It wasn`t the first time that shifting trade patterns had come to the Port of Chicago. Chicago was blessed by geography, the envy of every other inland port in the nation, and had profited mightily by taking advantage of the fact that it was the place in North America where the Atlantic Ocean and Gulf of Mexico came the closest.
”Our strength is our location,” said Tony Ianello, executive director of the Illinois International Port District, the government agency that owns Iroquois Landing. ”It always has been.”
There is myth that has taken on the force of history that Chicago was a creation of the railroads. It wasn`t. They came later.
In the 1820s, the east-west fur traffic that had sustained a small trading post around Ft. Dearborn was dying, possibly a victim of overhunting. The almost fatal blow came when the government closed the fort.
In those days the booming cities were on the rivers, places such as Pittsburgh, Cincinnati and St. Louis, where chugging sidewheeled steamboats picked up the produce of the interior to haul south to New Orleans. Chicago was an occasional port of call for lake schooners or sloops, which couldn`t get into the Chicago River because a sandbar blocked its mouth. The crews had to unload cargo by hand onto small boats that could clear the bar.
The problem was that Chicago, which in the next 30 years was to develop into one of the nation`s busiest ports, didn`t have a harbor.
The construction of two canals changed everything. De Witt Clinton, the persistent governor of New York, persuaded his legislature to find money for a canal linking the Hudson River with the Great Lakes at Buffalo, and the new State of Illinois talked Congress into giving it a land grant to build the Illinois-Michigan Canal between the Chicago and Illinois rivers.
The Erie and I-M weren`t much by modern standards. They were narrow, shallow canals on which boats were slowly pulled by horses or manpower, but they had an enormous effect on America. Immigrants poured west and mountains of grain flowed east. Just the planning of the I-M Canal with its eastern terminus at the Chicago trading post caused wild land speculation and created a town that didn`t stop booming for more than 70 years. The canal extended Chicago`s reach into territory formerly dominated by St. Louis.
Most important, the canals caused a major shift in the nation`s transportation patterns. New York and its western outpost of Chicago became a rival of New Orleans and its northern outpost of St. Louis.
When the railroad building boom came in the late 1840s and 1850s, investors on the East Coast and in Europe bet on Chicago, extending its reach even farther into the Mississippi Valley. The final blow to New Orleans and St. Louis was the Civil War, which closed the Mississippi to traffic for several years.
The railroads hauled the harvest to Chicago, where it was loaded onto ships for New York. Pork processing moved from Cincinnati to Chicago to be closer to the least expensive transportation route. Lumber harvested in Michigan and Wisconsin and intended to build all those little houses poured through Chicago, as did settlers and the manufactured goods they would need to tame the prairie.
When iron ore was discovered along Lake Superior, it was sent by ships to the new mills being built in Chicago. Coal to heat houses and smelt steel came by ship and train.
Chicago invested substantially in its port. It took the city nearly 30 years to conquer the sandbar that blocked the mouth of the Chicago River. The Sanitary and Ship Canal was dug in the 1890s to replace the I-M and prevent sewage from polluting the lake. Illinois built locks and dams on the Illinois River to make it navigable all year to Chicago, and the city in 1916 built Navy Pier to handle modern steel ships that had replaced the schooners.
But that was a white elephant. The port had moved south to Calumet, and Chicago, with its Burnham Plan, had decided to develop the downtown lakefront for recreational uses.
By the 1950s, however, trade patterns were again shifting.
When the U.S. and Canada in the 1950s decided to build the St. Lawrence Seaway to open the Great Lakes to international shipping, Chicago spent $25 million to dig a deep water port in shallow Lake Calumet and create a port district.
But after an initial spurt of traffic, the seaway failed to live up to Chicago`s expectations. Most of the grain traffic that Chicago had monopolized shifted to barges down the Mississippi, there were early indications that the steel industry was in trouble and the railroads were aggressively capturing new container traffic to East and West Coast ports.
Traffic at the Port of Chicago had declined from a post-seaway high of 48.3 million tons in 1970 to 36.1 million tons in 1977, the year before the decision was made to proceed with Iroquois Landing, according to data provided by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the official scorekeeper for America`s waterways.
The port district, unable even to repay its original bonds to build Lake Calumet, borrowed $15 million from the state to build Iroquois Landing.
But traffic at the port has continued to plunge. Tonnage on the Calumet River in 1990 was only 8.9 million tons-less than a third of what it was in 1970. Lake Calumet added another 1.3 million tons.
The port district has struggled with a declining American maritime industry, limited powers, lack of money, competition from an increasingly aggressive Port of Milwaukee, periodic charges of corruption, a succession of apathetic city administrations and most recently attempts by Mayor Richard Daley to give away port land for everything from a third airport to a catalog warehouse.
”Chicago is a big city and doesn`t care about its port,” said one maritime official.
In 1974, for the first time, river barge traffic at the Port of Chicago exceeded traffic carried in deep-draft lake ships. By 1988, the last year for which comparative data from the Illinois Department of Transportation is available, almost three tons were being hauled by barge for every ton handled by ships. New Orleans once again had become the Midwest`s principal outlet to the ocean.
MarAd officials are now talking about a new trade pattern from Latin America north along the Gulf Coast to New Orleans, then up the Mississippi. Chicago would have been its northern terminus, except that Milwaukee in September received permission from the U.S. Coast Guard for a river barge route up the lake from Chicago.
”Chicago has a great natural advantage. You would think a lot of agricultural products would move through here, but not anymore. The rivers are more competitive,” said John R. Dobrzynski, manager of transportation for the Board of Trade. Chicago is also hurt by the stranglehold the railroads have on the port. ”Information gathered from various grain merchants shows that switching charges for placement or pickup of loaded rail cars at elevators . . . are prohibitive within the port district. Charges vary from 10 cents per one-hundred weight to as high as $344 per car,” Dobrzynski said in a letter to federal officials this year.
Some maritime officials think that coal may become a major commodity in Chicago, especially as tightening air pollution restrictions worldwide cause an increased demand for low-sulphur coal from Montana and Wyoming, but that has not happened.
Chicago`s underlying problem, in the opinion of a number of maritime officials, is that it has allowed its port to deteriorate. The port district, which operates on a shoestring budget without even a marketing department, has little control over what happens on its own property. By law, it owns Iroquois Landing and the Lake Calumet facilities, plus 1,200 undeveloped acres, but must lease them out to private operators.
The bulk of the rest of the facilities along the Calumet River are privately owned. Port district facilities account for only 9 percent of the cargo in the Chicago area, said John J. Gavin Jr., a consultant hired to handle public relations. Chicago was once a major shipbuilding center, but George Steinbrenner`s American Shipbuilding and Construction drydock and yard has been closed for nearly a decade, and the port district is powerless to force redevelopment of the site.
The district doesn`t control the turning basin at the mouth of the Chicago River, which the city`s Park District wants to turn into a
recreational facility. ”That would choke off a connection to the lake,” said MarAd`s Ames. ”A million tons a year of barge traffic pass through the locks into the lake and the basin is important to commerce.”
The Chicago River and its outlet to the lake could become increasingly important if, as federal officials hope, significant barge traffic develops from Latin America and river barges are allowed onto Lake Michigan to other ports.
On the other hand, the city-owned Port of Milwaukee in recent years has spent millions of dollars upgrading its piers to capture container traffic and what is called roll-on, roll-off, or RoRo, in which vehicles in shipment, such as tractors imported from Russia and used cars being sent to Poland, can be driven off and on specially designed ships.
Such traffic doesn`t produce the huge tonnages that bulk cargos like iron ore used to, but it is extremely profitable. ”We deliberately diversified . . . to avoid the feast or famine problem that hurts ports that rely on single commodities,” said Kenneth J. Szallai, director of the Port of Milwaukee.
That port`s plan is to attract a diversity of high-value traffic, mostly in manufactured goods.
Milwaukee also has a five-man marketing staff to attract traffic. Chicago has none.
”That guy from Milwaukee (Szallai) is very aggressive,” said Gavin.
”He`s been out for our lunch for some time.”
