The Chicago River, cleaner than it’s been in more than a century, is back. And it’s about to challenge Chicago’s lakefront and Loop for the heart and soul of the city.
Over the next two decades, a new river will be created-a major new focal point of city life. Thousands of people will move to new homes on its banks. Hundreds of stores and businesses will open on land along the water, now empty or underused.
Chicagoans will go to the river’s edge. They’ll sit under shade trees on its banks and see fat goldfish stare back from just below the water’s surface. They’ll watch the play of light on the water. And they’ll listen to the quiet.
Still, major questions remain. Decisions being made now and over the next two decades will determine the nature of the river for the next century. And the central one is: Whose river will this new Chicago River be?
For the river to reach its full potential as an embodiment and symbol of Chicago, it will have to belong and be open to all Chicagoans. But pressure is growing to wall off sections of the riverbank for the private pleasure of the affluent owners of new town homes and condominiums.
Also at issue is whether public officials will be able to take advantage of a golden opportunity to establish large new parks on the river, and whether they’ll be able to win their battle to save some of the riverfront land for the city’s dwindling supply of factories.
Even so, the transformation of the Chicago River, long dismissed as Lake Michigan’s ugly cousin, is well on its way.
Quietly, almost secretly, the river has made its comeback, thanks in large part to the multibillion-dollar Deep Tunnel project that, starting in 1985, significantly reduced the amount of raw sewage coming into the river.
Up and down the river’s 20-mile length, canoeists are already plying its waters. And motorboats, and Jet Skis, and tour boats, and cargo-laden barges. Fish are being caught, and someday may even be safe enough to eat.
The foul smells are gone. Mountains of scrap metal are being removed and land cleared for lucrative new development.
“This is everybody’s river,” said Laurene von Klan, executive director of Friends of the Chicago River, a civic organization working to improve the river.
Like the lakefront and the Loop, the river is becoming a place that Chicagoans will point to when they want to describe themselves and their city. It will be a place where tourists go, a place where Chicagoans themselves meet.
Yet, many Chicagoans still don’t know where the river is or what it’s like.
They drive over bridges every day without realizing that they’re crossing the river. They work in buildings that have turned their backs on the water.
Even in city parks, they can’t see the river because of the fences and thick growth of trees and bushes that block their view.
They don’t know that the river gets its start under the small Lake County municipality of Park City, outside of Waukegan, 25 miles north of Chicago. They don’t know it has a waterfall, albeit one only about four feet high.
They don’t know that, on a summer afternoon, they can stand on the shore almost anywhere along the river and watch fish leap out of the water-and forget that they are in one of the world’s largest cities.
The river is the reason Chicago is. More than a century ago, a prairie metropolis arose on its banks because of the link the river provided between Lake Michigan and the Mississippi River.
Yet, strangely, it is as if the river appeared only yesterday in the center of the city, sinuously threading its way 20 miles through the grid of streets, through the North Side, through the South Side, gracing the steel-and-concrete cityscape with its humble majesty.
If the lake is power, the river is persistence. “It never takes a breath,” said geographer David Solzman of the University of Illinois at Chicago. Both are revelations of nature, and both evoke responses deep in the human psyche. Yet, while the lake was touted for more than a century, the river was ignored.
Indeed, polluted by industrial wastes and employed literally as a sewer-its current was even reversed a century ago so sewage wouldn’t go into the lake-the river was long the city’s embarrassment.
Now, suddenly cleaner-although not completely pure-the river has been discovered like a treasure long buried in a field.
Neighborhoods that shunned the waterway in its bad old days proudly identify with it today: River North and River West. And so attractive has the river become that it’s now a major selling point for new housing.
Consider the $40 million of single-family homes and condominiums being built along the North Branch just north of Foster Avenue. It’s called River’s Edge. And the same name has been bestowed on the 60-unit residential complex that is planned for a former office building site at Diversey Avenue.
In addition to cleaner water, another attraction of the new Chicago River is its proximity to the wealthy, gentrified neighborhoods of the North Side (Lincoln Park, Lake View and the Gold Coast) and to the increasingly affluent communities rising up around the Loop (Dearborn Park and River West).
Any available land in these areas is being targeted for redevelopment, especially large single-owner parcels. And those are the sort of parcels that are frequently found at the river’s edge, not only up the North Branch but down the South Branch as well.
As factories have fled the city, the riverbank has become lined with empty spaces and underused buildings, amid industries that remain strong and vital. It is a redevelopment opportunity that would be prized, even if the river weren’t there.
Whose river?
“You have to be a dreamer about these things,” said Mayor Richard M. Daley, the river’s strongest booster.
“I remember another mayor 20-some years ago said we’re going to be fishing in the river. And now you’ve got everybody talking about the river being cleaner and having more and more fish. My father always believed in the river.”
Daley’s vision is to link up the city’s two great natural resources: the river and the lake. To complement the lakefront parks, he envisions a continuous walkway-a riverwalk-at the water’s edge through the Loop and up and down the North and South Branches that “people can use for fishing, relaxing, bike riding, jogging and all that.”
Yet, even with the mayor’s dreams and clout behind such plans, key questions concerning the new Chicago River remain to be answered.
“There really is a turning point coming, especially on the North Branch where there is a lot of development pressure and where we’re seeing more and more requests to privatize the river,” said Christine Slattery, a top planner in the city’s Department of Planning and Development.
“We meet virtually every week with people who want to develop on the North Branch.”
That gentrification effort hasn’t spread yet to the portion of the South Branch that’s outside the downtown area. But it’s only a matter of time, according to Gerald Adelman of the Open Lands Project, a civic group working for more public open space.
“I see some of the greatest opportunities to shape the character of the river on the South Branch,” Adelman said. “You’re talking about a clean slate when you’re talking about the South Branch. You’re talking about vacant land.”
But how much of such development will be open to the public? And how much will be the private preserve of the affluent?
Developers of large projects along the river need city approval, so city planners use the negotiations as a means of persuading owners to set aside the river’s edge for the Daley-envisioned riverwalk.
“We try to argue the benefit we’re giving them by giving them the right to develop along the river,” Slattery said. “The river is something they didn’t pay for.”
But, in seeking such concessions, the city is on shaky legal ground. And, increasingly, developers want to wall off new residential complexes from river edge intrusion so they can offer home buyers private access to the waterway.
To strengthen its hand, the city, in conjunction with private and public agencies, is putting the finishing touches on two much-needed, comprehensive plans for future use of the river and its banks.
Such efforts, however, are sharply undercut by Chicago’s system of zoning, which gives individual aldermen virtual totalitarian control over the classification of land in their wards. It is a system that has been frequently abused in the past, and it fails to recognize the river’s citywide importance.
Also of concern is the lack of effort by public agencies, particularly the Cook County Forest Preserve District, to buy empty or underused parcels along the water’s edge for new parks that could be linked by Daley’s riverwalk.
There is only a limited amount of land along the river in Chicago, and most of it is in private hands. Once land is bought for a new residential, commercial or industrial use, it won’t become available again for redevelopment for another century or more, if ever.
