Like a distant planet or a hidden continent, the Chicago River is a world of its own, complex and often contradictory.
It is cleaner than it has been since the early days of the village called Chicago, but it still isn’t completely free of sewage.
Fish are abundant, but not as abundant as they might be. Raccoon tracks cover the mud along some of its banks, and exotic birds find safe haven in its foliage. But its layers of sediment, particularly near the Loop, are loaded with toxins.
There are stretches of the river-where the water is dirtiest-that teem with microscopic bacteria, guaranteed to churn your stomach. And there are sections-the cleanest-so untainted that some far-from-crazy Chicagoans are even planning to swim in them.
“It’s watching this thing heal that’s so captivating to people,” said Laurene von Klan, executive director of the Friends of the Chicago River, a civic group working to improve the waterway.
The healing of the Chicago River-the improvement in its water quality, the reduction in its pollution, the return of its fish-has been the key factor in the waterway’s resurgence.
But it is far from pollution-free, and there is much that has to be accomplished before it can reach its full potential as a center of the city’s life, on a par with the Loop and the lakefront.
“It’s basic human nature: People expect a river to be a living thing. That’s what makes them feel good,” said Von Klan. “But we don’t want people to think, `Oh, the river’s clean. It’s a done deal.’ “
Nearly $2.5 billion has already been spent or committed to improve the water quality of the Chicago and its sister rivers, the Des Plaines and Calumet, through the Deep Tunnel project. And the effects already are significant.
Yet, that work won’t be completed for another two decades.
And there’s still a final phase of tunnels and reservoirs, expected to cost about $1.2 billion and take many more years, that will be needed before the water is really clean. And no one knows now where that money’s going to come from.
Although Mayor Richard M. Daley and several active civic groups are strong proponents of the river, the steady supply of federal money that has funded the cleanup so far has been drying up.
But Von Klan and other activists are optimistic that, as more Chicagoans get to know the river and use it, the higher it will rise as a local, state and federal priority.
“The more people we can get on the river or next to it-or even to see it-the more advocates we’ll have for the river,” said Wink Hastings of the National Park Service, who is overseeing an extensive study of the waterway and the way Chicagoans think of it.
There are many potential symbols of the new Chicago River: the bass being caught in the inner harbor, just west of the locks to Lake Michigan; the Black-crowned Night Heron skimming along the water’s surface on the North Branch; or the exuberant Jet Skier plowing down the main channel, past the skyscrapers and office workers of the North Loop.
But perhaps the most potent is the beaver couple nicknamed Maude and Claude Beaver by officials at the Apparel Center. The beavers took up residence for as long as three years at the water’s edge at the foot of the 25-story building, which is near the heart of the city’s central business district.
Garon Fyffe was the man brought in to capture and relocate the beavers after they had toppled or trimmed at least 26 trees in a landscaped area next to the Apparel Center. His job notwithstanding, Fyffe said that seeing the beavers there “felt like a blessing. The earth is healing itself before our very eyes.”
Maude and Claude Beaver were proof of how much more hospitable the new Chicago River is to living things.
They also are an example of the natural wonders that are hidden along the river, even downtown, and of what can be found by Chicagoans who go to the waterway with open eyes.
An approachable river
“The river is now becoming a more valuable and approachable resource,” said Lt. Earl Zuelke, commander of the Chicago police marine unit.
The key word is “approachable.”
For more than a century, the human and industrial wastes of a metropolis clogged the Chicago River and drove city residents away from its banks. The water smelled. The fish died. The banks were lined with garbage.
It didn’t matter. The meandering prairie stream had been deepened and widened and straightened and purposely transformed into an open-air sewer. The river was doing its job.
The genesis of the new Chicago River is rooted in the first days of the modern environmental movement, the early 1970s, when city, state and federal officials decided, once and for all, to do something about the sewage in Lake Michigan.
That was a problem that reversing the flow of the Chicago River had been expected to solve nearly a century before. And, for the most part, it had.
But the river could hold only so much sewage and storm water. And, in times of particularly heavy rains-about once or twice a year-it became necessary to re-reverse the river’s flow and send the tainted water out into the lake.
This often required that the city’s beaches be closed, and it threatened to poison the water that Chicago took from the lake for drinking and cooking.
Thus was born the Deep Tunnel project, a massive public works effort with an expected price tag of $3.6 billion. Begun in 1975, the project is aimed at eliminating pollution and flooding along the Chicago, Des Plaines and Calumet Rivers.
It consists of more than 100 miles of underground tunnels and at least three huge reservoirs with enough capacity to hold 41 billion gallons of storm and sewer water, the overflow that would be expected from the worst rain in a 100-year-period. Construction is expected to continue for at least another 20 years and probably longer.
The initial impact of the Deep Tunnel was felt on the Chicago River in 1985, when new tunnels serving much of the waterway’s length went into operation and sharply reduced the flow of sewage.
Instead of once every four days, the overflows into the river occurred on average only once a month. Other overflows-which totaled nearly 34 billion gallons of sewer and storm water in 1994-were captured by the new tunnels and held until they could be treated at one of the district’s plants.
Suddenly, without the routine infusion of new, raw sewage, the water of the Chicago River began to clear and become more hospitable to fish.
The water also was healthier for fish because, as of 1984, the agency now known as the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District had stopped chlorinating its treated water.
The chlorination had been done to reduce the level of fecal coliform bacteria released back into the waterway. But, in the 1970s, federal environmental officials dropped requirements that limited the amount of such bacteria in waters, such as the Chicago River, that weren’t being used for swimming.
The change in the river’s fish population was dramatic.
Sam Dennison, a fish biologist with the district, has been testing the river’s waters for fish since 1975. Lowering electrodes into the river, he stuns nearby fish so they can be captured, counted, weighed and then released back to the water to wake up groggy but otherwise unharmed.
In the 1970s, he never found any fish-not even the otherwise ubiquitous carp and goldfish-on the South Branch of the river at Damen Avenue.
Then, between 1985 and 1989, he was able to collect 60 pounds of fish for every 30 minutes of sampling there. And, by the 1990s, he was taking in 140 pounds per half hour.
The experience was the same at other sections of the river. At the junction of the North and South Branches of the river, just northwest of the Loop, Dennison could only find six species of fish in the 1970s. Today, at least 24 are present there.
While carp and goldfish are still among the most abundant, such sport fish as coho salmon, chinook salmon and largemouth bass have been found in the junction’s waters.
Throughout the Chicago River system, the number of fish that Dennison was able to catch in a half hour quadrupled between the 1970s and the 1990s. And the fish caught in the 1990s weighed more-nearly five times more-than the ones studied in the 1970s.
Dennison’s findings have heartened Mayor Daley, whose father had predicted a quarter century ago when he ran City Hall that, one day, the river would be clean enough for fish to thrive there.
“It’s amazing, the variety of species,” Daley said. “Everybody thinks its only carp or catfish. It’s amazing what can live in the river.”
Swimming in the river?
So, after decades of abandonment, the Chicago River is now teeming with fish. And, if it’s good enough for fish, how soon will it be good enough for humans?
How about next year? That’s what Von Klan wants to do.
“The idea,” she said, “is to promote the improvements to water quality over the last few years and change perceptions that the river is foul and awful.”
Von Klan has begun planning a swimming race to be held in the river next summer.
“We want to elevate the perception of the river as a wonderful, living thing,” Von Klan said. But she added, “Before we do it, we’ll have to be absolutely certain that everything is fine.”
There’s no law against swimming in the river, according to Zuelke of the police marine unit. But he’d look askance at anyone who’d want to do it. “I’d either think they were crazy, or trying to commit suicide, or were careless,” he said.
Many other Chicagoans would agree. They look at the greenish-grayish water of the river and think they’re looking at polluted water. In some places, they’re right. In others, they’re wrong.
It’s a matter of perception. The Chicago River bears no resemblance to the roaring, rushing, refreshing mountain stream that Chicagoans-and most Americans-have come to equate with a clean waterway. So, it looks polluted.
What they don’t know is that a prairie river, like the Chicago, is never going to look like a mountain torrent, especially a prairie river that’s been so modified by human hands. The Chicago’s current isn’t strong enough to cleanse the river of the small specks of dirt, vegetation, insects and whatever that, floating in the water, give it that “dirty” appearance.
Yet, much of the real pollution can’t be seen. And it’s hard to tell where the clean water is.
Von Klan knows. That’s why she wants to hold her swimming competition in the inner harbor, just west of the locks to Lake Michigan.
She knows that all of the water in the inner harbor is from the lake. Ever since the flow of the river was reversed, it has been lake water that’s fed the river, rather than vice versa.
As a result, swimming in the inner harbor would be the same as swimming in the lake and-in terms of water quality-as safe.
But that’s not true of the rest of the Chicago River. No indeed.
Consider this: Among the most abundant fish in the inner harbor are the alewife, the rock bass and the bluegill, all species that thrive in the lake. But, despite the significant improvements in water quality throughout the system, few fish of these species make it down even to the main channel, to say nothing of to the North or South Branches.
The rugged, pollution-hardy carp and goldfish are difficult to find in the inner harbor. But throughout the rest of the river system, they dominate.
These are signs that the inner harbor water is relatively pollution-free, but not the rest of the system.
To be sure, the greater diversity of fish in the river today is a sign that the water is healthier. But, given the cessation of chlorination and the reduction in sewer overflows, there should be even more fish and even more species.
For example, during the 1990s, Dennison has found 35 species in the river, but nine other types that had been detected in small numbers during the previous 15 years haven’t turned up.
“There’s something keeping fish out besides the quality of the water,” said Dennison, the fish biologist.
One part of the explanation may be that, as a channelized stream, the Chicago River lacks the sorts of habitats-such as quiet pools or rushing rapids-needed by some fish species.
Another may be that the river’s sediment, thick with heavy metals from long-ago industrial processes, is toxic to the fish.
And a third may be sewer overflows that still come in, on average, every fourth day in the upper North Branch, where the Deep Tunnel pipelines won’t go on-line for at least two more years.
A river to fish in
Ken Schneider, a veteran Chicago-area fisherman, has been fishing the Chicago River for a decade now. Does he eat what he catches?
“Honestly, no,” Schneider said. “Only the perch I catch in the (inner harbor) basin at the sluice gate. I will not eat any other fish in the river. The perch I know live in the lake most of the time.”
Illinois officials routinely study the fish in Lake Michigan and other bodies of water in the state to determine which might be unhealthy or dangerous to eat. But the Chicago River was so polluted for so long that it has never been studied.
For one thing, many of the fish in the river aren’t sport fish. For example, the most abundant species is the bluntnose minnow, a tiny cousin of the carp that, in the river, averages about one-tenth of an ounce in weight.
Carp is by far the biggest fish in the river by weight, averaging about four pounds. But state advisories warn against eating carp caught in the lake, and the general consensus is that such caution is even more necessary for the carp that dwell in the river.
The problem is that a carp feeds off the river bottom. There, it is likely to ingest organic material from sewer overflows and heavy metals from old factory wastes, which can cause cancer and other health problems in humans.
“Most of the chemicals are persistent. They bio-accumulate in the fatty tissues,” said Joel Cross, a biologist with the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency. “It’s usually a big lump in the (fish’s) belly.”
So, anyone planning to eat a river-caught carp is warned to trim off this excess fat and to cook the fish in such a way that any other fat drips off. But even these precautions wouldn’t protect against other pollutants, such as mercury, that settle in other parts of the fish’s body.
Once the Deep Tunnel segment serving the upper North Branch is completed in 1997, the number of sewage and stormwater overflows into that stretch-and flowing into the rest of the river system-will be reduced to 12 per year.
And, once the first reservoir for the Chicago River system is finished in 2005, the overflows throughout the system will drop to just four per year.
More tunnels and reservoirs will be needed to stop the overflows into the Chicago, Des Plaines and Calumet River, but will cost the Water Reclamation District an estimated $1.2 billion.
Reducing such overflows gives the river a chance to cleanse its bottom of organic pollutants, said Cecil Lue-Hing, the research director for the Reclamation District. But this natural cleansing won’t do anything for the heavy metals that scientists have discovered in the sediment.
“Extreme levels of cadmium, chromium, copper, lead, mercury and zinc were found (in the river’s mud). Elevated levels of iron, nickel and silver were also observed,” wrote Irwin Polls, a district biologist, and a colleague in a 1992 scientific paper.
But the significance of those findings? No one’s sure, according to Polls.
As long as water quality was so poor in the Chicago River and other U.S. waterways, no one paid much heed to the sediment. Now that the water is becoming cleaner, attention is turning to the tainted mud.
It would be possible to clean the river bottom by dredging up the sediment, but where to put it? Because it’s polluted, it’s prohibited from the usual dump sites for dredged mud.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers recently started studying some alternatives, including using the sediment to fill in the little-used, human-made North Branch Canal along the east side of Goose Island.
What’s in the water?
While humans aren’t likely to eat the mud from the Chicago river bottom, they might swallow some water if they fall in from a canoe. And, as the river becomes more popular, they might even be tempted to swim in parts of the waterway not fed directly by lake water.
How unhealthy is that?
Not very, according to Lue-Hing. But it isn’t recommended.
Since the cessation of chlorination in 1984, the levels of fecal coliform microbes in the river are now extremely high just downstream from all of the Reclamation District’s sewage treatment plants, including the one at Touhy Avenue on the North Shore Channel that empties into the Chicago River.
For example, a 1993 study by the district found that there were 134 fecal coliform microbes per 100 milliliters upstream of the Touhy Avenue plant.
That was well below the limit permitted for swimming beaches on the lake: 500 microbes per 100 milliliters.
But, downstream of the plant, the treated water was rife with fecal coliform-with 7,259 microbes found for every 100 milliliters.
Lue-Hing said that such a number, while dramatic, isn’t all that worrisome. For one thing, many of the microbes die off quickly for lack of food. For another, the bugs don’t do much more than prompt a case of diarrhea.
“Fecal coliform is an organism from the gut of warm-blooded animals, including man. We all put it out,” Lue-Hing said. “When they get in your system, they create some toxins, and they release some toxins that change the behavior of your microbiological population-and clear you out.”
But there’s another, more important reason for people to stay out of the river where the bottom can be 20 feet or more below the surface.
“My concern about swimming is not about whether they’ll get sick. It’s whether they’ll drown,” Lue-Hing said.
“The banks are vertical. Once you fall off the bank, you’re in the full depth of the river. You’ll drown unless you’re a strong swimmer.”
Claude and Maude Beaver
Beavers are strong swimmers. And up and down the length of the Chicago River, signs of beaver can be found: trees gnawed of their inner bark; others-amazingly thick-toppled into the water.
There are many trees like that along the water at the foot of the Apparel Center. The wholesale clothing facility, with its own Holiday Inn, is at 350 N. Orleans St., on the north side of the Main Branch of the river, just west of the Merchandise Mart.
It was last May that officials at the building realized that beavers were living at the water’s edge. However, based on signs detected by Garon Fyffe, the expert called in to remove the beavers, the animals had been there as long as three years.
Sharing the park-like river’s edge with two geese and their six new-born goslings, the beavers lived in a lodge on the point of land that sticks farthest into the Main Branch’s junction with the North and South Branches.
There was a cleverly disguised air hole in the dirt near a tree, and two entryways just below the water’s surface.
“It was Claude and Maude Beaver, and they just got lost,” said Joe Balasa, the Apparel Center’s building operations manager. “They were wildlife in the wrong place. You’re talking about animals in the heart of the central business district.”
Fyffe agreed that they needed to be relocated, or they’d eventually strip the site of its trees.
But learning of the beavers’ presence on the site “was almost a mystical experience for me,” Fyffe said.
“Here’s this little sliver of land along the river, surrounded by a city of glass and steel walls. Under those buildings are the bones of the buffaloes and the arrowheads of Indians. This little sliver was all that was left.
“And the beavers had come back.”
Fyffe, a naturalist who operates the A-B-C Humane Wildlife Rescue and Relocation service of Arlington Heights, set traps and came back daily to check on them, often in the hours after midnight when the animals were most active.
“At night, there were diving ducks out there, and fish jumping out of the water,” he recalled. “It was exciting for us to feel the timelessness. It was like paradise there, while the city was sleeping and the wilderness ruled the world. I could almost imagine I was back in time.”
Yet, the new Chicago River, even with the beavers and geese and Black-crowned Night Herons along its banks, is never going to be the original prairie stream.
Nevertheless, just as that stream was the key geographic feature in the creation of Chicago, the newly clean, newly attractive, newly fashionable river is well on its way to again becoming a central focus of life in the city.
Rediscovered, renewed, it will bind Chicago together again as it did in the city’s early years-not so much as a watery highway for commerce this time, but much more as a reminder, amid the concrete and steel of the cityscape, of the beauty, delight and wonder of nature.
