Deep underneath a Streeterville street, John Henry Propeck was moving pile after pile of debris and sandy soil to create an underground parking garage for a new 47-story condo building at the corner of Illinois Street and McClurg Court.
Then he scooped up a chunk of metal in the bucket of his backhoe. The next load unearthed a T-shaped bar, then a 40-foot chain. When he pieced the parts together last month, he realized he had discovered a 200-pound boat anchor buried deep beneath Chicago’s streets.
The anchor is a rusty reminder that the solid ground Chicago is built on wasn’t always so solid, and that boats were once moored in what now is the Streeterville neighborhood. Those who pulled the anchor from the earth are even asking whether it could have belonged to Capt. George Streeter, a gun-running hustler who supposedly ran his vessel aground 450 feet from Lake Michigan’s shore in 1886 and decided to stay put, creating the neighborhood that bears his name.
Propeck and a few members of the excavation crew knew none of the history until an acquaintance half-jokingly suggested the anchor could have belonged to Streeter. They fiddled around on the Internet until they found a picture of Streeter standing by his ship, the Reutan, with a similar anchor chained to its prow.
“I think it’s pretty interesting,” said Propeck, who has been a construction worker in Chicago for more than 25 years. It would be difficult to verify that the anchor was Streeter’s, said Libby Mahoney, chief curator of the Chicago Historical Society. Its rusted surface and clunky chain bear no mark other than the number 97.
