Raising of Chicago

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During the 1850s and 1860s engineers carried out a piecemeal raising of the level of Central Chicago. Streets, sidewalks and buildings were either built up or else physically raised up on jacks. This work was paid for both out of the public purse, and by private property owners.

1858 advertisement for building raising services (contains typos).
1858 advertisement for building raising services (contains typos).

Contents

[edit] Background

The City of Chicago scarcely rises above Lake Michigan, upon the shore of which it stands, and so for many years during the Nineteenth Century there could be little or no naturally occuring drainage at the city surface. Standing water festered and caused living conditions to be unpleasant, or much worse. Epidemics including Typhoid fever and Dysentery blighted the city six years in a row culminating in the 1854 outbreak of Cholera that killed six percent of the city’s population. Sanitary conditions were in no small measure blamed for these deadly outbreaks.

In 1855 engineers headed by Chicago’s newly employed Chief Engineer, Ellis S. Chesbrough, were commissioned to examine and solve the crisis; their solution was to install a sewerage system several feet above ground level. And in the event, there turned out to be no option other than to then raise the rest of the city above the level of the sewerage drains.

[edit] Earliest Raising of a Brick Building

In January of 1858, the first masonry building in Chicago to be thus raised—a four storey, seventy feet long, seven hundred and fifty ton brick structure situated at the northeast corner of Randolph Street and Dearborn Street—was lifted on two hundred jackscrews to its new grade, which was more than six feet above the old one, “without the slightest injury to the building.”[1] It was the first of more than fifty comparably large masonry buildings to be raised that year.[2] The engineer in charge was a Bostonian Mr James Brown who went on to partner with longtime Chicago engineer James Hollingsworth; Brown and Hollingsworth became the first and, it seems, most prolific building raising partnership in the city.

[edit] The Row on Lake Street

With experience, engineers’ confidence grew, and with it, the size of their projects. The fall of 1858 saw the first raising of a brick block more than one hundred feet long;[3] in the late spring of 1859, another one twice as long again went went up five feet.[4] By 1860 confidence was sufficiently high that engineers took on one of the most impressive locations in the city and hoisted it up complete and in one go. They lifted half a city block on Lake Street, between Clark Street and LaSalle Street; a solid masonry row of shops, offices, printeries, etc., three hundred and twenty feet long, comprising marble and brick buildings, some four storeys high, some five, having a footprint taking up almost an acre of space, and an estimated all in weight including hanging sidewalks of thirty five thousand tons. And the businesses that operated there were not closed down for the lifting; as the buildings were being raised, people came, went, shopped and worked in them as if nothing out of the ordinary was happening. In five days the entire assembly teeming and bustling with the common transactions of everyday city life was elevated four feet and eight inches clear in the air by a team consisting of six hundred men using six thousand jackscrews, ready for new foundation walls to be built underneath. The spectacle drew crowds of thousands, who were on the final day permitted to walk at the old ground level, among the jacks.[5] [6] [7] [8]

[edit] The Tremont House

The 1861 raising of the Tremont House hotel on the southeast corner of Lake Street and Dearborn Street was extensively documented in the Chicago Tribune. An old (by Chicago standards) hotel, the Tremont House was one of the city’s proudest buildings, a brick built behemoth six storeys high with a footprint over an acre large. Once again business as usual was maintained as the vast hotel parted from the ground it was standing on, and some of the guests staying there at the time—among whose number were several VIPs and a US Senator—were actually completely oblivious to the feat, as the five hundred men operating their five thousand jackscrews worked under covered trenches. One patron was puzzled to note that the front steps leading from the street into the hotel were becoming steeper every day, and that when he checked out, the windows were three or four feet above his head, whereas before they had been at eye level. This huge hotel, which until just the previous year had been the tallest building in Chicago, was in fact raised fully six feet without a hitch.[9] [10] [11] [12] [13] [14]

[edit] The Robbins Building

One notably difficult lift was that of the Robbins Building, an iron building one hundred and fifty feet long, eighty feet wide and five storeys high, located at the corner of South Water Street and Wells Street. This was a very heavy building; its ornate iron frame, its twelve inch thick masonry wall filling, and its “floors filled with heavy goods” made for a weight estimated at twenty seven thousand tons, a large load to raise over a relatively small area, not that that was going to stop the engineers tacking on two hundred and thirty feet of stone sidewalk and lifting that up too. Hollingsworth and Coughlin took the contract, and elevated the complete mass of iron and masonry in 1865 just short of two and a half feet, “without the slightest crack or damage.”[15] [16] [17] [18] [19]

[edit] Hydraulic Raising of the Franklin House

There is evidence in primary document sources that at least one building in Chicago, the Franklin House on Franklin Street, was raised hydraulically by the engineer John C. Lane,[20] of the Lane and Stratton partnership; these gentlemen had apparantly been using this method of lifting buildings in San Francisco since 1853.[21]

[edit] Buildings Relocated

Timber buildings in the centre of Chicago were often enough considered unworthy of being raised to grade. The practice of putting these multi-storey wooden frame buildings, complete, intact and furnished, on rollers and moving them to other locations altogether—usually to the suburbs—was so common as to be considered nothing more than routine traffic. Traveller David Macrae wrote incredulously, “Never a day passed during my stay in the city that I did not meet one or more houses shifting their quarters. One day I met nine. Going out Great Madison Street in the horse cars we had to stop twice to let houses get across.”[22] As discussed above, business did not suffer; shop owners would keep their shops open, even as people had to climb in through a moving front door. Entire rows of wooden buildings were also moved en bloc and relocated in order to open up prime city centre spots for wealthy real estate dealers to build nice new masonry blocks at the new grade.[23] [24] [25] [26] And in 1866 a two and a half storey brick building was moved from Madison Street to Monroe Street.[27]

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ Chicago Daily Tribune, January 26th, 1858.[1]
  2. ^ Chicago Daily Press and Tribune, January 1st, 1859.[2]
  3. ^ Chicago Daily Press and Tribune, October 4th, 1858.[3]
  4. ^ The Press and Tribune (Chicago), May 5th, 1859.[4]
  5. ^ The Press and Tribune (Chicago), March 9th, 1860.[5]
  6. ^ The Press and Tribune (Chicago), March 26th, 1860.[6]
  7. ^ The Press and Tribune (Chicago), March 29th, 1860.[7]
  8. ^ The Press and Tribune (Chicago), April 2nd, 1860.[8]
  9. ^ Chicago Daily Tribune, January 22nd, 1861.[9]
  10. ^ Chicago Daily Tribune, January 24th, 1861.[10]
  11. ^ Chicago Daily Tribune, February 26th, 1861.[11]
  12. ^ Chicago Daily Tribune, February 27th, 1861.[12]
  13. ^ Chicago Daily Tribune, March 15th, 1861.[13]
  14. ^ David Macrae, The Americans at Home: Pen-and-Ink Sketches of American Men, Manners and Institutions, Volume Two (of two), Edmonston & Douglas, 1870, pages 190-193, and reprinted by Lost Cause Press, Louisville, 1964.[14]
  15. ^ Chicago Tribune, October 31st, 1865.[15]
  16. ^ Chicago Tribune, November 14th, 1865.[16]
  17. ^ Chicago Tribune, November 17th, 1865.[17]
  18. ^ Chicago Tribune, November 20th, 1865.[18]
  19. ^ The Times (London), December 12th, 1865.[19]
  20. ^ The Press and Tribune (Chicago), April 30th, 1860.[20]
  21. ^ The Press and Tribune (Chicago), July 14th, 1859.[21]
  22. ^ David Macrae, The Americans at Home: Pen-and-Ink Sketches of American Men, Manners and Institutions, Volume Two (of two), Edmonston & Douglas, 1870, pages 190-193, and reprinted by Lost Cause Press, Louisville, 1964.[22]
  23. ^ Chicago Daily Tribune, April 18th, 1856.[23]
  24. ^ Chicago Daily Press and Tribune, December 20th, 1858.[24]
  25. ^ Chicago Daily Press and Tribune, March 9th, 1860.[25]
  26. ^ The Press and Tribune (Chicago), April 12th, 1860.[26]
  27. ^ Chicago Tribune, August 9th, 1866.[27]

[edit] External links