There are marks of the raising all over the city, mostly on the north and near north sections of the city. Most recently there was a news story about the rehab of the sidewalks in Logan Square on Milwaukee Ave. Outside of downtown things don't get replaced as quickly they basically had the same cement walkway that had been poured over 100 years ago. So it was tilted and cracked and starting to crumble then someone realized there's about 6 feet of nothing under the sidewalk. It was an area that had been raised and never touched again up until about 2016. When they opened it they found they buildings had a series of cellar doors. So after the city was raised people were storing stuff under the sidewalk.
you can find a lot of information here : forgottenchicago.com/features/uncovering-fc/ I do recall reading that once. I was doing research on the architectural marvel 'Ford City' (Sarcastic grin).
As someone else already said, the stone water tower survived. One slight misconception is that the whole city burned. The fire burned the down town area. The fire also took a long time to spread. How do I know this? My great 2x grandfather used his wagon to help people move their furniture out of the fire zone to his lumber yard in the near north side. The furniture stayed there quite a while as people rebuilt. That same great, great grandfather was a wheel wright who realized that it was going to be a dead end job. The city needed house raisers and movers. There were more jobs than skilled people to fill them. So you could contract to move one block. If you did a good job you could get another block and F. Schippel and Sons was born. The company lasted until the 1970's when my grandfather died. ... Still using the original screw Jack's. The Jack's were a bit different from the one you showed. The screw was about four inches in diameter and about two feet long. It had a ball on the top where a plate that contacted the building was set. Another flat plate about eight inches on a side was screwed on. A pyramid of timbers was built up to the proper hight. A 6x6 with a hair circle cut in one side was placed on top of the pyramid. The screw was put in the cut out and a second 6x6 was put on the other side. The screws were raised in a specific pattern until they reached their maximum height. New pyramid were built in better the existing ones, new screws were placed and the process was repeated. If the building was to be moved then large timbers were slid under the building and it was pulled along by two draft horses with a complicated block and tackle system that was pinned to the road with steel spikes. The building was rolled on 6 inch log rollers. Last part on the ramble. The reason the screws were still used in the 1970's was because hydraulic Jack's would raise a building unevenly and could twist and damage masonry buildings. Computer controlled Jack's have made the hand screws obsolete. I should do a video on this. We still have some of the original equipment used.
When I first traveled to America, I was shocked by the size of the Great Lakes when I flew over it and when I was walking down Michigan Avenue. Lake Michigan is 80.6 times larger than my country.
I have happened to learn of "The Raising of Chicago" through an English exam I took the other day. At the first, I thought it must have been some kind of joke or mistake, but now I understand it was real. So incredible! Thank you for uploading.
Oh my god I live in Chicago! I live in Chicago! I live in Chicago! I know every single place he went to! This the greatest day of my life! Yeahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!!!
Yeah me too a little bit but he said he was working, who knows how many days he was actually staying (maybe not that long) and if you were him would you really want to have to schedule a meet up for any fans who live in Chicago, which is probably already a pretty small number and is reduced far further when you think about how many of them will actually show up.
Jared Clark While I understand the way you feel, I would have been happier if he went to Seattle. Then again, I have a local bias towards Seattle, although Chicago has an infinitely better skyline.
Wow, thanks for the shortcuts! I hammered space twice as fast as possible to move as few frames as possible but it didn't work, so I set the speed to 0.25x and did the same space hammering. With the shortcut: click 1 second backwards and press "." a few times :D
Thanks, I never knew about those frame skipping controls. But that's pretty useless here - I get a spinny loading indicator every time I advance a frame, and it reacts slowly anyway. You'd think that something the RU-vid player does 50 times a second, would be quicker than this to do one at a time...
@Darktemp Thanks for the keyboard hints! I can now make people hop back and forth by typing "," "." "," "." "," "." "," "." "," "." "," "." over and over... ... ... ... and then I look at my watch and realize how much time I've spent making people do GIFfy dances... I don't think my RU-vid experience will ever be the same now... XD
Welcome to the "old northwest" of North America! Glad to have you nearby :) Chicago has always been a practical city, caring more for what it does than what it is, because forms change but the process remains. Your dual-video time travel segment at the end pretty much bears this out, and thank you so much for sharing these images and inspirations.
You should visit Seattle. They raised our streets too, but instead of raising the buildings, they just made doors on the second floors and renumbered the floors. The old first floors became basements where bars opened (to hide from the prohibition).
Life-long Chicagoan and mathematician. There are neighborhoods in the near south-west side where the houses stayed at the lower level, just where they were, and the street was raised next to them. They now usually have stairs up to what had been the second floor, as well as stairs down to a small enclosed area and what had been the street-level entrance.
The rough seam in Mr. Newhall's building is very likely to accommodate different rates of settling over the old foundation (which would have much less movement) and the new foundation (which would have more movement). I'm so excited that you've done an civil engineering video, Matt!
Shout out to Jason's Deli in the third building. I met the owner at their 40th anniversary party at the original Jason's in Beaumont, TX. Wonderful guy and a wonderful restaurant.
That freezeframe took me way too long to pause, but 13:40 1897: COPYRIGHT BY T.A. EDISON 1897 2017: YAH THAT'S RIGHT EDISON, I AM PLAYING YOUR FILM TWICE WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO, HUH? HAUNT ME?
Hey, just a quick tip - the comma and period ,. buttons will step the video backwards and forwards by one frame at a time. It's super easy to catch things like this using those.
I'm a math teacher here in Chicago, and I watch your videos with my students. I LOVE THEM! I especially love all the videos of you calculating pi (it's a tradition at my school to watch them on pi day). Next time you're in the Windy City I'd love for you to teach a class (11 to 14 year olds). Sorry to fan-girl so badly...just excited that you were visiting. Have a nice day....also if you could critique one of my classes I have on RU-vid that would be pretty cool....shameless plug. Thanks.
Hi Matt, If you're interested there's actually a giant underground network of narrow gauge railway under downtown Chicago. Most of larger, older buildings still have connections to them. It was almost entirely forgotten until a construction crew driving pilings into the Chicago River punctured one of these tunnels and flooded the basements of many of the buildings in downtown. It was a huge feat of engineering and used a fairly revolutionary design. See: Great Chicago Flood.
There are lots of buildings outside of downtown who's basements are the old street level. Every once and awhile when you dig, you will find intact buried walls (sometimes with intact windows).
Galveston, Texas was also raised. It's impossible to stand anywhere in the historical parts of Galveston and get exactly the same perspective a viewer would have gotten 100 years ago. Everything is higher than it was back then, and some spots are much higher. The feat of raising an entire city began with three engineers hired by the city in 1901 to design a means of keeping the gulf in its place. Along with building a seawall, Alfred Noble, Henry M. Robert and H.C. Ripley recommended the city be raised 17 feet at the seawall and sloped downward at a pitch of one foot for every 1,500 feet to the bay. The first task required to translate their vision into a working system was a means of getting more than 16 million cubic yards of sand - enough to fill more than a million dump trucks - to the island, according to McComb. The solution was to dredge the sand from Galveston's ship channel and pump it as liquid slurry through pipes into quarter-square-mile sections of the city that were walled off with dikes. Their theory was that as the water drained away the sand would remain. Before the pumping could begin, all the structures in the area had to be raised with jackscrews. Meanwhile, all the sewer, water and gas lines had to be raised. McComb wrote that some people even raised gravestones and some tried to save trees, but most of the trees died. In the old city cemeteries along Broadway, some of the graves are three deep because of the grade raising. The city paid to move the utilities and for the actual grade raising, but each homeowner had to pay to have the house raised. By 1911, McComb wrote, 500 city blocks had been raised, some by just a few inches and others by as much as 11 feet
I've lived in Chicago all my life and I knew that they raised the Lake Front; however, I never heard that they raised the buildings nor how it was done. Thanks so much for this video!
I love all the little editing touches as usual :) (The car at 3:35 not being lifted up, expired copyright from Edison at the end and probably more that I've missed)
This is a lot like how Seattle was raised up about 1 story higher, except it was a great fire that enabled the raising of the city instead of just happening afterwards.
When the US Army Corps of Engineers reversed the flow of the river (while carving the Illinois and Michigan Canal) they were sending the sewage to the rest of the state of Illinois, not to another state. Of course, now there is a water treatment plant (at 1000 East Ohio, yes I said EAST, out farther than Navy Pier) on a manmade island to treat the water that flows into the City. Technically, also, the digging of that canal made the eastern half of the United States into an island because you can sail all the way around Lake Michigan to Chicago River, to I&M Canal to Illinois River to Mississippi River to Gulf of Mexico/Atlantic Ocean to either St Lawrence Seaway and Lake Ontario or Hudson River and Erie Canal to Lake Erie, Lake Huron and back to Lake Michigan. Geoffrey Baer did a fascinating video called Chicago by River for PBS (I think back in the 80s or 90s) that explored my City that way.
The I&M Canal would only transiently reverse the flow of the river; it wasn't until the Sanitary and Shipping Canal was built that the flow was reversed entirely
I believe the Chicago water tower survived the fire because it was the only fully stone building built by that point. Its been awhile since i've been in grade school. Its a tourist thing you can find it, doesnt look anything like a water tower, more castle like.
This raising of entire cities is something a lot of coastal communities are going to have to do. As sea levels rise Manhattan for instance might find itself under several feet of water. So which is cheaper, building a seawall that holds back the sea but can break and cause a flood or raising every building ten feet and not have to worry for a few hundred years.
In 1975 in czech town Most a church was moved about 1km away from it's original site where it was build. Whole buildig was placed on rails and then moved.
Matt, the South Branch of the Chicago River was already there, and joined the North Branch at Wolf Point, where you were standing. The Sanitary and Shipping Canal was dug further South.
Aww. It's sad the number of Chicagoan's who don't know the history of our own city. There has been a lot of amazing engineering that has happened here, as well as plenty of great cultural developments! Hope you enjoyed our city, and will come back again.
For those that are wondering what the flashes say, on the left it always says "Copyright T.A Edison 1897", and on the right side it goes "Copyright Matt Parker 2017", "
Chicago exists where it is BECAUSE of the Chicago river's proximity to the Des Plaines river/Mississippi river watershed. Early traders would portage here to get between the waterways of the Great Lakes/Saint Lawrence Seaway and the Mississippi River system. Building an actual canal/reversing the direction of the Chicago river was the final step to making that pseudo-waterway continuous. Additionally, this also makes Chicago the Key Col between the Appalachian and Rocky Mountains, which I find quite interesting. Basically, if you're on Mount Mitchell in North Carolina and want to climb to a higher altitude without descending any further that you absolutely have to, you'd cross right through Chicago.
One additional detail about reversing the river was that the other states on Lake Michigan started complaining, because water levels started dropping precipitously. They had to bring in the Army Corps of Engineers to build a lock system between the lake and the river to prevent too much water from flowing out. As you said, very American, but we do have really great drinking water!
Interesting video! I lived in Chicago for a few years, and while I knew about the great Chicago fire and the upper level streets, I didn't know about the raising of Chicago. Very informative! Also, I like how you reproduced T.A. Edison's copyright watermark (but with your own name) at 13:07...
Matt, oh no! Don't leave!! I live right down the street from where you shot this and I need my Things to Make and Do in the 4th Dimension autographed!! Lol I love all your content so much!
Seattle did a similar thing, except they didn't bother lifting the buildings, they just made the second floor the new first floor. They planned it far enough ahead of time that many buildings were built accounting for that. There are places where you can walk on the old street one story below the current street.
As other comments have pointed out, Seattle did something similar. In Seattle, though, they didn't raise the buildings; they raised the streets. And when I say "raised", I mean they built a new street about 10 feet above the old street. New entrances were added to what used to be the buildings' second floors (or "first floor", to those of the U.K. persuasion), and the space between the two street levels was closed off to the public. You can tour the (incredibly creepy) void space under the Seattle streets via the Seattle Underground tour, which I highly recommend you do. Many of the old original 1800's storefronts are still there, with their original entrances bricked off, making for an eerie, dark underground ghost town effect.
Slight correction- the space between street levels was filled in. It's the sidewalks that remain hollow. Still a creepy subterranean ghost town though.
Just got back from Chicago and took the architectural boat tour (again!). Guide talked about how the the term Windy City was actually popularized by New York City editor Charles Dana. He was a New York journalist angry that Chicago won out to be the site of the 1893 Columbian Exposition (aka Chicago World's Fair).
I've heard about the river reversal in a »99 Percent Invisible« podcast. Fascinating stuff. But the cranking up of buildings (»wound up city«?) is a new one to me. Thanks!
Cities the world over could take a lesson from pre-Civil-War Chicago, now that sea levels are creeping up and storm surges / rainfall are regularly flooding coastal areas. If they could jack up the street level of a city 150 years ago, it would certainly be easier to do today, and is probably far less expensive than paying for constant flood damage, and building sea walls.
"Building occupants found their front door was now 6ft below street level... what were they to do?" Yeah in seattle we did the whole "new street level" thing too but we just put front doors out the second floor.
I heard about it from my father, an Iowan, when we visited Chicago in the 1970's. He pointed out a street that was sunk below the general level and explained why: that street had NOT been raised.
We see such half-buried buildings in; Glasgow, Manchester, Scarborough, St. Petersberg, London, Paris and etc, and none of those locations have any story of being raised. Many have basement windows looking into the dirt.
If you are still in Chicago or when you go back you should go to the Manadnock Building. This building looks very different on different sides because they realized halfway through it that to build a "skyscraper" (it's not that tall by today's standards but back then it was huge) it was important to have a solid steel frame... Not a thick base. Not necessarily the most interesting building other than that, but still a good piece of engineering history.
If you do visit, stay in the more developed and affluent areas as much as possible. Some negative aspects attached to the lesser areas in that particular city. Same with Detroit and I live near it.
Very interesting. The street-raising reminds me of a similar thing happening in the fictional city of Ankh-Morpork (from the Discworrld series). However, they didn't raise their buildings to match the new street level - they merely built on top of the old ones. I wonder if the raising of Chicago inspired Pratchett.
I wonder if I can walk around blindfold in chicago and know where I am just by the feel of the street under my boots. Then I'd know for sure ankh morpork is based off chicago.
One thing about Chicago I remember clearly: I went there on a business trip in 90's. When we were walking along the lake shore I mentioned to my US colleague hoew it reminded me Helsinki (where I lived and still live). My collewague was furious that Chicago IS "the windy city" and no place is like it. Few years later he vistied Helsinki in September. While we were walking from reastarant back to their hoteö he approacehd me and said: "Topi, this is just like in Chicago." A big lake or a big sea on the side of the city does not make a difference. Go Lissabon some time.
Isn't it funny that there are so many more people in Chicago today, but the streets back then were so much more crowded. Even considering that the cars hold people it doesn't account for the total number. It's weird.
The other thought about "Windy City" is that it was coined in the early 1890s, when many prominent businessmen were promoting Chicago as the perfect site for the Columbian Exposition, which took place in 1893 in Jackson Park. People in New York thought that these promoters of Chicago were full of hot wind, the way they bragged about Chicago, and the term Windy City took hold. Similarly, "Second City" doesn't refer as a city second to New York, but the second city that rose from the ashes of the first after the great fire.
