December 17th, 2015: Men Jacking in Chicago

[xoxoxoBruce]

Chicago was a quagmire, built on mud 4 ft higher than Lake Michigan, and the Chicago river. They tried to grade the streets. Fail. They tried to cover them with planks. Fail. Then the 1854 Cholera epidemic killed 5% of the population, so 95% were mad as hell and not going to take it any more. The Sewerage Commission of 1855 hired experts who said build a storm sewer, but you can't bury it, it has to be built at street level then buried. But the buildings? Jack 'em.

......

They hired a new guy in town named George Pullman(later of railroad fame), to figure out how, and supervise, jacking the whole city between 4 and 14 ft. The smaller buildings were dragged out of town with horses. Thousands of men using thousands of screw jacks and cribbing, jacked the big ones, built new foundations, built the storm sewers, and filled the streets in. Horses and hand tools, no heavy equipment.

......
Amazingly life went on, although I'll bet it wasn't quite as bucolic as this Currier & Ives print, especially in bad weather. I don't know how long this reinventing Chicago took, but five years later there was a Civil War pulling men and materiel away, then fifteen years later was the Great Chicago fire. Bummer.
I didn't see any mention of sanitary sewers? OK, another site says they were used as combination sewers, dumped into the river which dumped into the lake. Then in 1885 the sewage reached the water intakes in the lake, Cholera, 11~13% poof gone, 87~89% mad as hell again. So they dug a channel from the Chicago river, to the Des Plaines River now sending the flow(sewage) out of the lake to the Illinois River, and Mississippi river. That's how they moved the WW II submarines built next to, and tested in the lake, down to New Orleans.

link