It made sense for
the early settlers of Chicago to nestle right down next to the lake, alongside
the river. Back in the early 1800’s any
commerce that might come to the area – and the certainty of that prospect was
far from bright – would come by way of those two resources.
Sometimes, though,
a blessing can also be a curse. Living
within the barriers of a river on the north and west and a lake on the east was
fine as long as there were only a few thousand folks trying to get along in the
circumscribed space. But by 1850 there
were 30,000 people in the rapidly growing metropolis on the prairie; by the
time of the Great Fire in 1871 there were 270,000.
Space was, to say
the least, at a premium and when the fire wiped the slate clean, commercial
business stayed in what is today the Loop with some residential property to the
south, and industry and residential property, for the most part, was located
across the river.
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| Washington St. Bridge propped on supports, 1906 (Chicago Daily News Archive) |
The easy way to
connect the two obviously was by building bridges. The complicating factor was that the bridges
could not be permanently engineered; there had to be a way to accommodate the
ships that moved up and down the river.
By the end of the nineteenth century the biggest lake freighters
measured well over 400 feet in length, and somehow the bridges had to be built
in order to allow these huge ships to deliver the grain and lumber and raw
materials that had put Chicago on the map in the first place.
The solution was
the swing bridge, which sat on a turntable in the center of the channel and
which could be rotated from a position where the bridge lined up with the
streets on either side of the river to a position where the bridge swung 90
degrees where it would lie parallel to the banks of the river, allowing ships
to pass on either side.
This arrangement
solved the problem, but barely. Ships
were smacking into the bridges all the time, splintering railings, crumbling
foundations, at times knocking the entire bridge out of alignment. By the early part of the 1900’s the whole
situation was intolerable.
In fact, on January
10, 1901 The Chicago Tribune ran an
article on the city’s bridges under the headline Sees a Menace in Nine Bridges:
City Engineer Refuses to Retain Responsibility for Fragile Structures.
Four bridges, the
ones on West Division Street, North Avenue, Archer Avenue, and Twenty-Second
Street were in such bad shape that the city engineer recommended closing them
completely. Five more bridges, at Wells
Street, Washington Street, Harrison Street, Twelfth Street, and Eighteenth
Street were less dangerous but still so shaky that the city engineers refused
to be responsible for them.
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| Wells St. Bridge, looking north, with Chicago & Northwestern terminal in the background (Chicago Daily News photo archive) |
Goose Island was
the section of the city most affected by the situation. According to coverage in The Tribune, “The engineers had hardly raised the scow which formed
Division street bridge over the canal when the bridge over the river was found
to be almost past service. An attempt
was made . . . to patch it up and save it.
If the bridge be closed it is expected that insurance rates will be
increased; as the fire risk will advance.”
Clearly, in a city
that numbered over two million human beings, something was going to have to be
done.
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