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| Clark Street Sandmaster-Blasted (Chicago Daily News archive) |
Indignation
aplenty on this date, May 2, in 1929 as The
Chicago Tribune railed against the sand companies of the city and the boats
they employed to ship sand for concrete into the city, the result of an
accident two days earlier that saw the 251-foot-long sandboat Sandmaster smashing the heck out of the
Clark Street bridge.
“The
city council and the sand companies agree that this expensive and aggravating
interruption of business is not unreasonable.
They unite in rejecting less burdensome methods of bringing building
sand into the city. It could be done by
carriers which would not require bridge openings. It could be done at hours when a bridge
opening would be of no consequence. A
few sandboats have the right of way in the council and thousands of trucks,
cars, and pedestrians rate nothing,” the paper editorialized. [Chicago
Tribune, May 2, 1929]
Captain
Ava Smith, the skipper of the Sandmaster,
stated, “It wasn’t my fault. I had the
port motor going full ahead and the starboard motor in reverse. There was plenty of room to pass through but
just before we got to the bridge, the tender must have swung it back about ten
feet right into the ship.” [Chicago Tribune, May 2,1929]
In
1929 a large number of river bridges still sat on turntables that were located
in the middle of the river. When boats
approached, the bridges were swung so that they paralleled the shore, leaving
close quarters for ships that had to pass on either side of the opened bridge
on a very busy river.
All
Clark Street traffic, including a major north-south trolley car line, had to be
rerouted after the accident. If there
was any positive to the situation, a new Clark Street bascule bridge had been
started, and it had been the hope that the old bridge could be kept going until
the new bridge was finished sometime later in the year. That was not to be. It was a mess, especially for the first
couple of days when almost nothing could move up or down the main stem of the
river.
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| Streetcar traffic on the Clark Street bridge, 1906 (Chicago Daily News archive) |
On
the same day that the editorial ran, the Sandmaster
was freed from the wreckage of the bridge while the city council went to work. Alderman William A. Rowan introduced a
resolution to mandate fixed bridges on the river. The Commissioner of Public Works was also
ordered to pursue, pending a completion of his investigation, court action
against the Materials Construction Company, the owner of the boat, as a result
of the $50,000 worth of damage to the bridge and the blockage of the Clark
Street entrance to the Loop.
The
investigation moved ahead with speed. By May 9 a survey of the records had
revealed that the Sandmaster had hit
13 bridges on the river in three years in 44 separate incidents. “The Sandmaster’s
bridge-ramming career began on May 21, 1926,” The Tribune reported, “when it struck a ladder at the Fullerton
avenue bridge and ended, so far as the present records are concerned when it
knocked the 600 ton Clark street bridge seven feet from its foundation last
week. [Chicago Tribune, May 9, 1929]
The
Fullerton Avenue and the Diversey Boulevard spans were particularly
unlucky. The ship had rammed the former
bridge 18 times and the latter 13 times.
The investigation also revealed that another six inches would have
thrown the Clark Street Bridge, along with the six pedestrians standing on its
turntable, into the river.
On
the following day, May 10, the president of the Construction Materials company,
J. R. Sensibar, responded to all of the criticism. “The injuries to bridges were, in the main,
trifling damages to wooden planks and ladders,” he said. “They were caused by the carelessness of the
city, not the carelessness of the boat’s captain. The Sandmaster
has made 1,300 trips on the river. The only two serious accidents were those at
the Cortland Street bridge in January, 1927, and present damage to the Clark
street bridge.” [Chicago Tribune, May 10, 1929].
On
May 12 Mr. Sensibar (I love the name – a cross between “sense” and “sand bar”)
went into more detail, more lucid and far more illustrative of his legitimate
cause for outrage at the fingers that were being pointed in his direction.
“The
depth [of the river] is the cause of many of the accidents,” he began, “such as
boats colliding with bridges and other boats.
We load the Sandmaster so it
will draw 15 feet, and it goes along throwing up a ridge of mud on each side of
it, thus keeping the river dredged to 14 or 15 feet . . . Because of the
present depth, we load the Sandmaster with only 1,500 tons, whereas its
capacity is 3,500 tons . . . if we were able to load to capacity, the number of
bridge openings would be reduced by one-half.”
Originally,
the United States government had dredged the river to a depth of 22 feet, but
when the Chicago Sanitary District took over the operation, things gradually
changed. Over time the sewage that was
dumped into the river had decreased its depth to 14 feet.
“It
would be a saving of money to the city in the long run to restore the river to
its proper depth and turn it back to the government,” Mr. Sensibar concluded.
A
week later things had begun to grow really tense. Traffic across the bridge, of course, was
non-existent . . . because the bridge was non-existent. Many businesses along the busy Clark Street
corridor were facing extinction, store vacancies were occurring, and an appeal
was made to the Commissioner of Public Works to ask the City Council for an
additional $125,000 “to pay for overtime and other items necessary to place the
new bridge in service for street cars and pedestrians by July 1.”
[Chicago Tribune, May 19, 1929]
A
day later Captain Smith was placed on trial for reckless navigation before
United States Steam Vessel Inspectors.
Electricians testified that one of the cables carrying power to the
bridge had been broken for three hours before the accident. The bridge tender said that the other cable
failed when the bridge was opening. Still,
the city asserted that Captain Smith and the Sandmaster were far enough from the bridge to have reversed engines
and avoided the crash. [Chicago Tribune, May 21, 1929]
Well,
you can guess how that worked out.
Captain Smith was found guilty of reckless navigation on May 29 and his
master’s license was revoked for 30 days.
The verdict stated that the accident that knocked the 600-ton bridge
turntable seven feet from its foundation “might have been avoided” and that
Captain Smith’s statement that he was proceeding at four miles an hour against
a two mile an hour current was “not to be taken seriously.” [Chicago
Tribune, May 19, 1929]
In
an amazing display of engineering the new trunnion bascule bridge at Clark
Street was opened in a formal dedication ceremony on July 10 of that same
year. The river kept on flowing, the
bridge started going up and down, and all was well . . . for awhile.
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| Clark Street bridge house today (JWB Photo) |
A
lot of oversimplification takes place today about the Chicago River – not
surprising since it has never looked as good as it does right now. A lot of folks assume that the river was
reversed in 1900, and everything was right and just. But the love-hate relationship with the river
continued through much of the twentieth century as cars, buses, elevated
trains, and pedestrians were delayed by random bridge raisings and those who
made their livelihood on the river cursed a city that had grown because of
their efforts and yet always seemed ready to make things as difficult for them
as it could. And boats continued to
crash into bridges and into each other.
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