Driving down 127th Street, you might not notice the hill Blue Island sits on–even though it’s about 50 feet high, a mile wide, and six miles long north to south. According to A.T. Andreas’s 1884 History of Cook County, Blue Island got its name because weary voyageurs sick to death of flat, swampy prairie sometimes had the illusion that its heavily wooded north end was floating on a distant, shimmering lake.
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Most of us have heard of the pioneering ten-year task of reversing the Chicago River that followed: digging the canal, at times through solid rock, and surreptitiously opening the gates one day before Saint Louis could file suit against the project. Popular history ends there, but the district kept on. Besides the Sanitary and Ship Canal, it also dug the North Shore Channel (connecting the North Branch of the Chicago River to the lake near the Baha’i temple in Wilmette) and the Calumet Sag Channel, which runs roughly from Argonne National Laboratory to just east of Lake Calumet.
By 1911, when the district began digging the Cal Sag, its engineers were aware of other ways to deal with sewage. But they knew best how to dilute it and flush it downstream, and besides, another canal would help create a barge highway running from the Illinois River to Calumet Harbor on Lake Michigan. Finished in 1922, the channel sent sewage away from the lake, and also gave cargo en route from the Mississippi to the Great Lakes a way to bypass the Loop.
If necessity was the mother of invention, then perhaps district engineer Bill Macaitis was its midwife. He knew the reason for filtering was simply to keep those last few solids from consuming scarce dissolved oxygen. Why not leave the solids in and simply dissolve more oxygen in the channels? Sometime in 1983 he sketched a deceptively simple way of doing that: raise the water with a pump and then drop it back through the air. In other words: build a waterfall.
Macaitis, accustomed to working on the often-controversial Deep Tunnel, is pleased that no one opposed his creation. The five waterfalls-cum-parks were some $270 million cheaper than advanced filtration would have been, though he is quick to point out that without good sewage-treatment plants and the Deep Tunnel, an urban waterfall wouldn’t help much: it would probably foam and stink. “When it’s 95 percent clean already, then you can do something like this. This is the last little kick that gets us there.”
