Undoubtedly Chicago's most notorious industrial artifact,
is a little tributary
to the Chicago River's South Branch called Bubbly Creek.
It was once an open sewer
running from the long-gone Union Stockyards nearby.
The decomposing animal waste caused the little waterway
to churn and bubble, hence the name.
Muckraking novelist Upton Sinclair wrote,
"Here and there the grease and filth have caked solid,
"many times an unwary stranger
"has started to stroll across and vanished temporarily."
These days recreational boats share the channel with barges.
This is one of two boathouses on the Chicago River designed
by architect Jeanne Gang.
But lest we forget, the Chicago River
is still a wastewater channel.
The river's flow was reversed in 1900
in a gargantuan public works project
to divert our sewage away from Lake Michigan,
the source of our drinking water.
Today treatment plants clean the wastewater
before sending it on down the Mississippi.
This one in Stickney is one of the largest in the world.
It serves 2.3 million people in a 260-square-mile area
including central Chicago and 46 other communities.
The plant can clean 1.4 billion gallons
of wastewater every day.
The industrial past has left its mark
on the Chicago River's north branch too
in the form of a manmade island.
Chicago's first mayor William B. Ogden created it
as one of his many lucrative business schemes
in the mid-1800s.
Ogden dug this channel east of the river
and mined the clay for brick making.
Then he connected the channel to the river at both ends,
creating more waterfront property to lease or sell.
The area became heavily industrialized
and many immigrant workers settled
in a surrounding shanty town nicknamed Little Hell
for the flames from the local gas works
and possibly for the dangerous streets as well.
In the post-industrial era, Goose Island,
like much of the land along the Chicago River
is targeted for residential redevelopment.
This goddess overlooking Goose Island is a leftover
from the early 1900s when Montgomery Wards
moved its headquarters and giant catalog warehouse here.
The goddess statue called the Spirit of Progress
is loosely based on a similar statue atop
an earlier Wards office tower on Michigan Avenue.
And that statue was in turn a replica of this racy figure
of Diana by the famous sculptor Augustus St. Gaudens.
Montgomery Ward himself had seen it
at Chicago's World's Columbian Exposition in 1893.
Here's maybe the most creative reuse
of a defunct industrial site.
It looks like a beautiful natural limestone canyon
but wait a minute, a canyon in famously flat Chicago?
Of course, it's manmade.
This was Stearn's quarry in Bridgeport,
it operated for about 130 years until it was turned
into a landfill for construction debris in the 1970's.
By 2009 the landfill became a remarkable new park.
Landscape architects Site Design piled up the debris
to make a scenic hill overlooking a wetland
that cascades down into a fishing pond surrounded
by towering limestone walls.
A much, much bigger quarry is still going strong
in the far south suburb of Thornton.
In fact, it's one of the largest quarries in the world,
mining stone that's crushed up to make gravel and concrete.
In places, it's 450 feet deep
that's about 45 stories.
Maybe it's caught your attention from I-80.
This limestone is Chicago bedrock and it's loaded
with fossils of ancient sea creatures.
That's because 400 million years ago,
this was coral at the bottom of a warm shallow ocean.
Today a mined-out part of the quarry is used as a reservoir.
During major storms, it collects excess water
from the deep tunnel system until that water can be pumped
to treatment plants like the one in Stickney
that we saw earlier.
But in other parts of the quarry,
management says there's enough limestone left
for another 200 years of mining.