[HN Gopher] Raising of Chicago
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Raising of Chicago
Author : lukasgelbmann
Score : 68 points
Date : 2025-01-06 16:31 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (en.wikipedia.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (en.wikipedia.org)
| nkrisc wrote:
| I don't know if this was during the same time period or not, but
| in some parts of the city (mostly residential or smaller
| commercial areas) they didn't bother raising the buildings, they
| just built the streets up higher and added flying walkways from
| the new sidewalk height to the new front entrances on the second
| story of the houses. Many of them had stairs that went down to
| the old ground level and I think in most of them they had been
| converted to separate apartments.
|
| My dad's small commercial building in Pilsen looked normal, but
| if you peeked into the holes in the sidewalk out front you could
| see a vaulted space underneath where the old sidewalk used to be,
| which was kind of unnerving when you realized the sidewalk was
| crumbling. You could even access it from the basement of his
| building (which I suppose used to be the ground level?), but he
| never let me go down there as a kid.
|
| I also know of one or two old homes from around this time period
| in the neighborhood I grew up in (which wasn't part of Chicago at
| this time) that were later moved off what became the main avenue
| through the area to new locations about a block away. I think
| that happened much later though.
| joezydeco wrote:
| My family is originally from the Pilsen neighborhood, you can
| see examples all over the place of houses lower than the
| street.
|
| Example: https://maps.app.goo.gl/F39JxUPZoobGMgiq9
| nkrisc wrote:
| I know between Division and North there's some remaining
| blocks like that too:
| https://maps.app.goo.gl/NHriGdh1cvL193487
|
| Though so many are gone now and replaced with new
| construction.
| selectodude wrote:
| It's a lot broader than that. Goes at least to Fullerton.
| bilbo0s wrote:
| I feel like only in places like Chicago could this have worked.
| It's like the water system in Chicago, just massive. And everyone
| just shrugs and says, "Dig 100 miles of deep tunnel and massive
| reservoirs? Yep. Let's get 'er done."
|
| A lot of places I've lived, things like that wouldn't fly. I was
| equally amazed at Phoenix with their, what I can only call a
| "strategic water reserve".
|
| A lot of thought and money goes into stuff like that.
|
| I get the strong sense that in most American cities if you would
| have told the population that we all need to undertake a massive
| public work, _(Oh, and pay for it by the way)_ , they would yank
| you from office and tell you to go F yourself.
| dugmartin wrote:
| It was done in other cities. Boston flooded a bunch of towns 60
| miles to the west to build a water supply:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quabbin_Reservoir
|
| New York City built three long aqueducts to bring in water:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_water_supply_sys...
|
| I doubt you could get anything even resembling those projects
| built today due to environmental concerns.
| selectodude wrote:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_Water_Tunnel_N.
| ..
|
| Likely not as greenfield development but they're still
| building.
| fsckboy wrote:
| > _I feel like only in places like Chicago could this have
| worked_
|
| the original downtown of Seattle got moved up 1 floor: they
| didn't raise the buildings, they raised the street, the old 2nd
| floors became first floors.* You can still visit the
| underground Seattle in some places.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_Underground
|
| * carefully worded to also work on European floor number
| systems.
| toast0 wrote:
| Port Angeles, WA has a similar, but smaller Underground.
| grogenaut wrote:
| They massively re-landscaped most of downtown seattle, in one
| phase by using hoses to blast hills down and extend the
| waterfront. In another phase they built the streets up like 12'
| or more. I think stuff like this happened in many places.
|
| Really it still does. I'll trigger many bostonians by invoking
| the dig. Seattle has bored some massive tunnels recently and
| re-scaped its waterfront
| bilbo0s wrote:
| I think there is a misunderstanding of the engineering
| challenges in some of these projects.
|
| The Big Dig was less than 10 miles, never deeper than roughly
| 100 ft. TARP is over 100 miles always deeper than 100 ft. And
| because of intended use, it all has to be dug through solid
| limestone bedrock. The engineering challenges are non trivial
| in both, but one is on a massive scale that the other is just
| not.
|
| Speaking to the Seattle example, the reason for building the
| streets higher is that, in Seattle, people would have
| revolted if they had decree'd "All shalt raise thine
| buildings 12 to 24 feet as did the multitudes in Chicago."
| That's what I mean. Seattle is the example that proves the
| rule. No one had the political capital to force a Chicago
| style raise on Seattle.
|
| That said, between you and me, as an engineer, I would have
| done things the Seattle way and left the buildings at ground
| level. Raised the streets and then turn the formerly ground
| level floors into basements. It's not the end of the world if
| basements flood from time to time. And some drainage might
| even help with that. Chicago, on the other hand, wanted the
| "complete" solution. They were done with dealing with floods.
| Even in basements, they were intent on eradicating flooding.
| Which is a laudable goal, and Chicago has been much better
| off because of it. But the risk and the cost is just a whole
| lot higher than I would have felt comfortable with given the
| tech available to me at the time.
| phailhaus wrote:
| To be fair, it took an epidemic that killed _six percent of the
| city 's population_ for them to take it seriously.
| mxuribe wrote:
| The whole concept is bonkers! By this i mean that i can not
| imagine many officials would even have the will to even try
| something so big and audacious nowadays. Also, my favorite note
| in the wikipedia entry (besides the whole article being
| awesome!), is this one: "Many of the city's old wooden buildings
| were considered not worth raising, so instead the owners of these
| wooden buildings had them either demolished or else placed on
| rollers and moved to the outskirts of Chicago. Business
| activities in such buildings continued, as they were being
| moved." Just crazy!
| Kon-Peki wrote:
| > I can not imagine many officials would even have the will to
| even try something so big and audacious nowadays.
|
| How about renaming 567 streets on a single Friday?
|
| https://chicagology.com/chicagostreets/streetnamechanges/
| mxuribe wrote:
| Wow! Even the renaming of streets - which yes, would need
| physical work to swap out the physical street signs - seems
| to far fetched to be done nowadays! But, that's a pretty cool
| factoid; thanks for sharing!
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| This will totally (have to) happen in Amsterdam within the
| century.
| an_aparallel wrote:
| Ah man - this is one of the cooler things i've ever heard of. I
| first heard of it in PBS doco "Chicago: City of the Century".
| That documentary - is one of the finest chronicles of modern
| society i've ever seen. The insights into psychology, civil
| engineering, and history are second to none. Most profound to me
| were the "design" of suburbs with the trappings we dont think
| very much of these days - libraries, pools, shopping centres and
| so on - were created to push "ideal lives" which were basically
| the dangled carrots of real estate empires. Brilliant stuff.
| ashryan wrote:
| I just came across American Experience for the first time over
| the last week. What I've seen so far is incredible.
|
| This is their YouTube profile:
| https://www.youtube.com/@AmericanExperiencePBS/featured
|
| Unfortunately, the doc you mention isn't on there. They do have
| the transcript on their site tho:
| https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/chicago/
| yegle wrote:
| Apparently Sna Francisco also has the tradition of moving houses,
| most recently in 2021 https://www.theguardian.com/us-
| news/2021/feb/22/victorian-ho...
|
| The Guardian also has an article written back then:
| https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/feb/23/san-francisc...
| awad wrote:
| Are all the raised areas sitting on top of the jackscrews (where
| used) from 170 years ago? That itself is astounding.
| jordanb wrote:
| No the Jackscrews would have been removed for reuse after the
| lift.
|
| By the way you can still buy jacks like these. They're
| considered safer than hydraulic jacks and are often called
| "house jacks":
|
| https://www.homedepot.com/p/Jet-20-Ton-Screw-Jack-441320/306...
| animal_spirits wrote:
| I like that in the drawing of the men lifting the hotel, there's
| people in the hotel. I would be so pissed at them lol
| Oarch wrote:
| I've told people about this event before and they couldn't
| believe it! Then I tried to research it more, find more
| depictions and there's frustratingly little online. Began to make
| me wonder whether it was a prank.
| alehlopeh wrote:
| Miami Beach has been doing this for a couple of decades now. In a
| few places the street is 1 or 2 feet higher than the sidewalk.
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