Shall We Gather at the River: Chicago's First River Swim in Almost a Century

 Once upon a time, the Chicago River, as rivers usually do, flowed into Lake Michigan.  The rapidly growing city used the river as its public sewer, sending our nasty stuff out into the same lake from which we drew our drinking water.  Strangely enough, this resulted in deadly outbreaks of cholera and other unpleasantness, so at the turn of the 20th century we started a massive public works project and built the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal, an engineering marvel that allowed the flow of the river to be reversed and for our sewage to float down the Mississippi to become New Orleans's problem.

We were so proud of this that in 1927 we held a Chicago River Swim and then, due to increasing pollution, we banned it from happening ever again - until this year.  Organizers tried it again in 2024, drawing over 1,100 applicants, but the city denied the necessary permit citing,safety concerns.  The event was shifted to Lake Michigan, where $200,000 was raised for charity.

This year the concerns somehow disappeared, so a permit was issued, and on Sunday, September 21st, nonprofit A Long Swim organized 500 qualified swimmers diving in from the Chicago Riverwalk for either two or one mile heats.

The event benefits ALS research at Northwestern's Feinberg School, as well as swim safety education for Chicago's at-risk children.

swimmers gather along the Chicago Riverwalk

First two-mile swimmers crossing the finish line

First one-mile swimmers lining up

Photographer takes a kayak

The Morning After of the (Not-Entirely)Great Chicago Fire Festival

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If only 1871 had been so anti-climatic . .  .

The morning after Saturday night's Great Chicago Fire Festival, the three structures representing the city that been floated into the middle of the Chicago River to burn up in dramatic fashion as the event's spectacular grand finale, remained dispiritedly intact, the letters of the messages that were to be revealed still largely secreted inside (Surprisingly, they did not spell out “Brought to you by Rahm”.)

Sunday, a flotilla of techs boarded all three barges for the postmortem . . .

With electricians contemplating the wiring that had failed to set the river ablaze . . .

Tens of thousands of spectators had crammed the sidewalks and bridges to catch a glimpse of the $2 million spectacle, mounted by Chicago's storied Redmoon Theater Company.

Earlier, to be sure, there had been music and food, fiery cauldrons, flaming buoys, and a floating locomotive that breathed fire, and after the bonfire fizzled, the crowd came alive for a final fireworks show. Read Chris Jone's review here.

And the interminable waits for not much of anything to happen gave the spectators time to take in the architecture of Chicago's spectacular riverfront, which was still there in its full glory and without a single singe the following morning.

Towers, Skylines and Clouds on a Brisk Fall Day

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Chicago Under the Dome, only through Sunday. The urban visions of Level Chicago 2013

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You have only through Sunday night to see the installations of Level Chicago 2013, at five separate locations along the Chicago.  As we wrote recently, it's a project of L.A. based LERATA (Laboratory for Experimentation and Research in Art, Technology and Architecture) and is intended to be a preview of a far larger project next year.

image courtesy LERATA

The one installation I haven't seen at all is Julio Obelleiro and Wildbytes Building Music, at the plaza of the 2 North Riverside, a/k/a Daily News Building at the river and Madison Street.  It projects images against the blank wall of the Civic Opera Building on the opposite of the river.

What I thought was the Level event at the Daily News Plaza is, instead, Butterflies and Buffalo, which features both the world's largest camera and the images it creates for photographer Dennis Manarchy.  BandB runs all the way through October 31, so we'll discuss it in a separate post, soon.

The other installations of Level are along a stretch of the river from Michigan Avenue to Clark.

Skip message, by Daniel Sauter + Ketai LLC, is on the lower riverwalk between Clark and Dearborn.  It also features a projection, along the concrete wall that separates the walk from lower Wacker, and it features a mobile phone weblink that allows you to send text to appear on the display.

A block east, between Dearborn and State, there's Sabrina Raaf's Meandering River, based on mathematical equations scientists use to predict a river's morphology.  To create this installation, these snapshots are etched onto thermal material, hung down at the center, and trailing off to bottom and the sides.

The last two installations,  by Daniel Miller, are in abject utility room under lower Wacker near the Bridgehouse Museum.  Site A takes video shot at a suburban site where the world's first nuclear reactor was rebuilt in 1943 and uses a rotating projector to cast the images across all the interior surfaces of the service room.

Perhaps, the most detailed and intriguing of all the installations is Miller's Contained.

In a small, otherwise empty room, under a clear dome, you'll find an incredibly detailed model of Chicago, drawn from images on Google Earth.  Two spare metal arms hold lighting that complete a full rotation every 40 minutes to simulate light from the moon and sun falling on the city throughout the course of a day.  There's even a humidifier to create ‘smog.’ “In this dome I am exploring the closed system that we live in called earth,” writes Miller.  The dome's image is also picked up by a camera that feeds to a video screen just outside the room.

Between the model that is both exact and abstracted, and its sealing beneath the glass dome, in a closed-off room just steps from the actual skyline and the movement of human beings along the walkways, and in cars, buses and boats, Contained captures the mystery that lies between our physical world and the energies and desires that animate it.

If this is what Level can accomplish with just five installations, a full-up version next year could be a very grand thing, indeed.

Level runs through Sunday at the locations on the map below.  Stated time is 6:00 to 10:00 p.m., but it seems that many installations really don't get started until the sun goes down.