Volume 40, Number 17 · October 21, 1993
Chicago Underground
By Garry Wills
Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West
by William Cronon
Norton, 530 pp., $27.50
Perfect Cities: Chicago's Utopias of 1893
by James Gilbert
University of Chicago Press, 279 pp., $13.95 (paper)
Constructing Chicago
by Daniel Bluestone
Yale University Press, 235 pp., $25.00 (paper)
Louis H. Sullivan: A System of Architectural Ornament Inc., 986 Woodland Avenue, Plainfield, NJ 07006, 908-757-4700; (fax) 908-756-4133. Discount available for booksellers.)
foreword by John Zukowsky, by Susan Glover Godlewski, essay by Lauren S Weingarden
Rizzoli / The Art Institute of Chicago, 159 pp., $110.00 (Copies of this book are only available from Roy P. Jensen,
In the spring of 1992, maintenance crews in Chicago found that a mysterious flood was filling the downtown area's extensive system of subbasements. There had been no rains to cause this, no rise in the Chicago River. Local columnist Mike Royko said Lake Michigan must have sprung a leak—and, sure enough, fish were soon spotted in the rising waters. Vulnerable underground electric cables and control panels were sputtering out. Thousands of tons of water were breaking through partitions, threatening the foundations of historic buildings. Even when the source of the water was found, the mystery was not dispelled. A puncture had occurred in an abandoned network of delivery tunnels, in the part that runs under the Chicago River. The river was coursing all through and under the downtown, through fifty miles of these labyrinthine conduits. Most Chicagoans had never heard of the tunnels, and even those who had were vague about their origin and purpose.
Review, 6430 words
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