Cities are fascinating. Isn’t a chunk of the waterline built on debris? San Francisco is too. Push it into the water and build, it’s fine.
Another interesting thing about Chicago is how the stockyards emptied into “bubbly creek,” which is why it’s named that. There’s a few feet of animal fat still bubbling at the bottom.
Interesting to note that the rotting animal bits causing the bubbles are OVER A HUNDRED years old. Holy fucking hell they had to have dumped a lot in there
In the Wikipedia article it talks about some of the ways they used the stuff! Collecting the gases hadn’t occurred to them but it did catch fire a lot.
Wikipedia quotes The Jungle by Upton Sinclair:
The packers used to leave the creek that way, till every now and then the surface would catch on fire and burn furiously, and the fire department would have to come and put it out. Once, however, an ingenious stranger came and started to gather this filth in scows, to make lard out of; then the packers took the cue, and got out an injunction to stop him, and afterwards gathered it themselves. The banks of “Bubbly Creek” are plastered thick with hairs, and this also the packers gather and clean.
Here is one of my bits of Chicago trivia. Ridge road is one of the oldest roads in Chicago. If you drive down it, you will notice there are a lot of cemeteries along the road. That is because the ridge it is named after is the beach dune from the old shoreline when the lake stretched further inland during the last glacial period. The cemeteries build along this road because it’s easier digging graves in sand.
Remember that time they accidentally flooded downtown? Chicago has a fun history of architecture and city planning
I actually didn’t know about that! Incredible.
Cities are fascinating. Isn’t a chunk of the waterline built on debris? San Francisco is too. Push it into the water and build, it’s fine.
Another interesting thing about Chicago is how the stockyards emptied into “bubbly creek,” which is why it’s named that. There’s a few feet of animal fat still bubbling at the bottom.
Shame on me for having never read The Jungle, I had no idea this existed
Interesting to note that the rotting animal bits causing the bubbles are OVER A HUNDRED years old. Holy fucking hell they had to have dumped a lot in there
That sounds like some of that carbon might have been successfully sequestered.
In the Wikipedia article it talks about some of the ways they used the stuff! Collecting the gases hadn’t occurred to them but it did catch fire a lot.
Wikipedia quotes The Jungle by Upton Sinclair:
Here is one of my bits of Chicago trivia. Ridge road is one of the oldest roads in Chicago. If you drive down it, you will notice there are a lot of cemeteries along the road. That is because the ridge it is named after is the beach dune from the old shoreline when the lake stretched further inland during the last glacial period. The cemeteries build along this road because it’s easier digging graves in sand.
That is some FANTASTIC Chicago trivia
I recently learned one of the reasons they dye the river once a year is to do leak testing.