Reversal of Fortune

In the mid-1800s, Chicago was growing like crazy, but it was also built on a swamp and struggling with a basic problem: sewage. Engineers raised the city’s streets, jacked up buildings, and dug tunnels beneath Lake Michigan, but the city kept outgrowing each solution. So Chicago took on its biggest, baddest, craziest idea yet: digging a gigantic canal that would reverse the (0:41) Chicago River entirely, one of the massive, ridiculous achievements that changed people’s ideas of how far you could go to make a city work.

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