Raising Chicago's buildings while life continued inside

HostThink about walking into your favorite shop to pick up a tin of coffee. You stay for a few minutes, chat with the clerk, and then step back outside. But when you do, you realize the sidewalk is suddenly several inches lower than the floor you just stood on. In Chicago back in the eighteen fifties, that wasn't a dream. It was just how the city worked. I have been trying to wrap my head around how you even begin to lift a whole city block while people are still inside eating lunch.

GuestIt sounds like a tall tale, but the reason they had to do it was pretty grim. Chicago was a fast growing place back then, but it was built on a swamp. It sat only a couple of feet above the lake water. There was nowhere for rain or waste to drain away. The streets were basically giant pits of deep, thick mud. It was common to see horses and wagons get stuck or even sink into the mess. But the big problem was the sickness. Since the waste had nowhere to go, it just sat in the streets. This led to massive outbreaks of things like cholera that killed thousands of people. The city was basically sinking into its own filth.

HostSo they couldn't just dig deeper sewers because they would hit water immediately. They were trapped by the mud.

GuestThey really were. So the city leaders made a bold plan. Instead of digging down, they would build up. They decided to lay a new sewer system right on top of the old ground. But for that to work, the entire city had to be lifted up between four and fourteen feet. They had to create a new, dry ground level for the whole place by covering those new pipes with dirt.

HostI keep trying to picture the tools for this. We're talking about the mid eighteen hundreds. They didn't have massive cranes or power lifts. How do you move a stone building without it just crumbling into a pile of bricks?

GuestThey used a very simple tool called a jackscrew. It's just a heavy metal stand with a big screw through the middle. To lift a building, they would dig out the base and place hundreds, sometimes thousands of these jacks side by side. For one big building, they might hire six hundred men. Each man was in charge of a few jacks. When a whistle blew or a command was given, every man would give his screws a quarter turn at the exact same time.

HostI can barely get three people to agree on where to go for dinner. How do you keep six hundred guys moving together in a dark basement? If one side moves faster than the other, wouldn't the whole wall just snap?

GuestThat was the secret. It had to be a perfect dance. They moved the building up just a tiny fraction of an inch at a time. It was so steady and slow that the walls never even cracked. This is actually how a man named George Pullman made his first big pile of money. Before he was famous for those fancy railroad sleeper cars, he was the guy people hired to pull off these massive lifts. He proved that if you were careful enough, you could move a mountain of brick as if it were a feather.

HostBut surely the city had to stop. You can't have people living in a hotel while it's literally hovering in the air on some screws.

GuestThat's the most shocking part. They never shut down. Businesses stayed open, and life just went on. One of the best examples was a luxury hotel called the Tremont House. It was five stories tall and made of heavy stone. While five hundred men were in the basement turning five thousand jacks, the hotel was still full of guests. People were sleeping in their rooms and eating in the dining hall. Most of them had no idea they were moving. They were being hoisted into the sky while they drank their tea.

HostBut what about the pipes? If the building moves up and the main water line stays in the ground, wouldn't everything just break? You would've gas leaks and water spraying everywhere.

GuestThe engineers were way ahead of that. They used flexible lead pipes and rubber hoses. As the building rose, these hoses would just stretch and bend. This meant the gas lamps stayed lit and the water taps never went dry. It was a huge win for the engineers. The city didn't just survive the project; it stayed open for business through the whole thing.

HostIt still sounds like a mess to walk around, though. If one building is ten feet up and the one next door is still down in the mud, how do you even get from one to the other?

GuestIt was a very strange time to live there. The city became a jagged mess of different heights. You would see one new shop at the new level, and its neighbor would be way down low. They had to build these shaky wooden stairs to connect the high sidewalks to the low ones. Some people didn't even bother lifting their buildings. They just made the old first floor into a basement and turned the second floor into the new main entrance. That's why if you walk around some parts of Chicago today, you're actually walking on top of the original city.

GuestThe whole project took years, but it worked. It turned a plague-ridden marsh into a dry, modern city by literally picking it up. It gave every other city in the country a template for how to fix a bad location by building a better one right on top of it.

HostThat shop clerk from the start would've just kept selling his coffee, while a small army of men beneath his feet slowly pushed him and his whole world toward the sun.