The City That Jacked Itself Up: How Chicago Lifted Its Buildings Out of the Mud

In the spring of 1861, a guest checking into the Tremont House, then the grandest hotel in Chicago, might have noticed something odd about the front steps. Each morning there seemed to be one more of them. By the time he checked out, windows that had been at eye level when he arrived were several feet above his head. Nothing was wrong with his eyes. The entire brick hotel, guests, furniture, bar room and all, was being lifted into the air by hundreds of men crouched in trenches beneath it, each turning a set of iron jackscrews a fraction of a revolution at a time.

This was the raising of Chicago, one of the strangest public works projects in American history. Over roughly two decades in the middle of the 19th century, the city decided that the cure for its deadly mud was to lift itself out of it: streets, sidewalks and, one by one, hundreds of buildings. Brick hotels went up six feet with guests still inside. Half a city block rose in five days while shoppers kept shopping.

A city built at the waterline

Chicago grew up in an awkward place. The young city sat on flat, marshy ground only a few feet above the surface of Lake Michigan, on clay soil that soaked up very little water. When it rained, the water had nowhere to go. Streets turned into troughs of mud deep enough to swallow a wagon wheel, and the standing water mixed with everything a fast-growing frontier city threw out: kitchen slops, privy waste, the runoff from stables and slaughterhouses.

Then came the epidemics. Cholera hit Chicago again and again in the late 1840s and 1850s, and the outbreak of 1854 killed 1,424 people, roughly one Chicagoan in twenty. Nobody yet knew what caused cholera, but filth and bad water were increasingly suspected, and the city’s swampy streets were full of both.

The obvious fix was a sewer system. The problem was that sewers need a slope. To drain by gravity into the Chicago River, a pipe has to run downhill, and in a city that was already almost at river level there was no downhill to be had.

An engineer’s upside-down idea

In February 1855 the Illinois legislature created a Board of Sewerage Commissioners for Chicago, and the board hired Ellis Sylvester Chesbrough, who had been Boston’s first city engineer and had helped build that city’s water system. Chesbrough’s answer to the slope problem was simple to state and enormous to carry out. If you can’t dig the sewers down, build them up.

His plan laid the new sewer mains on top of the existing streets, at or near the old ground level, and then buried them under fill, raising the street surface by several feet. That gave the pipes the fall they needed to drain to the river. It became the first comprehensive sewer system in the United States, and it came with a catch that everyone could see. Once the street was several feet higher, every building along it would be standing in a hole.

The city raised the streets. What happened to the buildings was largely left to their owners, and they had three choices. They could tear the building down and put up a new one at the new grade. They could give up the ground floor, turning it into a basement and moving the front door upstairs. Or they could do the thing that made Chicago famous: pick the building up.

How do you lift a brick building?

The first big test came in January 1858 at the northeast corner of Randolph and Dearborn streets. The building was a four-story brick store, about 70 feet long and estimated to weigh 750 tons. An engineer from Boston named James Brown set some 200 jackscrews under it and raised it 6 feet 2 inches to the new grade, “without the slightest injury to the building,” as the account of the day put it. More than 50 comparably large masonry buildings were raised in Chicago that same year, and Brown, working with the Chicago engineer James Hollingsworth, became one of the busiest building raisers in town.

The method was brute force applied very patiently. Workmen dug down beside the old foundation and cut openings through it, then pushed heavy timbers through to make a cradle under the walls. Jackscrews went under the timbers. A jackscrew is about the simplest machine there is: a thick threaded iron screw in a sturdy base, turned with a bar through a hole in its head. Each turn raises the load by the pitch of the thread, a fraction of an inch, but the long lever and the screw together multiply a man’s push into tons of lift.

The trick was keeping hundreds of them in step. If one corner rose faster than another, brick walls would crack and windows would shatter. So the jacks were turned in tiny, coordinated increments. As the building crept upward, crews slid fresh timbers into the gap and masons built a new, taller foundation underneath it.

The young man from Albion

The name most often attached to all this belongs to George Mortimer Pullman, who would later become famous, and then infamous, for his railroad sleeping cars and his company town. Building raising was Pullman’s first act. His father, a carpenter in western New York, had patented a machine in 1841 that used jackscrews to move buildings, and the family business found steady work shifting structures out of the way when the Erie Canal was widened.

In 1859 Pullman, then in his late twenties, came to Chicago with his business partner Charles Moore to raise the Matteson House, a large brick hotel at Dearborn and Randolph that its owner had struggled to find anyone willing to tackle. According to an account based on Pullman’s biographer, his crew used about 800 screw jacks and needed only ten days to lift it the five feet it had to go. The job made his reputation. Pullman didn’t invent Chicago building raising, since Brown had raised the first brick building more than a year earlier, but he became its most famous practitioner.

Half a city block in five days

The showpiece came in 1860. On the north side of Lake Street, between Clark and LaSalle, stood a continuous row of four- and five-story brick and stone buildings about 320 feet long: shops, offices, printers and a bank, covering nearly an acre. With their hanging sidewalks, they were estimated to weigh around 35,000 tons. A consortium of six contractors, including Brown, Hollingsworth and Pullman, agreed to lift the whole row at once.

They put about 6,000 jackscrews under the block and hired 600 men to work them, roughly ten jacks per man. According to Pullman’s biographer, the brothers ran the work by whistle: Albert Pullman crouched with the laborers under the buildings, George stood in the street, and when one whistled and the other answered, every man gave each of his jacks a quarter turn, moved down the line and did it again. The block went up a fraction of an inch with each round.

In five days the entire row rose 4 feet 8 inches. The businesses inside never closed. People came, went, shopped and worked in the buildings throughout, and the spectacle drew crowds of thousands. On the last day, onlookers were allowed to walk at the old ground level, among the forest of jacks, underneath half a city block. According to one Chicago architecture historian, the contractors were proud enough to commission a lithograph of the row from the artist Edward Mendel, the image at the top of this article, and used it in their advertising.

The hotel that rose with the guests inside

Then came the Tremont House. The big brick hotel at Lake and Dearborn, where Stephen A. Douglas and Abraham Lincoln had traded speeches in 1858, was the city’s most famous. In early 1861 the firm of Ely, Smith and Pullman took the contract to raise it about six feet. George was away for part of the job, and his brother Albert saw it through to completion in March 1861, less than four weeks before the Civil War began at Fort Sumter.

The hotel stayed open the whole time. Some 500 men worked from covered trenches under the building. One 19th-century history describes each man minding ten screws and giving each a half turn at a signal, so smoothly that “not a pane of glass was broken, and the business of the hotel went on as usual.” That is where the story of the guest and his ever-steeper front steps comes from.

Houses out for a walk

Not everything was worth lifting. Much of early Chicago had been thrown up quickly in wood, and many owners decided it made more sense to sell the old frame building, or move it, and put up a new masonry block at the new grade. Moving a house became so common that Chicagoans barely looked up. The Scottish traveler David Macrae wrote that never a day passed during his stay “that I did not meet one or more houses shifting their quarters. One day I met nine.” Another visitor watched a tavern roll past his window still open for business, and described families who ate supper and went to bed in a moving house, then woke up on a different street.

The technology kept improving, too. In 1860 an engineer from California, John C. Lane, raised the four-story brick Franklin House using hydraulic jacks, a method Californian builders had been using since the early 1850s. Screw jacks did not disappear, though. In November 1865, Hollingsworth and Coughlin lifted the Robbins Building, a five-story iron building on South Water Street, 150 feet long and, with the heavy goods stacked on its floors, estimated at 27,000 tons. With about 1,580 jackscrews and some 400,000 feet of lumber, they raised it and 230 feet of stone sidewalk by 27.5 inches in 21 days, “without the slightest crack or damage,” a local paper reported.

A city of staircases

Raising Chicago was never a single event. Owners lifted their buildings on their own schedules, and the streets were filled in piece by piece, so for years the city’s sidewalks rose and fell like a staircase. A pedestrian might climb up and down between old and new levels several times in a single block. One guidebook of the era warned visiting women about loiterers who hung around the sidewalk steps hoping to catch sight of a lady’s leg, and signs reminded walkers to “Use Your Intellect.”

Traces of it are still under your feet in downtown Chicago. Where owners didn’t raise their buildings, the new sidewalk was often built on a structure over the old one, leaving a hollow space between the old ground level and the new walkway. Owners used these vaulted spaces for storage. As recently as 2001 the city still had more than 2,000 of them, and they turn up today, at real cost, whenever streets are rebuilt.

London was having its own sewage reckoning in the same years. The summer of 1858, while Chicago’s building raisers were busy lifting their first brick blocks, was the summer of London’s Great Stink, which finally pushed Parliament to pay for a modern sewer network. Both cities learned the same lesson: getting the waste away was only half the problem.

The water problem, and a river run backward

Chesbrough’s sewers worked, and that created the next crisis. They emptied into the Chicago River, and the river flowed into Lake Michigan, which was also where the city got its drinking water. The better the sewers drained the streets, the dirtier the water near the shore became.

Chesbrough’s second great project went out under the lake to find clean water. He designed a brick-lined tunnel five feet wide that would run through the clay beneath Lake Michigan for 10,567 feet, about two miles, to an intake crib in deep, clean water. Work began in May 1864, with small mules hauling carts of clay through the bore, and lake water flowed into the city through the tunnel in March 1867, to celebrations that hailed it as the eighth wonder of the world.

Even two miles was not far enough as the city kept growing. The lasting fix was the boldest of all: make the river run the other way. Deepening the old Illinois and Michigan Canal in 1871 reversed the river for a season, but it didn’t last. After a huge storm in 1885 washed river filth far out into the lake, alarmed Illinois lawmakers created the Sanitary District of Chicago in 1889. (A popular legend says that storm caused a cholera epidemic that killed 90,000 people. Chicago historians say it never happened.)

The Sanitary District dug the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal through the low ridge that separates the Great Lakes from the Mississippi basin. When the water was let in, in January 1900, the main stem of the Chicago River began flowing away from the lake, carrying the city’s wastewater toward the Des Plaines, Illinois and Mississippi rivers. The American Society of Civil Engineers later named it one of the Seven Wonders of American Engineering, and several of its engineers went on to help build the Panama Canal.

Chicago wasn’t the last city to do it

The idea of lifting a whole city outlived Chicago. After the Galveston hurricane of 1900 killed at least 6,000 people, the Texas island city built a concrete seawall and then raised its grade behind it, from 1903 to 1911. Working section by section, crews lifted around 2,000 buildings on hand-turned jackscrews, along with streetcar tracks and water pipes, while dredges pumped sand from the harbor entrance through a canal cut across the city to fill in underneath. Residents got around for months on boardwalks laid along the tops of fences, and the last area was not filled until 1928.

Why it worked

Engineering history tends to remember its disasters most clearly, like Galloping Gertie twisting itself apart in a steady wind. The raising of Chicago is the opposite kind of story. It was huge, risky and a little absurd, and it mostly worked. Like the engineers who later saved the Leaning Tower of Pisa without straightening it, the building raisers succeeded by moving something enormous in tiny, carefully controlled steps.

The payoff was a city that could drain, a sewer system that set the pattern for others, and eventually clean water from a river that runs backward. The next time a Chicago building has a front door oddly far above the sidewalk, or a basement that runs under the street, it may be a leftover of the years when the city stood on jackscrews.

Further reading