In 1900, Chicago engineers reversed the flow of an entire river to push the city’s sewage away from Lake Michigan; 126 years later, the river still runs backwards
Chicago’s founding problem had always been plumbing. The city drew its drinking water from Lake Michigan and emptied sewers into the Chicago River, which flowed straight into Lake Michigan. But every rainstorm flushed the stockyards and slaughterhouses and a million people’s waste out toward the water intakes. This is why the nineteenth-century city was periodically…