BROWDERBOOKS
The book trailer for Forbidden Brownstones is finished. There are two versions, each lasting only thirty seconds. I will give everyone a link to the trailer very soon. It's short, but it's an experience. I've never done this before.
How Cities Die: by Water or by Fire
Cities have many ways of dying. If circumstances change -- a mine gives out, a railroad goes another way, etc. -- people leave and the town just fades away. Such was the fate of the ghost towns of our old Wild West. Such too was the fate of the great Mayan sites of Central America: for some unknown reason, people abandoned them and went elsewhere.
Death by fire is less of a mystery. Chicago in 1871 was consumed by a fire that sent the inhabitants fleeing into Lake Michigan, where they watched this wooden boom town of the vast Midwest go up in flames and smoke. I grew up in Evanston, the first suburb to the north, and when we drove into the city my parents never failed to point out, as we passed them, two stone structures on North Michigan Avenue that survived the fire: the Old Water Tower and the Pumping Station, though the latter's interior had been gutted.
San Francisco too was destroyed by fire, following the great earthquake of 1906, which ruptured the water mains and left the city defenseless as fire broke out and slowly began consuming the city. I lived there for a short time on Nob Hill, and most of the structures in my neighborhood, often with charming bay windows, dated from 1906-1908, when the city began rebuilding.
New York has had many fires, but none ever destroyed the whole city. The great fire of 1835 ravaged much of the financial district, and the fire of 1845 destroyed much of the same area, but it didn't spread beyond. Today, in spite of congestion, the danger of fire is greatly reduced, because of building codes and the ability of firemen to get to a blaze in a matter of minutes. I know, having experienced two fires in my building, both caused by human error, that were quickly contained.
And death by water? Manhattan's West Village, where I live, is vulnerable. During a hurricane a few years ago, the water in the Hudson River rose up and in a twenty-foot-high wave flooded Bethune Street for a whole block before subsiding. That unprecedented event flooded the basement of Westbeth, the huge artists' residence, leaving the residents without power. My building, several blocks from the river, was not affected, but we lost power for four days, because the generators in a basement elsewhere had been flooded. So New York is vulnerable, but Manhattan does not face the full brunt of hurricanes; that privilege is reserved for the New Jersey shore and Long Island.
In Chicago it's another story. I relate to Second City, having grown up near it and stared wide-eyed when my mother took me there by the El, and the tracks crossed the Chicago River just after the massive Merchandise Mart. Seeing no tracks, just the river far below, I felt that we were hurtling through space with no support beneath us: scary, but exciting.
Chicago, I now learn, was built on a swamp. Why build at all, given the soggy ground? Because geography made it inevitable. As the native peoples had known for centuries, a brief portage let one go from the Chicago River to the nearby Des Plaines River, thus connecting the Great Lakes to the Mississippi River, since the Des Plaines flowed into the Illinois River, and that river flowed into the Mississippi. And when the roads and then the railroads came, any road or line intending to reach the northern Midwest and West -- Minnesota, the Dakotas, and Montana, for instance -- had to pass around the southern end of Lake Michigan, where a fort and then a town was built. And that town became a metropolis, the city of Chicago.
Chicago and my hometown Evanston get their drinking water from Lake Michigan. So what does Chicago do with its sewage? It pumps it into the Chicago River, and as that river flows away from the lake, its water is cleansed by a series of treatment facilities, so that clean water finally flows into the Illinois River and the Mississippi. And this system, keeping Lake Michigan free of sewage, worked for decades, including the time when I grew up in nearby Evanston. But it didn't work forever.
What happened? Starting a few years ago, rain, rain, rain. Rainstorms the like of which no one alive had ever witnessed. On May 17, 2020, the tainted water in the Chicago River rose to record levels. To keep it from flooding downtown Chicago, some of it had to be released into Lake Michigan, endangering the city's water supply. This was meant to be a brief emergency measure, but the unprecedented rain continued, so in desperation the gates were opened and closed repeatedly. Basements were flooded, and electrical power was shut off. With more such record-breaking rains predicted, the city found itself in a struggle against the lake, whose waters were rising ominously. But even before that crisis, back in 1987 gale-driven winds had driven swollen Lake Michigan waters into the city.
When my parents drove us into the city of Chicago, they usually went by way of Lake Shore Drive, a lovely lakeside highway that always had the lake in view, often just a short distance away. But now I learn that back in 1987 the lake flooded Lake Shore Drive. Lake Shore Drive, that charming highway of my childhood, under water? Inconceivable -- or so I always thought. The fact of it shatters all my assumptions, the naive presumption that, just because some things always were, they would never change. And change they did, as more storms sent Lake Michigan waters shoreward to demolish giant concrete barriers, float 3,000-pound cars, and flood low-lying city streets. Chicago's south side has become a war zone, with patio furniture replaced by sand bags, concrete blocks, and barriers. Aware that floods are eating away the very foundations of their buildings, residents live in fear.
If Lake Shore Drive can be flooded, why not all the shorelines of New York? Why not Greenwich Village? Why not any low-lying neighborhood in the city? Death by water -- the death of a whole city -- now seems like a distinct possibility. Not today, perhaps, and not tomorrow. But sometime, sooner or later, in the future. Those who study long-term weather conditions do not rule it out. Our future: death by water.
Source note: This post was inspired in part by Dan Egan's article, "The Battle Between a Great City and a Great Lake," in the New York Times of Sunday, July 11, 2021.
© 2021 Clifford Browder
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