Raising of Chicago

These conditions caused numerous epidemics, including typhoid fever and dysentery, which blighted Chicago six years in a row culminating in the 1854 outbreak of cholera that killed six percent of the city’s population.

[2][3][4][5] The crisis forced the city's engineers and aldermen to take the drainage problem seriously and after many heated discussions[6][7]—and following at least one false start—a solution eventually materialized.

Workers then laid drains, covered and refinished roads and sidewalks with several feet of soil, and raised most buildings on screwjacks to the new grade.

This was a solid masonry row of shops, offices, printeries, etc., 320 feet (98 m) long, comprising brick and stone buildings, some four stories high, some five.

In five days the entire assembly was elevated 4 feet 8 inches (1.42 m), by a team consisting of six hundred men using six thousand jackscrews,[15] which made it ready for new foundation walls to be built underneath.

[18][19] Some of the guests staying there at the time—among whose number were several VIPs and a US Senator—[20] were oblivious to the process as five hundred men worked under covered trenches operating their five thousand jackscrews.

[21] One patron was puzzled to note that the front steps leading from the street into the hotel were becoming steeper every day, and that when he checked out, the windows were several feet above his head, whereas before they had been at eye level.

Consequently, the practice of putting the old multi-story, intact and furnished wooden buildings—sometimes entire rows of them en bloc—on rollers and moving them to the outskirts of town or to the suburbs was so common as to be considered nothing more than routine traffic.