(Chicago) With the closure until spring of Gainer Plaza at Millennium Park, where the famous “bean” by British sculptor Anish Kapoor is located, all our attention is now focused on the other jewel of downtown Chicago : its rivers. They have benefited for years not only from a sanitation program which is bearing fruit, but also from beautification efforts which have seen the extension of the Riverwalk, a two kilometer promenade along the Chicago River – the Main Branch, as the locals say.
It starts from the shores of Lake Michigan and follows the south shore to the mouth of the North and South Branch. There we come across terraces, restaurants, bars, several quays from where we can undertake short architectural interpretation cruises. But there are also the facilities of Urban Kayak, which organizes guided trips on the river. Indeed, you can visit the city center by kayak along the water, with fabulous skyscrapers all around your head!
After the usual recommendations, we slide from the ingenious boarding dock on rollers to reach the river, not very far from the lock which separates the river from Lake Michigan, beyond the Jean Baptiste Pointe du Sable Lake Shore Drive – we will see later who this illustrious character with the most French-speaking name is.
As there is a lock, the current is always regular, you just have to be careful of the many boats circulating in the river. This is why we cross to the north shore, to paddle in the right direction of traffic! But rest assured, our guide Zach Sabitt is in constant communication with the port authorities, which allows us to glide with ease on the calm waters of the river. And to admire the spectacle before us.
PHOTO PIERRE-MARC DURIVAGE, THE PRESS
On the right in the photo you can see the columns of Trump Tower, which extend to the surface of the river.
After contemplating the magnificent St. Regis Tower, the most recent addition to the Chicago skyline and the tallest skyscraper designed by a woman – the work of Jeanne Gang peaks at 365 m – we quickly find ourselves at the foot of the unmissable Trump tower. Our guide explains to us that the former American president had expressed the wish in 2001 to have the tallest tower in the world erected in Chicago, but that the September 11 attacks had slowed down his efforts – just like his bankers, in fact.
Nevertheless, the megalomaniac billionaire asked none other than Adrian Smith, the same one who would supervise the construction of the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, to propose plans for a skyscraper worthy of the Trump name. Completed in 2009, it was at 423 meters the second tallest building in the United States. “When you look at the glass surface of the tower while you are five inches from the water, it still looks really big,” our guide said with a laugh, emphasizing the word “huge.” », delivered with a Trump-like intonation.
PHOTO PIERRE-MARC DURIVAGE, THE PRESS
The kayak ride ends at Wolf Point, at the confluence of the North and South Branches of the Chicago River.
A little French-speaking history in Chicago…
He then invites us to turn around to look at the Du Sable Bridge, named a few years ago in honor of the real founder of Chicago, Jean-Baptiste Pointe du Sable, a mixed race of Haitian origin who built his house and established a supply station here in 1779. In 1800, du Sable sold his property to French-Canadian trapper Jean Lalime, who four years later passed it on to John Kinzie, another Quebec merchant.
For 200 years, this Kinzie was wrongly considered the founder of the town. “You want to give a black man credit for being one of the founders of one of the greatest cities in America? our guide asks with irony. It was his daughter-in-law, Juliette Augusta Magill Kinzie, author and historian, who gave this credit to her father-in-law, a good white man of Christian valor. » This same Kinzie was responsible for the first murder committed in Chicago; he killed Lalime in 1812, after a quarrel that went wrong…
PHOTO PIERRE-MARC DURIVAGE, THE PRESS
The daily Art on the Mart screenings are presented every evening on the facade of the Merchandise Mart, a huge building built in 1930 which, at 372,000 square meters, was the largest building of its time.
All this takes us back more than 100 years before, in the footsteps of Louis Joliet and Father Jacques Marquette, the first Europeans to have paddled in the same waters as us, which however flowed towards Lake Michigan at that time – we reversed the flow with great blasts of dynamite so that they head towards the Mississippi basin from 1900.
PHOTO PIERRE-MARC DURIVAGE, THE PRESS
The Chicago Maritime Museum notably offers some paintings accompanied by video presentations of famous people from the city’s history.
Amazing museum
A visit to the small Chicago Maritime Museum is also worth the detour to retrace the origins and development of Chicago, intrinsically linked to its waterways. Informed by the region’s natives, Louis Joliet was the first to establish that a short portage between the Des Plaines River and the Chicago River made it possible to join the Mississippi basin to that of the Great Lakes and the Atlantic Ocean. For the record, it is on this trail, called the Ottawa Trail, that the foundations of the legendary Route 66 were laid!
Among other things, the Maritime Museum contains replicas of bark canoes made by Chicagoan Ralph Freese, including the one he built in 1973 to mark 300 years of the Joliet-Marquette expedition to Arkansas. Freese also built the large 34-foot canoe used in Ottawa for the centennial of Canadian Confederation.
PHOTO PIERRE-MARC DURIVAGE, THE PRESS
Map of the city of Chicago in the 19th centurye century, exhibited at the Maritime Museum
If we explore the museum a little further, we learn lots of truly astonishing things. For example, a World War I German submarine salvaged as spoils of war was torpedoed in Lake Michigan as part of an exercise by theEastland, a refloated ship which had previously been the victim, docked in the Chicago River, of the worst maritime disaster in the Great Lakes (you can’t make this up!). We also see some models of ships that sailed to the port of Chicago, such as the USS Wolverine, an improbable aircraft carrier built from a steamship driven by paddle wheels; it was used for training from 1942 to 1945 – no fewer than 1,300 pilots landed on its deck!
Shipping costs were paid by Choose Chicago, which had no control over the content of the article.