My dad's small commercial building in Pilsen looked normal, but if you peeked into the holes in the sidewalk out front you could see a vaulted space underneath where the old sidewalk used to be, which was kind of unnerving when you realized the sidewalk was crumbling. You could even access it from the basement of his building (which I suppose used to be the ground level?), but he never let me go down there as a kid.
I also know of one or two old homes from around this time period in the neighborhood I grew up in (which wasn't part of Chicago at this time) that were later moved off what became the main avenue through the area to new locations about a block away. I think that happened much later though.
Though so many are gone now and replaced with new construction.
The work was performed by the architectural firm of Vonnegut, Bohn & Mueller, co-founded by Bernard Vonnegut, father of the noted author Kurt.
<https://www.archdaily.com/973183/the-building-that-moved-how...>
How about renaming 567 streets on a single Friday?
The Guardian also has an article written back then: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/feb/23/san-francisc...
This is their YouTube profile: https://www.youtube.com/@AmericanExperiencePBS/featured
Unfortunately, the doc you mention isn't on there. They do have the transcript on their site tho: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/chicago/
<https://yewtu.be/watch?v=NB5bMyir4-g>
(The Blues Brothers, 1980)
A lot of places I've lived, things like that wouldn't fly. I was equally amazed at Phoenix with their, what I can only call a "strategic water reserve".
A lot of thought and money goes into stuff like that.
I get the strong sense that in most American cities if you would have told the population that we all need to undertake a massive public work, (Oh, and pay for it by the way), they would yank you from office and tell you to go F yourself.
Really it still does. I'll trigger many bostonians by invoking the dig. Seattle has bored some massive tunnels recently and re-scaped its waterfront
The Big Dig was less than 10 miles, never deeper than roughly 100 ft. TARP is over 100 miles always deeper than 100 ft. And because of intended use, it all has to be dug through solid limestone bedrock. The engineering challenges are non trivial in both, but one is on a massive scale that the other is just not.
Speaking to the Seattle example, the reason for building the streets higher is that, in Seattle, people would have revolted if they had decree'd "All shalt raise thine buildings 12 to 24 feet as did the multitudes in Chicago." That's what I mean. Seattle is the example that proves the rule. No one had the political capital to force a Chicago style raise on Seattle.
That said, between you and me, as an engineer, I would have done things the Seattle way and left the buildings at ground level. Raised the streets and then turn the formerly ground level floors into basements. It's not the end of the world if basements flood from time to time. And some drainage might even help with that. Chicago, on the other hand, wanted the "complete" solution. They were done with dealing with floods. Even in basements, they were intent on eradicating flooding. Which is a laudable goal, and Chicago has been much better off because of it. But the risk and the cost is just a whole lot higher than I would have felt comfortable with given the tech available to me at the time.
the original downtown of Seattle got moved up 1 floor: they didn't raise the buildings, they raised the street, the old 2nd floors became first floors.* You can still visit the underground Seattle in some places.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_Underground
* carefully worded to also work on European floor number systems.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quabbin_Reservoir
New York City built three long aqueducts to bring in water:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_water_supply_sys...
I doubt you could get anything even resembling those projects built today due to environmental concerns.
You can visit the reservoir area and see the razed town centers that are miles from the actual water. It's kind of a sad monument to the "messy" consequences of central planning.
Likely not as greenfield development but they’re still building.
<https://www.phoenix.gov/waterservices/resourcesconservation/...>
By the way you can still buy jacks like these. They're considered safer than hydraulic jacks and are often called "house jacks":
https://www.homedepot.com/p/Jet-20-Ton-Screw-Jack-441320/306...
