The Chicago River has a complicated history. For more than a century, it absorbed factory waste, raw sewage, and runoff from the city’s meatpacking industry until it became one of the most polluted urban waterways in the United States.
For a long time, most people assumed the damage was simply permanent. Then a small, stubborn group of people decided to try something that had never been done before. A nonprofit called Urban Rivers started installing floating gardens directly on the river, and the results have been remarkable.
Now, a very different kind of river project is taking shape on its surface. Floating gardens are turning part of the river into a living habitat and, in the process, improving water quality in one of the most engineered urban rivers in the country…