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| Norman Rexford Flickr CC BY-NC-SA Open gates on the Blue Island locks in 1959. The north wall remains, along with the gatehouses. The gates themselves have been removed, but their location is easily identified today. Michael Brandt posted The Blue Island Locks & Gate Houses in 1959 shortly before their removal to widen the canal. Gate locations and houses still visible on the north bank of the canal. Paul Petraitis: O'Brien Locks near Lake Calumet took over these duties! |
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| 3D Satellite |
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Norman Rexford Flickr CC BY-NC-SACal-Sag Channel in Operation looking east (8-24-1922)
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Norman Rexford Flickr CC BY-NC-SALooking East from Rock Island Bridge (12-6-1916)
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In turn, the 60-foot canal replaced the Calumet Feeder Canal for the Indiana & Michigan Canal.
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Norman Rexford Flickr CC BY-NC-SA
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| MWRD posted Historical photo of the week: Construction of the Cal-Sag Channel in Blue Island on September 16, 1920, viewed looking east towards Stony Creek and the Ann Street and Western Ave bridges, showing A. Guthrie & Co. Inc casting concrete channel walls which were later removed when the channel was widened between 1955 and 1965. |
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| Forgotten Railways, Roads, and Places shared Joseph Obrien Originally dug as a feeder canal for the I & M canal around 1850, than it was widened again in the 1950s to what we have today. David M Laz posted The Cal Sag Channel under construction on Oct. 5, 1914 Turk Meyers Definitely a deeper looking channel than the Sanitary and Ship Canal. Jose J Aguado It's that deep then, is it? Michael Kaput 25 to 30 Ft. deep. Phil Lauricella Many of those workers, Paddy Irish, are buried in St. James on the Sag churchyard. Along with the ghosts there, it is an amazing place to visit. My wife was baptized there in the 1950s..... https://www.historicstjames.org/about-us John Weber what is the address ? Dennis DeBruler John Weber 10600 Archer Ave, Lemont, IL 60439 https://www.google.com/.../data=!3m1!1e3!4m5!3m4... |
The Cal-Sag was widened at different places at different times. I can't copy pics, since they're copyrighted, but at https://www.historicaerials.com/, you can follow the canal over the years. One example: where the tri-state passes over the canal, in 1951 the canal is 60 feet wide or so, with no tri-state. In 1961, it has been widened with the tri-state bridges in place.
ReplyDeleteAnother place of interest is between the Western and Kedzie bridges. From 1959-1967, you can literally watch bridges being built partly over dry land in preparation for the widening. It isn't until the 1973 photo that the canal is actually widened. So that part of the widening had to take place between '67 and '73.
I don't know how much those pics cost or if they're available somewhere else in the public domain, but they would be a great addition to this blog, IMHO.
There is another photo from 1967 available at this location, showing bridges that were built in preparation for the widening to come at https://carl3615.smugmug.com/History/Aerial-Photos/i-8mmdPbP/A. This is a copyrighted photo for sale, but I accessed it through this site: https://carl3615.smugmug.com/History/Aerial-Photos/, which anyone can visit (it has other historic aerial photos, including some of the Cal-Sag). It seems to me that linking to it shouldn't be a problem, since more traffic means more potential sales, but I'm no copyright lawyer, so if this is a problem, feel free to delete this post.
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DeleteDennis, the canal was built with 6 passing sidings/lie-bys 300 feet by 60-75 feet. Two of these lie-bys were in the walled sections of the canal at the eastern and western ends (these were the 60-foot width ones), which made up approximately 1/3 the length of the channel. The four others were somewhere in between (these were the 75-foot width ones) the walled sections.
ReplyDeleteBy 1939, three lie-bys had been added to the Cal-Sag, each 4,200 feet by 150 feet. They were dug east of 104, Ridgeland and Crawford. I don't know if these were added to the existing ones or if they were in other parts of the channel.
This is according to "Calumet First and Forever." In any case, the 60-foot width given for the original construction is the general width without the lie-bys. By the time they got around to widening it to 225 feet in the 1950's/1960's, large sections of it with the lie-bys were already nearly that length it sounds like.
Found out through further research that the development of the Cal-Sag and Blue Island Lock had the same issues as most of the rest of the system, namely that primary local interest was one of sanitation & the federal interest was primarily navigation. The lock, then, was primarily developed as a controlling work since the states on the lake had finally begun to worry about lake levels and the effect Chicago would have on them. Chicago would have been perfectly content to have simply built the Cal-Sag sans a lock.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, the primary operation of the controlling work at Blue Island was that the western gates would generally be left open and the eastern gates cracked to induce flow into the channel from the Little Calumet. This was enough to reverse the river during regular, dry-weather operations. Only when ships were requesting entrance or exit at Blue Island would the controlling work actually be operated as a navigation lock. Wet-weather operations were as they are today: gates closed during storms to prevent backflows and only open when the Cal-Sag was at risk of spilling out of its embankments. Because of the channel's limited capacity, at the times, backflows were quite common. The moving of the controlling works northeast to the Calumet River and the widening of the Cal-Sag Channel meant many fewer backflows, and now they are even more rare with the implementation of the Deep Tunnel project despite the huge population growth on the south side of the metro.