Mile 78.3: River Grove (DPRT)
First visit: Oct. 7, 2022 Public trail? Yes Private land? A little Distance walked: 2.4 miles
The final leg of the Des Plaines River Trail (DPRT), from Belmont Ave. to North Ave., hugs close to the river that splits my hometown of River Grove in two. By many standards this is hardly the best section of trail, with parts that are so low lying that I’ve actually seen crayfish walking across. The only portion even remotely groomed is the very end, between 1st Ave. and Sunset Bridge Meadow. But it also has so many mysterious, oddball, leftover artifacts of earlier civilization that it can feel like walking through an archaeological dig, or a junkyard.
It starts with the original Belmont Ave. bridge structure, a few yards south of the current bridge marking the border between Chicago and River Grove. My oldest brother says a car once flew off the new bridge and slammed into the east portion of the old bridge, which happens to still be connected to the original Belmont gate of the St Joseph Cemetery (burial site of famed Chicago mobster Babyface Nelson). The DPRT runs beside the cemetery toward an imposing railroad bridge and eventually Grand Ave. Here the land belongs to the Cook County Forest Preserve, and also contains mysterious cement artifacts viewable and reachable from the trail.
Just south of Grand Ave. are the scattered remains of riverside houses demolished after floods in 1938 and 1948. Around Fullerton Ave. is an old, cistern-like pumping station, surrounded by newer flood control measures. Further south of 1st Ave. is a long-abandoned water pump and tank that the Forest Preserve believes was once used for irrigating the golf course at the nearby Oak Park Country Club. Past this is the site of the old Armitage Dam, removed in 2012. And lastly, not far from Sunset Bridge Meadow, are remnants of an African American CCC camp, a reminder that segregation existed within living memory of the baby boom generation.
I walk this section of the DPRT more than any other because it is closest to where I live now, and it’s possible that I happen to notice so many more artifacts here just because I come here so often. But I look for other examples everywhere I hike, and though I occasionally see one here and there – like an old Forest Preserve marker at the north property line of the Northbrook Hilton – there is no greater concentration along the riverfront than in River Grove.
I grew up west of the river, the side with Rhodes School, the Thirsty Whale (R.I.P.) and Gene & Jude’s. Kids east of the river had River Grove School, Scheltens Field and the RGFD fire station, whose emergency vehicles could only reach the west side of town by the always-busy Grand Ave. bridge. My mother was convinced this meant that houses and residents perished in greater numbers on our side of town, and for all I know she may have been right. I fondly remember some five-alarm blazes in the area where I grew up, including the Acme fireworks factory (its real name) near the present site of Triton College.
But one of my most enduring memories of living in River Grove has to do with the river, and it is a memory shared by virtually every Des Plaines River community from Lyons north to the Wisconsin border.
The flood of 1986
During an 18-day period in September 1986, parts of southern Wisconsin and northern Illinois near the Des Plaines River experienced up to 16 inches of rain, which came on top of as much as 10 inches that had fallen just a week or two earlier. Those of us downriver in Cook County got rain too, and then we got all the water flowing down the Des Plaines from Lake County, so that by October 4 the river near us reached nearly ten feet above flood stage. We found ourselves glued to news reports predicting the river’s crest while working with National Guard troops to lay sandbags around my parents’ house.
At the time people referred to it as a 500-year flood. But perspectives change. Flooding that occurred in 2008 was called a once-a-century-flood. 2013’s flooding was called “The Great Flood of 2013.” In July 2017 they called it record flooding, and then in May 2020 it was just plain old flooding (although it was caused by “the wettest month on record in 150 years of official rainfall observations” per WGN). And it isn’t like the Des Plaines River hadn’t flooded before all that, as the 1986 disaster broke flood records from 1938, 1948, 1960 and 1969. The very name of the river, whose changes over a hundred-year period were documented by Henry Dunlop Smith, may be derived from a time in the 18th century when it was simply called Plein, according to his 1940 book chronicling the river’s name and history:
“This word, which can properly be used in French to refer to ‘high water’, seems to be derived from the habit of the Des Plaines of overflowing its banks, a tendency which was as well-known to Marquette by 1675 as to some of the modern ‘pioneers’ whose cabins were flooded in the high water of 1938.” Smith died in 1983, just missing this even greater calamity.
These more recent floods have wrought havoc on a much more densely populated region, and appear to be happening more frequently (Google “Gene & Judes flood” and you’ll find pictures from the many years they’ve been literally underwater), and the urgency among all of the affected riverside communities to do something about it was reaching its own crest after the 1986 disaster.
Flooding is normal; maybe we’re the problem
Rivers spill over their banks routinely and naturally, and the cause is grade school physics: too much water too fast. The Des Plaines River has an extensive 1,455 square mile watershed (931,489 acres) meant to absorb its overflow, with an average width of ten miles. Try to imagine five miles either side of the Des Plaines River, anywhere — or any urban river, for that matter, and you can picture exactly what’s happened to the watershed: it’s been buried under concrete. Nonporous, non-permeable concrete.
As with any once-a-century flood, especially the ones that happen several times a century, a combination of factors contributed to the 1986 disaster, not least of which is the degradation and destruction of the river’s natural drainage system, i.e., the floodplains, spillways, wetlands and forests that comprise the Des Plaines River Watershed. Quoting a 1986 NOAA report about the flood: “The majority of the watershed in Cook and DuPage Counties consists of highly developed residential and commercial properties. What little land that is left for farming is diminishing constantly because of the establishment of new shopping centers, subdivisions and light industry.” That’s what they said nearly forty years ago, when there was still some farmland around. Imagine how they’d describe it now.
As with so many things human, we tend to build stuff to address the problems we’ve caused by building stuff, and some of the earliest and most primitive solutions to flood control are still visible, and active, up and down the Des Plaines River: sewer outfalls, which are basically drainage pipes that discharge their contents directly into the river. The culverts feeding the river function similarly, but with an important difference: many of the outfalls are dumping something called CSO, which doesn’t stand for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Instead, it stands for Combined Sewer Overflow, the key words being Combined Sewer, an old and very common sewer configuration in Cook County that combines stormwater with literal human sewage, which includes God knows what all people put down their drains. I’ve seen what this means in my own basement, where gag-inducing sewage has backed up during times of extreme flooding. This still enters the river today, although purportedly less often.
That’s because we continue to build even more stuff to deal with it. As flooding and drainage have become more consequential throughout the Des Plaines watershed, including the many tributaries that feed the river, the tactic of diverting stormwater has come to include reservoirs and ever deeper (and more expensive) tunnels, comprising a system that ultimately returns the runoff to the same waterways, albeit further downstream and generally cleaner.
The Deep Tunnel
This is the work of the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District (MWRD) of Greater Chicago, which is responsible not only for the seven wastewater treatment plants serving Cook County (read more about that here), but also for building and managing the Tunnel and Reservoir Plan (TARP), also known to Chicagoans as the Deep Tunnel. Approved in 1972, partially functional today, and scheduled for Stage 2 completion in 2029 (when there could well be need for more tunnels and reservoirs), the Deep Tunnel seems to be working, though the pace of its construction still can’t keep up with the pace of development. In the meantime, once-a-century weather events are occurring more frequently. The result is there is still flooding, and there is still CSO.
To that end, there is a CSO Events Map at the MWRD’s CSO website so you can see if and where a CSO event has occurred. A CSO event is when a CSO site overflows and returns untreated water to a waterway. During my hikes I saw signs identifying TARP intake manifolds as well as Combined Sewer Outfall locations, which warn of stormwater release that may contain harmful bacteria. (Which may explain why all the Des Plaines River fishing videos I watch are catch-and-release. More on fishing in my River Forest section.) There are also numbers to call if you happen to see outfall discharge during dry weather, which invites speculation as to what or who continues to discharge into the municipal sewage system to such a degree that dry-weather outfall is even possible.
NOAA and the U.S. Geological Survey track real-time water levels from electronic data collection units located at 11 spots along the river, starting in Russell, Illinois on the Wisconsin border all the way down to the Brandon Road Lock in Joliet. I saw these collection boxes on many of my walks. Water levels on eight tributaries are tracked as well – there are seven units on Salt Creek alone. That’s a lot of data points scattered around a vast and diminished watershed, and reflects some lessons learned from prior flooding. I also saw ruler-style water level gauges on pedestrian viaducts that, if nothing else, would at least tell you how far bottom is if you happened to be on trail during a flood.
This might have come in handy for some folks over the 4th of July weekend in Chicago this year, when torrential rains flooded streets and homes (and a NASCAR race), forcing the MWRD to re-reverse the flow of the Chicago River and release excess water into Lake Michigan. I visited the CSO Events Map and noted multiple events over the period of July 2-5, though most were on the Chicago River. My own basement flooded after local combined sewer systems were inundated with nine inches of rain in about three hours, which is a reminder about why the Des Plaines, and all rivers, are so prone to flood: too much rain, too fast, and nowhere else for the water to go.
Watershed restoration
Other flood management measures are being taken as well, some of which are from the build-more-stuff school, like berms, levees and more outfalls. But there are others taking a different approach, which is the restoration and expansion of the river’s native watershed. The fact is that virtually every preserve I visited is letting nature restore itself, with some help, including the ones where the Deep Tunnel is present – a common sight in Cook County.
In Miller Meadow, a Cook County Forest Preserve south of River Grove, one of these gigantic TARP manifold covers sits alongside a walking path cutting across the spillway, where it is helping to drain the meadow, and the surrounding wetland, when the river floods. Setting aside the implications of this, and even the degree of its real effectiveness – which, from what I can tell, does seem to have reduced the incidence and severity of local flooding – the encouraging return of native habitat was one of the most uplifting aspects to my time spent walking the river.
The health and function of the Des Plaines watershed is a subject of great concern among the public bodies responsible for and affected by the river, as I’ve covered elsewhere in my travelogue. I’m not suggesting we’ve achieved an era of golden enlightenment; there still exists a substantial industrial footprint downriver from Lyons, and, as I’ve said, there are outfalls in Lake and Cook Counties disgorging water of such toxicity that they have to post warning signs around them. Especially on this final section of the Des Plaines River Trail, which I walk more than any other, I sometimes get a whiff of air that smells suspiciously like petroleum, along with other chemical odors.
But there is an impressive and increasingly diverse coalition of interests advocating and influencing legislation for the watershed, especially in Lake and Cook Counties, which may one day achieve actual stasis on behalf of the river, at least upstream. Cook County’s Metropolitan Planning Council published its Lower Des Plaines River Watershed-Based Plan in October, 2018, a 224-page behemoth that’s a mere supplement to the MWRD’s more generalized watershed plan, and as agency plan documents go, it’s a pretty good read. And it’s hardly the first of such measures, as it credits an earlier plan from 2004, developed by the Lower Des Plaines Ecosystem Partnership, as well as a similar Lake County plan.
Taken together with state and public/private preservation entities, these plans offer a blueprint for restoring the health of the watershed by returning it as much as possible to its native state and assisting it when conditions exceed its capacities. As they did during all those once-a-century floods, starting with that one that nearly swamped my family home in 1986.