Mile 120: Joliet, Illinois
First visit: Dec. 19, 2022 Public trail? Public yes, trail no Private land? No Distance walked: Less than 1 mile
While the Des Plaines River may flow within Chicago city limits, it’s only for three or four miles at the city’s westernmost border. I’ve said previously that most Chicago residents are probably not aware of this, which assumes they’ve ever even heard of the Des Plaines River. But in Joliet, the state’s third-largest city, it would be hard to not know the Des Plaines flows through it, because it flows literally through the center of town. It’s an immense working river by this point, already carrying most of the Chicago metro area’s treated wastewater along with a great deal of barge traffic, and there is little about it that resembles the quaint and meandering stream that originates in Wisconsin.
The way cities live on and with the Des Plaines River became a subject of almost as much interest to me as anything else about the river, and it was enlightening to compare the river’s presence in communities like Pleasant Prairie, Libertyville, Des Plaines, Riverside and Joliet. Just as Riverside is remarkable for how it incorporated the river into its village plan, Joliet is remarkable for how it appears to have not. I don’t say this in a disparaging way, and in fact I’m sure I am quite ignorant as to the many ways the river and the city have had to accommodate one another over the years. During my first visit to Joliet in mid-December (which was my first ever visit to Joliet), my first impression was that aside from its downtown bridges and canal-like retention walls, nothing else about the city seems to acknowledge the river running through it. This includes the Joliet Area Historical Museum, which pays loving tribute to old Route 66 and The Blues Brothers, as most of Joliet does, but which had not a shred of information about the river’s role in the city’s history.
Perhaps because the Des Plaines seems almost like an afterthought here, it’s also not a great place for trying to walk the river. Besides a couple of small city parks on the river’s west bank, which offer nothing in the way of trails, walkers must be satisfied with the meager views available from N. Bluff St., or S. Des Plaines St.
Joliet: City of Stone (and bridges)
Of course, there are the bridges, and almost all of them can be walked, which I did. There are seven in Joliet (counting the twin I-80 bridges as one), including the Brandon Road bridge. But if the city has any defining symbolism – besides the old Route 66 signs and the ever-present Blues Brothers – it’s the downtown draw bridges. They are certainly picturesque with their art deco appearance. All five of them were built between 1934-35, and rehabbed in the mid-80s. All five were designed by the Scherzer Rolling Lift Bridge Co. of Chicago. And aside from a small drawbridge over the Brandon Road lock, all five represent the only draw bridges on the Des Plaines River.
A lot of this bridge information I know because I looked it up at historicbridges.org and used their handy Bridge Browser. It’s a remarkable fan site catering to bridge enthusiasts, a group that must be large enough to explain why the six-lane cantilevered bridge on I-80 earned mention in Wikipedia’s otherwise scant coverage of the river. Finding this site made me feel better about my own OCD.
To quote the website: “Two of the four Scherzer rolling lift bridges in Joliet have two lanes and are narrower than the other two which carry three lanes. The appearance of these bridges are much different because of the narrower design. They have the illusion of looking taller, and the feeling of passing through a tunnel is more pronounced when you drive across this bridge. Oddly, both of these two-lane bridges feature builder plaques crediting the Mississippi Valley Structural Steel Company with building the bridge. The three-lane bridges have no builder plaque.”
Now that’s a level of minutiae I can appreciate! Not mentioned here is that the fifth downtown drawbridge, also a Scherzer bridge, is a trunnion bascule bridge, much more common in Chicago. That’s the Ruby St. bridge, by the way, from which you can see the I&M Canal confluence pictured in the earlier Confluence section. Don’t laugh, this is the kind of information that comes in handy during trivia contests.
The only dam left on the Des Plaines
For all the trouble I had finding historic record of the city’s relationship with the river, there is one facet of it that is recorded in great detail, and that is the Brandon Road Lock and Dam, which is actually on the National Register of Historic Places. Arguably the most astonishing symbol of the river’s transformation from country stream to mighty waterway, it scarcely seems possible that such a thing could exist on the humble Des Plaines River. Yet there it is, just south of downtown Joliet, the only dam on the whole damn river (more on that in a moment). And unless someone does something fast, Asian Flying Carp are going to storm the Great Lakes by swimming right through the lock there. That they haven’t done so yet is astonishing in its own right.
The Brandon Road Lock and Dam was built from 1927-33, and incorporated into a USACE network called the Illinois Waterway the same year the I&M Canal was officially closed down – though the old canal and its junction lock can still be seen here, where the I&M Trail picks up. Among other things, the lock and dam are the principal means by which to control water levels between Lockport and Joliet.
Unlike many of my other Top 5 locations, the lock and dam are both publicly visible from the Brandon Road bridge. But it isn’t pedestrian-friendly, even if I did walk across it without getting run over.
Having by now seen the river in all of its disparate moods, it was still a revelation to me to see it here, where it looks more like the Mississippi River than it does the Des Plaines River. I stood transfixed on the Brandon Road bridge longer than public safety officials would recommend before I moved on to the lock. Like the dam, it’s the only one on the river. Its little drawbridge doesn’t even offer a shoulder for the unlucky walker, but it does offer an unimpeded view of the lock. And it turns out that lock will be the next front in the invasive species war.
Before I get to that – because that’s lock-related – let me address one more thing about the dam situation on the Des Plaines.
Those of us who grew up in Cook and Lake Counties no doubt remember the so-called low-head dams on both the Des Plaines and the Chicago Rivers. Built from 1918-1968, they were all removed from both rivers between 2011-2021; 14 in total, 11 of them on the Des Plaines.
The low-head dams, whose name derives from their relatively short drops, were built to assist with farming, river crossing, navigation, and fish control, among other things. But urban development and changing attitudes towards river management helped make a case for their removal, work that was undertaken by the Army Corps of Engineers and the Illinois DNR with the help of the Lake and Cook County Forest Preserves – and the Village of Riverside, which took sixteen years to remove the Hofmann Dam after agreeing to the idea. The removal of the eleven dams – three in Lake County, seven in Cook County, and one in Riverside – cost more than $6 million, and provoked spirited debate among preservationists on both sides of the argument. It turns out that dams hold a much more sentimental place with people than I would have guessed, and despite numerous benefits to their removal, there was some passionate public resistance to the plans.
As if in tribute to their popular legacy, multiple Forest Preserves in Cook County are still otherwise unaccountably named for the former dams. Which is confusing to people like me, who expected to see a dam at Dam # 1 Woods.
The Great Lakes in the balance
“New carp barrier being built at Brandon Rd.” is the headline of a Chicago Tribune story from Jan. 19, 2022. I won’t make you go to the Tribune’s site because they’ll probably make you pay to read the article. So let me summarize it here, because this lock is an important part of Chicago’s future, as well as that of Lake Michigan and all the Great Lakes.
Up until now I’ve been following the river’s story from north to south, as the river flows. But here at Brandon Road we’re going to turn around and look back upstream for a moment, because the lock here is where the Asian Flying Carp are getting through to the Sanitary and Ship Canal – and the rest of the Des Plaines River.
While discussing the confluence with the Sanitary and Ship Canal earlier, we briefly considered the two strategies currently being employed to keep invasive species from swimming between Lake Michigan and the Mississippi River: a series of electric grids in the San Ship Canal off Romeo Road, and a line of mesh fencing and concrete barriers between the canal and the river – the latter intended to prevent contamination during flooding.
The shortcoming in the current configuration is that the carp can still get right up to the grid, and all it would take is a power failure to bring down the whole defense. (Or a one-hundred-year flood, which seem to occur about every five or six years now.) How about we try to stop them before they can even get to the confluence, thereby protecting both waters upstream from Brandon Road?
That’s in fact the plan, as laid out by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, with the enthusiastic backing of groups ranging from the National Wildlife Federation to the Alliance for the Great Lakes.
“Plans for the $858 million project include a technology gauntlet — an electric barrier, underwater sound, an air bubble curtain and flushing lock — to stop carp from swimming to Lake Michigan,” reports the Tribune article. Looking at a diagram of the proposed structure, it looks to deter the fish before they even get to the lock. Such an effort will be costly. Much more so than the $18 billion it is estimated it would cost to simply shut down the canal. UASCE is putting about $226 billion toward the project as part of funding received from the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure plan, while Illinois and Michigan have also committed funding. Projected in a best-case scenario to be completed in 2030, vested organizations will have some time to secure the rest of the funding, but there’s reportedly enough in place now to begin preliminary work.