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Raising of Chicago

During the 1850s and 1860s, engineers carried out a piecemeal raising of the grade of central Chicago to lift the city out of its low-lying swampy ground. Buildings and sidewalks were physically raised on jackscrews.

These conditions caused numerous epidemics, including typhoid fever and dysentery, which blighted Chicago six years in a row culminating in the 1854 outbreak of cholera that killed six percent of the city’s population. In five days the entire assembly was elevated 4 feet 8 inches (1.42 m), by a team consisting of six hundred men using six thousand jackscrews,[15] which made it ready for new foundation walls to be built underneath. Consequently, the practice of putting the old multi-story, intact and furnished wooden buildings—sometimes entire rows of them en bloc —on rollers and moving them to the outskirts of town or to the suburbs was so common as to be considered nothing more than routine traffic.

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