Has Mother Nature developed a multi-color hue for Chicago's namesake river

There’s one thing that anybody who’s native to Chicago knows for sure – our namesake river ain’t blue in color.

The natural muddy green of Chicago River. Photos by Gregory Tejeda

You might be able to look out to the east from downtown high rises and see a Lake Michigan that is a luscious blue in color and appears to extend off so far into the distance that you might mistake it for an ocean, rather than just a lake – albeit one of the Great Lakes that make the Midwestern U.S. so unique.

BUT EVERYBODY WHO’S ever spent time here knows the Chicago River, which the lake flows into so as to avoid having our sewage and waste wind up in our drinking water supply, knows our river water is different.

It has taken on a green hue. In fact, it has taken on different shades of green, and not just because of St. Patrick’s Day.

For on that March day, city officials go out of their way to add dyes to the river water (or at least the portion of the river that separates Downtown from the Near North Side) so that it becomes a bright Kelly green.

As opposed to the sickly, dingy green with a touch of brown to it that is the usual color of our namesake river.

Still some industry in downtown portions of Chicago River

IT’S ACTUALLY ONE of the local gags, the quality of our river. So tainted with sludge that it might almost be possible to walk across the water, even if you don’t happen to be Jesus Christ.

Or that one accidental tumble off a downtown bridge into the water and the biggest threat may not be that you’d drown, but that you’d become poisoned just by coming into contact with the water.

By comparison, salt piles along Chicago's 'other' river -- the Calumet

My own gag acknowledges the fact that the river water quality actually has improved in recent years – to where our river is no longer toxic, but is now merely polluted.

Despite all of these noxious comments (about as tainted as the river itself), I have to say I always considered the Chicago River – particularly the part of it that goes through downtown from Lake Michigan to the split between the south and north branches – to be a significant part of our city’s personality.

SO WHAT SHOULD we think about the fact our city’s river is now taking on distinct shades? Is it a split personality? A physical manifestation of Chicago’s character?

For what it’s worth, WLS-TV on Monday reported that since Friday and through the weekend, the river has taken on distinct shades of green. The south branch being the usual muddy green color that we usually associate with the river while the north branch has a brighter shade almost like that fake green trotted out every St. Patrick’s Day.

Is this Mother Nature’s way of saying we ought to celebrate St. Patty’s Day every day in Chicago?

Is the muddy green color appropriate as river passes Trump tower?

The Metropolitan Water Reclamation District and the Chicago Department of Water Management both told the television station that this multi-shade of green is actually natural, and not something we need to concern ourselves with. Not yet, anyway.

RECENT STORMS AND seasonal vegetation changes allegedly are responsible for the varying hues. Although further tests are supposedly still being taken to see if there’s going to be any lasting effect to Chicago River water.

Personally, I find this quirky – almost something to laugh about. Considering that Chicagoans of any sense know better than to drink directly from the river, and that we know it is still decades far in the future that one-time Mayor Richard J. Daley’s decades-old dream of people being able to fish in the Chicago River will become reality.

So as for our river, we’ll have to adapt to multi-shades of green, and let’s hope it doesn’t turn fiery red.

The Cleveland Indians baseball team may be closer to a World Series appearance than our Chicago White Sox, but we’re more than willing to let Cleveland and its Cuyahoga River (which caught fire due to the waste in the water back in 1969) be unique.

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Some of us don't have the sense to see Chicago's wonders; we're losing people

It seems not everybody shares the love I have for this magical land built along the southwestern shores of Lake Michigan – the Census Bureau reported this week the Chicago metropolitan area is nearly 20,000 residents smaller than it was a year ago.

Long-standing cultural institutions not enough to bring people to Chicago, ...

That would be the equivalent of an entire suburban community being suddenly obliterated from the map – although I’m sure urban development types would tell me it is people fleeing the city proper to go live in those suburbs.

FOR THE RECORD, the Census Bureau estimates that the Chicago-area population (including the portions that spill over the state lines into Indiana and Wisconsin) is 9.513 million.

Officially, the last Census count in 2010 showed the Chicago area at 9.461 million people. So we’re still bigger than we were a few years ago.

But the reality is that the estimated population count for this year is a 19,570 person drop compared to last year, which was an 11,324 person drop from the year before that.

It seems that when compared to other cities across the Great Lakes region and Midwest, we’re typical. Technically, the word out of Detroit, Cleveland and St. Louis is worse.

BUT WE IN Chicago have always thought of ourselves as worthy of being held to a higher standard. Hence, we notice that places like New York and Los Angeles experienced population hikes of 2-3 percent.

... nor are the newer novelties such as 'Cloud Gate'

Not huge, but not insignificant either.

Now I’m not about to claim that the Midwest is somehow dragging Chicago down, making the city that blue dot on a red sea as way too many politically-motivated maps depict these days. If anything, I always thought Chicago was the spiritual capital of this vast region that thinks the Atlantic and Pacific oceans have nothing on that great body of water known as the Great Lakes, and that one-time Chicago Tribune publisher Robert R. McCormick sort of had the right idea that “Chicagoland” was truly unique – even if his reasons why were a little half-cocked (or maybe were ahead of his time in predicting much of the region's political support for Donald J. Trump).

Corncobs along the Chicago River ...

I did notice the one demographer who told Crain’s Chicago Business that the Chicago area population is “flatlining,” as in we’ve dropped about as low as we can get and this is the bottom.

ALTHOUGH ANYBODY WITH sense knows we don’t bottom out until we literally become a ghost town – a place of long-abandoned structures just waiting for Mother Nature to whack the one-time site of the Second City with a massive tornado that causes everything to come tumbling down.

... and a gaudier structure located upstream

Now I’m sure some people are going to want to claim the politically partisan bickering that has occurred the past few years is somehow scaring people away.

I doubt it.

Largely because I think many people have enough sense to disregard the blowhard tendencies of the government officials they elect. Besides, most of the people who want to make that line of attack are more interested in blaming the “other side” for the population loss.

This shoreline of Lake Calumet is firmly located within the city limits

THEY WANT TO lambast somebody, rather than try to figure out the solution to our problems; which, admittedly, do include the fact that a significant number of people are willing to up and leave what I will always regard as the most wonderful city on Planet Earth.

Where else will you find streets named for Goethe?

Even if there are some people, particularly of African-American persuasion, who’d rather move back South to the lands their grandparents fled. Segregation isn’t what it once was down there, and our land of opportunity has fallen off as well.

Or there may be all those other individuals who push themselves out further and further away from Chicago’s downtown core to the point where they don’t want to think of themselves as being part of the metropolitan area.

Although I’m always inclined to think those people ultimately will be “punished” for their lack of faith by finding themselves so far out in the middle of “nowhere” that they’ll wind up longing for the days when they were a part of that wondrous urban area that gave us deep dish pizza, electrified blues music and a century’s worth of mediocre-to-bad baseball – both South and North sides!

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What will they miss; other than chance to see Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame?

(NOT IN) CLEVELAND – So Gov. Bruce Rauner and Sen. Mark Kirk, R-Ill., who allegedly are the two prominent Republican political officials from Illinois, are among the politicos who couldn’t be bothered to show up for the Republican National Convention that began Monday on the shores of Lake Erie.

 

RAUNER: Keeping his distance from Cleveland

Both are among the many GOP types who want to keep some distance between themselves and likely Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump.

OF COURSE, I doubt their presence is being missed at all this week, with many of the Trump types who will formally pick him to be the GOP candidate who takes on Democrat Hillary Clinton viewing them suspiciously.

Rauner, after all, is the guy who has shown himself to be incapable of crushing Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan, D-Chicago, while Kirk is the guy whom they only begrudgingly voted for in 2010 and certainly aren’t going to get all worked up over this year.

He is, after all, the guy who was branded by none other than Trump himself as a “loser,” as though if he’d only accept the love of Trump he’d have a chance of beating Democrat Tammy Duckworth come Nov. 8.

It is clear from reports emanating from Cleveland that this year’s presidential nominating convention is nothing like previous versions – which usually amount to over-glorified pep rallies in which political operatives gather together, get all worked up, then go back home to try to spread that sense of energy to the masses to get them to vote.

INSTEAD, THIS IS purely about Trump. It is about feeding his massive ego and making him feel like he’s staging an event that will go into the history books. Even though I expect that whatever does come out of Cleveland this week will be little remembered and long-forgotten.

There’s no way any event that features actor Scott Baio as one of its prominent faces bears any resemblance to an event that dictates serious public policy.

 

KIRK: Not likely missed on shores of Lake Erie

Heck, I’d take this event more seriously if Trump had arranged for Scott’s cousin, Jimmy Baio, to be the big-name speaker. Since the 1970s television show “Soap” (where Jimmy played the smart-alecked son of Jessica and Chester Tate) was probably more intriguing than any of the shows that featured Scott.

Or does anyone really think that highly of “Charles in Charge” or the later years of “Happy Days” that featured Scott Baio as a prominent player?

BUT HAVING PSEUDO-celebrities show up probably is totally in line with the kind of presidency that Trump would give us – should the electorate actually go so far as to give him a majority of the vote come Election Day.

Lots of glitz and glamour, with the likelihood that the actual duties of governing being relegated to fairly anonymous geeky-types hired by a president who thinks of himself as more a CEO-type who barks general orders and is quick to shift the blame away from himself whenever anything goes wrong.

It’s no wonder the serious governing types don’t feel compelled to be on hand for the nominating convention, which usually would offer them a chance to be seen by government-geek types and draw attention to themselves.

Rauner is passing on the chance to be viewed as a national figure; likely because he knows he can only come across as looking foolish in this environment. Better that he spend his week finding events across Illinois to travel to – such as his Monday appearance in Taylorville where he addressed the issue of restrictions on the sale of addictive bath salts. Better that than being seen near Trump.

AS FOR THOSE people who are in Cleveland this week, I hope they feel like they’re accomplishing something significant – other than being in the presence of Stephen Colbert, the entertainer who plays the part of a political commentator which means that Cleveland is probably the perfect place for him to spend a week in search of a cheap laugh.

Nobody else gains much. I don’t feel like I would be missing much by not being in Cleveland this week. For the Indians are in Kansas City playing the Royals, so skipping out on Baio’s speech or the comments of any of the many Trump family members who will speak grandly about dear ol’ daddy is not an option.

 

This week is all about Trump; nobody else

As for playing hooky (delegates get free admission, thanks to AT&T) to see the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame? My brother actually went there once, and claimed the overall experience was one of the biggest let-downs of his life. Too much about Cleveland trying to claim a cultural significance for itself, and not enough about the music itself.

Which could be appropo for the convention itself – lots of fluff detracting from the serious detail of people trying to show why they’d actually be qualified enough to justify our voting for them come Election Day!

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No charge in Cleveland. No guilt in Chicago? Problem remains the same

There are people now peeved in Cleveland, what with the fact that prosecutors along the Cuyahoga River think that the shooting death of a 12-year-old boy by police officers is not murder.

Another ugly scene headed Tuesday. Although when is the Criminal Courts Building ever a pleasant place to be?

I’m sure it will be their ideological cousins in Chicago who will be gathered outside the Criminal Courts Building on Tuesday when Jason Dan Dyke shows up in court and either he or his attorney says the words they don’t want to hear.

“NOT GUILTY. YOUR honor.”

For it will be the Chicago cop’s arraignment in which he and his attorneys will begin the process of fighting back against the people who have spent the past month with the videotape that they say shows Van Dyke killing a 17-year-old in cold blood.

Even though the video shows the gunfire coming from off-screen. It is other testimony in combination with the video that led the Cook County state’s attorney deciding they could charge the cop with a criminal charge – six counts of murder, to be specific.

Which is what people in Cleveland wanted to happen to two police officers who were involved in the shooting death of Tamir Rice – who was killed when police mistook the pellet gun he pulled from his waistband and pointed at them for a weapon that could have caused them bodily harm.

OF COURSE, THE activists in Cleveland are arguing that police should not have cared about such an act, and should have realized it was coming from a child. Which kind of reminds me of an old “Hill Street Blues” episode in which one of the often-noble Hill Street officers shot and killed a boy who pulled out a toy pistol at the wrong time.

Laquan could easily be ...

That cop was supposedly traumatized and the episode told of how his act ultimately devastated his career.

But the modern-day reality may be that some people were so eager to point out the legal justification for the two officers in Cleveland that they’re too willing to ignore the loss of a child’s life.

And some may also be willing to accept the acts of Van Dyke, whose attorneys told the Washington Post about how they intend to punch holes in the credibility of the video because it lacks audio.

PARTICULARLY OF THE information that police were provided during all those moments of driving in the squad car prior to encountering Laquan McDonald. Meaning they may really have seen him as some sort of major threat, particularly when he tried to get away from them on first encounter.

... Tamir's Chicago 'cousin'

Which activists like to think was McDonald trying to walk away from a conflict. But I am aware that the law gives police the legal right to stop people. That and the dinky blade could wind up providing some sort of legal justification.

I bring this up because I remain suspicious of those who want to believe this is such an open-and-shut legal case – one in which the officer will someday find his head being stuffed into a jail cell toilet bowl while being sodomized.

A grotesque image, but one I’m sure some people would take perverse pleasure out of its occurrence.

YET IT WILL be a long legal fight either way. Take the Washington Post, which recently did reporting about police violence in this country and found that during the past year, there were at least 975 people shot to death by police officers.

Only eight ever got charged with a crime. Which truly puts Van Dyke in rarified air if he was one of the few so over-the-top outrageous that he couldn’t escape a criminal indictment.

We’ll have to wait and see what ultimately happens with Van Dyke, who during his 14 years as a Chicago police officer had some 20 complaints filed against him – complaints that he somehow managed to be cleared of in all cases.

Although in one aspect, it doesn’t matter. Regardless of the verdict of some future jury, both Laquan and Tamir are dead – cut short before the prime of their lives was even close to coming.

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Miami?!??

This is going to be a sacreligious thought for some. But I didn’t care enough about where LeBron James wound up to want to watch ESPN’s hour-long stint of prostitution where they let the now-former Cleveland Cavaliers forward announce which basketball team he was going to bless with his presence for the next few years.

In fact, I’m glad that when the World Cup final is played Sunday, there will be so many alternatives that I can avoid paying attention to the television network that would like to think it is reporting on sports, but is really making athletics all the more trivial.

A PART OF me wants to start boycotting anything having to do with ESPN on account of the way they so willingly gave up their airtime for this nonsense. I’m sure they think they scored a “scoop” and will try to dismiss people like me as merely being bitter that we didn’t get the story first.

Yet treating this self-indulgent trite trash as something ever so significant makes me want to puke – especially since too many people think that ESPN is somehow the significant news media entity, rather than just another infotainment channel among the hundreds that many of us can access on our cable television packages.

Which means the people who might be the most sane are the ones who are willing to put up with the “luddite” label and get their television signals over the airwaves.

Now in a sense, I don’t blame LeBron James. He’s a ballplayer, and he has an ego like many professional athletes. I expect him to pull ego-centric silliness such as he has conducted the past week to turn himself into a presence that must be catered to.

MY PROBLEM IS with people who are too willing to play along with that, instead of doing our best to try to knock down the hype and try to report on whether or not there truly is any benefit to having LeBron James in ones’ line-up.

With James and the other players the Miami Heat (the stupidest franchise name in professional sports, even moreso than the Utah Jazz or the Tampa Bay Rays) picked up in recent days (including Chicago-area native Dwyane Wade), that team had better win something.

They had better make a clean break from their history of nothingness and start to amount to something as a sports franchise. Or else James is going to find that he’s the biggest bum in all of pro sports (he’s going to make Alex Rodriguez appear to be well-loved).

He dumped on his home town of Cleveland, and managed to string along the franchises of the major cities of this country. He’s going to have a lot of people hoping that his career fizzles into a pile of dog-do.

WHAT CRACKS ME up is that much of the early speculation saw the free agent battle for James’ services as a good ol’ Chicago vs. New York brawl. Some even put Los Angeles into the equation.

But this was supposed to be about what metropolis would turn James into the symbol of their city for the upcoming decade.

Instead, it truly seems that this was nothing more than a Cleveland vs. Miami battle, with the big cities (including our own) strung along to feed his ego.

I’m not shocked that James could ignore all those people who behaved as though they were Chicago Cubs fans (don’t any of these people have jobs?), carrying those black signs reading “home!” and trying to create an almost intimidating presence to keep the one-time Cleveland-area high school prep star with his hometown NBA franchise.

Instead, James gave up the hometown memories for nice weather, which as far as I’m concerned is about the only real difference between Cleveland and Miami (unless one wants to factor in the lack of Cubanos in Cleveland).

SOME WILL CLAIM that it was the chance to create a “super team” with Wade and Chris Bosh that could win something in Miami. Yet I’m wondering if they could produce a lot of teams that fall just short.

Perhaps it is because I have seen too many baseball teams that think they can buy their way to a championship. It is true that a team can usually spend money to get that final remaining part to a team that actually wins something.

But thinking that they can go on a checkbook spree this week to suddenly make Miami an elite NBA franchise? That’s nonsense. They could wind up being the best second-place team in the league, or the one that consistently gets knocked out of the playoffs in the early rounds.

But maybe James will be entranced by the flash of Florida, which depending on the type of person one is can be more appealing than anything coming from the Big Apple or the Second City. Why do I suspect that if the NBA had a team in Las Vegas, that would have been the preference of LeBron, and just about every other ballplayer on the planet today.

BESIDES, I STILL wonder if Chicago sporting luck would have had its way with James and brought down his talent?

In which case, the Chicago sporting scene is better off without the additional disappointment. The Cubs will give us enough of that in coming years.

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