This Chicago Landmark was first brought to the area Geocachers attention by Nervous Nick with his cache, Bubbly Creek (I can't believe it is Bridgeport!)
. He did place it a little further north and in a residential area and I thought I would change things up by placing it at the bitter end of this stagnant pond.
This wasn't always the bitter end. There used to be an eastern arm (to the Union Stockyards) and a western arm that have both been filled in (see the image of the 1913 topo uploaded below).
He did a great job with the description and I will share it here...
Original Description from Nervous Nick...
Hog Butcher for the World,
Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,
Player with Railroads and the Nation’s Freight Handler;
Stormy, husky, brawling,
City of the Big Shoulders....
Carl Sandburg,
Chicago
(1916)
From the 19th Century until the 1970s Chicago was home to the Union Stockyards, which was an immense place of mass slaughter, as well as home to the Armour packing plant, which was, in its day, the largest meat processing facility in the world.
The Stockyards comprised a one square mile area between Halsted and Ashland just to the south of here. The squalid living conditions, the exploitation of human labor, and the bleak socioeconomic reality of the early Twentieth Century Stockyards are graphically documented in a classic novel, The Jungle, by Upton Sinclair (1906). If you are any sort of student of Chicago history, then you should check out this work. At the very least, check out this link to learn a bit about the area.
The offal from this meat packing industry was, of course, cavalierly dumped into the nearest available receptacle--in this case, the South Fork of the South Branch of the Chicago River.
To this day, many years after the closing of the Stockyards, and decades after their heyday, the organic waste which was dumped into the river still decays on the bottom of the river, and on a calm day you can see the bubbling of the gases produced by this fermentation. Hence, this part of the Chicago River (which dead-ends somewhat north of 39th Street) has, for as long as I can remember, been called "Bubbly Creek".