Chicago: Aerial view from Lake Michigan to the Chicago River

Aerial view from Lake Michigan to the Chicago River ; The confluence of the Chicago River and Lake Michigan hardly resembles what it was a century and a half ago. Once a brackish stand of water, the mouth of the River has been shifted east by landfill and reshaped by massive public works projects. Even the direction of the River has been changed, the result of an astounding engineering feat completed in 1900. By closing the river mouth with locks and digging deep diversion channels in outlying areas, the Chicago River's sewage-filled flow was shifted away from the city's drinking water source, Lake Michigan, to a course that eventually empties into the Mississippi River.