Pilsen

This guide to Chicago's Pilsen neighborhood follows the Irish and German canal diggers who cut the Illinois and Michigan Canal by hand through swampy prairie in the 1840s, then stayed on the low, waterlogged ground along the river once the digging was done. It traces the decades of flooding and cholera outbreaks that followed, and how the district became a major lumber hub after the Great Fire of 1871. Lumber floated in on barges to rebuild a city that had just burned to the ground.