Oak Street Beach

This guide to Oak Street Beach asks why a sandy shore exists at all on a lake edge Chicago engineers spent a century fighting to hold back. It traces the accidental pier that snagged sand in the 1880s, the steamship that ran aground on the resulting sandbar in 1886, and its captain George Wellington Streeter, who decided the accidental island belonged to him and spent decades in court insisting he had founded his own country. He lost, and the reclaimed ground became the neighborhood called Streeterville, named for him anyway.