Chicago engineers spent the mid-nineteenth century physically lifting entire brick buildings, streets, and sidewalks up to fourteen feet in the air using thousands of manual jackscrews.

A closer look

Chicago engineers spent the mid-nineteenth century physically lifting entire brick buildings, streets, and sidewalks up to fourteen feet in the air using thousands of manual jackscrews. Because the city was originally built on a completely flat mud swamp next to a giant lake, early residents suffered from constant epidemics caused by raw sewage getting trapped in the stagnant streets. To install a modern gravity-fed sewer system, work crews simply placed giant wooden beams under massive multi-story hotels and hired hundreds of men to turn the jacks simultaneously. People were reportedly still shopping inside the department stores and drinking heavily in the taverns while the actual foundations of the buildings were being hoisted into the sky right beneath their feet. It remains a towering testament to an era when urban planning involved terrifying levels of structural danger rather than spending fifteen years completing environmental impact studies!