The North Shore Channel is a drainage canal built between 1907 and 1910 to flush the sewage-filled North Branch of the Chicago River down the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal. A sluice gate usually prevents the canal from draining out to Lake Michigan in Wilmette, though the gate must be opened occasionally to prevent downstream flooding. The north end is near the Bahá'í House of Worship, and connects to the North Branch at the junction of several North Side community areas, such as Wilmette, Evanston, Skokie, Lincolnwood, and Chicago. In 1999, the system of which the canal is a part was named a Civil Engineering Monument of the Millennium (as part of the Chicago wastewater system) by the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE).
Canoeing and kayaking are allowed; there are several put-in points along the length. In addition to water navigation there are walking and biking paths along nearly the entire length of the canal.
Surrounded by parks and steep, wooded banks, the canal also provides a corridor for local wildlife. Chicago's only waterfall (looks like a concrete spillway) in the city limits is just south of Foster Avenue, in Chicago's River Park, where the North Branch drops four feet through a dam into the canal.
Famous quotes containing the words north, shore and/or channel:
“We might hypothetically possess ourselves of every technological resource on the North American continent, but as long as our language is inadequate, our vision remains formless, our thinking and feeling are still running in the old cycles, our process may be “revolutionary” but not transformative.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“He stood bewildered, not appalled, on that dark shore which separates the ancient and the modern world.... He is power, passion, self-will personified.”
—William Hazlitt (1778–1830)
“This is what the Church is said to want, not party men, but sensible, temperate, sober, well-judging persons, to guide it through the channel of no-meaning, between the Scylla and Charybdis of Aye and no.”
—Cardinal John Henry Newman (1801–1890)