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:
“I meet him at every turn. He is more alive than ever he was. He has earned immortality. He is not confined to North Elba nor to Kansas. He is no longer working in secret. He works in public, and in the clearest light that shines on this land.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Late in the afternoon we passed a man on the shore fishing with a long birch pole.... The characteristics and pursuits of various ages and races of men are always existing in epitome in every neighborhood. The pleasures of my earliest youth have become the inheritance of other men. This man is still a fisher, and belongs to an era in which I myself have lived.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“How old the world is! I walk between two eternities.... What is my fleeting existence in comparison with that decaying rock, that valley digging its channel ever deeper, that forest that is tottering and those great masses above my head about to fall? I see the marble of tombs crumbling into dust; and yet I don’t want to die!”
—Denis Diderot (1713–1784)