Chicago · Self-guided audio walk

The River That Runs Backward

Walk the Chicago River from its engineered reversal to the towers and bridges that rose on its banks.

7Stops
3.6 kmDistance
55+ minTime

Photo by Ryan Dickey from Evanston, IL / Chicago, United States on Wikimedia Commons

Chicago's main branch flows away from Lake Michigan by design. In 1900 engineers reversed the river to stop sewage from poisoning the city's drinking water. It was the largest earth-moving operation in North America at the time, and it saved the city.

This walk follows the Riverwalk from Lake Street east to the lake, then crosses to the north bank and traces the towers that defined Chicago's skyline: the Wrigley Building's gleaming terra cotta, Tribune Tower's Gothic facade embedded with stones from across the world, Marina City's twin corncobs, and the colossal Merchandise Mart. Along the way you pass the DuSable Bridge, a double-deck bascule that still lifts for boats more than a century after it opened.

The whole tour runs about 100 minutes at a comfortable pace. Every step tells the story of a river reversed and a city built on its banks.

Hear it on the street

Get the turn-by-turn audio guide in the app. The narration plays itself as you reach each stop, hands-free and offline.

Download on theApp Store Get it onGoogle Play

Stop by stop

The route

Interactive map of the route. The full stop list below works without it.

Must see

Photo by alusch on Openverse

Chicago Riverwalk at Lake Street

0:00

Where the Riverwalk's western stretch meets the confluence. The Chicago River flows away from the lake here by design, a reversal engineered in 1900.

You are standing at the western end of the Chicago Riverwalk, where Lake Street crosses the main branch. The water moving past you is heading west, away from Lake Michigan. That direction is not natural. Until 1900, the Chicago River emptied into the lake, the same lake the city drank from. Sewage, slaughterhouse runoff, and stormwater all went into the river and straight into the drinking supply. Cholera and typhoid killed thousands.

The solution was the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal, a 28-mile channel dug from the South Branch to the Des Plaines River, on the far side of the continental divide and about 40 feet lower than Lake Michigan. It took eight years and the excavation of 42 million cubic yards of earth and rock. On January 2, 1900, workers breached an earthen dam on the South Branch, and gravity did the rest. The river reversed, and Chicago's sewage began flowing toward the Mississippi instead of the water intakes.

The Riverwalk itself came much later. Daniel Burnham imagined riverside promenades in his 1909 Plan of Chicago, but the first section did not open until the 1970s. This stretch was completed in 2016. Walk east along the water and you will see the city the river built, one bridge and tower at a time.

Open in Google Maps

≈19 min walk to the next stop

Must see

Photo by Kenneth C. Zirkel on Wikimedia Commons

DuSable Bridge

0:00

The world's first double-deck, double-leaf bascule bridge. Opened in 1920, its four bridgehouses hold bas-reliefs of Chicago history.

The bridge ahead of you is the DuSable Bridge, still called the Michigan Avenue Bridge by most Chicagoans. When it opened on May 14, 1920, it was the first double-deck, double-leaf bascule bridge ever built. Bascule means seesaw: two massive steel leaves, each weighing more than 1,600 tons, pivot on fixed axles to let boats pass. In its early years the bridge lifted more than 3,000 times a year. Today it lifts about 40 times.

Look at the four bridgehouses, one at each corner. They were designed by Edward Bennett in the Beaux-Arts style, part of Daniel Burnham's vision for a grand gateway between the north and south sides. The bas-relief sculptures on the pylons were added in 1928. The southwest bridgehouse holds the McCormick Bridgehouse and Chicago River Museum. You can walk inside and spiral up five stories to see the massive gears that raise the bridge.

Before this bridge was built, Michigan Avenue stopped at the river. The north side was a tangle of industry, docks, and Pine Street, a country road. The bridge and the widening of Michigan Avenue opened the north to development and created the Magnificent Mile. In 2010 the bridge was renamed for Jean Baptiste Point DuSable, Chicago's first permanent settler, whose homesite sat at the north end.

Open in Google Maps

≈2 min walk to the next stop

Local pick

Photo by swimfinfan on Openverse

Wrigley Building

0:00

Chicago's first air-conditioned office building, clad in six shades of white terra cotta and modeled on the Giralda tower of Seville's cathedral.

That luminous white tower is the Wrigley Building. Chewing gum magnate William Wrigley Jr. built it between 1920 and 1924, the first skyscraper north of the river. He chose the site carefully: the bridge had just opened, and the jog in Michigan Avenue frames his building perfectly from the south.

Look at the color. It is not one white but six, each shade slightly lighter as the building rises. The effect pulls your eye upward to the clock tower, which is modeled on the Giralda of Seville's cathedral. Each clock face is 19 feet 7 inches across. The building has been floodlit every night since it opened, with only three interruptions: World War II, a lighting replacement in 1971, and the 1973 energy crisis.

The architects, Graham, Anderson, Probst and White, used glazed terra cotta, a material that had proven itself in the 1893 World's Fair White City that so impressed young Wrigley. The south tower was completed first, in 1921, and the north tower followed in 1924. A walkway at the third floor links them. The building was also the first air-conditioned office building in Chicago. Step closer and you will see ornamental detail on every surface, even on the roof where almost nobody looks.

Open in Google Maps

≈2 min walk to the next stop

Free preview ends here · stops 4 to 7 continue in the app

Tribune Tower

A neo-Gothic skyscraper with fragments of world landmarks embedded in its walls, the result of a 1922 design competition won by Howells and Hood.

in app

Marina City

Bertrand Goldberg's twin corncob towers, a 1964 mixed-use complex where parking spirals up the first 19 floors beneath residential units.

in app

Merchandise Mart

Once the largest building in the world, this 1930 Art Deco giant fills two city blocks and remains a wholesale design center.

in app

Wolf Point

The confluence where the three branches of the Chicago River meet, a site of Indigenous portage routes and the symbolic heart of the reversal story.

in app

Good to know

Before you go

Is the Riverwalk free?

Yes. The Chicago Riverwalk is free and open daily from 6 a.m. to 11 p.m., with stairways down from Wacker Drive along the route.

SourceCity of Chicago

Why does the Chicago River flow away from the lake?

In 1900 engineers reversed the main branch so the city's sewage would run toward the Mississippi instead of into Lake Michigan, the drinking supply. At Wolf Point, where the three branches meet, you can see the reversed current at the spot this walk is named for.

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Provenance · last verified August 17, 2026

Built from the Wayside route itself: the stops, their order, and the walk between them.

Photo by Ryan Dickey from Evanston, IL / Chicago, United States on Wikimedia Commons · CC BY 2.0

Photo by alusch on Openverse · CC BY-SA 2.0

Photo by Kenneth C. Zirkel on Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 4.0

Photo by swimfinfan on Openverse · CC BY-SA 2.0

Photo by Acediscovery on Wikimedia Commons · CC BY 4.0

Photo by Chicago Running Tours & more on Openverse · CC BY 2.0

Photo by artistmac on Openverse · CC BY-SA 2.0

Photo by Ranjit Souri on Unsplash

Photo by artistmac on Openverse · CC BY-SA 2.0

Photo by David Paul Ohmer on Openverse · CC BY 2.0

Photo by Ben Collins-Sussman on Wikimedia Commons · CC BY 2.0