Friends Of The Chicago River
The 2023 Canal Boat Captain's Award Honorees - Part 1
Hello, everyone, and welcome to another edition of Canal Stories, a series brought to you by the Canal Corridor Association to celebrate the 175th anniversary of the Illinois & Michigan Canal and the communities that were shaped by its legacy. As you can imagine, supporting and maintaining a National Heritage Area is no easy task. It requires the dedication of a hard-working group of people, all striving to preserve our history, support the residents of our area, and carry on the stewardship of this great land.
One of the Canal Corridor Association’s long-standing traditions is the presentation of the Canal Boat Captain’s Award, which honors outstanding individuals and organizations who have contributed to the success of the I&M Canal National Heritage Area, and who have furthered the principles on which CCA was founded. Today, we’re kicking off a special week-long series highlighting the seven 2023 Honorees who were recognized at our Boat Captain’s Luncheon in April of this year, starting with the Friends of Chicago River, who opened the McCormick Bridgehouse Chicago River Museum in 2006, on the northwest corner of Wacker and Michigan Avenue.
This museum is dedicated to telling the story of the Chicago River and its watershed, from pre-colonization to the modern day, plus the history of the bridges that open along the river. See the first-hand journal accounts of early traders and learn about the changes, good and bad, brought on by the opening of the I&M Canal, and the population explosion of Chicago from 400 in 1830 to nearly 300,000 in 1870.
While the Friends have been doing the good work of leading the charge of cleaning up the Chicago River since their founding in 1979, the museum, with the help of the Chicago Riverwalk development, opened the doors to reach many more people. Last year alone, nearly 25,000 people toured the exhibits and left with a new understanding of the Chicago River and the river system. Executive Director, Margaret Frisbie, and museum director, Josh Coles, tell the story of how thousands of people worked together cleaned up the river, thereby increasing the Chicago River fish population from seven species in 1979 to nearly eighty today.
The museum covers five stories of the lookalike bridgehouse, completed in 1920, and the exhibits were rewritten and enhanced while the museum was closed during Covid in 2020 and 2021.
Congratulations to the staff, board, and volunteers of the Friends of the Chicago River for their efforts and activities to clean up the Chicago River, and for sharing their work with a larger audience through the Bridgehouse Museum, thereby enhancing the overall mission of the Illinois & Michigan Canal National Heritage Area.
That concludes today’s Canal Story. Thank you so much for joining us as we continue our journey through the history of the Illinois & Michigan Canal. If you’ve enjoyed this episode, pass it along to your family and friends, and be sure to tune in tomorrow for the second installment of this spotlight series, featuring the Friends of the Chicago Portage & the Forest Preserve of Cook County. We’ll see you again very soon.