We received word Friday morning from MCL Companies marketing director Susan Devine that MCL’s new park in the 400 block of East Illinois Street in Streeterville was open to the public, so I took advantage of the afternoon’s fair weather and walked down to River East. Some work was still going on and a few fences were still in place, but several people were already out enjoying the park.
As I was leaving, I bumped into a construction worker who said that while excavating the site for the underground parking garage, workers found an anchor, some chains and railings, possibly from George Wellington Streeter‘s boat, The Reutan. As the story goes, Streeter ran his steamboat ashore during a storm in 1886 near what is now the site of ParkView. The shallow water surrounding the beached boat later was filled in with trash, extending the landmass of the city.
The fellow I spoke with seemed to think the artifacts were indeed pieces of Streeter’s boat, but it seems equally plausible that they were simply pieces of trash from the landfill. Either way, he says they plan to use them to build some sort of monument to Streeter. I’ll be interested to get MCL’s take on the Streeter monument the next time I talk to them.
Below are a couple of MCL’s early renderings of the park, and photos I snapped from similar angles.
