If you want to swim in the Chicago River, you’ll have to wait till next year
Most Chicagoans wouldn’t dream of swimming in the Chicago River.
Doug McConnell wants to change that. But persuading the departments of Cultural Affairs and Special Events, Transportation and Fleet and Facility Management — not to mention the city’s Office of Emergency Management and the U.S. Coast Guard, among others — to let him jump in has proved much more difficult than expected.
McConnell and his co-organizer Don Macdonald hoped to organize a 2.4-mile open-water swim in the Chicago River this fall. Then the city’s Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events notified the team last week that the big swim would have to wait.
The new goal for the swim is September 2020.
“What we’re asking for is pretty atypical,” McConnell said. “Because it hasn’t been done for nearly 100 years, there isn’t a defined path that you’re supposed to take to get something like this approved. So I can understand why the city departments were a little betwixt and between about who the right department to talk to was.”
McConnell said he will use the extra year to line up sponsors for the event, which he estimates could cost $150,000. He hopes companies that have buildings along the river, as well as those with environmental interests, will want to support the swim.
“We’re not looking for just a single event, what we really want to do is get this done right so that we can turn this into one annual event to really showcase the river and the city,” he said.
McConnell said the swim would raise money for research for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as ALS or Lou Gehrig’s disease, at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine. The event will also raise money for Make A Splash, which provides swimming lessons for children.
McConnell’s concept for an openwater swim is far from half-baked. He is an open-water swimming expert and has swum all around the world, including in the English Channel and New York’s Hudson River.
He thought, “Why couldn’t we do this in the Chicago River?” McConnell eventually landed on a route that begins at Ping Tom Memorial Park in Chinatown and ends at the Clark Street Bridge in the Loop.
McConnell expects the inaugural swim will be open to about 200 experienced swimmers.
“We want to make sure that people can swim 2.4 miles, and that they aren’t going to get wigged out by murky water,” he said.
The “murky water” is a major concern for most people when it comes to the Chicago River. McConnell said the biggest challenge isn’t the quality of the water itself but rather convincing skeptics that it is clean enough to swim in.
Thomas Minarik, an aquatic biologist with the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago, said even though the water quality in the Chicago River has improved, there are still safety concerns like boat traffic and currents in the river that could pose problems for the swimmers.
Even though the river has become safer for recreation, Minarik said any natural body of water has a potential for bacteria to become dangerous.
“There’s always going to be a risk,” he said. “There’s a reason why people chlorinate their pools on a regular basis.”
The organizers put together a 70-page safety plan that includes ways to get swimmers out of the water in an emergency as well as protecting them from river traffic.
McConnell said the open swim is meant to be a celebration of how much the water quality in the river has improved since the 1970s due to numerous restoration efforts. Chicago hosted a series of competitive swims to showcase the newly clean river after the direction of the river was reversed in 1900, he said.
“Now we’ve come full circle,” he said. “The river is once again clean, so let’s celebrate that.”