(WI) Milwaukee Journal Sentinel – There are a lot of fish tales going around. Here is a true one that is about more than just the recently famous Asian carp. Once upon a time, many years ago, Chicago was a cesspool.
It was so polluted in the late 1800s, it has been written, that chickens could run across the scum that formed on top of the rivers.
I don’t know if I believe this because it has also been written that, instead of fish, the rivers were full of the floating carcasses of dead cats and horses, and I am not sure a chicken would go anywhere near a dead horse. But whatever. The smell and the disease were too much even for Chicagoans to bear. So they did something about it. More