Chicago River will host its first open-water swim in nearly a century

Story: 2025 C.E.  |  Last updated: April 20, 2026

For the first time in roughly 100 years, swimmers will enter the Chicago River in the heart of downtown. The nonprofit A Long Swim is organizing the event, carrying participants from the Dearborn Street Bridge to Lake Street — a stretch of water that, not long ago, no one would have considered safe to touch. The swim is both a celebration of decades of environmental effort and a fundraiser for swim education programs serving underrepresented youth. Mayor Brandon Johnson called it proof that the work is finally paying off.

At a glance

• Chicago River cleanup: Decades of policy changes, infrastructure upgrades, and community organizing have transformed one of America’s most polluted urban waterways into a recovering ecosystem where fish, turtles, and beavers now live.
• Open-water swim: A Long Swim is organizing the first public swim in the Chicago River in nearly a century, planned for 2025 C.E. in downtown Chicago, doubling as a fundraiser for youth swim education in underrepresented communities.
• Wildlife return: Conservation teams from the Shedd Aquarium regularly kayak the river and have documented increasing numbers of fish species, turtles, and birds — including “Chonkosaurus,” a now-famous snapping turtle that has become a local symbol of recovery.

How the Chicago River got here

The river’s turnaround didn’t happen by accident. It took a specific combination of national policy, local organizing, and sustained infrastructure investment — and it took a long time.

The Clean Water Act, passed in 1972 C.E., was the starting point. The federal law curbed the industrial pollution that had made the river toxic for much of the 20th century. Chicago had actually reversed the river’s flow in 1900 C.E. to push sewage away from Lake Michigan — a feat of engineering that also pushed problems downstream for generations.

Local groups filled the gap between federal policy and ground-level change. Friends of the Chicago River organized volunteer cleanups, pushed for stricter standards, and worked to restore riverbanks that had been hardened with concrete. Infrastructure upgrades improved sewage treatment and reduced harmful stormwater runoff. And innovative projects like the “Wild Mile” — a stretch of floating wetlands and green space along the North Branch — added new habitat directly in the river corridor.

Wildlife is moving back in

Conservation teams from the Shedd Aquarium now kayak the river regularly to document what’s returned. The list keeps growing: more fish species, native turtles, great blue herons, beavers. Kayakers who once avoided the water report clearer conditions and more wildlife than they expected to find in the middle of a major American city.

The most famous resident is Chonkosaurus — a massive snapping turtle spotted repeatedly near the river’s edge, photographed endlessly, and celebrated on social media as a living symbol of the comeback. That shift in public perception matters as much as the ecological data. When a city’s residents start treating a waterway as something worth visiting, photographing, and swimming in, the river has crossed a threshold that cleanup metrics alone can’t capture.

A model other cities are watching

American Rivers, one of the country’s leading river conservation organizations, has highlighted the Chicago River as a case study in long-term urban waterway revival. The lesson it points to: degraded rivers can recover, but it requires sustained investment, civic partnerships, and patience across political cycles.

Urban rivers across the U.S. and beyond face similar histories — industrial contamination, concrete channeling, decades of neglect. Chicago’s experience suggests a template, though every river and every city will face its own variables.

The open-water swim, in that sense, is more than a local event. It’s a signal to other communities that recovery is achievable — and that the end goal isn’t cleaner water on paper, but a river people actually want to be in.

What still needs fixing

The Chicago River’s story is a real success, but it isn’t finished. Heavy rain events still cause stormwater to overflow into the river, temporarily spiking pollution and forcing advisories. The city’s aging combined sewer system — which handles both sewage and stormwater in the same pipes — remains a structural challenge that riverbank restoration alone can’t solve.

Progress in urban ecology often works this way. Metrics improve, wildlife returns, public confidence grows — and hard infrastructure problems persist underneath. Chicago’s trajectory is genuinely encouraging, but the remaining gaps are a reminder that environmental recovery is a process, not a destination.

Still, the direction is clear. A river that spent much of the 20th century as one of the Chicago Tribune’s most documented environmental failures is now home to snapping turtles and, soon, human swimmers. That arc took generations to bend. It bent.

Read more

For more on this story, see: Inside Climate News

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