The Chicago River: A Natural and Unnatural History
A biography of the Chicago River.
A biography of the Chicago River.
The 1831 cholera riot in St. Petersburg was an extreme result of the city’s immense water pollution problem and led to social conflict between the educated classes and the poor people.
Since its foundation in 1703, the history of St. Petersburg is closely linked to the Neva River. The Neva is the biggest and the most important river in the Eastern Baltic. The citizens of St. Petersburg constructed complex technologies of river control that enabled them to live cheek by jowl with the mighty and self-willed stream.
The first cholera epidemic in St. Petersburg, then capital of the Russian Empire, brought to light the city’s enormous sanitary problems. During the course of the epidemic 12,540 people sickened and 6,449 died.
The St. Petersburg flood of 1824, in which the level of the river Neva rose to the 4 meter 20 centimeter mark, is the greatest in the history of the city. The city did not recover from the destructive effects of the flood until the mid-1830s.
Fedor Yakovlevich Alekseev’s painting of Karuselnaya square (now Teatralnaya square) during the 1824 flood.