Goose Island, The Neighborhood a Canal Built

On your left, the industrial strip boxed in by the river's north branch and its own narrow canal was shantytown ground before it was ever an island. In the late eighteen forties, Irish immigrants squatting without any legal claim built a settlement near Kinzie Street that other Chicagoans nicknamed Kilgubbin, after a parish in County Cork many of them had left behind. As the city grew, those families pushed north into the stretch between Chicago Avenue and Division Street, the ground this neighborhood sits on now, bringing the Kilgubbin name, and the pigs and geese they kept running loose, along with them.

The geography changed because of business, not nature. Starting in eighteen fifty three, Chicago's first mayor, William Ogden, formed the Chicago Land Company to dig a channel through here for clay to make bricks, cutting straight where the river had curved. Crews worked north from the south end, and by eighteen fifty seven that channel had rejoined the main river farther along, carving a shortcut past the old bend. The excavated waterway, later widened so barges could use it, became known as the North Branch Canal, or simply Ogden's Canal. In cutting that shortcut, the canal sealed the land off on every side, turning what had been a peninsula into an actual island, built by shovels rather than any river current. It likely took its lasting name from the geese the Irish families kept on it, and the name stuck long after the shanties gave way to the factories and tanneries that still line its banks today.