Bubbly Creek

Bubbly Creek / buh blee KREEK / n. Informal, colorful -- and dead-on -- name for the man-made south fork of the south branch of the Chicago River. Was used a century ago by the meatpacking industry as a dumping ground for discarded animal parts. The still-disgusting sediment produces gases that bubble to the surface. Novelist Upton Sinclair described it this way in his 1906 classic The Jungle: "A great open sewer . . . constantly in motion, as if huge fish were feeding in it, or great leviathans were disporting themselves in its depths . . . Here and there the grease and filth have caked solid, and the creek looks like a bed of lava; chickens will walk on it, feeding . . . every now and then the surface would catch fire."

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