The Shedd Aquarium is a Greek temple covered in seafood. Get close to the trim around the doors and windows and the classical restraint falls apart. Waves, shells, tridents, fish and sea turtles, worked into the stone and the terra cotta, all the way around an eight-sided marble building. Same architects as the Field Museum. Same white Georgia marble. Completely different mood.
The man who paid for it started as a stock clerk. John Shedd came to Chicago in eighteen seventy-one, the year the city burned, and took a job in Marshall Field's store unpacking merchandise. He kept getting promoted until, when Field died, he ended up running the entire company. Then he handed Chicago three million dollars for an aquarium, and died in nineteen twenty-six — a year before anyone broke ground. He never saw a single fish in the building with his name on it.
And the building presented a problem nobody had solved. Every serious aquarium in the world sat on a coast, where salt water is a pipe away.
Chicago sits beside the largest freshwater system on the planet and roughly a thousand miles from an ocean. So the Shedd built a train.
The Pullman works here in Chicago built them a private railroad car called the Nautilus. Thirty thousand dollars for the car, and another ten thousand for the equipment inside it. Pumps, air compressors, electric refrigeration coils, steam heat, and feeding tanks
