A Shipwreck Close to Home: The Hidden Gem of Hyde Park

Expositions Magazine

Issue 9 | Winter 2025

Location: 41° 48′ 29.52″ N, 87° 35′ 1.32″ W

Story by Evy Wyman

The 100-year old wreck of the Silver Spray is the closest shipwreck to the shore of Lake Michigan and most accessible for the curious swimmer. The Great Lakes together have swallowed an estimated 6,000 ships; the deaths of dozens of those ships have been caused by the Morgan Shoal, an area of shallow dolomite bedrock not far off the shore of Lake Michigan and remnant of a thriving coral reef from millions of years ago. In July of 1914, the Silver Spray ran aground on the dolomite shelf on its way to pick up UChicago students to visit the Industry of steel mills in Indiana. The crew initially remained aboard in order to keep making their evening stew. After three days filled with attempts to pull the ship free, the boiler caught fire and the crew finally abandoned ship. Over the years, the wooden structure, too, abandoned the ship. Today, all that is left are the metal parts – mainly the boiler, which, on an explorative swimmer’s lucky day, appears like a rock protruding from the water. It’s a stone’s throw away from shore, which has garnered it a close following by local shipwreck enthusiasts. Google maps of the site shows swimmers’ pictures from rare, especially lucky days for fans of the site when the boiler emerges high enough from the water that you can fully sit on top of it. It’s rumored there are free tours, as evidenced by an online picture of a hand-painted sign advertising free tours on Sunday afternoons.

The last time I was here was over the summer, on a hot clear day with pristine and bright water. Today, too, is a clear day, but less warm than the sun lighting up the waves would have you believe. It is our lucky day – we can see the wreck jutting out of the water from quite early: a few hundred feet before we disembark from our bikes.

My friend – who has failed this trip before on an unlucky day and has been thrumming with excitement about the prospect of impending success – follows me up the makeshift stairs. We step up onto the stone base first, then onto plastic, then wobbly ceramic. As we then climb over the rocks to the shore, the sounds from Lake Shore Drive, colloquially LSD, which have been all too present on our trip over here, nearly dissipate. Nearly.

We carefully pick our way down to the lake, avoiding the snaking metal rods popping out of the otherwise friendly, small-pebbled ground of Pebble Beach, and stopping to look at a smattering of large sea-glass (or is it lake-glass?). The waves lapping our feet, and then our legs and torsos as we walk in, are surprisingly dark.

Once we start swimming, the cold sets in almost immediately. Our armpits suffer the most as we doggy paddle away from the beach with suntanners and the constant, though distant, whistle of cars zipping by. On the afternoon of the new year, Jews typically perform Tashlich: casting their sins into the water in the metaphoric vessels of little torn pieces of bread. Our swim feels like a similar cleansing, falling only a couple hours before the sundown which marks the Day of Atonement.

This is one of the last days this wreck is accessible without a wetsuit; the ephemeral nature of the reachability of the site – sometimes visible and easy to navigate to, sometimes completely submerged, and completely seasonally dependent like all swimming in Lake Michigan – might be why this site, though visible from shore, is so far from present in the minds of those close by. However, I’m surprised it’s not a common activity for UChicago students interested in finding unique spots in their urban environment. My friend and I are two of the only UChicago students I know who know about the wreckage.

Students aren’t the only ones unaware; we watch from just too far away to call out as a boat speeds by, nearly hitting the slightly protruding boiler. It circles back and the helmsman peers curiously at what nearly marred his boat; for boat-owners, the Silver Spray has become a hazard.

Finally, we arrive: reddish metal above water, gray green in our goggles, the boiler greets us with an eerie calm. It’s long been deserted save for invasive zebra mussels filling every crack in the metal. We alternate between poking around and standing precariously on the slimy metal to take a break from the chill in the water. Sharks popping out of the murk surrounding us are all too easy to imagine, and there’s a distinct unsettling feeling when we peer into the cavernous darkness on the east side of the boiler. Despite, or potentially strengthened by, the eerie feeling that infects our trip while we poke around, it’s a marvel. For my friend, it’s a marvel that we truly found it this time around; for me, that it’s so distinct from my trip over in the summer. To both of us, it’s a marvel to find a hidden gem so close to home.

That first time I was here, I was taken by the fish – dark blobs, mostly sitting by the opening of the dark hole in the side of the boiler. They’re absent today, but on that hot day in June or July, the fish were the most memorable part of my excursion. On a summer, sunny day, with goggles and dull fish milling about the shipwreck, this spot feels more like Hawaii than it does Chicagoland. On an autumn day like today, it’s chilly, and as my friend puts it, “it’s nice, but I’m ready to get out.” We start the short swim back.

When we emerge on land, one of the two women left smoking and suntanning stretched out on a rock sits up, “I saw you swam all the way out – what is that?” she asks in a thick Chicago accent. The four of us look out towards where two of us just were while we tell her it was a shipwreck and she thanks us, “I’ve been coming to this beach since I was 16, and I never knew what it was.”