Chicago Area Waterway System

Sag Bridge, Illinois is an Unincorporated community in Lemont Township in southwestern Cook County, Illinois, United States. Sag Bridge is an important waterway junction between the Calumet Sag Channel and the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal. It is also the junction of IL 83 (Kingery Highway) and IL 171 (Archer Avenue) which meet at Sag Bridge to cross the Calumet Sag Channel together on the eponymous bridge. The community was named for a predecessor of the present bridge. It is within the village limits and postal delivery zone of Lemont, Illinois. Other than the bridge for which it was named and the canal that the bridge crosses, the most significant feature of the community is the historic St. James at Sag Bridge Catholic Church, listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

The Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal, historically known as the Chicago Drainage Canal, is a 28-mile-long (45 km) canal system that connects the Chicago River to the Des Plaines River. It reverses the direction of the Main Stem and the South Branch of the Chicago River, which now flows out of Lake Michigan rather than into it. The related Calumet-Saganashkee Channel does the same for the Calumet River a short distance to the south, joining the Chicago canal about halfway along its route to the Des Plaines. The two provide the only navigation for ships between the Great Lakes Waterway and the Mississippi River system. The canal was in part built as a sewage treatment scheme. Prior to its opening in 1900, sewage from the city of Chicago was dumped into the Chicago River and flowed into Lake Michigan. The city's drinking water supply was (and remains) located offshore, and there were fears that the sewage could reach the intake and cause serious disease outbreaks. Since the sewer systems were already flowing into the river, the decision was made to reverse the flow of the river, thereby sending all the sewage inland where it could be diluted before emptying it into the Des Plaines. Another goal of the construction was to replace the shallow and narrow Illinois and Michigan Canal (I&M), which had originally connected Lake Michigan with the Mississippi starting in 1848. As part of the construction of the new canal, the entire route was built to allow much larger ships to navigate it. It is 202 feet (62 m) wide and 24 feet (7.3 m) deep, over three times the size of the I&M. The I&M became a secondary route with the new canal's opening and was shut down entirely with the creation of the Illinois Waterway network in 1933. The building of the Chicago canal served as intensive and practical training for engineers who later built the Panama Canal. The canal is operated by the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago. In 1999, the system was named a Civil Engineering Monument of the Millennium by the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE). The Canal was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on December 20, 2011.

St. James Catholic Church and Cemetery, also known as St. James at Sag Bridge Church is a historic church and cemetery in the Sag Bridge area of the village of Lemont, Illinois. It is situated on a high bluff at the western tip of the glacier-carved Mount Forest Island, overlooking the Calumet Sag Channel and the community of Sag Bridge.

Mount Assisi Academy was a private, Roman Catholic, all-girls high school in Lemont, Illinois that closed in 2014. It was located in the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Chicago.

The Track Imaging Cherenkov Experiment (TrICE) is a ground-based cosmic ray telescope located at Argonne National Laboratory near Chicago, IL. The telescope, which contains a Fresnel lens, eight spherical mirrors, and a camera with 16 multianode photomultiplier tubes, uses the atmospheric Cherenkov imaging technique to detect Cherenkov radiation produced when cosmic rays interact with particles in the Earth's atmosphere. The telescope is primarily a research and development tool for improving photomultiplier tube cameras and electronic systems for future gamma and cosmic ray telescopes. It is also used to study the energy and composition of cosmic rays in the TeV–PeV range, and the collaboration is currently conducting pioneering work in detecting direct Cherenkov signals from cosmic rays.

Palisades is an unincorporated community in Downers Grove Township, DuPage County, Illinois, United States. Palisades is located along the north bank of the Des Plaines River and the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal. It is slightly upriver from the larger city of Lemont. Palisades is just east of Waterfall Glen near the Cook County line. It contains a business park on Jeans Road, which includes the Dupage County Knollwood Plant, a water treatment facility, various truck repair facilities, and other businesses. Palisades also contains various houses on the southern end of Madison Street, 97th Street, and Secret Forest Drive. The area is commonly referred to as "The Darien Palisades", given its close proximity to the City of Darien. It is named for Centennial Ridge, a rocky hill between the canal and the river, which reminded early settlers from New Jersey of the New Jersey Palisades.

The Western Open was a professional golf tournament in the United States, for most of its history an event on the PGA Tour. The tournament's founding in 1899 actually pre-dated the start of the Tour, which is generally dated from 1916, the year the PGA of America was founded. The Western Open, organized by the Western Golf Association, was first played in September 1899 at the Glen View Club in Golf, Illinois the week preceding the U.S. Open. At the time of its final edition in 2006, it was the third-oldest active PGA Tour tournament, after The Open (1860) and U.S. Open (1895). The tournament was held a total of 103 times over the course of 108 years. The event was not held in 1900, 1918 (World War I), and 1943–45 (World War II). Players from the U.S. won the tournament 77 times, followed by Scotland with fifteen wins. Walter Hagen had the most victories with five, and seventeen others won the event at least twice. The champions' list includes two amateurs: Chick Evans in 1910 and Scott Verplank in 1985. Beginning in 2007, the Western Open was renamed the BMW Championship, the penultimate event of the FedEx Cup playoff series. Played with the PGA Tour's point system as the sole qualification standard, it is no longer open to amateurs. Title sponsorship was introduced in 1987, and included Beatrice, Centel, Sprint, Motorola, Advil, Golf Digest, and Cialis.

Cog Hill Golf & Country Club is a public golf course and country club located 30 miles (48 km) southwest of Chicago, in Lemont. Cog Hill hosted the PGA Tour's BMW Championship from 2009 to 2011 on its championship course Dubsdread, as well as 16 times when the tournament was known as the Western Open.

Tedens is a ghost town in Downers Grove Township, DuPage County, Illinois, United States.

Sagawau Canyon is a canyon located at Sagawau Environmental Learning Center near Lemont, Illinois, in the Sag Valley. The site is owned by the Forest Preserves of Cook County and is the only such landform in the county. The canyon is known for its association with renowned Illinois botanist Floyd Swink, who did much to preserve the area during his career.

Now the NBL Program Office, the New Brunswick Laboratory (NBL), was a United States government-owned and operated, center of excellence in the measurement science of nuclear materials. It was established in 1949 by the Atomic Energy Commission and was located in New Brunswick, New Jersey. It was relocated between 1975 and 1977 and was located, as a Federal enclave, on the site of Argonne National Laboratory, about 40 kilometers (25 miles) southwest of Chicago, Illinois. NBL was part the Department of Energy's Office of Science Chicago Office.NBL is the U.S. Government's Nuclear Materials Measurements and Reference Materials Laboratory and the National Certifying Authority for nuclear reference materials and measurement calibration standards. As an internationally recognized Federal laboratory, NBL provides reference materials, measurement and interlaboratory measurement evaluation services, and technical expertise for evaluating measurement methods and safeguards measures in use at other facilities for a variety of Federal program sponsors and customers. NBL functions as a Network Laboratory for the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). NBL was reorganized into the NBL Program Office in 2016, and its nuclear reference materials were transferred to a new distribution center located near Oak Ridge, Tennessee. It is part of the National Nuclear Security Administration's Office of Defense Programs.

Argonne National Laboratory is a federally funded research and development center in Lemont, Illinois, United States. Founded in 1946, the laboratory is owned by the United States Department of Energy and administered by UChicago Argonne LLC of the University of Chicago. The facility is the largest national laboratory in the Midwest. Argonne had its beginnings in the Metallurgical Laboratory of the University of Chicago, formed in part to carry out Enrico Fermi's work on nuclear reactors for the Manhattan Project during World War II. After the war, it was designated as the first national laboratory in the United States on July 1, 1946. In its first decades, the laboratory was a hub for peaceful use of nuclear physics; nearly all operating commercial nuclear power plants around the world have roots in Argonne research. More than 1,000 scientists conduct research at the laboratory, in the fields of energy storage and renewable energy; fundamental research in physics, chemistry, and materials science; environmental sustainability; supercomputing; and national security. Argonne formerly ran a smaller facility called Argonne National Laboratory-West (or simply Argonne-West) in Idaho next to the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory. In 2005, the two Idaho-based laboratories merged to become the Idaho National Laboratory.Argonne is a part of the expanding Illinois Technology and Research Corridor.