The stretch of southeast Chicago along Lake Michigan was built on steel. In its heyday, about 200,000 people were employed here in the steel mills and other industries related to steel production and shipping. Immigrants from Poland, Ukraine and other European countries flocked to the area, along with waves of Mexican workers and African Americans from the South, all drawn by the promise of grueling but well-paying mill jobs.
"That was the reason people came to this area," said Rod Sellers, who volunteers at a small park district museum nearby. "My grandfather worked in the mills for 50 years. When we were kids and we'd get crabby, my mom would pile us in the car to go look at the slag [molten waste from steel production] being dumped. It was like a volcano erupting. When my dad's war buddy came to town, what did he show him? He'd drive him around all the mills. That was life here."
Today, Chicago's steel industry is gone.
There are still mills operating along the lakeshore in northwest Indiana, but the giants of Chicago steel have all closed their doors, from the folding of Wisconsin Steel in 1980 to the 2001 closure of the Acme Steel co*ke Plant, which baked coal into co*ke, the fuel used to melt iron ore to make steel.
Now the vacant Acme plant, whose components were built between 1905 and 1930, is the last major Chicago steel industry structure left standing. Wisconsin Steel, U.S. Steel and the other major plants were demolished and sold for scrap metal. That was to be Acme's fate as well, until a group of preservationists, environmentalists, former steelworkers and historians stepped in to save the structure.
This spring they persuaded the Landmarks Preservation Council of Illinois to list the plant as one of the state's 10 most endangered historic places, and they came up with a plan to purchase it from the scrap metal dealer who had bought it from the city at a bankruptcy sale.
"It wouldn't be here today if we hadn't come to the rescue," said Tom Shepherd, a member of the Southeast Environmental Task Force, one of the groups that is part of the coalition working to save the plant.
Now, they want to turn it into a museum celebrating the history of steel in Chicago. Marian Byrnes, an environmental activist in the heavily contaminated region for decades, visualizes turning the plant's 15 brick buildings into places where visitors can learn about the steel industry, the city's labor history and even the complicated process of cleaning up such a site. She points to Duisburg, Germany, where a steel mill that closed in 1985 was turned into a tourist attraction, the gasholder tank converted to a diving pool, the ore bunkers into mountain climbing walls and the casting facility into a concert hall. In Birmingham, the Sloss Furnace Co., which manufactured pig iron for steel mills until it closed in 1971, now houses the city's museum of industrial history.
"Each building could have a different focus," Byrnes said. "They could be devoted to different labor unions. A visitor could be guided through a day in the life of a steelworker. You would enter through the guard shack, where the workers' uniforms are still hanging in the closet and a deck of cards is still on the table."
Plans drawn by students at the Illinois Institute of Technology propose that the long, slanting chutes used to bring coal to the furnaces be made into glass-walled walkways for visitors, and the grounds now covered by twisted metal and stagnant water be transformed into lush gardens.
Before the museum plans can proceed, however, the sale of the property must be finalized and the city must complete an environmental assessment. Then the coalition will have to develop plans for remediating the site, which is likely contaminated with carcinogenic coal tar and other toxic compounds.
"When people hear that we want to make a museum out of a co*ke plant, they look at us like we're crazy," Sellers said. "The co*ke plants are like the Achilles' heel of the steel industry. The dirtiest part. When I was younger, I worked on a track gang repairing railroad track, and we hated coming to the Acme plant. It was the place you didn't want to go."
A city official said the environmental assessment is slated to start within the next month.
"The museum could include an exhibit on what it takes to remediate a site like this," Byrnes said. "We could use this as a demo project for new remediation technologies."
The remediation and redevelopment of the co*ke plant would fit in with an overall move to clean up and preserve this part of the city, which contains some of the last undisturbed native marshland in the region, plots that were never developed into residential or commercial tracts because of the contamination and heavy industry surrounding them.
It would also likely become part of the historic Illinois and Michigan Canal Corridor, which in 1984 became the country's first congressionally designated heritage corridor. "We're telling the stories of transportation and industry that changed the country," said Ana Koval, president of the Canal Corridor Association. "This would help us tell another part of the story."
The coalition has agreed to pay the salvage company $250,000 for the plant, the approximate amount it could have earned in scrapping the metal and bricks. They have raised about $65,000 from the United Steelworkers of America and other donors, enough to make a down payment and start on a two-year payment schedule.
The preservationists were disappointed July 4, when the salvage company demolished a nearby blast furnace that cooked coal for the Acme plant; it was the last of its kind in the area. Most of the sprawling conveyor belt that stretched hundreds of yards from the co*ke plant to Acme's steel mill across the Calumet River has been dismantled; pieces of it crashed down onto the road as it was being disassembled in September. But the portion of the conveyor belt arching across the river remains. Sellers calls it the only suspension bridge in Chicago.
Visitors to the Acme site could also see what many have described as "giant iron praying mantises" -- possibly the world's last Hulett Iron Ore Unloaders, built in 1912 for Republic Steel. The unloaders are located across the river from the Acme plant, near the Republic Steel site where 10 workers were killed during a labor clash on Memorial Day in 1937.
"Not many people know anymore about all the things that happened here," said Sellers, a retired high school teacher. "What do people in this area do now? They work for the county or use it as a bedroom community to commute. We want to keep the old history alive."
