However, maybe because of the cantankerous aging process or a rekindled love for the region’s history, I often find myself staring at these sites now, wondering what once was and one day could be.
By Emiliano Aguilar
Neighborhood pride defined and continues to demarcate much of Chicagoland. My hometown of East Chicago has plenty of neighborhoods: Marktown, South Side, North Side, Sunny Side, the Harbor, West Calumet, and Roxanna, to name a few. And these identifiers have become characteristic in many urban spaces throughout the United States. Various characteristics and landmarks that established the area’s boundaries are coupled with these neighborhood names. that makes them visually iconic; many of these landmarks in the Rust Belt refer back to a particular place’s industrial heritage. The distinctive character of half-scrapped, red sheet metal buildings of the steel mill and abandoned brick administration buildings became a sight I associated with home.
I often joked that I was from the “Tracks.” When asked to clarify, I said that I was the last possible house on the Northside, a stone’s throw from what is the Pegasus Yard and across the street from the warehouse facility for National Industrial Maintenance. Our home was within walking distance of my maternal grandfather’s longtime employer, Edward Valve Manufacturing Company, where he was awarded a lighter after decades of service. However, by the time I was born, much of his old workplace was a rusting site, fenced off from the park bearing its name.
As a kid, the abandoned warehouse at Edward Valve fascinated me. Not for its history or connection to my family’s story but because it was a cool, forbidden spot. One that I never trespassed in (but my siblings, on the other hand). I did not feel the same about many other places. Abandoned buildings, the half-scrapped buildings of ArcelorMittal, formerly Inland Steel, and the crumbling structures near my mother’s work in Gary, shamefully during my wayward youth, I viewed these as eyesores. As friends and family moved away from the industrial core, I saw how their cities had all sorts of wonders, often just shops and different restaurants. I didn’t understand suburbanization or the continued sprawl across the Calumet Region.
However, maybe because of the cantankerous aging process or a rekindled love for the region’s history, I often find myself staring at these sites now, wondering what once was and one day could be. In my historical research, I procrastinate for hours, looking through boxes of photographs in the East Chicago History Room in the main library. When I started at the University of Notre Dame, a friend gifted me a copy of Gary Ciadella’s The Calumet Region: An American Place for when I “feel homesick.” Throughout the black and white photos, I’ve seen how the industrial and residential blur within the region. I’ve also seen the immense change, as some of these photographs preserved sites that are now gone from the landscape. The boarded-up Main Street of my childhood, the idled and empty industrial sites, residences with overgrown lawns, and often ominous appearances all give me at least a moment of pause today. As a vital vestige of our industrial heritage, these ruins represent a piece of our shared history.
The phenomenon nor the sentiment isn’t new. Ava Tomasula y Garcia recounts the industrial history of the Calumet Region and ponders possible futures around Steelworkers’ Park. Emma Riva recalls experiencing the Festival of Combustion at Carrie Furnace: “ And Kathryn M. Flinn reminds us that ruin imagery “indulges our affection for fragments of history, traces of people like us, even our own picturesque trash.” Even Belt Mag editor, Ed Simon, reflected on ruins in an issue of The Dispatch. He noted the potential of looking at “our own crumbled ruins and acknowledge something of the numinous in a shattered window, cracked cement, and a rusted girder.” The region’s industrial heritage and the ruins it left behind fascinate many of us who live in their shadow. And it is easy for many people, both within these communities and on the outside, to discredit and dismiss these sites as “ugly” or “blighted.” They become almost synonymous with hard times and the downtrodden instead of appreciated for vehicles into our shared past.
A critical turning point came when I realized how far that shared heritage stretched. East Chicago’s industrial history proved so rich that it was called the “Arsenal of America” and labeled the “Workshop of America.” At its height, anywhere from 75% to 80% of the land was zoned for industrial use. During the Postwar Boom of the 1940s and 1950s, the manufacturing economy produced thousands of different items. Countless memoirs and residents recalled the work’s availability (and intensity).
Progress for these communities often appears in one of several avenues. Industrial cores hope to reindustrialize their space, inviting new industrial and manufacturing businesses. These new businesses provide a tax base and bring jobs into the community – or so the idea goes. Others wish for the up-and-coming label to gentrify their communities, attracting new, more middle-class residents. However, as countless cities have witnessed, gentrification displaces the most vulnerable and working-class among the residents.
Whether scrapping sites to start over or waiting for the possibility of gentrification, a key element remains unanswered: what do we do with what remains? Each of these avenues forward often invites or relies on demolishing the past to pave the way for a future. A favorite journey of mine from my current home in Robertsdale to the Indiana Harbor for research takes me through a microcosm of the Calumet Region. The greenspaces of Wolf Lake exist in the shadow of the daunting BP Refinery. Driving around the outer edge of the gated facility leads one into Marktown, a planned company town facing gradual destruction by the industries that border it. Crossing through the heavily industrialized corridor, you find yourself navigating between the sprawling steel campus of Cleveland Cliffs. Recently, piles of scrap that once were facilities on the campus now adorn the view.
But among the doom and gloom are glimpses of hope. In neighboring Gary, Indiana, an impressive grassroots effort to save Union Station is well underway by the Decay Devils, an award-winning preservation effort in the steel city. The organization has directed its attention to the 4,000 square feet of space within the station’s walls for several years. Hoping that the restoration of the station will serve as a vehicle to re-vision Downtown Gary, the Decay Devils worked, in 2017, to transform the abandoned station into a public art installation, complete with seventeen murals from local artists. This project was made possible by funding from the Legacy Foundation’s Transforming Lake County grant. In 2018, the iconic building became the property of the Decay Devils. As a part of their endeavor to rehabilitate the structure and transform it into a multi-purpose space, the organization operates an ongoing Revive Union Station campaign.
Although the preservation work surrounding Union Station is admirable, other sites, such as the Marktown Historic District in East Chicago, are less lucky. Famed Chicago architect Howard Van Doren Shaw designed the neighborhood using the classic English Garden City concept and built the English Tudor Revival style homes. Hired by Clayton Mark, Shaw’s neighborhood became home to the employees of Mark Manufacturing, with the first residents moving into the houses in 1917. Twice, the community escaped destruction due to the organization and successful lobbying of the community. In the early 1950s, Youngstown Sheet and Tube lobbied the city to re-zone the neighborhood as industrial land so they could build a tin mill. Again, in the 1970s, when the federal government wanted to finish the Cline Avenue extension, residents lobbied the city to prevent a third of their neighborhood from being demolished to pave the way for the route. In 1975, city officials successfully applied and had the district named to the National Register of Historic Places.
While residents continue to protest the encroachment of industry, the neighborhood is slowly being erased. In 2014, BP purchased several properties in the district, slating them for demolition. Residents decried the destruction of the historic homes in the neighborhood. In 2017, the Post Tribune questioned, “Will Marktown Survive?” The coverage noted that BP purchased fifty-two homes in the area, signaling a grim future for the district, even as lifelong residents continued to affirm that the neighborhood could be restored with city assistance. In January 2023, the city tore down additional buildings while promising funds for property owners to renovate and restore their homes in the district.
Still, some see a productive future for the region’s reindustrialization. A few years ago, the old warehouse behind the fence at Edward Valve came down. In its place, a new speculative building rose on the 14.5-acre site at an estimated $23 million. Discussing the project, Mayor Anthony Copeland told the local paper, “We saw something that was a terrible, terrible eyesore. This was horrendous. See what’s been built in its place. If you build it, they will come.” In February 2024, the property was still listed without a tenant.
This mentality proves one of the most daunting obstacles to overcome. Architectural Designer & Preservationist at Nurture Architects, Gwen Stricker, notes that industrial heritage sites offer a mental challenge themselves. According to Stricker, “Ruins in small towns, industrial or post-industrial America are much different. Industrial ruins are new, and often there are still many people in a community surrounding them that have lived through the economic rise and decline by such places; they may have even worked there themselves.” This tension points to why preservation and progress can often appear at odds. Often, we retain such positive, nostalgic memories of spaces that slowly begin to deteriorate over time. While these nostalgic memories could sometimes translate into momentum to save structures, this is not always true. Various factors could stave off this momentum, from property ownership, financial constraints, competing visions, or just a general lack of resources (broadly defined).
Additionally, Stricker claims, “many industrial heritage resources are not re-usable in the same way an office building or large historic mansion might be; they were purposely built to a specific manufacturing process, and typically only small parts remain.” This is further complicated by the potential for toxins that could require “significant clean up before they can truly become viable again.” This added complexity of preserving our past while confronting decades of environmental racism only adds to the troubled tensions of grassroots history.
Significant hurdles impact the preservation of these critical industrial heritage sites throughout the region. President of Decay Devils, Tyrell Anderson, says that two of their most considerable obstacles concern the lack of resources and the presence of vandals. Anderson states, “People come and do some wild things, then post it on their social media. We just ignore it and don’t publicize it.” Decay Devils Vice-President Lori Gonzalez adds that when the group started, there was much to learn about establishing and managing a non-profit organization. Unfamiliar with NPO management, Gonzalez recalled, “Many things were trial and error, but over the years, we [Decay Devils] have grown immensely.” While Decay Devils offers an inspiring move at community preservation, many other individuals and groups could lack the knowledge, resources, or even desire to preserve their past.
While I often think of my home regionally, the Calumet Region has numerous, frequently competing municipalities. Stricker notes that in the Region, “there are not strong municipal preservation protections that legally protect buildings or sites from demolition.” Looking through the online resources available for several City Clerk offices, I found only a handful of ordinances for historic preservation listed. Further digging led me to discover a few instances of these ordinances noted in council chambers, and they appear more like paper promises than actual guarantees.
I wish I had cared for the history around me when I was younger. Maybe now is just making up for time wasted, a race against the clock, and the daunting specter of revitalization. The structures are an integral part of our community identity. Historic landmarks offer an opportunity for reinvention—one that we should not take lightly, whether as outsiders, new residents, or longtime inhabitants of these spaces.
Living among these sites was never something to feel shame over. As many others have seen, these landmarks were never ruins, and describing them as such ignores the vital work residents have done for decades in building homes for themselves and others. This reinvention is part of our story, and we owe it to these sites to work to preserve them wherever possible.