EXTRA: Second City certainly ain’t ‘Ground Zero’ of the DJT Fan Club

It shouldn’t be a shock that, as has been pointed out in many reports, that President Donald J. Trump didn’t actually say anything specific about Illinois when he made his first visit as president earlier this week to the Land of Lincoln.

A sunny Saturday in Chicago … 

Trump was on hand to tout the U.S. Steel plant that re-opened in Granite City (near St. Louis). Trying to take personal credit for it, he went out of his way to avoid saying anything that anyone in Chicago could construe as a positive.

NOT THAT SUCH acts should be shocking. It is Chicago that is the reason Illinois is solidly in the “blue” column when it comes to electoral support and is one place that can be counted on to give its Electoral College support in 2020 to whomever runs against Trump for president.

As was evidenced by the political rallying taking place Saturday in the Near North Side’s Washington Square Park. The one-time Bughouse Square where the radicals would gather and literally stand on soap boxes to rant and rage about whatever issue caught their fancy. Once a year, they try to recreate that ol' spirit.

I stopped by briefly and caught a bit of the rhetoric – a woman complaining that modern politicos are all for gentrification that tries to attract cutesy businesses like an Amazon.com facility rather than a steel mill. Which is true enough -- the steel mills where my grandfathers were employed are both long-abandoned, and generations of people who thought they would have life-time jobs there have had to come up with alternate schemes for life.

Not that she, or many others on hand Saturday, would have been inclined to look favorably upon Trump and the actions he has taken that he claims are the reason U.S. Steel was able to reopen their plant in the St. Louis. The park was also filled with lots of anti-Trump rhetoric.

INCLUDING THE BANNERS that I couldn’t help but notice hanging all around the park.

… wasn't a pleasant place for everyone. Photos by Gregory Tejeda

Not that it was all feisty rhetoric by people wanting to play “anarchist” for an afternoon. There were those making a point of walking their dogs through the park, and for all I know making sure their pets deposited their loads of poop by those people they most disagreed with.

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Degrees of contamination?

Down in the land where Lake Shore Drive becomes South Shore Drive, we have the one-time site of a U.S. Steel plant that used to exist in Chicago.

What will become of the one-time South Works site on the Chicago lakefront?

Go down to 79^th Street, and you’ll find a plot of land technically larger than the Loop (a.k.a., downtown) where various real estate developers have proposed projects that – if they were to ever become reality – could seriously revitalize that part of the South Side of Chicago.

YET THESE DAYS, the one-time South Works plant that has been shut down for 26 years doesn’t seem any closer to having something new built on the site than it was on that January day in 1992 when U.S. Steel decided it was no longer financially practical to manufacture steel there.

The fact that steel mills and other industrial uses were on the site back to 1857 means that decades of contamination accumulated there. It had become a very seriously polluted part of Chicago.

And THAT, it seems, is the big hang-up keeping anyone from seriously turning the site into something new.

There was the Chicago-area developer who spent more than a decade talking about developing an entirely new upscale neighborhood on the site between the South Shore and South Chicago neighborhoods.

MOCK THE IDEA, if you will. But its location right on Lake Michigan makes such an idea possible, since there are limits to the amount of addresses in Chicago right on the lakefront.

But even that developer got tired of the bureaucratic nightmares that stretched the project out so long. Most recently, companies based in Barcelona and Dublin had their own plan for a residential development on the site – with the construction of modular homes along with some retail and office space.

But the Chicago Tribune reported their plans to buy the 440-acre site are, “currently on hold because of soil contamination problems that need to be cleared.”

Will this proposed development with the downtown skyline off in the distance ever become a reality?

Not that they’re being more specific. Just more environmental cleanup before anything can happen.

WHAT MAKES IT offbeat is that U.S. Steel, which still owns the land, insists they worked with the Environmental Protection Agency to do cleanup of the site.

They say they’ve been issued “No Further Remediation” notices, which would indicate the federal government is convinced the site is clean enough for a developer to come in and begin putting the site at 79^th Street into its 21^st Century life after steel.

Which is something I hope is true.

Because there are people who like to use the now-vacant site as a sort of expansive hiking or biking path. Heck, I’ve had occasions when I walked around the site – and checked out for myself the huge concrete break wall that is so big it isn’t financially practical to think about tearing it down.

IF IT REMAINS a contaminated site, it could mean I’ve tainted myself, and many other people also are walking around with the slime of slag and other contaminants on themselves.

Could it really mean that the Spanish and Irish developers wishing to build along South Shore Drive are really seeking some sort of buyout, or other financial perk, so as to make any project they do along our lakefront all-the-more profitable?

Or could it be that somebody is trying to cheap out, so to speak, on the environmental cleanup needed to turn the lakefront south of 79^th Street to the mouth of the Calumet River into a viable site.

How much of the steel mill residue remains? Image provided by Chuckman Chicago collection

The sad part of this story is this is a part of Chicago – the one where my own immigrant grandparents originally settled in this city, and where my parents were born and raised and I myself was born – that is oft overlooked by the rest of the city. To those of us with ties to the area, either explanation is completely believable.

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Will weekend provide evidence of revival for South(east) Side neighborhood?

An aerial shot provided by Google Earth of the old U.S. Steel South Works site, and the surrounding neighborhoods of The Bush (to the west) and South Chicago (naturally, to the south). The red-boxed area is where the concerts are to be staged.

This weekend, my attention is going to be focused on The Bush. And no, I’m not being perverted.

I’m referring to a portion of the South Side that some people regard as merely the northern tip of the South Chicago neighborhood, but which the locals think of as a neighborhood in-and-of itself.

THE BUSH IS located around 83rd Street to 87^th Street along the lakefront. The land right on the lake was once the site of the old U.S. Steel South Works plant in Chicago. As for The Bush itself, it provided housing for many of the people who actually worked at the steel mill.

People literally could walk to work.

Now I had one grandfather who worked for a time at that steel mill (my other grandfather worked his entire adult life at the old Wisconsin Steel mill down on 106^th Street). Not that he lived in The Bush. He was just a few blocks to the south, in South Chicago proper.

But he was still among those who lived in that neighborhood that is one of Chicago’s original Spanish-language enclaves (along with a lot of other ethnicities) because of its proximity to work.

WITHOUT THE STEEL mill there these days, there just isn’t reason for as many people to live in that aging neighborhood. There are many people all across the Chicago area who used to live in South Chicago, or have family ties that came out of there.

Which is why I find the whole idea of the Dave Matthews Band organizing a major concert festival this weekend in the neighborhood (instead of going the U2 route and staging their Chicago performance at Soldier Field) to be intriguing.

For me, South Chicago (and its sub-neighborhood of The Bush) is the old neighborhood. It is the place where I was born and where I used to go to visit my paternal grandmother (my grandfather died when I was 7).

The idea that thousands of people will be flocking to South Chicago and to The Bush for any reason is something I find unique. Since I am used to that particular neighborhood (along with many of the communities in Southeast Chicago, such as Hegewisch and South Deering) being isolated.

IT IS A place where the locals who have remained there for whatever reason don’t mind that they don’t encounter the rest of Chicago all that often, and may well even prefer it that way.

But such isolation also results in there being little right in the neighborhood for the local residents, who have to make special trips to get just about any of life’s necessities (there’s a reason I haven’t lived in South Chicago in decades).

Could the coming of a weekend series of concerts be what revitalizes interest in the neighborhood? Particularly the site of the old steel plant, which was once proposed to be the site of a Solo Cup facility, and now is talked about as a possible development for housing and maybe even a building that could someday become the presidential museum for Barack Obama once he leaves office.

It sounds overly optimistic to me, particularly since I am fully away of the relative ignorance that most people have about this particular segment of Chicago.

I DON’T MEAN ignorance in a sense that they’re mean-spirited. I mean they’re more clueless. Too many people seem to think Chicago can’t possibly extend that far south.

Considering that the city only goes as far north as 7600 before one hits Evanston, maybe they think the South Shore neighborhood around 75^th Street is the far southern city limits (not realizing that the 138^th Street separation between Hegewisch and the suburb of Burnham is the true Far South point for Chicago).

I also have been reading the incessant commentary being posted all over the Internet whenever anyone feels compelled to discuss these concerts. The neighborhood is too dangerous. There’s nothing there. Going that far south is a mistake.

All a lot of rants.

WHICH IS WHY I say my attention is focused this weekend on The Bush. I want to see how many people actually make the trip south for the concert, and figure out how many are amazed at the potential for a downtown skyline sighting once they get there.

It really isn’t that far from The Loop to The Bush. Heck, Metra trains take people from downtown to South Chicago every day of the week. Although in all honesty, I don’t plan to be in The Bush for this concert event – largely because I don’t care much for the Dave Matthews Band. And none of the other acts are all that appealing to this fanatic of jazz music.

I didn’t think much of Liz Phair back when she was actually a hip artist back in 1993. The thought of her playing Saturday afternoon isn’t enough to get me to shell out $85.

But for the “old neighborhood’s” sake, I hope a certain sizable segment does, and manages to behave itself while spending time in South Chicago.

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