Discovering the Calumet

After a century of industrial might followed by decades of decline,
the still muscular Calumet region is hard at work redefining itself.
This time, nature has a place at the table.

by Ryan Chew

the place

The Calumet region is a 45-mile arc of land at the southern end of Lake Michigan, bounded on the south by the long, low rise of the Valparaiso Moraine. Some 14,000 years ago, first a glacier and then ancestral Lake Michigan covered this landscape. As the waters receded, they left a series of sandy beach ridges, with two rivers, the Grand and Little Calumet, running parallel to the shore. The old lakebed sloped so gently that the rivers didn’t ever flow in a consistent direction. Instead, they would seep into Lake Michigan through one of two outlets miles from each other, depending on which way the wind blew. Most of the water just pooled up in a vast expanse of marshes and ponds, the largest being Lake Calumet on what would become Chicago’s Southeast Side.

Long after Lake Michigan retreated, another wave washed over the Calumet: the steel industry. Through much of the 20th century, the area between the South Works of US Steel at 79th Street and the Bethlehem mill at Burns Harbor refined more steel than most industrial nations. Tens of thousands of people worked in the mills. In the 1980s and ’90s, steel receded. A much cleaner steel industry now occupies a smaller basin, but it left a severe legacy of abandoned factories and toxic sediments.

It’s hard to say which is more remarkable about the Calumet region: environmental degradation on a scale unheard of even in other parts of our metropolis, or the underlying resilience of an ecosystem so rich that some small protected areas have more biodiversity than entire national parks. The numbers are awe-inspiring on both sides of the ledger.

• 24 species of orchids in the dunelands of northwest Indiana (the state of Hawaii has only 4)
• 28 toxic metals and chemicals above the “probable effect threshold” in Indiana Harbor, on the Calumet River
• 2,259 species found during the Calumet BioBlitz, a 24-hour intensive search by scientific specialists and volunteers, at Eggers Woods, Powderhorn Lake, and Wolf Lake
• 60 square miles of the region covered by slag, a sometimes toxic byproduct of steelmaking, and other waste

In a passage from his memoir, a young Barack Obama captured both the appeal and perils of the region at the time the steel mills were closing. He wrote of men on the Calumet River “flicking lines lazily into darkening waters” — then pulling out fish that were “strangely discolored, with cataract eyes and lumps behind their gills.” In a place with such a mix of hidden beauty and challenges, a lot depends on perspective.

perspectives

One of the things people like about heading into wild lands is the chance to drop off the map of familiar things and get a little lost. By that measure, the first time I headed to the Calumet region, in the early ’90s, was a roaring success. Chicago Reader columnist Jerry Sullivan had raved about colonies of rare night-herons nesting around Lake Calumet, in the “richest wetland ecosystem in Illinois.” Intrigued, I looked up 122nd and Torrence on a street map. The Chicago grid, eight blocks to a mile — how tough could it be?

The first trouble came south of 116th Street. The map said that 117th would follow, but instead, the grid sputtered and winked out. I kept going, passing 122nd. I was looking for a natural area in the conventional style — green vistas, a path of some sort, hopefully leading to a viewing platform. Torrence offered nothing like this, so I circled back, mildly surprised to see a flatbed truck of coiled steel in front of me making the turn onto 122nd. Another birder?

I bounced over railroad tracks looking for a place to pull over, and came to a gate where trucks were pulling in. The vista here was of chain-link fencing and concertina wire, vacant industrial land, and the high ground of a landfill. I turned out and continued along a road lined by scrub trees and fencing. If there was marsh back there, I had no idea how to get at it. My mind couldn’t place rich marshland in this industrial setting. I headed home, thinking I’d made a mistake about the directions. It would later become clear that my eyes didn’t yet know how to recognize it.

The natural areas of the Calumet region — hundreds of them, ranging from a few acres to 15,000 — don’t always conform to expectation. Geographer Mark Bouman, who has studied the region for 25 years at Chicago State University, says I was tripped up by the “cubist logic” of the Calumet, where, like a Picasso painting, elements are fragmented and placed next to seemingly foreign things.

In the Calumet region, your glimpse of a cerulean warbler at an Indiana savanna may be a streak of blue and gray against the dusty white paint of a neighboring oil tank farm. To see a harlequin duck with a helmet of rust and indigo diving for fish, you may have to navigate around a lakeside power plant. Emerge from the cool, dark forest and slide down the scorching dune sands, and a working steel mill may be a part of your beach vista. When your eyes adjust to the cubism of the Calumet, the incongruous things begin to make sense together.

The residents of the Calumet region have long lived within this unusual context. Amid pockets of middle class and wealthy neighborhoods, blue collar families predominate. Many have been here for decades or longer, celebrating their Eastern European heritage at Whiting’s Pierogi Fest or welcoming new Latino immigrants to some of the oldest Mexican American communities in the Chicago region.

When the mills were hiring, the union culture forgave the ills of the factories for what they provided. The mantra was: “If there’s soot on the window, there’s food on the table,” recounts Rod Sellers of the Southeast Chicago Historical Society. Still, there was always an undercurrent of working class environmentalism. John Pastirik, a jack-of-all-trades who leads bike tours of Southeast Side sites, knows Eggers Woods, a little preserve on the Illinois-Indiana border, the way one knows a childhood neighborhood. As you might point out a friend’s house, he’ll relate the story of a cluster of bur oaks growing through an opening where an elm fell more than a decade ago. “We’ve had beavers at Wolf Lake for years, but this is the first time they’ve ever come to Eggers Marsh,” he tells me. He knows because he’s been coming here since he was a kid in the early 1960s, looking for a haven from the commotion of his large working class family. Like Pastirik, Joann Podkul, the head of the Calumet Stewardship Initiative, grew up “in a family of modest means, the youngest of nine.” Her brothers built their own wooden boat to explore the local waterways. And Clem Balanoff, who founded the Southeast Environmental Task Force with conservation stalwart Marian Byrnes, is the son of a steelworker and union official. Balanoff says people often had a very direct connection to the land through hunting and fishing, despite spending much of their days at the factory. “I would often see people keeping their catch,” he says. “They’d always tell me it was for a neighbor.”

toward renewal

When the city of Chicago proposed building an airport at Lake Calumet in the late 1980s, a proposal that would require paving part of the lake, moving the river, and razing neighborhoods, it galvanized the movement. With the help of the Environmental Protection Agency and supporters from the wider Chicago region, the millhands and herons faced down the common threat to their nests. The Calumet activists championed an alternative future, an embryonic plan for a Calumet “ecopark.” Through the 1990s, the ecopark proposal has evolved into a loose but broadly shared vision for the region. It’s a vision largely shared on both sides of the border, and embodied in two major regional plans: Indiana’s Marquette Plan and the Calumet Initiative.

The Marquette Plan envisions public areas spanning the Indiana shoreline, with new parks and multi-use paths to get people past the industrial sites and out to the lake. The plan builds on Indiana’s history of 20th-century environmental activism, which helped create Indiana Dunes State Park and the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore. Costa Dillon, superintendent of the Lakeshore, points to the legacy of that action. “Prickly pear cactus still grows within 100 feet of arctic bearberry,” he says. “Many birders don’t even realize we’re one of the best birding areas in the country.” A full 30 percent of Indiana’s threatened and endangered species are found here.

The scene in Indiana is distinct from that of Illinois, says Ken Schoon of Indiana University Northwest. Many Indiana companies, including steel mills and BP Amoco, were never shuttered, though they now employ thousands fewer. Here, too, open space increases, though rural areas face sprawl.

John Swanson of the Northwest Indiana Regional Planning Commission said that a recent forum with more than 500 participants showed “very strong support for becoming a greener region. People want us to be leaders in environmental stewardship.” A centerpiece of the Marquette vision is “greenways and blueways” — meaning bike paths and a paddling trail linking the region. Swanson hopes to have a “sandbreaking” for a trail connecting the east and west units of the National Lakeshore this summer. Arcelor Mittal, owner of several of the region’s steel plants, has funded the initial stages of the blueway — NIRPC will publish a waterways map this summer, and some public launches will open.

The Calumet Initiative, a partnership including the City of Chicago, US Forest Service, Illinois DNR, and others, brought a peaceful end to battles over the future of the Southeast Side by setting aside large areas of brownfield and vacant land for industrial and commercial redevelopment, while also reserving 4,800 acres as open land for recreation and natural areas. The continued extension of a 1984 moratorium on new landfills prompted waste companies to sell their land. Starting in 1999, the city took over parts of Indian Ridge Marsh, Heron Pond, and Hyde Lake, adding Van Vlissengen Prairie in 2003, Hegewisch Marsh three years later, and finally Big Marsh. In Indiana, the National Lakeshore acquired some final parcels within its boundaries. The Nature Conservancy assembled the Ivanhoe Dune and Swale preserve. While opportunities remain, much of the land most desired for conservation has now been assembled.

On all sides of the region, agencies and environmental organizations have been grappling with the question of how to move forward. “In the first round of grants of the Calumet Ecosystem Partnership,” Bouman says, “people thought we needed a viewing stand to see the heron nests at Big Marsh. But somebody said, woah.” It wasn’t clear what impact construction might have on the hydrology, or on the herons themselves. As work was about to start at Indian Ridge Marsh, regulatory agencies began to express reservations, says Nicole Kamins of Chicago’s Department of Environment. No one was sure of the impact of improving sites like these. Might they be building an inviting hazard for migratory birds, tempted by the beauty of the marsh to raise chemically stunted young? Worse, the agencies couldn’t say what standard the city needed to meet.

In long rounds of discussion, regulators, staffers, and scientists hammered out the Calumet Ecotox Protocol — a daunting table of toxins, their likelihood to disperse or accumulate in animals, and a method for filling in gaps in knowledge. With a protocol established, the city could at last begin restoring sites — removing invasive plants such as Phragmites and stabilizing water levels to help night-herons at Indian Ridge.

“Ten years of hard work was needed just to say what we could do,” Bouman says. “You want to build a skyscraper, and people get impatient when all they see is the hole in the ground, but you’ve got to build the foundation. The foundation is laid now, and projects can move forward.”

There is no shortage of projects. Lee Botts, founder of the Lake Michigan Federation (now Alliance for the Great Lakes), recently inventoried 166 restoration projects in northwest Indiana, from complex brownfield cleanups for the Marquette Plan to the reseeding of former houselots in the Dunes.

As cleanup and restoration proceed, advocates have developed a vision that accepts the region’s unique juxtaposition of industry and nature as an asset. One model is the Duisburg-Nord park corridor in Germany, where factory hulks serve as climbing walls and people ice skate under conveyor belts. Environment Commissioner Suzanne Malec-McKenna recalls a dance performance at Big Marsh. “Busloads of people came to this really unusual place, with beaver ‘condos’ to the right, the Acme Coke Plant looming in the background, and this wetland assemblage,” she says. “And as the dancers are mimicking birds, herons are flying overhead and looking down. These juxtapositions, the messiness of the context, just make the story dynamic.”

Another powerful symbol of this aesthetic is the proposed Ford Calumet Environmental Center. Studio Gang, an architectural firm, won a design contest with a structure meant to suggest nest-building — they will salvage materials from local brownfields the way birds gather twigs. The bold design and green building techniques have drawn worldwide notice and will bring visitors even from overseas — if and when it’s built. Recent economic problems make funding uncertain, spawning impatience on the Southeast Side, where the center is coveted because visitors may also patronize local businesses.

People in the region even talk of “ecotourism.” Swanson of NIRPC cites bike shops on the trail network. Costa Dillon thinks kayak and ski rental could strengthen the Dunes’ connection to communities, and Malec-McKenna stresses the need to consider all sides of renewal: “economy, ecology, and community.”

This emphasis reflects a priority of the working-class neighborhoods that make up the Calumet region: creating jobs to make up for the lost mills. According to 2000 census figures, while the region’s population has held steady, slightly rising from 1.74 million in 1990 to 1.78 million in 2000, the number of residents with manufacturing jobs declined 22 percent.

Though events such as the annual Wolf Lake Wetlands, Wind, and Water Festival have begun to gain a following, at this point it’s still Pierogi Fest that brings thousands of people to Whiting to buy ethnic food. Calumet eco-development remains an embryonic concept with intriguing prototypes.

The future of the marsh and duneland will depend on teaching a new generation to appreciate its unique beauty. Multiple efforts — at the Dunes Learning Center, the Deep River Outdoor Education Center owned by the Gary schools, and Chicago Wilderness’ Mighty Acorns program — reflect the diversity of the region.

One of the most distinctive programs is Fishin’ Buddies, which brings children as young as six years old to fish in local ponds and teaches them the connection between water quality, habitat, and healthy fish. “We show them how vegetation gives smaller fish places to hide from predators,” says founder John Kidd. “They learn the anatomy of the fish, check the scales to find out the age.” This summer, Kidd is expanding a six-week “conservation boot camp” that places students from Chicago high schools with environmental agencies. He boasts of Fishin’ Buddies alumni who have gone on to work in environmental agencies. Kidd, an African American owner of a local auto shop, wants to make sure minority kids are exposed to the outdoors. He tells about a child thanking him: “When my teacher asked me to speak about what I did this summer,” the boy wrote, “I impressed my peers talking about oak and pine trees, about the plot surveys, about fishing, the different types of fish we caught, and teaching younger children to fish. I got an ovation, and I feel proud of what I did.”

Kidd says he’s optimistic about the future of the Calumet. Wild lands threatened with paving two decades ago are protected and on the path to recovery. Wetland sediments are being cleaned up. And for every fisherman tossing back a goggle-eyed catfish, another whispers about the return of sturgeon in Wolf Lake, looking for a bit of gravel to spawn over.