Restoring neglected waterways of the Southeast Side are major challenge.
For 70 years, from 1900 to 1970, the Calumet River on Chicago’s Southeast Side provided the cooling water, waste disposal, and shipping channel for a dense collection of steel, chemical, and metals manufacturing plants matched in few other regions of the country.
When the last of the plants closed in the late 20th century, Chicago authorities and Southeast Side residents were left with an unyielding and difficult challenge. How would Chicago clean up the river and shoreline lands damaged by decades of industrial discharges from the last century? And what economic and environmental opportunities lay ahead in the 21st century for 10,000 largely vacant acres along the Lake Michigan shoreline and drained by the Calumet River that encompass seven percent of Chicago’s land area?
Six years ago, Calumet Connect, a group of Southeast Side residents, opened the process for starting to answer those questions. They were joined by key partners like the Southeast Environmental Taskforce and Friends of the Chicago River in urging the city to toss aside convention in considering a new development strategy for the old industrial corridor. What was needed, they said, was a plan to that put the natural setting and water resources front and center. A clean river and the area’s vibrant wetlands would serve as anchors for a new neighborhood and business-friendly economic area.
In August, Chicago acted on those ideas and introduced its Calumet Area Land Use Plan.
At the center of the redevelopment proposal is wetland restoration and easy citizen access to the Calumet River and Lake Calumet, the largest body of water in the Chicago.
“What we would really like to see is a future for [the Calumet River] that protects ecology better, protects the water quality, and a transition based on the community’s vision,” said Adam Flickinger, planning director for Friends of the Chicago River.
Big Vision
Achieving those goals is as difficult as anything Chicago has ever sought to master.
As a working river and lifeline of commerce and labor in the Midwest, the Calumet River forms the natural boundary between Indiana and Illinois, and a key waterway connection to Lake Michigan and the Mississippi River. For its strategic proximity to Lake Michigan and its large deposits of coal, limestone and clay, the Calumet River has also served as the infamous home of Chicago’s heavy steel and cargo shipping industries.
Comprising six Chicago community areas of East Side, Hegewisch, Pullman, Riverdale, Roseland and South Deering, the Calumet Region was once home to four major steel mills operating along the Calumet River: U.S. Steel South Works, Wisconsin Steel, Republic Steel and Pressed Steel.
For this reason, the Southeast Side is considered Chicago’s industrial corridor and nicknamed by locals as “Steel City,” with the Calumet River being privately owned and zoned for industrial use.
Amid the height of Chicago’s steel belt era, the city of Chicago also made an unprecedented move to reverse the flow of its rivers–a decision intended to protect precious drinking water in Lake Michigan.
In 1922, the construction of the Cal-Sag Channel reversed the Calumet River in order to divert sewage and pollution from entering the great lake and improve both water quality and barge traffic along the river.
Despite city efforts to protect Chicago’s drinking water, the eastern branch of the Calumet River still empties into Lake Michigan through the Indiana Harbor and Ship Canal, leaving Calumet communities vulnerable to pollution and sewage, according to Friends of the Chicago River planning director Adam Flickinger.
“A large part of the Calumet river system does still connect to our drinking water, because it flows into Lake Michigan, everything north of the locks down there near Hegewisch Marsh,” Flickinger said. “I think it’s a really essential area to get right. That environmental justice lens that just simply still remains is so concerning, that communities are being heavily burdened by pollution. And the city needs to address that urgently.”
Residential proximity to a century of heavy industry has resulted in long-term contamination of the water, air and soil in the Southeast Side.
Lead poisoning, asthma, skin rashes and other related illnesses are prime health concerns among residents in the Southeast Side, according to a Calumet River Planning Framework by the University of Illinois Chicago Great Cities Institute.
“We have the highest rates of asthma in the city,” said Yessenia Balcazar, senior planning manager of the Southeast Side Environmental Taskforce. “Even just within the Southeast Environmental Taskforce as an organization, so many of us have family members that have respiratory illness and lung cancers. It’s so prevalent in the whole community.”
A Toxic Tour of the Southeast
On a humid summer afternoon in July Sam Corona, a Southeast Side resident and activist, leads two dozen Chicagoans on a tour of his community. Corona’s tour is part of the Alliance of the Southeast’s environmental justice tours, an effort to expose Chicagoans to key toxic sites along the Calumet – sites that have plagued residents like Corona of environmental injustices for decades.
Stepping off a tour bus at William Powers Park, Corona quizzes the group on their geographic knowledge of Chicago’s far southeast neighborhood. “We have something that other parts of the city of Chicago don’t have,” Corona said. “We have three lakes. How many of y’all knew that the city of Chicago has three lakes within it? No, no, nobody?”
Corona explains that the Southeast Side is home to not just to the impressive Lake Michigan, but also to Wolf Lake and Lake Calumet – an industrial waterfront operated by the Illinois International Port Authority that’s been notoriously inaccessible to residents.
“Lake Calumet has been reserved and cut off for industry because they like to use our waterways,” Corona said. “They think that they are the only people that should have access to it.”
“We built more than 40% of the skyline that makes Chicago iconic,” Corona added during July’s tour. “It was built and made on our shorelines, and now with what we’re left behind, we’re buried alive in pollution because of that.”
Superfunds of the Southeast
Corona isn’t exaggerating. Over 460 toxic brownfield sites exist on the Southeast Side and in Cook County’s south suburbs, according to an analysis by the University of Illinois Chicago.
Among hundreds of these post-industrial contaminated sites, the community is also home to three EPA Superfunds, a federal designation reserved for the nation’s most contaminated properties.
These three Superfund sites–Lake Calumet Cluster, the Schroud Property and the Acme Steel Coke Plant–also reside within the 10,000 acres of land that the city of Chicago hopes to redevelop in its land use plan.
But Superfund sites can take decades to remediate, posing an ongoing ecological and public health threat to the community, according to Balcazar. She and the Southeast Environmental Taskforce are key local liaisons for the EPA and have pushed for remediation on behalf of her community.
The U.S. EPA’s Press Officer David Shark provided Circle of Blue with updates on each of these sites. The Calumet Cluster Sites, which have been on the Superfund Priorities List since 2010, won’t determine the next phase of the cleanup process until spring 2027.
The Schroud Property, locally nicknamed as “Coal Hills,” was listed as a Superfund in 2019. Remedial investigations will continue into spring 2026 before clean-up efforts can even begin.
And finally, the Acme Site, the newest Superfund designated as of March 2024, is only beginning its remedial investigations of the site as of early 2026, said Shark.
“There’s a lot of feelings, like can’t we make this go a little bit faster,” Flickinger said. “It really just needs to be cleaned up so that it cannot continue to contaminate the water.”
Flickinger noted that the clean-up of the Schroud Property is of particular interest for the Friends of the Chicago River as the toxic site connects directly to Indian Creek, the only connection point between Wolf Lake and the Calumet River. The site is not only close to residential homes, Flickinger said Schroud threatens the habitats of beavers and fish near Indian Creek.
“But the way [the EPA] remediates the property depends on the future use,” according to Flickinger.
The Southeast Environmental Taskforce is pushing for community input on what they hope these sites will become – especially since the EPA’s remediation plans will depend on understanding how the land will be used going forward.
“Our priority for all three [superfund sites] is socializing these sites and bolstering that community engagement around them,” Balcazar said.
So how does the Southeast Side envision Calumet’s future while legacy pollution remains unresolved?
Balcazar said that in the cases of both Schroud and Acme, locals are eager for more green spaces, especially due to the sites close proximity to existing marshes and parks like William Powers Park. She said this community consensus has affirmed that habitat conservation is aligned with the wants of nearby residents.
Because of this, Balcazar and the Southeast Environmental Taskforce spearheaded the Calumet Connect, a collaborative of 12 environmental justice organizations, in 2019 to push the city of Chicago to modernize its land use plan for the Calumet.
The group hoped this would be the first step towards manifesting a future for the Calumet River with open space and waterfront access as a priority.
On August 6, the city of Chicago Department of Planning and Development (CPD) presented its draft land use map for the next 20 years, for an area roughly four times the size of downtown Chicago, said Luke Mich, city planner at CPD.
A Lagging Land Use Plan
Community advocates were united in their view that it needed more work.
CPD outlined its land designations for the 10,000-acre Calumet area. The map is designated into five categories: (1) open space and recreation, (2) neighborhood mixed-use, (3) commercial and light industrial, (4) moderate industrial, and (5) heavy industrial.
To Balcazar and the Calumet Connect, though, the map’s remaining emphasis on heavy industry, like freight use, is a disheartening move by the city.
“We had very high hopes with this process and the outcome of what the plan would be,” Balcazar said. “We wanted a pivot from heavy industry. We no longer wanted to see that even considered in the land use plan. And unfortunately, it’s still a huge big chunk of it.”
Although Mich emphasized that this is a move forward toward creating more “buffer zones” between heavy industrial and non-industrial areas like parks and residential homes, Balcazar and the Calumet Connect view this as a failure on the city’s part to move beyond its priority on heavy industry.
For one, environmental groups and locals were pushing for more public access to Lake Calumet, as it remains completely cut off from lakefront access and has served as a major freight port for the Illinois International Port District (IIPD), connecting the movement of goods between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River system.
What’s more, while the city works on its land use plan, the Illinois International Port District has also adopted its own master plan in 2022, concerning the 1,800 acres of property at Lake Calumet for freight operations.
The Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning (CMAP) advised on the master plan, with an emphasis on growing the Port’s already 19 million tons of cargo moved annually.
“My hope is to strike that balance and make sure that the Port can still continue their operations as an economic driver for the region, and maybe even over time, improve that and continue to bring in more money as the freight industry continues to grow,” said CMAP principal planner Tony Manno. “And find the right places for people to explore, the parts of that area that are safe to explore and interesting to explore, and make sure that the residents down there have a voice in what improvements are made.”
This property, however, is also situated within the city’s Calumet Area Land Use map, leaving community advocates like Balcazar uncertain about whether the Port’s master plan will impact the city’s land use goals.
“That has also been a point of confusion, because [Lake Calumet] is the Port Authority property,” Balcazar said. “There isn’t alignment between the two [plans], and between the two, there has been some favoring to what the Port Authority has put out.”
While the city of Chicago moves forward with its land use designs, Balcazar said that the Calumet Connect plans to issue a complaint brief in the coming weeks, expressing its concerns with the city’s emphasis on industry despite misalignment between the Port Authority’s plans and input from advocacy groups.
“It’s about what actual land uses are going to be changed or incorporated that’s gonna actually pivot the status quo of what this geography has been, which is heavily inundated by industry,” Balcazar said. “And [the land use map] is just not indicative of those things, of public access, of public health.”
The next phase of the Calumet Area Land Use Plan will be focused on gathering feedback from groups like Calumet Connect on the design guidelines and implementing the plan by summer 2026.
In the compliant brief, Balcazar is pushing for intervention on these plans before the city can begin the implementation phase next year.
Accessing the Calumet
Despite dissatisfaction with the city’s land use designations, Calumet Connect is taking matters into its own hands when it comes to riverfront access.
Within the boundaries of the proposed Calumet Area Land Use, Balcazar said her group is focused on a small sliver of green space on the western banks of the Calumet River between 96th and 100th streets. By next August, this site will offer Southeast Side residents a first-of-its-kind access to the river they call home.
“It would be the first time that residents ever get to access [the Calumet River] recreationally, or just get to be near it,” Balcazar said. “It’s an opportunity that has never been given to Southeast Side residents.”
Like so much of the Calumet story, the 100th Street Project is lakefront property owned by industry–in this case, People’s Gas.
But the two-year lease would finally give residents direct access to their working river, said Balcazar.
She hopes this is the first of a movement to reclaim access to the Calumet waterways and justice for her environmentally-overburdened community.
“The city of Chicago is what it is, in a large part, due to the Southeast Side,” Balcazar said. “We had to get that short end of the stick while the rest of the city gets to thrive because we were set aside for that [industrial] purpose. But now what? Now we need that shift. Now we need that change in narrative.”
