Shifting shorelines: Land reclamation and economic blackmail in industrial South Chicago

In 1880, the North Chicago Rolling Mill Company, soon to be the Illinois Steel Company, broke ground on 71.5 acres in South Chicago to construct its South Works plant along the Lake Michigan shore. This land near the Indiana border, 13 miles south of Chicago’s downtown, once had been a marshland where the Potawatomi Indians harvested muskrat pelts, and then a juniper and huckleberry-bush-covered hinterland where Chicago residents hunted and fished, and brewers and butchers dug for ice. But around its new factory, the steel company would build a high and tight board fence that cut off views and pedestrian access to 5200 feet of the lakefront between 79th Street and the Calumet River for more than 100 years (Gillette, 1901: 9; Submerged and Shore Lands Legislative Investigating Committee (SSLLIC), 1911: App. 15, Part 7, 198). ¹

Twenty years after the factory’s founding, the fenced boundaries on its north, west, and south were fixed, and yet the plant had curiously grown to 327 acres, more than four times its original size. The Chicago Daily Tribune broke the story in 1900 that Illinois Steel had for years not paid property taxes on the majority of this land. “The failure of the Assessors to put a valuation on the property,” the newspaper reported, “is due to the fact that they have no official knowledge of its existence” (Chicago Daily Tribune, 1900).

As in New York, Boston, Los Angeles, and most other port cities around the world, much of Chicago’s waterfront is “made” or “reclaimed” land (Kearney and Merrill, 2004, 2013; Rawson, 2009; Steinberg, 2014). The practice of creating new real-estate by dumping soil and other materials offshore has a long history. In the Netherlands, for example, human manipulation of water levels and shore lands began more than 2000 years ago and was integral in the seventeenth century to the political and economic development of the modern republic (Hoeksema, 2006). Although property rights associated with landfill proved very much in flux in the United States through the late nineteenth century, by 1892, case law had determined that, in general, a waterfront owner’s property extends to the meander line, the high-water mark. If land forms along the shore by natural accretion, it becomes the property of the lakefront owner. But if it is created artificially, then it belongs to the State, which owns the submerged land (Kearney and Merrill, 2004, 2013). ²

At the heart of the controversy over the South Works site—and other waterfront industrial sites in Chicago at the time—was whether the extra acreage at the plant had accreted naturally, as Illinois Steel claimed, or whether the company had actively created a new shoreline by dumping slag, its waste product, over the bank in order to extend its landholdings. As the Tribune proclaimed in 1901, “Old Maps Tell the Story” (Chicago Daily Tribune, 1901). Taking this claim seriously and “listening” to what the landscape and its archival record have to say reveals much about the ways in which corporations shape both material and economic landscapes to make them appear “natural” and stable when they are anything but. Blomley (2008) argues that “property” must be considered a verb as well as a noun; it reflects an often-contested process of legal claims and sometimes hazy distinctions between public and private space. In South Chicago, the steel corporation not only produced a legal claim to private ownership of public land. It physically manufactured those claims out of dumped refuse. I build on other scholars who have demonstrated the entanglement of ecological, social, and economic forces to show that global capitalism, as such, is repeatedly enacted in material ways through the landscapes all around us (Brenner and Theodore, 2002; Cronon, 1996; Curtis, 2003; Heynen et al., 2006; Heynen and Swyngedouw, 2003; Swyngedouw, 1999). Here and elsewhere, made landscapes, and the coincident production of legal claims to them, functioned as an infrastructure of corporate leverage over local communities and policymakers.

In this study, listening to the landscape reflects a political ecological approach to archival research (Biehler, 2009; Davis, 2009; Offen, 2004, 2012; Swyngedouw, 1999). I concentrate on the disputes over Illinois Steel’s made land in South Chicago beginning in the first decade of the twentieth century, including a 1906 court case against the steel company, a legislative transfer of submerged lands in 1909, and the subsequent publication of an extensive investigative report on the state’s “submerged and shore lands” in 1911. My analysis of archival sources including court transcripts, maps, newspaper accounts, and legislative records deepens the historical engagement of urban political ecology, a subfield that more often uses historical materials to contextualize contemporary issues of inequality (Davis, 2009; Heynen, 2013; Peet and Watts, 2004).

At the same time, unlike some work in the subfield of historical political ecology, which regularly engages with written, cartographic, and geological archives, my concern is less in using these materials to reconstruct the biophysical terrain of the past (Bell, 2015; Brannstrom, 2004). Today, the owners and developers of the former South Works site readily admit it is largely comprised of slag fill. ³ Rather, I take seriously the confusion, ambiguity, and contradictions of this historical landscape and its attendant politics and legal claims. Waterfront ecologies in particular are in a constant state of flux, as shorelines recede, advance, and are reengineered (Blomley, 2008; Bunce and Desfor, 2007; Hagerman, 2007; Kinder, 2015). In South Chicago, it is also clear that even at a given historical moment, there is no one ecology for the researcher to recreate. Despite many efforts at the time to map the shoreline to solidify legal claims or economic commitments, multiple ecologies coexisted in South Chicago’s shifting landscape for the various actors who fell under its influence or deployed its features toward conflicting ends. As Kinder (2015) writes of waterfront ecologies, they “indirectly—although never cleanly or conclusively—naturalize many, even contradictory, agendas” (p. 13). Indeed, the ecological ambiguity of the South Chicago shoreline mirrored the political muddiness of the early twentieth century, as Progressive reforms regularly rubbed against mandates for economic development (Gandy, 2002; McGerr, 2003).

My approach to this collection of judicial and legislative records and maps thus emphasizes an ethnographic sensibility. I look for cracks in the archive that foreground confusion over land claims, uncertainty about the shape of the shoreline, and anxiety about how to fix shifting sands and mobile capital in place. The archive reveals that instability in the landscape was instrumental to creating structures that supported the imbalance of power between a large corporation and a fledgling community desperate for jobs and other economic investments.

Hurley (1995) writes in his environmental history of nearby steel town Gary, IN, “industrial capital would use its power over people to preserve its control over nature” (p. 145). The inverse is just as salient; at South Works, Illinois Steel used its management of the environment to control its labor force and resist burdensome interventions from local and state politicians. As they continue to do today, residents in the late nineteenth century placed their hopes for economic stability in the perceived permanence of heavy equipment and brick factory buildings. But they also invoked the land itself in an effort to “ground” mobile capital and anchor its benefits. If the State would just give Illinois Steel more submerged property to fill in, boosters argued, the company would commit to the community and create jobs and tax revenue. For Illinois Steel, title to more land—a claim that the corporation materially produced via dumped slag—became the primary bargaining chip in its repeated threats to flee to Indiana or further afield where it might find more favorable labor conditions, environmental regulations, or tax incentives.

Here, this study intervenes in the historical literature on deindustrialization. The popular use of the term “runaway shop” reached a fever pitch in the United States during the 1970s and 1980s, as manufacturers increasingly left the Industrial North for the American Sunbelt and foreign markets where labor and environmental costs and regulations were more business friendly (Bluestone and Harrison, 1982). The steel industry maintains a starring role in the well-worn saga in which the golden era of union gains in the 1940s, particularly for the white male working class, gave way by the 1970s to an increasingly acrimonious relationship between management and labor (Cowie, 2010; Metzgar, 2000). Amid the economic uncertainty of the 1970s—a series of national recessions, high inflation, and the oil embargo—corporations like U.S. Steel leveraged their roles as communities’ primary employers by threatening to close plants and mills if workers did not give concessions or states continued to push new regulations (High, 2003; Hurley, 1995; Stein, 2010).

Other historians have argued that this familiar storyline is blind to many other examples of capital flight that fall outside of this timeframe. Sugrue (1996) places the roots of decline not in the economic climate of the 1970s but in the policies of workplace discrimination and residential segregation entrenched in the Industrial North by the 1940s. Meanwhile, the New England textile industry had moved south by the 1920s, and electronics manufacturers had already engaged in decades-long searches for lower wage workforces (Cowie, 1999; Cowie and Heathcott, 2003: 2). I extend this work by showing that corporate strategies of economic blackmail not only drove processes of post-1970s deindustrialization; they were also integral to fueling industrial expansion during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, another period of weak union protections, outsized corporate influence, and widespread social and economic inequality. My research helps challenge the declension narrative that assumes a non-cyclical trend toward decline resulting from the inevitable effects of neutral market forces by showing specific corporate and state actions that drove both economic development and disinvestment (Highsmith, 2011; Neumann, 2016).

This article begins with a discussion of the formative role of made land and claims to it in Chicago’s process of industrialization at the turn of the twentieth century. I then elucidate the ways in which the shoreline’s instability became a weapon of economic blackmail for Illinois Steel during the 1906 court case as well as a tool for local boosters anxious to anchor the nascent community’s development. I follow this with a discussion of the subsequent Chiperfield Report and its attempt to use maps to resolve competing interpretations of the “public interest” in the face of insistent ambiguity. Finally, I show how ongoing battles to claim this shifting landscape continued to shape South Chicago economically, socially, and ecologically over the course of the twentieth century.

South Chicago’s engineered shoreline is just one example of the multiple and ongoing local materializations of global capitalism. In applying urban political ecology’s emphasis on the structures of power that shape landscapes to an archival analysis, and by extending the typical chronology of economic blackmail, this article reveals how thoroughly corporate actions shape “natural” landscapes and the corresponding politics of laying claim to unstable ecologies. The disinvestment and capital flight that transformed communities across the American Rust Belt and beyond over the course of the twentieth century were not “natural” outcomes but were rather contested, uneven, and actively pursued processes. More often than not, the landscapes and their archives tell the stories.

The case for made land: People v. Illinois Steel

Chicago’s central role, both geographically and economically, in the nation’s expansion is well established. In the late nineteenth century, the city’s emergence as a hub for transnational railroad traffic, meatpacking, futures trading, and the mail-order retail business put Chicago on the map. Yet this map remained a work in progress. In Cronon’s (1991) classic work Nature’s Metropolis, Chicago functions as a case study for illustrating “second nature,” the human engineering of a city’s “natural” advantages in ways that ultimately negate the distinction (see also Smith, 1984; Swyngedouw, 1999). Efforts to control and claim the land—from the federal government’s acquisition of the territory from the Potawatomi in a series of early eighteenth-century treaties to the city’s rebirth after the Great Chicago Fire of 1871—were constituent to the processes of urbanization and industrialization.

Chicago’s waterfront, in particular, functioned as a key battleground for planners, lawmakers, and capitalists who wished to control its use for trade and production during the city’s early decades (Salzmann, 2008). Questions of ownership and appropriate use tied up much of the lakefront land in Chicago’s center in litigation between the 1860s and 1890s (Kearney and Merrill, 2004, 2011, 2013). Faced with limited public funding, the city and state relied on industry to pay for many infrastructural improvements. In 1852, the city gave Illinois Central Railroad more than 1000 acres of submerged land on which run its tracks on an elevated trestle just off the downtown lakefront in exchange for the corporation’s construction of protective breakwaters. After the 1871 fire destroyed the city’s downtown, much of the detritus was used to fill in this section of the lake, ultimately placing the tracks on solid ground. Decades of legal battles about Illinois Central’s control of this increasingly valuable lakefront property culminated with a U.S. Supreme Court decision in 1892 divesting the railroad company of its submerged holdings and monopoly on the Chicago Harbor. The court ruled that those lands should be held “in trust” for the public, setting off a new series of questions about rightful ownership of other lakefront landfill, including at South Works (Kearney and Merrill, 2004).

On the southern edge of the city, the Calumet River had been another locus of efforts to modify the shoreline to serve the needs of capital expansion. Beginning in 1870, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers made a significant investment in deepening, widening, and straightening the mouth of the Calumet River, which would become the southern border of the South Works plant, to make it more amenable to barge traffic. In 1869, the Calumet and Chicago Canal and Dock Company, a land developer, began grading and paving streets and otherwise “improving” the land. Despite the region’s marshy conditions, the Calumet and Chicago Canal and Dock Company pitched its plats as inexpensive, spacious, and “plac[ing] South Chicago in the front rank of desirable locations for economical operations in diversified pursuits” with “rapid advance in value certain” (Calumet and Chicago Canal and Dock Company, 1874b: cover, 7) (See Figure 1). While the land initially also became home to a silver smelter, a furnace forge, and lumber yards, the clustering of four steel mills in Southeast Chicago by 1901, of which South Works was the largest, plus new plants across the border in Indiana made the region one of the foremost concentrations of steelmaking in the world (Innis-Jiménez, 2013: 56). ⁴ By 1906, total tonnage of commercial ships on the Calumet easily exceeded that on the Chicago River at the city’s center (Salzmann, 2008: 144).

This process of reshaping the waterfront extended further beyond the city limits to encompass the Calumet Region as a whole, the area spanning from Southeast Chicago to Northwest Indiana. In 1889, Standard Oil began leveling dunes and filling in fishing grounds near Whiting, IN, to construct a new plant. By 1908, the corporation commenced a decades-long effort to reclaim 20,000 acres by draining the surrounding marshland. Another land deal in 1901 gave Inland Steel 50 acres in East Chicago, IN, in return for a $1 million investment in a mill and “improvements” that included grading the land, building a new harbor, and constructing a sewer system. The company soon turned to Lake Michigan to reclaim additional acreage (Wlasiuk, 2014). Meanwhile, when U.S. Steel built its company town of Gary, IN, in 1906, it moved the Grand Calumet River a quarter mile south, used slag to straighten its course, and extended its plant’s shoreline 700 feet into the lake (Hurley, 1995: 17). As a massive exercise in environmental engineering, the transformation of the region’s shoreline at once pointed to the power of industrial interests and to their instability, a duality that would continue to characterize South Chicago and the Calumet Region for the next century (Hurley, 1995; Salzmann, 2008; Tomasula y Garcia, 2017; Walley, 2013; Wlasiuk, 2014).

It was within this context of the region’s industrial geography that calls emerged for Illinois’s Attorney General to dig deeper into Illinois Steel’s expansion at South Works and “investigate and protect the rights of the public respecting ‘made’ land,” and the “encroachments of private individuals or corporations on the lake and rivers” (Chicago Daily Tribune, 1905a, 1905b). Did the land build up naturally with the tide and thus belong to Illinois Steel by happy circumstance? Or did the company actively make land on submerged property of the State? The Cook County Superior Court heard the case of People v. Illinois Steel beginning in 1906. Several witnesses for the State reported seeing suspicious activity at the plant’s slag dump, where the waste material from the blast furnaces was piled. According to them, a temporary rail line near the lakefront moved further and further east as rail cars spilled slag over the bank and created new land. John Stengel, a former pile driver and steamboat captain and an avid fisherman, testified that at night he regularly saw steam rising from the water off the shore of the plant, presumably from the hot slag (SSLLIC, 1911: App. 15, Part 6, 191–192).

The court testimony is full of confusion and contradiction among the witnesses over where the original shoreline, at this point cut off from public access for over 25 years, had been. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which spent decades making the Calumet Harbor suitable for industrial traffic, had raised concerns to Congress as early as 1884 that the steel plant’s practice of dumping refuse over the bank had extended the shore line by about four acres each year. The routine was interfering with the government’s Sisyphean task of dredging and constructing a pier, since the pier’s reach into the lake kept shrinking as a result. Then, adding to the muddle, the Corps suggested five years later that it might have been mistaken, noting that the shoreline’s advance “continued uninterruptedly . . . long after the dumping of the slag had been stopped” (Benyaurd, 1884: 2–4; Marshall, 1889: 2119) (See Figure 2).

A map of South Chicago that in effect acted as a chief witness for the State during the court case showed 187.2 acres of new land shaded in bright yellow as comprising the bulk of the steel plant by 1905 (SSLLIC, 1911: App. 15, Part 6, 347; Atlas 4, Map 1006.21). Illinois Steel did not dispute that its plant had expanded east. The defense was quick to object, however, to the notion that the expansion was a result of what the prosecution called “unnatural action” (SSLLIC, 1911: App. 15, Part 6, 472–473). In the end, the master in chancery presiding over the case determined in 1908 that Illinois Steel should pay the State for the disputed acreage. The challenge that remained was that there was no mechanism through which the land could be sold to Illinois Steel without passing a new law in the State Legislature.

(Re)Claiming South Chicago and grounding mobile capital

Despite real-estate developers’ initial portrayal in 1874 of South Chicago as a satellite that was primed to join with downtown to “rapidly become united portions of the metropolis of the Northwest,” 35 years later the industrial outpost remained geographically and culturally isolated (Calumet and Chicago Canal and Dock Company, 1874b: 7). South Chicago had been annexed to the city along with Hyde Park in 1889, but popular visions of Chicago continued to stop well to the north. During and after the court case, Illinois Steel made clear that, unless offered a deal, it could find a more favorable environment in which to do business. The issue of the legislative fix in this dispute over public and private landholdings at South Works became a means by which residents of South Chicago expressed their anxiety about capital mobility and attempted to transform the unstable land into an anchor against such threats.

The landscape of South Chicago had quickly transformed from a tree-studded escape and marshy wilderness to an industrial outpost. According to one civil engineer in 1891, roughly two-thirds of the area near the mouth of the Calumet River lay below the high-water level of Lake Michigan. “It is a grave question of public policy and humanity as to how far it is wise to encourage the growth of population on such sites,” he wrote, calling South Chicago “a sponge to saturate with the communal filth” (Cooley, 1891: 30). Ten years later, many of the streets near the lake and river had by necessity been raised from a few inches to up to eight feet above the ground where houses had been built. Little had been done to ameliorate the abundance of standing water, however, and most of the region had no sewer system (Gillette, 1901: 23–24). Housing and public health advocates called the district “filthy beyond description . . . extremely dreary, ugly, and unhealthful” (quoted in Abbott and Breckinridge, 1911: 160). Even Illinois Steel’s attorney, eager to devalue the land for which it was being asked to pay, rhetorically asked a witness in the court case, “Can you call to mind in a great big city a place that looks so absolutely rotten?” (SSLLIC, 1911: App. 15, Part 6, 389).

South Works had become part of Illinois Steel in 1889 in an era of corporate mergers. ⁵ In 1901, a much bigger consolidation placed Illinois Steel in the hands of the newly formed U.S. Steel Corporation. The “steel trust,” now the largest steelmaker in the world, controlled roughly two-thirds of domestic steel production and became a target for Progressive Era reforms. The growing South Works plant employed more than 6000 people by 1900 and 10,000 people by the start of the trial (Gillette, 1901: 28; SSLLIC, 1911: App. 15, Part 6, 620). South Chicago residents represented 18 nationalities at the time, with immigrant workers coming primarily from Poland, Germany, Sweden, Ireland, and increasingly from Eastern Europe (Gillette, 1901: 16, 28; Pacyga, 2003).

As a sociologist described in 1901, industry completely defined South Chicago’s landscape and reinforced the community’s marginal status:

A rude inclosure of yard, tracks, and buildings; of scores of great smokestacks and furnaces, from which belch forth clouds of smoke and dust, shuts off most of the population from the splendor of the lake view. Gigantic elevators, railroads cutting through the region in various directions, streets raised above the yards, sidewalks of differing heights, ponds of water, garbage and litter, unpainted and non-descript houses, and unpaved streets, suggest in a way the picture of the town. (Gillette, 1901: 49)

Descriptions from social workers 10 years later showed that with the region’s rapid population growth—from roughly 800 people in 1874 to more than 50,000 in 1900—little had improved (Calumet and Chicago Canal and Dock Company, 1874a: 4; Gillette, 1901: 12). “The stranger within the gates of South Chicago is overwhelmed with the fact that the world is made for industry, not for men and women and little children,” they wrote (Abbott and Breckinridge, 1911: 174). Not only was the entire population of South Chicago economically dependent—directly or indirectly—on Illinois Steel; the engineered environment around the mill and the harbor had been “made for industry” in every sense.

Despite the neighborhood’s remote location from the city’s more established downtown, its unfavorable conditions, and its diverse, working-class population, South Chicago’s leaders strove to assert a fixed and coherent community identity. Faced with the controversy over the land Illinois Steel reclaimed from the lake and its threats to uproot, South Chicago residents were among the most fervent lobbyists for a legislative fix, as they attempted to anchor the steel plant’s investment in place. On a Tuesday night in March 1909, hundreds of South Chicago residents filled Saenger Hall, a neighborhood venue on Houston Avenue, to capacity. The Chicago Business Man’s Association had called the meeting to urge the passage of legislation that would allow Illinois Steel to buy the “made land” in question from the State and settle the matter once and for all. One of the most striking elements of the proceedings was the underpinning anxiety that so clearly presaged fears of the “runaway factory” most often associated with American deindustrialization two generations later.

In transcripts of the event, in which 12 speakers were given 10 minutes each to address the crowd, one finds a clear effort among the neighborhood’s business leaders to “ground” jobs and taxes in South Chicago. “We have come here and we have made our homes here; we have invested our money, we have put our labor and time here and this is our home,” said attorney Warren E. Colburn. “South Chicago has been built up upon the faith of the Illinois Steel Company, in the belief that this company was a permanent concern.” Referencing the negative effects on the community of a shutdown during the 1885 recession that led to mass layoffs, speakers linked the plant’s physical presence to the promise of local jobs, thousands of dollars in new tax revenues to support schools and municipal services, and increased payrolls to support consumer spending (SSLLIC, 1911: App. 15, Part 7, 207, 254).

South Chicago residents had grown particularly concerned when U.S. Steel founded the city of Gary three years earlier, just 17 miles away across the Indiana border. Hundreds of local families had already left Illinois to work at the more modern Gary plant (SSLLIC, 1911: App. 15, Part 7, 219). The challenge for South Chicago, as most speakers saw it, was that Indiana’s legislature had decided to attract new industry by charging only $25 an acre for submerged land that steel companies and other industrial interests could then fill in to expand their plants, while Illinois was proposing to charge $100 an acre. Illinois State Senator Albert C. Clark explained that with Gary already able to make steel cheaper at its new plant, “If you do not give [South Works] ground to enlarge so that they can tear out some of their congestion and put in new machinery, coke ovens, they cannot keep pace with up-to-date plants” (p. 254). Instead they would simply close up shop and relocate. “It is evident to all that capital must be well protected, be certain of its conditions or it soon goes elsewhere where it will receive more consideration,” he said (p. 229). Indeed, U.S. Steel Founder and President Elbert H. Gary made the same argument when visiting his namesake steel town in Indiana that May. Faced with unfavorable legislation, “the inevitable result is that the large corporation or the large pecuniary interest will gradually drift away from such locality and from such people,” he warned (p. 286). Predominant narratives often place interstate competition for business in the context of late twentieth-century deindustrialization and postindustrial economic development (Neumann, 2016; Peters and Fisher, 2004). The dispute over the permanence of the South Works land and its corporate occupier here, however, reflects the fundamental instability and opportunism of industrial capitalism from its inception.

Clark and Gary’s language about capital flight also is striking in the way it treats capital as a material thing that can be captured or redirected. Like the initial whistleblowers on the “made land” case, the businessmen at the meeting readily invoked the land itself as the key battleground of economic debate. “We all have felt that the natural advantages of Chicago were sufficient to gain and hold any enterprise that might come,” Ross A. Woodhull, an ice cream maker and future alderman, told the assembled crowd. “Gentlemen, pride always goes before a fall. Where the natural advantages do not exist sometimes it is possible to bring about artificial advantages, and that I believe is what our sister state has done” (SSLLIC, 1911: App. 15, Part 7, 216). Corporations and policymakers, the businessmen suggested, have the power to alter the physical landscape in order to reshape the economic and political ones. “Thirty years ago our lakefront was nothing but muskrats and mudhens and piles of sand,” said E.L.C. Morse, the neighborhood school’s principal. To vigorous applause, he asserted that “Illinois Steel is what made this land worth anything” (p. 246).

Those who opposed selling the made land to Illinois Steel, however, suggested that “there is much more at stake than what appears on the surface” (SSLLIC, 1911: App. 15, Part 7, 60). The dispute took place in the midst of Progressive Era agitation pushing back on the outsized influence of big corporations such as the “steel trust” of which Illinois Steel was a part. Many citizens saw the sale of the State’s submerged land to a private interest as an obvious land grab. While groups like the Chicago Commerce Association proclaimed that the retention and expansion of industry were “of far greater importance to this City, County and State than the item of price,” (p. 85) those who opposed letting the lakefront “be gobbled up by rich corporations” feared the Steel Company would sell its new landholdings at a hefty profit and move to Indiana regardless (pp. 49–50, 67).

Aside from the Potawatomi, who entered the legal fray to claim that the tribe had never relinquished in its treaties the submerged land in question (SSLLIC, 1911: App. 15, Part 7, 137–142), opponents to the sale largely based their arguments on the “public trust doctrine” that the 1892 Illinois Central Railroad case had established. The State, according to the doctrine, held submerged lands in trust for public uses such as navigation, recreation, or natural preservation. Proponents of the legislation that would transfer the South Works land from the State to the corporation, meanwhile pitted the notion that that an abandoned plant could become a public amenity—a “playground for our children”—against a masculine image of a community that would “put our shoulders to the wheel as men and fight for twelve million [dollars]” in projected payroll (SSLLIC, 1911: App. 15, Part 7, 221). Although Daniel Burnham and Edward Bennett’s famous Plan of Chicago for the Commercial Club (1909) would be released just four months later showing a comprehensive vision of the city’s lakefront as a parkland leisure-scape, Senator Clark saw no comparison: “Imagine a boulevard with a lady on horseback passing in front of the Illinois Steel Company’s plant,” he said. “Such a picture is too ridiculous to be thought of” (SSLLIC, 1911: App. 15, Part 7, 253). ⁶

In the political debate over made land, both boosters and reformers thus sought to define what kind of economic ecology South Chicago would have. What would the relationship between capital and community look like on the ground—both in the landscape and in lived experience? Business interests transformed pollution and slag, matter that is “out of place” in Mary Douglas’s (1966) classic formulation of “waste” and is duly excised from the Plan’s radiant illustrations, into symbols of profit and productivity. Industrial byproducts became the place itself, the ground beneath residents’ feet. In contrast to boosters’ anxious devotion to preserving the economic lifeblood of the neighborhood, reformers’ efforts to define the “public good” independent of corporate influence put forth a competing vision that was based on improving public health and access to waterfront space. In both cases, residents attempted to quite literally solidify their claims by portraying the thoroughly engineered landscape as a natural asset whether for industrial expansion or for open access to the lakefront.

The Chiperfield Report: Mapping the public’s interest

Ultimately, the General Assembly passed three bills, introduced by Senator Clark, in June 1909 that allowed Illinois to sell 234 acres of South Works’s made land and 101 acres at two other industrial sites to corporate owners. The price was $100 an acre (Chicago Daily Tribune, 1909). The controversy also sparked the creation in 1909 of a state commission, the Submerged and Shore Lands Legislative Investigating Committee, tasked with mapping and documenting ownership of all Illinois property along its rivers and Great Lake. State Representative Burnett M. Chiperfield, the chair of the House Judiciary Committee who called for the investigation, led the 10-member committee. The “Chiperfield Report” that the committee published in 1911 is written firmly in the Progressive spirit of protecting “the public.” Chiperfield, along with a few others on the committee, had voted against granting Illinois Steel the made land in South Chicago (SSLLIC, 1911: App. 15, Part 1, 57). While the South Chicago businessmen and Illinois Steel had sought to “reclaim” this land from Lake Michigan, from nature, so that it could be “devoted to useful and productive purposes,” the committee vowed to “reclaim” the land from “aggressions of private or corporate interests upon the public rights” (SSLLIC, 1911: App. 15, Part 7, 254; Vol. 1, 5). Following Daniel Burnham, the report recommended preserving and beautifying the lake for public uses including hunting, fishing, and pleasure resorts (SSLLIC, 1911: Vol. 1, 8).

When the Chicago Daily Tribune had proclaimed in 1901 that “Old Maps Tell the Story” of Illinois Steel’s alleged land grab, it did so in the context of political and social reforms and the professionalization of the social sciences, activities that demanded the exhaustive accumulation of data for legitimation. The Chiperfield Report is likewise intensely focused on documentation. The legislation authorizing the report requested that the committee have access to a laundry list of facts: “such records, data, evidence, documents, maps, plats, surveys, field notes and profiles” as any federal agency had available (SSLLIC, 1911: App. 15, Part 7, 75). Ultimately, the committee documented more than 1800 acres of made land along Illinois’s lakes and rivers, 1087 of which were in Chicago (SSLLIC, 1911: Vol. 2, 58). As in the Illinois Steel court case, mapping this land, in particular, was a tool with which the committee attempted to pin down mobile capital. Like the act of dumping refuse into the water to create new land, mapmaking was a means of conjuring stability out of shifting sands. It also functioned as a contested exercise in defining the public good.

As part of the proceedings of the Submerged and Shore Lands Legislative Investigating Committee, the group of state legislators convened one August morning in 1909 for a boat trip. Their guide was Edward T. Cahill, a Chicago attorney who represented the public’s interest in Chicago’s waterfront property and played a prominent role in the committee’s hearings. The group boarded the “Robert R” at 10 o’clock and set off to observe the structures and land along the Chicago River. Like the Calumet River and Harbor further south, the waterfront at Chicago’s heart had long been a contested site of capital accumulation and corporate modification. Cahill, who came armed with a slew of maps to which he constantly referred, pointed out along the way various encroachments into the waterway that producers of coal, crushed stone, steel wire, lumber, and farm equipment as well as canneries, tanneries, breweries, and cold storage facilities had constructed (SSLLIC, 1911: App. 15, Part 1, 93).

Cahill approached the natural landscape and built environment as a repository of evidence that could be read to elucidate proper ownership. As they passed Deering Harvester, he pointed out how the corporation filled in the river with refuse “the same as the steel people did on the South side,” and added, “You can see wa[y] back there is how nature left it” (SSLLIC, 1911: App. 15, Part 1, 105). As they traveled down the South Branch of the river, Cahill pointed to a cluster of industrial slips as evidence of money from “the pockets of the poor tax-payers” being spent for private gain. Representative David E. Shanahan’s assertion that in fact a brick company had paid for those particular slips was briskly rebuked as the boat moved on. When Shanahan asked Cahill if he had been at this site 20 years ago, Cahill admitted he had not, but Cahill’s map-based convictions left no room for alternatives. Further up the river, John “Jawn” J. McKenna, a fixture in local politics who came along on the trip, pointed out where he had helped dig out slips on property he rented 30 years before. When McKenna emphasized that the city, “did not pay one nickel for these slips,” Cahill’s response put an end to that conversation as well: “They certainly did,” he said. “The facts are there” (pp. 109–112).

With its proceedings, which over the course of several months included other waterborne excursions and lengthy testimony from riparian landholders, the Submerged and Shore Lands Legislative Investigating Committee sought to create a legacy report that, in contrast to ecological and political reality, fixed the shoreline in place. The results are as intriguing a material artifact as the land itself. The three-volume report is accompanied by 16 appendices. In addition to newspaper clippings, correspondence, land deeds, and transcripts from committee proceedings and court cases, the majority of the appendices, some of which are in multiple parts, are collections of both new and historical maps. ⁷ These detailed maps of all of the state’s waterways are bound in volumes so heavy and large—up to three feet wide—as to be unwieldy for one person to handle. In declaring that its survey would “be the basis for checking up any further invasions upon the public waters of this State,” the committee imagined that the weight of the historical record it drafted and bound would endure long after capital interests in the shore lands shifted (SSLLIC, 1911: Vol. 1, 2).

If maps indeed “tell the story,” the narrative that the committee’s documentation lays out also highlights the variability of their authority. During the court case, laborers’ testimonies repeatedly outlined contradictory mental maps of the shoreline, much to the chagrin of frustrated attorneys. Other moments in the historical record, such as when Shanahan and McKenna question Cahill’s data, similarly undermine one’s confidence in the map in Cahill’s hands. Such cracks in the record assert alternative ways of knowing based on lived experience. The committee’s proceedings were meant to settle uncertainty over land rights, but just as witnesses in the Illinois Steel case could not say for sure where the original shoreline had been even though they had worked at the plant, helped build the government pier, or tended to the harbor’s lighthouse, the messiness of the lived situation highlighted the elusive processes by which capital production constantly reshaped the land beneath one’s feet.

The same year that Illinois Steel gained title to its slag-made land and Chiperfield began his investigation, the U.S. Supreme Court decided the case New York Central & Hudson River Railroad Company v. United States (1909). In this case, the court determined that a corporation could be held liable for unlawful actions of agents under its authority, a decision that got at the contradiction of capital’s abstraction and its real-world impact. “If, for example, the invisible, intangible essence or air which we term a corporation can level mountains, fill up valleys, lay down iron tracks, and run railroad cars on them,” the decision reads, “it can intend to do it, and can act therein as well viciously as virtuously.” ⁸ As a case study, South Works makes clear that the “air which we term a corporation,” an elusive vehicle for economic transactions, can indeed leave an enduring imprint on the landscape. The court’s words also get at a fundamental tension between corporations and the communities in which they locate. In its threats to flee to Indiana if it could not continue to mold the shoreline to its needs, Illinois Steel brought to the fore a key contradiction: in spite of capital’s idealized mobility, residents and policymakers regularly make efforts to harness or redirect it into “virtuous,” place-based corporate commitments. In materially transforming the shoreline, Illinois Steel’s investments in South Chicago grounded and defined a community at the same time that its actions ultimately revealed the impermanence of that anchor. Efforts to document capital’s role in shaping the landscape likewise faced the reality that even dominant ways of knowing are subject to changing needs and motives. The extensive maps included in the Chiperfield Report, the data with which the committee hoped to create an authoritative record that could be referenced long into the future, today rest in obscurity at the Illinois State Archives, literally crumbling away in researchers’ hands.

The legacies of a shifting shoreline

The South Works plant continued to expand, employing up to 20,000 people at its peak production during World War II. But despite Chiperfield’s efforts to eliminate uncertainty over landownership, controversies continued to plague the steelmaker’s interests in made land. Another flurry of legislation and litigation in the 1960s and 1970s showed the ongoing imprint of corporate interests on the shoreline, as they intersected with community concerns. A state law (SB 782) passed in 1963 granted 194.6 additional acres of submerged land to U.S. Steel, the South Works plant’s parent company, giving the corporation 10 years to claim title to the land. The agreement led to litigation in 1966 alleging that the sale violated the Illinois State Constitution’s protection of public lands from special interests, but the courts ultimately upheld the sale. ⁹

In 1973, after 10 years had passed without U.S. Steel taking title to the land, opponents again sought to reclaim it for public use, and Illinois Attorney General William J. Scott filed suit to block the sale. U.S. Steel, in echoes of the controversy almost a century earlier, had failed to pay an estimated $22.8 million in taxes on the property in question. In its defense, the corporation blamed its failure to reinvest in South Chicago on the onerous costs of new environmental regulations (Suburbanite Economist, 1973). Given the right business conditions, the corporation again claimed, it would serve the public by creating jobs and being a boon for the local economy. ¹⁰ In 1976, at which point the plant employed about 8500 people, the Illinois Supreme Court determined in People ex rel. Scott v. Chicago Park District that the sale violated the public trust doctrine after all, asserting that the “benefit” of increased employment would be incidental to the steel company’s private gain. Just as the shoreline continued to evolve through a muddy mix of natural accretion and corporate engineering, the court added that its interpretation of the public trust doctrine “should not be considered fixed or static” but likewise could be “molded and extended to meet changing conditions and needs.” ¹¹

According to Richard Crosby, chief of the Attorney General’s environmental division, the State feared U.S. Steel could keep adding land east through Lake Michigan to Illinois and Indiana’s maritime border, “and then the State of Illinois would have nothing to say about it” since Indiana could ultimately determine the extent of the corporation’s expansion. For its part, U.S. Steel called the court’s decision “an unmistakable message to commerce and industry that courts of this state no longer deem their presence welcome” and said the ruling could mean an end to future investment at the South Chicago plant (Bukro, 1977).

As tensions between public and private interests continued to fester and interstate (and international) competition for economic development and industrial output intensified, the many efforts to anchor the capital investment of the South Works plant in place ultimately failed. Southeast Chicago’s steel economy collapsed beginning with the 1980 closure of Wisconsin Steel in South Deering. The South Works plant, having grown to nearly 600 acres, began downsizing in the early 1980s and finally shut down operations in 1992. With the area’s other, smaller mills facing similar fates, tens of thousands of jobs that had once supported Southeast Chicago disappeared, upending the region economically and socially (Bensman and Lynch, 1987; Walley, 2013).

U.S. Steel maintained ownership of the South Works property after closing the plant and in 2004 entered an agreement with Chicago real-estate developer McCaffery Interests to transform the brownfield over the course of several decades into a massive mixed-use development of 50,000 residents called Chicago Lakeside. While nineteenth-century activities at this site had transformed a marshland into a soot-shadowed factory, a new round of landscape modifications attempted to turn the brownfield green again. Beginning in 2009, the State dumped 204,000 tons of dirt dredged from the bottom of Lake Peoria on 25 acres of the slag-made land. The dirt traveled on barges to the same slip where ore boats had once docked to unload raw materials for steelmaking (Illinois Department of Natural Resources, 2012). This latest iteration of “made land” converted the lakefront back into park land and gave South Chicago residents access to the lake between 79th Street and the Calumet River for the first time in over 100 years. Senator Clark and the businessmen of South Chicago who in 1909 had scoffed at the idea of turning this portion of the city’s lakefront into recreational space would have been shocked by developers’ drawings transforming the plant’s ore slip into a 1500-slip marina surrounded by a pedestrian promenade, restaurants, shopping, and condominiums (McCaffery Interests, 2015; Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, 2010; Walley, 2013; on similar projects, see Dillon, 2014; Hagerman, 2007; Kinder, 2015; Taft, 2016).

Meanwhile, one-third of South Chicago’s shrinking population, by this point majority African-American and Hispanic, lived below the poverty line. ¹² Some residents, including many former steelworkers, used the promise of new development as an opportunity to unload declining properties and move out of the neighborhood in whose homes they had invested when work at the steel company seemed permanent. Others became vocal opponents to what they saw as another land grab that, despite promises for inclusion of affordable housing, was designed to attract new residents rather than serve the existing community. Although plans for Lakeside ultimately collapsed in 2016 as the developers failed to secure enough investment, new plans for a “sustainable” mixed-use community on the site have been proposed (Ori, 2017).

Conclusion

The history of South Chicago’s unstable landscape materializes the uneven power relations involved in longstanding community and political efforts to anchor corporate capital in place. To uncover South Chicago’s constantly shifting ecology is to recognize it not just as a landscape shaped by economic, legislative, and judicial actions. It is also to see South Chicago as a community whose social and cultural identities both cohered and were undercut via these processes. Just as the land on which the plant sat and legal claims to it were seemingly conjured from nothing to serve the needs of corporate capital, residents on both sides of the made-land controversy deployed the landscape as a tool to preserve community health—public, ecological, and economic—in the face of a fractured reality.

The corporate restructuring of both the land and the community over the course of more than a century reveals an ongoing process shaped by specific economic and political decisions and priorities rather than a natural market evolution. The long history of the South Works site complicates the traditional narrative of deindustrialization, which commonly locates processes of capital flight as the consequences of economic conditions in the 1970s. Recent work has shown that the industrial heyday of the post-World War II period is in many ways anomalous (Cowie, 2016; Cowie and Salvatore, 2008). The South Works history similarly reveals that wealth inequality, the decimation of union power, and race-to-the-bottom competition for business investment since the 1970s shares much in common with the early twentieth century. Illinois Steel had been threatening to leave Chicago for Indiana since the early 1900s, just a couple decades after it was founded. Not only does the controversy over made land in South Chicago expand the narrative of the “runaway factory” well before its typical association with late twentieth-century deindustrialization; it also shows that the threat of corporate abandonment was integral to the process of industrial development to begin with.

The ways in which corporate capital actively reshapes the physical landscape to make processes of disinvestment seem natural are not always as obvious as the case of South Works’s shifting shoreline. Other communities, including those in the immediate vicinity, struggle to recover from decades of corporate decisions in which both the environment and local residents remain, at best, afterthoughts. Much of the Calumet Region has long been a dumping ground for toxic waste (Tomasula y Garcia, 2017; Walley, 2013). More recently, in 2013 residents of Southeast Chicago’s East Side found themselves living under black clouds of dust from mountains of petcoke, a byproduct of oil refining being stored along the Calumet River. Activists succeeded in closing the facilities by 2016 (Wallaert and Evans, 2016). Meanwhile, more than 1100 people were evacuated from a public housing project across the state border in East Chicago, IN, that was constructed in the 1970s adjacent to a lead and copper smelter. Although the industrial facility closed in 1985, testing in 2016 revealed dangerously toxic soil (Stark, 2016). As at other brownfields, the remediation process involves removing tons of soil, which will then be trucked into another, likely marginalized, community for disposal (Dillon, 2014).

Thinking of these ever-shifting landscapes through the lens of urban political ecology illuminates the often-invisible processes by which such sites—and their residents—are valued and devalued in negotiations between global capital and local governance. As in the made-land case against Illinois Steel, the issue of the “public interest” remains very much at the heart of local governments’ ongoing efforts to attract and retain jobs and economic activity. Over the past 50 years, cities and states have come to depend more and more on private investment to drive urban development and infrastructural improvements in the face of reduced public funding (Brenner and Theodore, 2002; Neumann, 2016). Corporations’ motivations to serve in the public’s best interest rest on “good faith” and a potential for profit rather than mandate. As in former industrial communities across the United States, the question of who will benefit from the next iteration of landscape modifications at the South Works brownfield remains an open one.

The South Chicago case study deepens urban political ecology’s engagement with both the historical landscape and the archive as materializations of global capital’s muddy and contradictory local impacts. Approaching the archive ethnographically, as this research has, reveals the ways in which legal ambiguity of land claims and a shifting ecology together constitute a lived experience of economic precariousness. It also illuminates, through cracks in the record such as confusion over witness testimony and other conflicting accounts of the shoreline, that there are alternative truths to the official maps or legislation that function to codify an infrastructure of corporate leverage over communities. In South Chicago, as in other marketplaces, nothing is fixed or settled: not capital investments, community identities, maps of the neighborhoods, nor the land itself. The most recent collapse of the plans for redeveloping South Works makes clear that plans for economic development are often surface deep. Although old maps can tell the story, nothing is ever as enduring or unmovable as it seems on paper. OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

The 1874 promotional map from the Calumet and Chicago Canal and Dock Company highlighted South Chicago’s harbor, access to railroads, and proximity to downtown Chicago (Calumet and Chicago Canal and Dock Company, 1874b, Newberry Library).

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 2.

This detail from a map created for the Submerged and Shore Lands Legislative Investigating Committee Report (1911) shows how the shoreline at the South Works plant moved east between 1869 and 1909 (SSLLIC, 1911: Atlas 1, Map 1103.21, Illinois State Archives).

Highlights

In the early twentieth century, Illinois Steel used waste material to expand its South Chicago plant onto submerged land that was State property, sparking judicial and legislative intervention.

Made land, and the coincident production of legal claims to it, functioned as an infrastructure of corporate leverage over local communities and policymakers.

Multiple ecologies and uses of those ecologies coexisted uneasily in corporate, legislative, and community efforts to define South Chicago’s economic and political landscapes.

Corporate strategies of economic blackmail not only drove processes of post-1970s deindustrialization; they were integral to industrial expansion.

The capital flight that transformed communities in the twentieth century was not a “natural” outcome, but was contested, uneven, and actively pursued.