South Chicago City Dump
Chicago, IL

By Emiliano Aguilar

Chicago’s South Side is littered with the remains of its industrial past. From the façade of the former US Steel South Works to sites bustling with activity, such as the Pullman National Monument. I grew up in the shadow of Chicago, over the state line in the appropriately named East Chicago, Indiana. My hometown and much of Northwest Indiana, often referred to as “Da Region,” looked more like Chicago and shared more of its history than other parts of Indiana. We even have our own ruins, such as the abandoned warehouse of the Edward Valve Company, the half-scraped ruins of Cleveland Cliffs (formerly ArcelorMittal and before that Inland Steel), and the ever-shrinking Marktown.

This world comes alive in the short stories of Hugo Martinez-Serros, whose family arrived to work in the region’s steel industry. Like them, tens of thousands of people arrived on the South Side to labor arduously in often unsafe environments. Ethnic Mexicans arrived as solos, single men, ahead of their families. These pioneers paved the way for their families and extended networks.

In “Distillation,” first published in The Last Laugh and Other Stories (1988), Martinez-Serros recalls a family drive from their home on the South Side to a municipal dump across the neighborhood. Recalling the weekly Saturday drive southward from their home through alleys crossing 86th, 89th, and 95th Streets, Martinez-Serros describes their final destination vividly: “Before us was the city dump — a great raw sore on the landscape; a leprous tract oozing flames, smoldering; hellish grounds columned in smoke, grown tumid across years.” The narrator, along with his family, sifts through the trash, looking for items to salvage. Together they search for items to sell and discarded produce as a means to survive during the Depression.

As clichéd as it might be, what is one person’s trash if not another person’s treasure? I first read Hugo Martinez-Serros after picking it up from the free box at the Purdue University Northwest library. While the book had seen better days, it showed clear signs of love: dog-ears, a weathered spine, yellowed pages, scribblings from an earlier reader, and a fair amount of shelf-wear. Salvaging this copy from among discarded textbooks and novels, I discovered Depression-era South Chicago. While familiar to me in my work as a historian, thanks to scholars like Gabriela F. Arredondo and Michael Innis-Jiménez, the world Martinez-Serros described differed greatly from the region I knew as a lifelong resident.

Northwest Indiana and Chicago’s South Side are part of the Rust Belt. Once an industrial sprawl of hundreds of thousands of jobs manufactured hundreds of items, the region began to decline in the 1970s and 1980s. However, the Rust Belt is not simply a ruin, some vestigial piece of our shared past. For decades, cities have worked to revitalize their communities and, in some cases, evoke their industrial heritage. In the 1990s, Northwest Indiana communities turned to the gaming industry and lakefront casinos to supplant the loss of manufacturing jobs.

These revitalization plans did not exclude piles of trash. In the 1990s, the City of Chicago built Harborside International Golf Center on top of the old dump. Childhood searches for scrap to sell or barely expired food were replaced by golfers scouring the rough for balls that went astray. In high school, I played on one such dump-turned-golf course as a part of my varsity team. Like Martinez-Serros and his family sifted through the refuse and remains at the municipal dump, I played on the former dump. These carefully designed courses of bright green fairways are nestled among industrial complexes. On clear days, you can see the iconic Chicago skyline.

The region’s residents turned heaping piles of trash into a site of recreation and frustration. While the narrator retold joyful and almost play-like salvaging, this was coupled with the frustration and fear of his brother falling into a pile of trash. This joy and fear of garbage-diving became replaced with the joy of a long drive and the frustration of a mixed putt. However, the presence of the golf course for recreation is a mixed bag. While many praise the efforts of turning trash into treasure, changes to the Chicagoland landscape are not limited to trash heaps. In some cases, rich historical sites, such as those on the Most Endangered List, are under threat of removal in the name of progress. While some residents are content with this change, others view it as a loss of the shared heritage and history of the area. Although many deride the area, which still suffers from the harmful legacy of environmental injustice, those of us who remain continue to chip off the rust and show that Da Region is a vibrant home.

Emiliano Aguilar Jr. is a native of East Chicago, Indiana. Currently, he is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend. His manuscript in progress, Building a Latino Machine: Caught Between Corrupt Political Machines and Good Government Reform, explores the complexities of the ethnic Mexican and Puerto Rican community’s navigation of machine politics in the 20th and 21st centuries to further their inclusion in municipal and union politics in East Chicago, Indiana. His writing has appeared in Belt Magazine, Immigration and Ethnic History Society’s Blog, Oxford Research Encyclopedia of America History, The Metropole, the Indiana Historical Society Blog, and Building Sustainable Worlds: Latinx Placemaking in the Midwest (University of Illinois Press, 2022).

Photo by Cameron Smith, culinary director at Infuse Hospitality in Chicago. He can be found on Instagram at @iamfood0079.

For the most recent version of the Calumet Heritage Area Most Endangered List, please visit the Calumet Heritage Partnership.

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4831 S. Vincennes Ave.
Chicago, Illinois

By Joseph S. Pete

Powell’s Books used to have a few locations in Chicago, none anywhere near as large as the fabled city block full of books in Portland. Now only its venerable Hyde Park bookstore remains, but I fondly remember the Lincoln Park Powell’s with its distinguished rows of dark-wood bookshelves soaring up to the ceiling, the rarefied upper shelves reachable only by sliding ladder. It had the hallowed airs of some centuries-old university library. It’s where, as a pock-faced and perpetually despondent teenager, I first obtained a copy of Richard Wright’s Native Son, which swiftly became one of my favorite and most re-read books.

Fran Lebowitz said at a recent talk at the Auditorium Theatre in Chicago that literature should be a window and not a mirror. I found Wright’s Native Son to be both. It was a mirror in that I hailed from the heavily industrialized and culturally similar Northwest Indiana just outside the familiar South Side landscapes he described. As a troubled youth, I could also relate strongly to Bigger Thomas’s alienation and desperate sense of doomed hopelessness. And Mary Dalton’s rebellious dalliance with communism spoke to my burgeoning political consciousness. I was delving deeper and deeper into reading serious literature and Native Son had more recognizable touchstones than the 19th-century British and Russian classics I was devouring around that time. It just clicked for me.

But it was also a window into the African American experience I could never fully know, and that intrigued me. I had started to see the white flight, abandonment, and segregation that split greater Chicagoland asunder as the great defining original sin that corrupted the area. Highways came to divide white and minority neighborhoods in both Chicago and the Calumet Region. I went to high school about a block south of Gary when it was still the murder capital of the United States, where as many as 13,000 vacant buildings have rotted in shameful testament to people’s unwillingness to live next door to people who look differently. The sins of our forefathers scarred the landscape with blight, boarded-up storefronts, and rubble-strewn buildings with collapsed roofs. Native Son explores racial discrimination that sadly remains just as relevant as ever. A recent HBO adaptation, instead of putting Bigger through a show trial, modernized his plight by having Bigger gunned down extrajudicially by trigger-happy police.

Wright grew up in Jim Crow Mississippi and moved as a young adult to Chicago’s South Side, his family following the Great Migration from the South to the more prosperous industrialized cities of the North. He spent the most time in one place on the second story of a row house in Bronzeville, a largely residential neighborhood flanking Grand Boulevard (now called Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Drive). He lived with family in a two-story building with a cream-colored brick façade, bay windows, a tiny patch of lawn, and an entrance with stone stairs and relatively unembellished Greek pillars, the most modest home in a strip of taller and more architecturally extravagant houses. Today, the home is privately owned, and no tours are offered, but you can admire the solid masonry of the stone-and-brick exterior and enduring handiwork of craftsmen from 1893, when it was built.

Wright lived on that densely populated stretch of S. Vincennes Ave. in his early 20s, working as a postal clerk until the Great Depression cost him that position. He went on to bounce around the city, working a series of unskilled jobs, but spent that formative period in the Black Metropolis that produced many intellectuals, artists, and musicians, such as Gwendolyn Brooks, Louis Armstrong, Ida B. Wells and Sam Cooke.

During his downtime, Wright studied great authors and started to pursue his literary ambitions. He contributed to the area’s vibrant culture, founding the South Side Writers Group and the literary journal Left Front as he started to publish his own poetry. He also began his first novel, Lawd Today!, which he finished in 1935 but wasn’t published until after his death decades later.

There’s not much to see now on the quiet residential street other than a plaque designating the house as a Chicago Landmark, but the modestness of the abode that helped nurture Wright to greatness is the point. Ninety years after he lived and started writing there, the neighborhood continues to hum with culture. There’s the Harold Washington Cultural Center, the Southside Community Art Center, Room 43, the Bronzeville Art District Trolley Tour, and the Bronzeville Walk of Fame, among many other points of interest.

Though just south of the glittering skyscrapers of the Loop, the majority-black Bronzeville often gets as overlooked as it was when Wright lived there from 1929 to 1932. In Native Son, Mary Dalton tells Bigger, “I’ve been to England, France and Mexico, but I don’t know how people live ten blocks from me. We know so little about each other.” Even today, many suburbanites and recent Big Ten grads transplanted to the North Side have never set foot in the rather genteel neighborhood. I frequently attend White Sox games just across the highway, but it feels a world away. The divisions that doom young men like Bigger Thomas still stand today in great sweeping corridors of concrete and ingrained prejudice.

The descendent of steelworkers, author and award-winning journalist Joseph S. Pete hails from the Calumet Region just outside Chicago, where the oil refinery flare stacks burn round the clock and the mills make clouds. His literary work and photography have appeared in more than 100 journals, including Proximity Magazine, Tipton Poetry Journal, O-Dark-Thirty, Line of Advance, As You Were, Chicago Literati, Dogzplot, Proximity Magazine, Stoneboat, The High Window, Synesthesia Literary Journal, Steep Street Journal, Beautiful Losers, The First Line, New Pop Lit, The Grief Diaries, Gravel, Junto, The Offbeat, Oddball Magazine, The Perch Magazine, Bull Men’s Fiction, Rising Phoenix Review, Thoughtful Dog, shufPoetry, The Roaring Muse, Prairie Winds, Blue Collar Review, The Rat’s Ass Review, Euphemism, Jenny Magazine, and Vending Machine Press.

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North Meridian Street
Indianapolis, Indiana

By Wesley R. Bishop

Booth Tarkington would still recognize his hometown of Indianapolis, Indiana, which he described in The Turmoil as “a midland city in the heart of fair open country, a dirty and wonderful city nestling dingily in the fog of its own smoke.” Although the city has undergone significant changes since he grew up there more than a century before, the spirit of the city, a spirit he often strove to capture in prose, is still very present. The Turmoil, first published in 1915, is not Tarkington’s most well-known work, but it makes a strong case to be the novel that best understands the sprawl of Indianapolis. Even in the twenty-first century, the city feels less like a compact entity and more a conglomeration of different parts haphazardly tied together by long avenues that serve as borders for racial, geographic, and socioeconomic divisions.

Often these expansive streets — 38th Street, Keystone Avenue, Massachusetts Avenue, Meridian Street — feel less like connections within the city and more like corridors racing somewhere else, kicking up smog from endless exhaust. Again, Tarkington’s words feel familiar:

The smoke is like the bad breath of a giant panting for more and more riches. He gets them and pants fiercer, smelling and swelling prodigiously. He has a voice, a hoarse voice, hot and rapacious trained to one tune: ‘Wealth! I will get Wealth I will make Wealth! I will sell Wealth for more Wealth! My house shall be dirty, my garment shall be dirty, and I will foul my neighbor so that he cannot be clean — but I will get Wealth!’ . . . And yet it is not wealth that he is so greedy for: what the giant really wants is hasty riches. To get these he squanders wealth upon the four winds, for wealth is in the smoke.

I read The Turmoil this past year, a year of considerable unrest. COVID, the George Floyd protests, and the fallout from the final year of Trump’s presidency swirled together, clogging the air, suffocating all in its path. It felt like monumental, terrifying, history was being recorded on an hourly basis.

Yet the thing that most stood out to me as I read Tarkington from my apartment in Indianapolis was the almost audible cries of the American nation’s demands for continued growth. Not just businesspeople, but school administrators and customers and politicians, all demanding quick reopenings, defying mask mandates, and adding another level of grime to an already perilous situation. These calls for “wealth” — much like we see in The Turmoil — happened while we all could see the impacts of COVID. Air quality, smog or virus laced, be damned. Things needed to be open. To stop economic activity — shopping, working, selling — was to die even if going forward meant actual death.

Tarkington’s acknowledgement of social issues often earned him notice from contemporary readers and some critics. The Turmoil was followed by two other novels — The Magnificent Ambersons and The Midlander — that dealt with the issue of America’s transition into a new industrial age. These novels all take place in a fictionalized Indianapolis, and ultimately, The Turmoil’s major characters conclude that despite the hurried rush of growth and development, the United States could (and probably would) continue to move forward culturally. Today it reads as incredibly optimistic, but as I drive through the city over a hundred years later, I think Tarkington was essentially correct. It is not an admission I expected to make.

Indianapolis and the United States have been violently remade in the process of industrialization, and as Tarkington saw the rise of the industrial belt, residents of the Midwest’s rust belt are watching the tail end of that process. From rise to fall, to remaking again, again, again. Yet despite that, we still make art, we still think, we still strive for beauty and dignity.

As Tarkington notes, though, this is not a smooth process. The social classes that Tarkington discusses are still very much present in the city. The Indianapolis police department, a frequent subject of protests and calls for change, patrols the vast spread of the city. Even more sprawling than in Tarkington’s lifetime, Indianapolis often feels like a city held together by nothing more than geography.

At the height of the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, marchers crossed 38th Street, a de facto border within the city that separates the city’s working class from its wealthiest residents. Marchers transgressed that border, going so far as to stand outside the governor’s mansion on North Meridian Street. I remember that night as my phone dinged with messages from friends and colleagues. Many in the city understood that a reckoning may be about to begin, where the wealthy and sheltered were being forced to see the cost of this inequality. Yet the protesters after chanting turned away from the mansion and began the long trek back to the center of Indianapolis.

What lies in store for us, the subjects of a tumultuous age? It’s impossible to say. Yet, like Tarkington’s novel, I remain largely optimistic that despite whatever dirt- or pandemic-congested state waits for us we will have (and must have) our ability to create meaningful representations of our lives — that, after all, is culture. We must do it, even as the giants pant violently for wealth.

Wesley R. Bishop is a historian, poet, and editor living in northern Indianapolis. He is an assistant professor of American history at Marian University Indianapolis and is the founding and managing editor of The North Meridian Review: A Journal of Culture and Scholarship.

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