358 Bus Stop, Torrence Ave. & Pulaski Rd.
Calumet City, Illinois

By Ava Tomasula y Garcia

“forgive my geography, it’s true i’m obsessed

with maps.” –José Olivarez, “Wherever I’m at That Land Is Chicago”

The Calumet Region coheres into shape and sense through the totalizing language of maps. The gridmarks through which reality has been arranged here for over two hundred years are that of longitude, latitude, scale, treaty boundary, x-marks-the-spot. Isn’t that the work that maps do, after all? They make the real, real. Chart, fix, occupy, extract. They make the given world seem inevitable.

I’ve been looking at these maps for a long time, trying to understand how land becomes resource and then gets thrown away. How people continue to live on it and love it.

José Olivarez is a poet from Calumet City, the city that takes its name from this Region. I think he gets it. His images always seem to return home to the Region. This is true even when he’s battling, word by word, the terms of that return: this is one of the most segregated and polluted areas in the lands now called the United States. Looking at the maps, the Calumet Region emerges as a total sacrifice zone; a waste dump for centuries of capitalism; an overdetermined and overburdened 90-ish-square miles stretching from South Chicago through Northwest Indiana along the southern shore of Lake Michigan.

A hard place to call home. Even harder not to go back to the map to describe it; harder still not to get trapped by the dense tangle of border lines and scale markers and RxR crossings which would choke you. To not feel like there’s no way out of the world its representations would have you believe are inevitable.

Blueprints to the city-sized steel mills, past and present. Hazardous waste containment sites marked out on a grid. So-called “early settlement” maps of Indiana and Illinois show how the Potawatomi Nation was rounded up and cornered by gunpoint. How Menominee himself refused to sell Neshnabé land even after he was viciously detained by settler militia men. See how quickly land speculation is mapped into reality in the wake of the Trail of Tears: limestone quarries marked out, coal veins sought, railroad lines laid down.

Chicago booms into existence on the map, literally constructed from the “raw materials” of the cleared Calumet: water, wood, limestone, coal, sand for cement, and clay for bricks. The world’s first refrigerated train cars, carrying meat from the Chicago stockyards across the country, cooled by ice cut from Calumet lakes and rivers and running the rail lines that crisscross the Region today. Plat maps showing how houses butt up against the Standard Oil refinery, now BP. 

My family’s history of living and working around the Region walks in lockstep with a history of illness: cancer and dementia from so much pollution, from day in and day out drinking in the soils and waters that industry has determined must be wasted for bigger profits. It seems like illness is hard baked into what it means to be from here, and, for me, so is leaving. When Olivarez writes, “i needed to believe suffering was honorable,” the line hits hard.

Yet what I love most about Olivarez’s work is that, while always being grounded in place, he doesn’t write about the map. He doesn’t “mistake the map for the territory,” as Sylvia Wynter put it. This poetry doesn’t go around, in Olivarez’s words “pretending the bones / are the real thing.” He’s after life, not its flattening. When I take the bus up Torrence Ave. through Cal City, past the train lines, past the scrap metal yard, past the recycler plant, I’m riding through territory which exceeds those bones. The land doesn’t give up. Look one way and you see intermodals speeding by on miles of burnt-out rail lines. Look the other way and you see sand cranes and egrets burst out of the dune grass. A cloud of starlings flits through the sunset. Marsh water floods the road. Heavy industry mixes with the watery, oh-so-alive earth.

Olivarez finds the little cracks in the totality. His images of life in Calumet City mix with my own memories, peeling themselves off the map: Olivarez in “Cal City Winter” as a kid on another frozen winter morning, “jumping up & down at the bus stop / trying to warm up.” My own memories, waiting in the car for Berta to get off work at the Burger King at River Oaks Mall, breath curling in the December air. Biting into a gordita from Loli’s, steaming hot down my throat. Springtime bugs gliding back and forth on the Little Cal River, weaving a gossamer haze, summer heat shimmering, a thousand mirages. People always say that we have the prettiest sunsets, then joke that it is because of the pollution. The road the car snakes along was once the shore of an ancient lake, was taken over by settler stagecoaches, was a sand mining pit, was paved over for scrap trucks to traverse. You settle into place.

This is what no map will ever show but sometimes a poem does: the way individual lives layer up moments of anger, pain, and love — how these emotions sediment themselves into place as tracks for others to walk whom you may never meet. This is what living in the Calumet means, too. Olivarez’s poetry has become my map to the Cal Region. Not a map as in chart, fix, occupy, extract. A map as in “i’m always out south / of somewhere. i know the sun rises / in Lake Michigan & sets out west.”

With it, I’m trying to navigate those questions that I haven’t been able to figure out for my own life: “I want to learn what the birds know— / to love a home when it is abundant / & to leave when the love stops.”

Olivarez’s map is a question in answer to my questions. Where does a person begin and the place they’re from end? Can you ever leave a home? Can a home ever cease to be that — can it be ground out, like a cigarette butt on a cold winter morning? When you leave, do your memories go with you? Or do some of them stay behind, settling into the landscape?

Surely, some mark of the love a place gave you and that you gave back stays in the soil. Surely.

Ava Tomasula y Garcia was born in 1994 in Chicago and grew up in South Bend, IN. She currently lives in New York City, studying medical anthropology as applied to the so-called “undiagnosed” illnesses of the Calumet Region. Before, she worked at the Southeast Side of Chicago’s Centro de Trabajadores Unidos.

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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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2907 Cleveland Street

Hammond, Indiana

By Samuel Love

“Ours was not a genteel neighborhood,” Jean Shepherd wrote of Hohman, his fictional Northwest Indiana hometown. The opening story from his 1971 book Wanda Hickey’s Night Of Golden Memories and Other Disasters describes a community “nestled picturesquely between the looming steel mills and the verminously aromatic oil refineries and encircled by a colorful conglomerate of city dumps and fetid rivers.” Whomever wrote the back cover copy for the 2000 Broadway Books trade paperback apparently didn’t read that part, describing the collection as a “beloved, bestselling classic of humorous and nostalgic Americana.”

The association of nostalgia with Shepherd’s work has long puzzled but not surprised me, especially in the light of the 1983 film A Christmas Story, which is based on parts of his 1966 novel In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash. He is the author of arguably the quintessential modern American Christmas tale, but much of the bite of his work has been lost in the process of transcribing and adapting for viewing audiences the narratives that originated on late night radio in New York City in the 1950s. His stories first saw print in Playboy and The Village Voice in the 1960s, were adapted for public television in the 1970s, and finally in the 1980s, Hollywood.

Shepherd always insisted that his books were novels, not memoirs or collections of short stories. He also insisted that his literary works were fictional, that Hohman was a “mythical place,” a composite of all of the region’s industrial communities. Yet his description of fictional Hohman accurately describes the geography of his actual boyhood neighborhood in Hammond, Indiana. The Indiana Harbor steel mills and the Standard Oil refinery were just a few miles upwind. Even closer was the polluted Grand Calumet River. To the south were the brackish waters of the Little Calumet. And to the east, the Gary City Dump.

Jean Shepherd was born in Chicago in 1921 but grew up in Hammond, where the main street is Hohman Avenue. His family lived on Cleveland Street on the southeast side of town, in the Hessville neighborhood, near families named Schwartz, Flickinger, and even Bumpus. His books and films contain the typical disclaimers about “resemblance to individuals living or dead,” yet he often used the names of real people for his popular “kid-dom” stories.

Of the two houses on Cleveland Street that the Shepherd’s called home, the one at 2907 has the strongest claim as “The Jean Shepherd Boyhood Home” — on February 18, 1939, a seventeen-year-old Jean etched his name in the attic rafters. The current owners have lived there since the late 1970s, raising a family and growing to tolerate the curious people who wander by and photograph the exterior — provided the curious don’t linger around too long or violate the family’s privacy. When Shepherd’s younger brother Randy arrived in a limousine and asked to see the inside, they turned him away. They had no idea who he or Jean Shepherd were.

The nearest thing to a public Shepherd monument is the Christmas Story House Museum in Cleveland, opened in 2006 in the home used for the film’s exterior shots. It is a more appropriate celebration of the cultural phenomenon and ultimately the creativity of Jean Shepherd. Better to celebrate his talent as a fiction writer than perpetrate fictions about his life for tourists. Shepherd’s real-life father abandoned the family. And Shepherd himself eagerly left Indiana after his World War II service. “People ask me if I miss Hammond,” he told a crowd at the county library in 1984. “Do you miss the cold sores you had last week?”

Shepherd’s relationship with the region is often mischaracterized as “love-hate.” I don’t think there was hate from either side. Even before the film his hometown began embracing the man and his myths. Shepherd made regular public visits in the last three decades of his life. And we continue to remember him since his death in 1999. On the south end of Hessville is the Jean Shepherd Community Center, opened in 2003. Local theatre companies stage adaptations of A Christmas Story during the holiday season, and the nearby Indiana Welcome Center hosts an annual exhibit called A Christmas Story Comes Home.

Perhaps what some people mistake for nostalgia was Shepherd’s refusal to pander to his audience by mocking his hometown and the people there. “Never make fun of anything,” he frequently reminded his audience, “unless you love it.”

Samuel Love is the editor of The Gary Anthology (Belt, 2020) and lives in Gary, Indiana. Visit him at www.samuelalove.com.

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