Though the Steel Mills Are Long Gone, the Southeast Side of Chicago Still Manifests A Relentless Spirit (2025)

A stirring parable of Southeast Chicago can be told through the punk band Dead Steelmill. They formed in 1985 in response to the collapse of the local steel industry. All four members came from steelworker families and their ethos contains the neighborhood’s values of family, relentless spirit and rebirth.

They recorded the CD “Just Laid Off” in 1996 on their Wisconsin Steel label; it included the sadly prophetic “No More Neo Nazis” and “Eliminate Bigot Old Men.” Dead Steelmill recorded seventeen songs in five hours with the late Steve Albini. The 2003 follow-up was “Sweatshop” with the high-strung “Pollution,” reporting that cancer rates were fifty-percent higher in the neighborhood steel mills and the darkly foretelling “Trump (is coming).”

The group is representative of the post-industrialization generation of imagination. The children of the steelworkers grew up in the glitter rain, a term locals used for the graphite flying around like promises from the mills. Dust was everywhere, even on cars that took them to faraway places. The neighborhood sky was orange at night because of the fire rising from the twenty-four-hour-a-day operation.

At its peak, U.S. Steel employed 20,000 people on the Southeast Side. When the plant closed in 1992 about 700 workers remained. The region was once the country’s largest producer of steel. The fifty-foot-high Picasso statue in Chicago? Fabricated at the American Bridge division of U.S. Steel in Gary, Indiana.

The original Dead Steelmill consisted of lead singer Corny Ramirez, Terry Johnson on rhythm guitar, Roman Castaneda on drums, and Steve Sulka on bass. I befriended the band after a 1996 gig at the Fireside Bowl on the North Side. According to the Southeast Chicago Historical Society, Southeast Chicago consists of the communities South Chicago (founded 1836), South Deering (formerly Irondale, 1845), East Side (1851) and Hegewisch (1883). In the 2020 census, South Chicago had 27,300 people—an 11,000 person drop from 2000—East Side had 21,724, South Deering had 14,105 and Hegewisch, with 10,027 people, was the only community with growth, up from 9,781 in 2000. The area is almost an island, surrounded by Lake Michigan, the Calumet River and Wolf Lake south to Hegewisch.

Union leader Frank Lumpkin (1916-2010) became a fan of Dead Steelmill. The former prizefighter came to the band’s gigs on the Southeast Side, and Dead Steelmill joined Lumpkin’s Save Our Jobs Committee. Lumpkin formed the committee in 1980 when Wisconsin Steel closed, he lost his job and his pay and vacation checks from his last three months of work bounced. He had toiled at Wisconsin Steel for thirty years. Johnson proudly wore one of Lumpkin’s old derbies during shows. Mayor Harold Washington appointed Lumpkin to task forces on hunger and dislocated workers. Lumpkin was also a member of the Communist Party and the Save Our Jobs Committee until his death.

The area maintains a muscular ethic. Former Cubs catcher and Minnesota Twins coach Rick Stelmaszek (1948-2017) lived at 83rd and South Shore Drive. Until 1980 the wrestler Edward “Moose” Cholak (1930-2002) operated the Calumet Beach Inn, 99th and Ewing, a bar his father once owned. It was a popular gathering spot for fellow Croatians. Moose wrestled 8,000 matches between 1953 and 1987, when the sport evolved into television entertainment. Dick Butkus was a 1962 graduate of Chicago Vocational High School (CVS), 2100 East 87th. Former NFL offensive lineman and longtime NFL offensive line coach Mike Sullivan was a 1986 graduate of St. Francis de Sales High School, 10155 South Ewing.

The journey of Dead Steelmill navigating the murky waters of deindustrialization resonated with me, and I was attracted to the band and their feisty personalities. My late father had started his career working as a gofer for Swift & Company in the Union Stockyards and later moved into purchasing in downtown Chicago. At the end of his career, Swift became part of the holding company Esmark, Inc. The company moved to Texas in the early 1980s. Swift no longer had a presence in Chicago. I keep his small good-bye plaque in my office: “In appreciation of your many faithful years and loyal service 1938-82.” And that was that.

Dead Steelmill recorded “I Won’t Retire” in 1996 where Corny sings, “It’s time to retire, you did a good job, but now you’re like a bump on a log. And you’re no longer a cog in the machine.” This was grunge Woody Guthrie. In 1996 Corny told me, “The very fight against corporate America is what keeps Frankie alive. He told me how we reignited his ignition.”

Life has not been kind to Corny.

His brother Ray was crushed to death in a 1975 accident at U.S. Steel South Works. Ray was twenty and a child was on the way. The band recorded “Industrial Accident” about the event. When I saw Dead Steelmill in 1996 Corny had had his large intestine removed after a serious bout with colitis. And then things got worse…

Deep moments live beneath the surface of U.S. Steel.

To understand the spirit of this island neighborhood you need to listen to Corny’s story, his family and the greater community. You don’t give up.

Late at night in October 2021 Corny was walking upstairs to the bedroom of his East Side home. It is a familiar place. Corny moved into the house with his wife Frances on Valentine’s Day 1987. The home is just five blocks from the Indiana border. During that October night Corny made it to the top step before falling backwards. He tumbled eighteen steps to the hallway floor. He was alone.

He broke his C-5, C-6 and C-7s, the cervical spinal nerves at the neck. “Actually I broke my C-5 in 2005 when I slipped and fell in my tub,” he says during a recent conversation from his dining-room hospital bed. “I made a full recovery. And with this fall, Humpty Dumpty goes again and I reinjured the C-5 but also did 6 and 7. It was severe. I was lying on the floor. By that time my arms weren’t moving at all. I was able to call my nephew Miguel Ramirez who had a key to the house. I told him not to call anybody, to tell you the truth.”

Miguel checked in during the early morning and got him to a chair. Corny still didn’t move. His daughters Xochitl Onohan and Serena Ramos were alerted. Onohan says, “I called and I hear my dad in the background, ‘I think I broke my neck.’ For a freak accident like this you go into straight mode. We got an ambulance and he went straight to the University of Chicago. He was in surgery by that night.”

At the time Corny was divorced from Frances. “Having gone from being independent and active to not being able to, it was hard,” Corny says. “I fell into a depression for a bit. But coming to terms with my situation and keeping my faith, my God. That’s a big part of it. And the support I have now. My soulmate [Frances]. She didn’t have to come back. She didn’t have to take that responsibility and come home. A lot of times when people are put into facilities, they don’t last physically and mentally. I’ve had issues with kidney stones, up to seven-and-a-half grams that were nearly deadly. I was reluctant when I first got them. It was ‘Let me die.’ After the fact I saw how selfish that was to the people that cared for me. It’s not my call. I thank God I have nurses, people that come and transport me. I realize that although I am how I am now, I’m blessed. Others don’t have support and the medical care. And the situation we’re living in now with this current [presidential] administration, who knows what may be cut from people who need it?”

Onohan continues, “Some people in the administration have never experienced what South Chicago has experienced. We know the effects of what taking away can do. When you start taking away people’s rights and their ability to take care of their family, they are going to run to other things to get what they need. I’m thankful. People looked out for us in immense ways through all of this. I remember my dad helping people out who had no heat. Twenty years later they’re helping his cause and giving to GoFundMe. A lot of horrible things are going on and that’s what is shown in the media but there’s still a lot of hard-working, compassionate people. We don’t want to ignore that. I try to stay away from politics as much as possible, but my dad is very passionate about it.”

Frances says her soulmate is dealing with high blood pressure because of current events.

Corny laughs and says, “They’ve been shutting the TV off on me.”

Frances adds, “Love does not die because you are divorced. Love is a verb.” Corny is five-foot-three. He has physical therapy and sees assorted doctors but he will never walk again.“This is how it is going to be,” he says while looking above. “I’ve come to terms with my life and how I am. It didn’t come easy. Being angry, and mad and sorrowful, those were big hurdles. What makes it a whole lot easier is for me to have someone who loves me unconditionally.”

Love births courage.

Corny caught COVID after his accident and had to navigate a serious wound on his backside. Onohan is married with sons ages seven and eighteen. Her sister Serena is married and a mother of three who works in administrative management in the manufacturing industry. “I had to learn and sacrifice a lot,” Onohan says. “He was in the hospital until December 2021 then back to my house [in Highland, Indiana]. On Christmas Eve 2021 my parents reconciled and had their first conversation in five years. Sometimes we don’t realize how a tragedy like this can bring your family together. Had this not happened, I would have never seen my parents together again. Both of them are very stubborn,” she says with a smile. “We had to come together as a family to work this out.

“As far as my dad and his well-being, you can see he is still himself.”

Corny is fifty-nine years old. He has the same warm smile and the heated energy he had when I saw Dead Steelmill in 1996 at the Fireside Bowl. During my couple visits to his house, he made me laugh.

Corny and his extended family live in the 10th Ward. On May 15, 2023, Peter Chico was elected the first Latino alderman of the 10th Ward, which runs from 79th South down the Lakefront to the Indiana border and then to 135th and Brainard and west to the Bishop Ford Expressway. He is the grandson of John Chico, a union leader who became president of Local 65 at U.S. Steel South Works in the late 1970s. He is also a cousin of Gery Chico, former Chicago Board of Education president and mayoral candidate. Peter Chico has heard Corny’s story because the neighborhood is as tight as a bolt on a machine. He sees the metaphor of reinvention.

For example, sections of the Illinois Quantum and Microelectronics Park (IQMP) will contain a computer research development plant on the old South Works site, 8080 South DuSable Lake Shore Drive. It is slated to open by 2026. The anchor tenant is the California-based tech company PsiQuantum. Groundbreaking is this spring. The Quantum project has been endorsed by Alds. Greg Mitchell (7th) and Chico.

“We talk about rebirth and how we have to make do for ourselves,” the forty-two-year-old Chico says in a phone conversation. “We have a long history of that. The mills were our community. Generations worked there. U.S. Steel built the bridges and skyscrapers of American cities. The work that is going to be done on IQMP; finding cures for cancer, dealing with climate change; when you talk about that in a community that has seen no massive development in decades, it is exciting, long overdue, and going to lead to the rebirth of the entire 10th Ward and South Chicago.”

Corny grew up in South Deering. He attended George Washington High School for two years before moving to Chicago Vocational for his final two years. He picked up HVAC (heating, ventilation, air conditioning) skills at CVS and became a maintenance mechanic at Newark Electronics on North Pulaski. “My uncle worked in the mill, but he would always take me on his side jobs which I learned to do,” Corny says. “He encouraged me to learn as much as I could. Nobody could take that away from me. I always remembered that. At the time Washington was ninety-nine percent African American. My father didn’t like that. But I followed through with what my uncle said. Those were some of the best years of my life. Not only learning different trades but learning to know different people.”

Wisconsin Steel closed in 1980 as Corny was entering high school. “I always thought the mill would be one of my next steps after high school,” he says. “Because that was usually the case. You follow in your father’s or uncle’s footsteps.” His father Cornelio Ramirez, Senior, and his uncles worked in the mills. His father was a Wisconsin Steel lifer until he developed a heart condition. His brother Ray was crushed to death. “I saw the mills lock out their workers without even getting their personal possessions, showing up to work with the gates chained and locked,” Corny says. “Any checks they had not cashed were void. Your whole livelihood was gone. What do you do? Some took their own lives.

“The mills were steady employment [but] as dangerous as it could be. You could have a home and maybe send your kids to college. There were plenty of steel mills. You could leave one steel mill and get another job at another steel mill. That lasted until the 1980s when Reagonomics hit. It gave these big corporations incentives to go abroad for cheaper labor.”

Chico’s father worked in the mills and then for the Illinois State Police. “You graduated from Bowen [High School] on a Friday afternoon and you were in the mill Monday morning,” Chico says. “That was the pipeline. And these were good jobs. Commercial Avenue was so vibrant, people walking up and down all those years when the mills were running.”

Dead Steelmill formed in 1985 in the basement of an apartment building at 106th and Green Bay Avenue. Corny knew Roman Castaneda, a neighborhood drummer with soul and disco rhythms. Guitarist Johnson was from Hammond, Indiana. as was bassist Sulka, who contributed his love of old-school country, like Jimmy Dean’s “Big Bad John.” Corny was on lead vocals. Sometimes they called their music “punkry and western.” This was before the Waco Brothers emerged on Chicago’s North Side.

The group first wanted to call the band The Accident in honor of Corny’s brother. Johnson suggested Dead Steelmill. “The mills were falling apart right in front of our eyes,” Corny says. “And we saw the aftereffects.

“When we started with the punk thing people said, ‘What the hell is this?’ They thought we were crazy. Especially the elders. We would be invited to do a church [event] or a benefit and sing ‘Just Laid Off.’ But after seeing our energy and simply with our band name, they related. My idea was to keep the idea of the people working alive for the next generation to know that this happened here.” Frances adds, “The first time they performed was the day we got married.” July 20,1985.

“We go downtown to City Hall,” she says. “We took our oldest daughter Serena (she was three at the time). We’re coming home and I thought we were supposed to consummate the marriage. But no, I told him he was going to consummate it with the band. [She laughs.] It was a block party at Jacq’s Fallout at 96th and Avenue L. All in all, who knew we would be here today?”

The band recorded its debut CD “Just Got Laid Off” in 1996 with the late Chicago engineer Steve Albini. They knew Albini from his work with his hardcore band Shellac, but Corny is unsure how Albini knew about Dead Steelmill. “He may have seen us at the Fireside Bowl or Metro,” he says. “We reached out to him and he said, ‘I love you guys!’”

“Just Got Laid Off” was recorded in Albini’s Northwest Side bungalow. Corny brought his daughters to the session. “We go there with our equipment, go in the basement and we don’t see no recording equipment,” Corny says.

“Straightforward guy. We talked about how we wanted to record. He had a small room for me just for the singing. But no equipment. We finally asked, ‘Where are you going to be?’ He said, ‘I’m going to be in the attic.’ All his equipment was in the attic. We went up there and he had these thick doors for security. He told us how we didn’t waste any time. He just kept going. Certain songs he put on an oscilloscope [that measures sound waves]. We’re all looking at each other. He goes, ‘This is intense!’”

Albini was putting the sound to vision. Johnson called the device the punkifier. Corny says, “Steve liked the fact that we were playing as fast as we could, but we were on time and we were in key.”

Corny embraced the progressive ethos of fast electronic Black music when he was at George Washington High School. “It was house music,” he says. “I would go to the dances. But I had that sense of Led Zeppelin. And I heard the Ramones when I was twelve. The Clash. I had a friend who listened to the Dead Kennedys and the Circle Jerks, good bands. That’s how I got into liking the punk rock.”

One of the band’s most unlikely fans was Frank Lumpkin. Dead Steelmill was mentioned in his 1999 biography “Always Bring A Crowd” (International Publishers), written by his wife Beatrice Lumpkin. She is still around at age 106. Corny says, “You did not want to push back on Mr. Lumpkin. He rallied for those who gave up and had no hope. He continued to fight to get every little aspect of what he could for people in the mills. Even if it was percentages of stock that might not have been much at the time. He was out there for the justice of the working class.” Dead Steelmill did several gigs to benefit Lumpkin’s organizations.

Members of Dead Steelmill visit and jam with Corny. Christopher Sandoval, the Shake Rattle & Roll band guitarist comes every Wednesday and another regular at Club Corny is Mario Zavala, a Southeast side musical icon and former member of the pop-rock Bedbugs. He is a first cousin of Frances. “That’s beautiful,” Corny says. “It’s a blessing to reflect on the simple things in life. Just watching all this hatred divide and conquer for the sake of the mega-rich? The ideas for these songs is what we were living. And we’re still going through it.”

The community is paying back. A “Corny Fest” fundraiser was held in May 2022 at the South Chicago Mexican American Social Club, 3101 East 92nd. It has been on hiatus but will return on June 7 at the same location. There is also a GoFundMe. A large white plastic “C” emblem hangs in the family living room. It is signed by the artists who performed at Corny Fest. A cross is affixed in the middle of the emblem.

“That festival was important for my dad’s well-being,” Onohan says. “I wanted my dad to see the impact he still was making.” Corny not only attended the festival, he belted out “I Won’t Retire” from his wheelchair. He says, “They wheeled me right in front of the stage. It was a great feeling.” The Albini-produced album “Just Got Laid Off” has been released digitally and on June 7, the 2003 “Sweatshop” will be available. Onohan’s upcoming “Beast in Me” recording will also be released digitally. Music and merchandise including a Dead Steelmill hoodie with logo designed by the band’s latter-day bassist Carl Skeens and a “South Going North” crewneck are available at projectxochi.com. Dead Steelmill proceeds go toward medical expenses.

“Last year I saw how many people were posting shows of Dead Steelmill from 1998,” Onohan says. “To think about songs like ‘Trump (is coming)’ like they did.” Corny says, “The songs we made are so relevant now. We did the Trump song when he set up shop over here around 1995 with his floating casino [in Gary, later the Majestic Star II, closing in 2021].” The song appears on 2003’s “Sweatshop.” The band attacks Trump with thrashing bass and drums in a snappy ninety-six seconds reminiscent of the Dead Kennedys.

Portions of the lyrics are: “Wasting all your money just to make him rich, Don’t you know it’s just a trick. He’s got so much money what’s he trying to prove. And he’s only after you and you and you…” Twenty-two years later, Corny says, “This guy Trump is something else… and people love him. Trump is coming all right.” The television at the foot of his bed is dark.

Xochitl Onohan is a songwriter, vocalist and entrepreneur who won the 312 Music Award for Latin Artist of the Year in 2024 and the Chicago Music Awards 2024 Most Promising Entertainer. She performs under the name of Xochi. She was born in August 1987 at South Chicago Community Hospital (now Trinity). Her birth name is Aztec for “flower.”

Last fall Xochi released “The Island,” a reggae-hip-hop track available on all platforms. It is a frank reflection on destiny and faith. She has learned to give to her community. Onohan sings cantor in the choir at her Our Lady of Grace Church in Highland, Indiana. She is an executive board member for the Jones Memorial Community Center in Chicago Heights. It offers seniors programs and after-school programs that serve more than 250 area children. Chicago Heights reminds her of South Chicago. And, she has a full-time job in the document services department of a Chicago law firm and helps her mother as a caregiver to her father.

Family spirits forever dance in her soul.

On a sunny afternoon in late January, she sits in a chair across from her father’s bed. Her mother sits in a nearby chair. “I was born after the mills,” Onohan says. “I called it ‘generational pessimism.’ So many people lost their jobs. My father was such a big advocate for worker’s rights. By the time I graduated [George Washington] high school in 2005 there were a lot of gangs, race wars. This neighborhood was such a thriving place our generation heard about. We never experienced that. So many people in this neighborhood were worried about the bare minimum.

“Artists are now trying to start out without the chutzpah. People say, ‘What are you doing that for? You better get a job.’ So there is an imagination that had to happen for me to even get where I am now. I had to think outside the box. My parents have set the foundation for me to feel comfortable standing on my own and saying whatever I want to say. And holding that torch of, ‘I’m going to be raw. I’m going to be real.’ I’m going to talk about medical health, jobs, alcoholism. By the time I grew up the community was in shambles. I fell in love with a young man that was murdered with his best friends. He was in gangs and I have a son with him. There is an aftereffect of growing up in a neighborhood that goes from thriving to poor.

“What I’m trying to build with my music is the vulnerability of what it takes to be a human being in this world right now. Finding compassion with others.”

Late last year she dueted with Massey on “Never 2 Hot,” a hip-hop dance track that deals with climate change (and a sampling of “Dancing In the Street”), Xochi and Massey performed the song on Grammy weekend at the Writers Guild Theater in Beverly Hills.

She collaborated with Colorado-based producer Joe “Baby” Michaels, who recorded “Never 2 Hot” at Dockside Studio (B.B. King, Irma Thomas, Susan Cowsill and so on) in Maurice, Louisiana. “When I was approached about the song, it struck a chord with me because of everything that happened in my neighborhood. The right for clean air.”

Xochi (Onohan) does not want to limit herself. “I’ve done a lot of R&B,” she says. ”You can put a pop song in front of me and I’ll do a pop song. I’m a songwriter. I can do country. I want to do music with service.”

After Dead Steelmill ended around 2015, Corny and Frances were listening to the fifties station on satellite radio when they carpooled downtown for her job as a receptionist at Mercy Home for Boys & Girls. She loves fifties music. Corny thought he should form a fifties and sixties cover band. He recruited five neighborhood musicians and they formed Shake Rattle and Roll. The band successfully launched on the summer festival circuit in 2017. Onohan joined on harmonies in 2019.

“That was the first time I was able to sing with my dad and be on stage with him,” she says. “We’d trigger right and I’d jump up and down and be singing all the way.” She also formed the side-hustle Afternoon Delight, a cocktail lounge duo with keyboardist-harmonica player Paul Melchor (Paul E. Keys). He is half-Mexican, half-Polish and learned how to play accordion when he tagged along with his father in the Southeast Side taverns.

Corny’s career in music influenced his daughter spiritually as much as artistically. “My father has lived a fairly normal life outside of this stage,” she says. “I was raised in a home of love, music and hard work. I’ve seen my parents put time and effort into causes that were important to them. We weren’t going to baseball games. I was going to Free Fest [at Montrose near the Lakefront]. It’s crazy that now I’m doing my own music. I’ve been in the studio since I was fifteen. I went to grammar school with Brian Bates, a good friend of mine from the Southwest Side.” Now a Los Angeles resident, Bates co-wrote and produced Beyoncé’s Grammy-winning hit “Texas Hold ‘Em.” He’s also collaborated with Ariana Grande and Usher. “He’s told me how the music industry is so small,” Onohan says, “but the music business can be wherever the music takes you to.”

The family’s living room has no mirror on the wall, but then again it might. Frances says, “The way Xochi is with performing, that’s the same way Cornelio was,” she says. “He has always had a lot of ambition. That’s what I loved about him. Whether it was work or music. You had to move forward. T-shirts, gigs, caps.”

From his hospital bed, Corny smiles and says, “One-hundred percent or nothing.”

When I embarked on this story in November many residents told me an Airbnb was scheduled to open. I was curious about such signs of gentrification, but no one could confirm that fact. Further research on the Airbnb website found about a half-dozen Southeast Side options. (Not including Pullman and Chatham.) The Southeast Side is so under the radar, locals are sleeping on this “vacation property rental” concept.

But the area was ahead of the game in congestion tolling. Landing in Southeast Chicago is a breeze if you pay the one-way $7.80 toll on the Chicago Skyway.

Gentrification might still be a generation away, but there are some big investments coming that should breathe new life into the old neighborhood.

• The Chicago real estate developers Related Midwest and CRG are developing the Illinois Quantum and Microelectronics Park. The state is investing $500 million toward the construction of the campus.

• Fueled by a $25 million state grant, IBM will build the National Quantum Algorithm Center on the site.

• Advocate Health Care is making a billion-dollar investment that calls for more locations across the South Side and features a fifty-two-bed hospital on the Quantum site between 79th Street and the Calumet River. Services will include surgery, ICU, a cardiac catheterization lab, diagnostic testing and imaging and robotic surgeries. The bed capacity can be expanded if needed. Advocate says it is one of the largest long-term community-focused health-care investments in the nation. According to a 2019 New York University School of Medicine report, there’s a thirty-year life expectancy gap between residents of the South Side and those who live on the North Side. Groundbreaking for the twenty-three-acre site is later this year with the hospital scheduled to open in 2029.

Long-time 7th Ward Alderman Greg Mitchell says, “This is a transformative moment for the 7th Ward, especially for the South Shore and the South Chicago communities. For over thirty years, this vacant site has stood as a symbol of disinvestment and missed opportunities that have deeply impacted the entire Southeast Side. It [the hospital] will bring much-needed access to health care, create jobs and stimulate economic growth, laying the foundation for further investments.

“I believe in what they are doing with wellness. When you see that [thirty-year] disparity, it is disheartening sometimes. I have a very aged community. I appreciated the approach in that they are putting different sites throughout the Southeast Side so people have an opportunity to see a doctor and not use the emergency room as a doctor’s appointment. And to have a state-of-the-art hospital built to augment those kinds of health initiatives adds a lot of value to the community.”

Mitchell, fifty-five, grew up in Jeffrey Manor. He is former director of IT operations at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. His ward is roughly framed by East 71st to Lake Michigan, west as far as Blackstone Avenue and Stony Island and south to 104th and Bensley. The 7th Ward includes South Shore, Calumet Heights and Jeffrey Manor and shares pockets of South Chicago and South Deering with the 10th Ward.

The Quantum site is where steel meets Silicon Valley. In a December 2024 press conference, Governor JB Pritzker said, “The work that will take place at the National Quantum Algorithm Center and across the Illinois quantum infrastructure will help us wrestle with the most pressing questions of the day in climate change and national security, health care and beyond.”

Chico never forgets that U.S. Steel shut down in April 1992. “It’s 450 acres of undeveloped Lakefront property,” he says. “In no other city in the world would that property sit vacant for more than thirty years. One, Quantum is going to uplift the community. We’ve already seen how catalytic it has been to get a new state-of-the-art hospital on the north end of the site. What I’m most excited about is leveraging the resources and knowledge from the campus into the schools. Our students will have an opportunity unlike any others.”

A spokesperson for Related Midwest says that over the next six years more than 20,000 jobs, mostly in construction, will be created. Minority and women-owned business participation will be given priority during construction and ongoing operation, along with Related Midwest’s existing equity, diversity and inclusion directive.

At least 150 full-time jobs will be created through the project, fired up by PsiQuantum. “They’re not going to be people from our community,” says Joann Podkul-Murphy, a lifelong area resident and president of the Southeast Chicago Historical Society. “I suspect they will be people already trained in AI. Our community has too many dropouts and immigrants that haven’t been able to get the kind of education some other people have.”

According to an IQMP (Illinois Quantum and Microelectronics Park) spokesperson, the partners are talking with the City Colleges of Chicago, Northwestern University, the University of Chicago, the University of Illinois System and Chicago State University about creating a talent pipeline of all skill levels to feed employers on campus. And Advocate is committed to hiring more than 1,000 new employees within the next three years in roles throughout the hospital’s South Side service area.

One of the most common concerns of Southeast Side residents is the steel-mill-era waste and pollution that has been left behind. “Related Midwest, CRG and [general contractor] Clayco have extensive experience developing sites that require environmental remediation,” says Tricia Van Horn, Senior Vice President Marketing and Communications for Related Midwest. “We are working with the IEPA to develop a workplan that adheres to all EPA, OSHA and local regulations. Measures will include installing slit fences and sediment barriers around the site to prevent soil runoff, using water trucks on site for dust control during earthwork and demolition, conducting regular road sweeping to reduce debris and installing construction fencing and screening to limit airborne particulates.”

Meanwhile, the neighborhood art scene continues to grow. Sky Art opened in 2001 in South Chicago and now operates from a 6,000-square-foot studio facility that was formerly Ellis Cleaners at 3026 East 91st. The space contains a computer lab equipped for digital media application, a sculpture studio and gallery space.

An emerging Southeast Side Art District consists of the Nine 3 Studios, 9300 South Chicago, Under the Bridge Art Studio, a co-op at 10052 South Ewing and Buena Vista Projects art gallery, 10056 South Ewing.

Chico says, “I support the artists in our community and how they incorporate the stories and history of the neighborhoods in their artwork. Our stories need to keep getting told.”

During a February show at Under the Bridge, Frances purchased an acrylic red heart made by neighborhood artist Matt “Shapeless” Rodriguez. “It is a heart with a lot of movement,” she says. “I wanted to put it in the room for Corn and I. It has so much emotion I had to have it. It is alive.”

Lead developer Related Midwest and CRG promise to use art to transform an urban experience. For their Lathrop Homes mixed-income initiative along the Chicago River at 2000 West Diversey, they incorporated a Julia C. Lathrop mural to honor the social reformer. The mural was produced by narrative artist Michael Ferrarell. Related Midwest and CRG also partnered with Chicago artists Erik Peterson and Bryan Saner to repurpose wood from trees displaced during the renovation. Their team created sculptural outdoor seating that doubles as public artwork overlooking the property’s Great Lawn, originally designed by landscape architect Jens Jensen (1860-1951), who also designed Garfield Park, Humboldt Park and Douglass Park. Related Midwest and CRG will continue these initiatives at the IQMP site.

Roman Villarreal is the best-known living artist on the Southeast Side. I also call him the unofficial mayor of the Southeast Side. He leads but does not own the Nine 3 studio, a former gas station that also includes his summertime work space. His wife Maria coordinates programs at Under the Bridge.

Villarreal has his eyes cast on Steelworkers Park, 87th and Lake Michigan, where one of his sculptures is installed. The Quantum development will be about a half-block south of his sculpture. The park district property is anchored by ore walls that are about thirty feet high and stretch 2,300 feet from the lakeshore. For more than a hundred years these walls stored iron ore pellets and coal, shipped to South Works when Lake Michigan was not frozen. “They’re not going to tear them down,” he says. “They are the longest walls in the Midwest, in size and length. That’s perfect for an international exhibit of street art. There’s enough space for forty artists. We want to supply them with equipment. These are harmless ideas. The arts are not competition. When the mill closed everything happened fast. They repossessed your cars, your house, drug addiction, alcohol, everything you could think of. It hit us hard. And there was no preparation. One minute you had a job and they took it away. I had a lot of jobs after the mills. I was a car salesman. I worked in community services. But my passion was for the arts. I quit everything to pursue art.”

In line with the Advocate hospital development, there are concerns about health equity on the Southeast Side. “Everybody I know has some kind of respiratory problem,” Villarreal says. “I have asthma. Cancer was a big one. COVID hit us the hardest. Our immune system was already down because of what we were already exposed to.”

On the day of our visit, Walgreens announced it was closing its long-time neighborhood store at 9148 South Commercial Avenue.

Roman Villarreal turned seventy-five years old on March 30.

His five-inch-tall clay figurines of his South Chicago neighbors have been featured at the Field Museum. His 1998 sculpture “See, Speak, Hear, Yet the Bullets Continue” is part of the collection of the National Museum of Mexican Art in Chicago. He had a solo exhibition, “Roman Villarreal: South Chicago Legacies,” at the Intuit Art Museum in 2022. His limestone sculptures define the Velveteen Rabbit children’s park in Palmer Square. Ten of his sculptures beautify the Southeast Side.

And his 2015 Steelworkers Monument in Steelworkers Park at 87th and Lake Michigan is an important gateway to the neighborhood. The grounds are an overlooked jewel. The sixteen-acre park features walking paths, trees and a rock-climbing wall reborn from one of the historic ore walls. During the summer, movies are projected on the wall and art fairs are held in the park.

You can look out over the lake and see smokestacks from the ArcelorMittal steel manufacturing plant in East Chicago and some of the U.S. Steel Gary Works. It teases the Illinois neighborhood about what used to be.

Steelworkers Park was previously part of the South Works complex. Villarreal’s bronze sculpture depicts a steelworker embraced by his family. The art stirs the soul. Villarreal worked at U.S. Steel from 1967 to 1975 with a two-year break in the Army and then at Wisconsin Steel from 1975 to 1977.

“When the mill closed I wanted to do a monument of something that [represented] we were there,” Villarreal says during a colorful conversation at his kitchen table in the South Chicago neighborhood known as “The Bush.” There’s neighborhood debate on where “The Bush” name came from, but the consensus is that the streets were once lined with beautiful bushes. Villarreal says, “I started going to community meetings and suggested the sculpture. I finally made my own model. I had never done anything large.”

Not counting the pedestal, the steelworker’s tribute stands twelve feet tall. “Alderman Pope [10th], who was alderman at the time, liked the idea,” he says. “I submitted everything through them. It is faceless because it started getting too political. They wanted Sadlowski [steelworker activist Ed Sadlowski 1938-2018], John Chico, Alice Peurala [USWA Local 65 president].” John Chico was Villarreal’s union leader.

Villarreal had a “gotcha” moment. He says, “I realized the steelworkers were not about steel, but they were about family. Every steelworker was a family man. These men came here for one reason: their families. The design came about because I have three children, a dog. Simple things. I could have done a steelworker doing work but that wasn’t the mill.

“The mill was family-oriented.”

A memorial at Our Lady of Guadalupe Church, 3200 East 91st, honors twelve fallen Vietnam-era soldiers from the neighborhood. Many are of Mexican American descent. The loss is greater than any other parish in the country, according to a WTTW-Channel 11 report. Villarreal is an Army veteran. “Don’t get me wrong, I did my two years in the service,” he says. “But I didn’t go overseas. I had friends who did. One minute we were all in school. The next thing you know we’re all in the military with the lotto. The lotto hit us hard here. That’s why we have the monument.”

Onohan says, “The Southeast Side was the first Mexican neighborhood in Chicago. People look at Pilsen and Little Village, but South Chicago had the first Mexican church. [Our Lady of Guadalupe was founded in 1923.] I went to an all-Black grammar school, passing down that thing of un-bias to feel comfortable around people who look different than you. Now we’re living in a world that is holding so much weight. I’m thankful I come from a neighborhood that is very integrated and filled with so much culture.” According to the American Community Survey, fifty percent of the 10th Ward in which Corny and Frances live is Hispanic (35,958), thirty-eight percent is Black (27,497) and 10.7 percent is white (7,697).

Here’s the thing: The 10th Ward age range is twenty-eight percent ages newborn to seventeen (compared to the city of Chicago at 20.6 percent), 10.9 percent (7,831) ages eighteen-to-twenty-four and 13.4 percent (9,605) ages twenty-five-to-thirty-four.

This is the area’s unique generation of imagination.

Murals light up the neighborhood like stars in the sky. For example, the work of Chicago muralist Jeff Zimmermann adorns the side of the Sky Art building. The large-scale mural depicting three Sky Art children and Stella the dog that belonged to Sky Art executive director Sarah Ward was installed in 2016. “He works alone,” Villarreal says during a February stop at the mural. “He was out here at night. They asked if I could do them a favor and watch his back. I stood around, kind of like security.” The Southeast Side also hosts the annual Meeting of the Styles, a traveling international tribe of graffiti artists that was born in 1997 at the Schlachthof Wiesbaden cultural center in Germany. It lands on the Southeast Side every September in conjunction with the Mexican Independence Day parade. The three-day event includes art-based advocacy and free entertainment. Last year graffiti muralists from Algeria, Mexico, Poland and other locales from across the United States came to the neighborhood.

“Our ward doesn’t have a strong presence in the arts like the 10th,” says 7th Ward Alderman Mitchell. “I definitely support it in our schools and the park district. As we get more families with kids coming into the neighborhood there will be more attention focused on the arts. We’ve seen how they have beautified the viaducts in South Chicago. We don’t have a lot of that here. My constituents are more aged and older home owners. My focus is trying to turn some of those vacant homes into homes for families.”

Mitchell says there was talk of Theaster Gates’ Rebuild Foundation purchasing an old substation at the corner of 87th and South Chicago for a potential neighborhood studio for young artists, musicians and DJs. “It fell through, but it is something that is always on the radar,” Mitchell says. “I’m supportive of it.”

The remote location of the Southeast Side shapes an independent voice. “When you talk about the past of South Chicago, we’re underground,” Villarreal says. “We’re super-talented here. [The pop-rock band] Bedbugs. Dead Steelmill. There was one era of all-Mexican bands. They came from the community. The energy was positive. When I first got passionate about art I talked about Dada. In a community like this they thought I was a nutcase. I was working with Louis Cortez, a Vietnam vet who went to the Art Institute. We had a huge discussion about the arts. I studied by myself. When you’re an outsider artist, you are always learning. And in South Chicago we encourage each other.”

Maria adds, “It’s because we are so far here southeast. Some people think the end of Chicago is Hyde Park. Hyde Park is a beautiful place, but even when we took a cab they would say, ‘Where is South Chicago?’ They were scared to come here. The independence also comes from the fact that we’re survivors from the steel mills. We don’t give up.”

Villarreal has lived in South Chicago his entire life and has been in the same two-story home since 1967. The wood-frame house is at least a hundred years old. The wooden homes in his neighborhood were built for the millworkers. “I lived here a year before I went into the Army,” he says. His father Donaciano Villarreal came to the Southeast Side in 1949. He had been working in the fields in Michigan and heard that U.S. Steel was hiring. He did not realize the new employees were slated to be strikebreakers. “I was born here in 1950,” he says.

“My five siblings were born in Texas. The brother of my father was named Vinarrcio. Those are not Mexican names. I don’t know how they got Italian names. My mother Clia’s side is from Tamaulipas. My father’s Villarealos family is from Qualitas. They were seasonal farm workers because they were on the border. Once he got here in America he did his thirty years and retired. He was a millwright.”

“We were here when it was at its peak. If you didn’t work during that period you were lazy. When I got out of the military I went back to the mill in 1970. If you were a soldier you kept your time in the mill. I was always a laborer, at the bottom of the totem pole. When I got back from the military I tried to be a millwright. I started to learn. I wanted to move fast. That’s not the way the mill works. It’s seniority. You have to wait until ten people die before you start moving up. They didn’t care how good a worker you were or how loyal you were. So I figured, ‘That ain’t for me.’ I’ve always had a passion for the arts. My mother said I was given the gift of shaping even when I was a little kid. I always wanted to be an artist even without realizing what an artist was. Destiny had that for me.”

Villarreal told his father he wanted to go to school to become an artist. He mentioned the Art Institute. The elder Villarreal replied to his son in displeased tones. And then he asked him if he was nuts. “At that time artists were not part of the norm,” he says. “It was the trades: carpenters, electricians and ironworkers. That was moving up.” Instead, Villarreal is self-taught and proud to be called an “outsider” artist.

He is prolific. He works out of two studios. During the winter months he paints at the kitchen table of his home in The Bush neighborhood. His cottonwood sculpture “The Garden of Bush” was installed in 2020 down the street near 92nd and Baltimore. There are more than 900 of his paintings in his basement and the number keeps growing. During the summer he sculpts outdoors at his studio at 9300 South Chicago. “In the summer you don’t catch me in here,” he says.

Villarreal recalls a 1980s visit to his house from a shaman from Mexico named Tilpotonqui. “He was involved with the Red Wave [of tribal self-determination],” he says. “I met a lot of people through the American Indians and Chicano movement. They were on their way to the Sun Dance.”

On every first full moon in August, a sacred Sun Dance ceremony is practiced by the Lakota and other Plains Indian tribes at locations in South Dakota. “People like Leonard Crow Dog [1942-2021, activist and leader of Sun Dance ceremonies], Leonard Peltier,” he explains. “The recently commuted Peltier’s 1999 memoir was ‘Prison Writings: My Life Is My Sun Dance.’”

Villarreal continues, “They needed help in making peyote pipes for Sun Dance. They showed me the designs so I designed them. Then they blessed my house. They did an ancient ceremony in the house. Low and behold, over the years we’ve been involved in four fires. The house next door burned and a little boy died in the fire. We pulled four children out of that fire. A few years later two houses burned on the opposite side of us. Finally, the cottage on the same side of my house burned and took my garage. My house has survived all these things. I’m not saying it’s the blessing, but it is a remarkable coincidence. It was an honor to be approached by them.”

His humility reveals a child of clay.

Villarreal’s first medium was clay. He remembers shaping little dolls and toys when he was five years old. He follows no plan. “Things just happen,” he says. “The figurines are studies of people in the neighborhood. During the winter I hibernate and just work in clay. I use air-dry clay and after it dries I completely cover it with glue. It gives it durability. I don’t have access to a kiln so glue lasts longer. I still walk around the neighborhood. Certain ones are real characters, others are common people. I don’t put faces on a lot of my sculpture work. I was in a [2022] group show at the Art Institute, ‘A Lion for Every House’ and a critic made a comparison between me and Cezanne. I didn’t know who Cezanne was. Then I realized we were going in the same direction, emotion without putting faces.”

The 1972 Malo hit “Suavecito”— considered the Chicano national anthem—plays out of an iPhone on his table.

The mills inspired Villarreal’s art at age seventeen. “They had clay in the black furnace,” he says. “When I had time on my hands I’d take little pieces of clay and shape. That’s when I really got into making little heads with moustaches and hair. They all looked different. I realized I had a whole collection of them. I didn’t even give them away. So I started hiding them in the steel mill. It was just a whim.”

At the time he was an oiler who worked around the mill with grease guns and oil cans. “I was always moving somewhere,” he says. “When I came back from the military in 1970 the little heads had already become a myth. People were asking where they came from. I did a show in the 1980s at the [now-gone Local 65] Union Hall, 93rd and South Chicago. One of the guys came to the show and he had one of my little heads. That was the first time I was interviewed by a newspaper, the [now-defunct] Daily Calumet.”

Villarreal moved on to scrap pine, elm and cottonwood before landing in limestone. And limestone is his kryptonite. Villarreal would dig out rocks from the multitude of abandoned buildings in his neighborhood. One time some local kids asked him why he was hauling out rocks from the Millgate apartment project down the street from where he lived. “I told them it is gold,” he says. “Once I carve it, it becomes gold. They looked at me like ‘What?’ And I taught some of those kids years later.”

Villarreal worked in large pieces of limestone before meeting the late Mexican artist Jose Moreno at the Museum of Science and Industry in 1986. “He was a taught artist,” he says. “He worked with some of the top sculptors in Mexico. But he was a realist. I picked up more tips on what to do with the rocks. We had just gotten done doing the Hyde Park Art Fair. We said ‘Let’s do a project together.’ But we need a big rock. That’s when we went to the Lakefront on 57th Street.”

In 1986 Villarreal recruited his daughter Malinda to pose as a mermaid for a seven-foot limestone sculpture. He never secured permits to install his artwork, so Villarreal, Moreno and apprentice sculptors Fred Arroyo and Edfu Kingigna snuck into Burnham Park in the early morning to work on the sculpture. The mermaid was featured in People magazine in 2001 where Malinda said, “It’s not my body—I was way skinnier!”

Villarreal says, “For a rock it’s been traveling a lot. In its early years it sank. The lake went up and it went down.”

In 2000 the mermaid was discovered by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. And in 2004 the Chicago Park District moved the mermaid across the street to a maintenance storage facility. He recalls, “There was a car accident that hit the wall of that building and part of the wall fell on top of the mermaid. She got damaged. I went to the yard and said, ‘I’m the guy that made the mermaid. Where is she?’” Villarreal was directed to the wounded mermaid in the corner.

In the summer of 2007 Villarreal was teaching art classes to inner-city kids at Bessemer Park, 8930 South Muskegon. The park is named after Henry Bessemer, the inventor of the steelmaking process. Villarreal arranged with the Park District to have the mermaid moved to Bessemer Park where he could repair it with his students. “Then I got a call one morning and they say, ‘The mermaid is going down Lake Shore Drive!’,” he says. “I go, ‘What?’ I called the park district and found out they moved it to where it is now.”

“The Secret Mermaid,” as locals call it, currently lounges around at Oakwood Beach, 4100 South Lake Shore Drive. “That project brought me to a whole new level,” he says.

Villarreal is the mentor for many artists in the neighborhood. Joel Cardenas, aka Cosmoteocal, drops by his house during our visit. He wants to discuss a three-winged lion sculpture with Villarreal. Cardenas, forty-six, is a sculptor-painter who formerly played bass in the band Wonderland Honey that opened for Dead Steelmill. “Everything here is underground,” he says at the kitchen table workshop. “There was a bar across the street from here called Farolito [a small paper lantern in Northern Mexico]. Bands from Mexico played there. We were lucky. Art and music. Corny saw our band in the 1990s. We did psychedelic rock. We thought we were bad-ass until we saw Corny.”

On April 20 Roman and Maria Villarreal will celebrate their fifty-fifth wedding anniversary. Maria went to the now-closed Saints Peter and Paul high school with Villarreal’s sister Carmen. While Villarreal was in the service, Maria wrote him letters with updates on the neighborhood. “I didn’t think nothing of it,” she says at the kitchen table. “Then my uncle came from San Jose. I told my mother I wanted to go out there to start something new.”

She knocks on the kitchen table and continues, “One Saturday morning my cousin tells me there’s a soldier at the door. I’m like, ‘What? I don’t know anybody out here.’ Well, he was stationed in Monterey. I go to the door and there’s Rome!” He continues the story, “I hitchhiked there.” That’s Southeast Side fortitude.

She adds, “He slept in the park across the street. The streets were named after Disney characters. I never thought about getting married. I didn’t know about all the crazy stuff he did. At the time he wore dark glasses but when you looked under there he had beautiful brown eyes. And his big beautiful lips. We got to know each other, we grew together and we had our kids.”

He says, “What she didn’t mention is that her mother was against the whole thing. So she called her uncle and told him to get rid of me. I show up that weekend and about eight guys, their friends and family, are standing in front of the house. I look at them and say, ‘Is everybody going to beat me up at one time or is it one-on-one? They said, ‘One-on-one.’ That was fine. So I put my backpack down, took off my glasses and put some paper in my mouth. I didn’t want my teeth to be knocked out in case I got hit. Then I say, ‘Okay, who is going to be the first one?’

“And they look at me and say, ‘Welcome to the family.’”

Today, Roman and Maria have three children, eight grandchildren and fifteen great-grandchildren.

“In the winter we have our leisure life,” Maria says. “We get up at about ten, have our coffee, ten-thirty until eleven, he sets himself up in the kitchen. The house is so big, I go wherever I want to go.” Roman adds, “Smoke a joint. It depends on the pot. I’ve been smoking pot since the seventies. When I started Mexican pot was only six or seven percent THC. Now it is up to thirty something. It [art] depends on what I smoke that day and go into that different gear.” There is also an edible shop around the corner from the Villarreal homestead.

They are just blocks away from the former U.S. Steel site, 128 acres between 87th Street, DuSable Lake Shore Drive and the Calumet River. Several projects have been proposed for the site. The most colorful effort was the three-day Lakeside festival in July 2011 that featured the Dave Matthews Band, Drive-By Truckers, an antique Ferris wheel and a spectacular view of the Chicago skyline. The old EJE (Elgin, Joliet and Eastern Railway) line ran near the concert site. The train would drop off coal for the steel mill. Nearly 100,000 people attended the festival. Despite more than one-million dollars in site-development investments from Jam Productions and Live Nation, the festival was never repeated.

Dave Matthews covered “Don’t Drink the Water.”

“I was scared about that festival,” says the historical society’s Podkul-Murphy. “The space had been abandoned for some time. Even in daylight you had to watch where you stepped. There were railroad tracks. There had been plans to develop it decades ago and it never happened. There were supposed to be four twenty-two-story condo buildings. There’s a possibility Quantum might revive some of the businesses that used to be there. Right now it is vacant lot after vacant lot through Mackinaw Avenue [along the old South Works]. That’s where the taverns used to be. Guys lived in these boarding houses. Bars were connected to whatever country you came from. Maybe it was just five people in a tiny room, but they worked different shifts. People spoke the same language. Croatia. There was a Polish bar across the street from Mr. Vrdolyak’s [office, 9618 South Commercial, now under the helm of former alderman Ed Vrdolyak’s sons].”

Roman adds, “The weirdest thing about the concert is that the neighborhood didn’t know what was going on. We saw this huge influx of young white kids. We never heard of Dave Matthews. The police were very protective of the site. They didn’t want you hanging around. A few people in the neighborhood made a couple bucks selling water. But when they came in this direction we said to be careful. This is dangerous territory. Gang violence had risen to a higher level in that period. This neighborhood got hit hard. The only reason was because the mills were gone. There was no more work. The energy of a lot of these young people went into gang-banging.”

After a long chain of lost opportunities, Roman Villarreal believes the U.S. Steel site and his neighborhood are on the upswing. “We have to understand it is money,” he says. “You can’t stop progress. They are going to get millions of dollars, but they are under no obligation to do anything for us. Our problems are social. We need work for our kids. We need to upgrade some of the storefronts. And it will be a different class of people.”

Corny Ramirez says, “That’s the give-and-take of ‘progress’ in a community. In a community that needs a shot in the arm, you’re going to have gentrification. No doubt. Because investments are going to be made from outside the neighborhood. And those investors will want to reap the rewards. It’s just a matter of time because there’s so much open land here.” Frances adds, “Quantum will be off the Bush area and a lot of people didn’t buy there for a long time. All you need is one person to sell their property for $300,000. You got them. Slowly but surely taxes will go up. Then another person will sell. You have to stay. Once you let someone buy your property for a higher price, there goes the neighborhood.”

Jim Klekowski is a lifelong resident of the East Side. He spent thirty-five years in the film industry as an independent location manager. He worked on “Natural Born Killers,” Dolly Parton’s “Straight Talk” and between 1996 and 2004 he was Chicago location manager for the TV series “ER.”

Klekowski, seventy, is now retired and serves as the volunteer vice president of the Southeast Chicago Historical Society. The group’s small but mighty museum is located in the Calumet Park Fieldhouse, 9801 South Avenue G. The fieldhouse is 101 years old and was designated a Chicago landmark in 2006.

“It’s been over thirty years since something stood there [South Works] that was making money for the neighborhood,” Klekowski says while greeting museum visitors on a Thursday afternoon. “It’s a wasteland. Now everyone is looking down here. Things don’t start here. They start at the Obama Presidential Center [scheduled to open in 2026 at 6001 South Stony Island]. You’ve got the Red Line expanding to 130th. [Construction is planned to begin in late 2025.] You’ve got the EPA working on what was Acme Steel on South Torrence for another development. It’s a Superfund site. Then you’ve got Quantum.”

Why are things finally happening now?

“I don’t think it’s dumb luck,” Klekowski says. “First, that is the largest tract of land in the city of Chicago still available to do something on. It’s on the Lakefront which is always a big draw. We’d be a little tank town without Lake Michigan. Transportation is all around. You have four major bus lines passing by 79th and South Shore Drive. The Metra. The South Shore goes through Roseland and stops in Hegewisch. Everything is here and easily transferable into something even more. Before Quantum came in, McCaffery was trying to make plans.”

McCaffery Interests and U.S. Steel proposed a master-planned “Chicago Lakeside Development” community with 13,000 homes, seventeen million square feet of commercial space, a 1,500-slip marina and an extension of South Lake Shore Drive. The project died in 2016 due to U.S. Steel’s inability to secure financing.

This is the frustration Chico always hears from his constituents. “The most difficult thing is that there were three proposed failed projects over the past thirty years,” he says. “Obviously Quantum was met with skepticism. How is this going to be different from the last three failed projects? Those projects got close to something happening and for whatever reason they fell through. You see and hear more of a buzz now because it’s been in the media.”

The media-friendly historical society museum opened in 1986 and is dedicated to Jim Fitzgibbons (1914-1983), a lifelong resident of the Southeast Side and general foreman at South Works. He started in the mills at age fifteen as an inspector. Late in life Fitzgibbons was an administrative aide for Alderman Vrdolyak. “Mr. Fitz,” as he was known, founded the East Side Historical Society in 1976. He also was a liaison for the Southeast Chicago Historical Project (SECHP), an archival study of the labor movement in the four area neighborhoods. Spearheaded by the late labor organizer Ed Sadlowski and the late Mirron Alexandroff, former president of Columbia College, the project produced a feature-length documentary, “Wrapped in Steel” and extensive archives, which are now housed in the museum. While the project was still in the process of being built, Fitzgibbons died of cancer. The movie and the museum are dedicated to him.

The first-floor museum is housed in the fieldhouse’s original library and looks black-and-white-hopeful like a Frank Capra movie. The 1,452- square-foot museum features photographic murals that were part of the SECHP. The historical society has always been an all-volunteer operation. “About a third of that photo collection is from that original project,” Klekowski says during a January conversation in the museum. “Since then the founders of this museum continue to collect neighborhood ephemera and personal items.” The museum has Fitzgibbons’ South Works employee badge.

“We have almost a complete history of the labor movement in the neighborhood,” Klekowski says. “We have histories of all the steel mills that were here as well as small family businesses and larger places like Goldblatt’s and Walgreens. We had a lot of mills. And a lot of jobs.”

If Klekowski was choosing film locations from the Southeast Side where would he go? “Looking south from 95th Street at the train track entrance to the Short Line rail yard,” he says. “Because of the dramatic image of the Skyway and railroad bridges in the background. The second location I’d choose is Commercial Avenue from the Immaculate Conception Church bell tower, looking south with South Chicago spread out below. A parade on Commercial Avenue would be a nice touch.”

The scene in “The Blues Brothers” movie where Jake and Elwood Blues received a divine message from James Brown was shot in 1979 at the Pilgrim Baptist Church of South Chicago, 3235 East 91st. The church interior was actually shot in Hollywood, but director John Landis loved the exterior, most notably the steeple. The iconic Bluesmobile jump was filmed on the 95th Street drawbridge. Many people in the neighborhood talk about that and there’s a Jake and Elwood mural under the Skyway at 100th and Ewing. In January 2020, portions of the FX show “Fargo” were shot at a boatyard on the Calumet River just under the Skyway and at the historic former Schlitz Brewery-Tied House, 9401 South Ewing. Fake snow had to be shipped in and in a classic Chicago switcheroo it snowed the day after shooting.

Klekowski is also author of the 2002 coffee-table book “South Chicago U.S.A.: A Photographic Essay” (Ellis Avenue Studio). “We’re not just history,” he says. “A number of us are involved in committees working on the arts for the projects here, including speaking with the Quantum people. I don’t understand the technology behind it entirely because I was not born with a phone in my hand. But there never was going to be 18,000 jobs there [South Works site] again. No matter what would have gone in there, the EPA wouldn’t allow the same pollution that occurred in the steel-mill days. Quantum is bringing in incredibly modern stuff. Whether it is one-hundred or 150 jobs, the neighborhood has a chance to get some of those. But all the construction jobs will be around here. And the feeder plans in high schools to lead up to those jobs, because the kids have to be trained. It’s a great idea.”

Klekowski’s father Frank was a steelworker at Republic Steel for twenty-eight years. Before that, just after World War II, he drove train engines in South Works for the EJE Railway. Both his parents served in World War II. Klekowski’s mother Bernice met Frank in 1937 when they were meatpackers at the Cudahy Brothers plant, 91st and Baltimore. The building is still standing. “Swift had a small plant on the same block,” Klekowski says. “Armour was also in the neighborhood. But Cudahy was the big one down here, not at the Union Stockyards.” All four of his grandparents emigrated from Poland starting in 1909.

During one of my visits to the museum I bumped into retired neighborhood fireman George Castas. He was visiting his donated fire coat, standing tall in a corner. He worked at Engine 46, 92nd and South Chicago, between 1988 and 2018. He held his four-year-old fox terrier Freddie as he looked at distant sparks.

Castas, sixty-five, worked in the black furnace and mill at South Works from 1978 to 1988. His father was a crane operator at Wisconsin Steel. “It was awful in this area when they closed,” he says. “My dad didn’t get a pension. And he had twenty-eight years. You had to have thirty to get a full pension. They only gave him $270 a month for all those years. A lot of guys took it very hard.”

Carolyn Mulac is the historical society’s secretary-treasurer and newsletter editor. She lives in South Deering. Mulac is a retired librarian who spent the last twenty years of her career as a reference librarian at the Harold Washington Library. Ironically, the museum location was a Chicago Public Library branch from 1926 to 1955 before it moved to Ewing Avenue. “We just had a young man here from Paris,” she says, nodding to a black-and-white photo he took of an abandoned neighborhood building. “He’s doing a documentary. Europeans are really interested in this area. We’ve had students from Germany. They’re going through some of the same things with their brownfields there.”

On a cold winter night on the East Side of Chicago longtime neighborhood musicians Phil Angotti and Mario Zavala take the stage at the Crow Bar, 4001 East 106th. Well, it’s not technically a stage, but it is a large space at the north end of the tavern. The area is on the same plane with people sitting along the forty-four-seat bar. Every bar stool is occupied. Union workers. Electricians. Ladies with lots of bling. Everyone is on the level.

Angotti begins the evening with a tender cover of the Beatles’ “In My Life” which sets the mood for any exploration of this sidebar neighborhood: “There are places I remember. All my life, though some have changed. Some forever, not for better. Some have gone and some remain…” The Sunday night audience appears to have remained. They know the personable bar owner Mike Carroll and he knows the tequila shots the regulars like.

The Crow Bar tavern and banquet hall opened in 1952 on the East Side island between Lake Michigan, the Calumet River and Wolf Lake on the south. The East Side was born in 1881 with the building of the South Works manufacturing plant. There is an unvarnished vibe to this side of Chicago. There’s no new housing and no hipster coffee shops or taverns. Driving around these neighborhoods is like spinning back to the 1940s and fifties. Locals have called it a “City Within a City.” The East Side also abuts South Chicago and Hegewisch as part of the Southeast Side. Indiana is just a couple blocks away.

“We call it Alphabet Land,” says Carroll, the second-generation owner of the Crow Bar. “People come here and the streets are A, B, C, what the hell is that? And we’re surrounded by rivers, bridges and trains. We’re our own island.

“There’s no relationship with downtown. The streets are kind of simple. There’s A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, no I, there’s J, K but that’s not on the East Side, that’s in Hegewisch, then Ewing, L, M, N, no P, then an O and then it just goes to Green Bay.” Some say the letter grid was derived from “Alphabet City,” laid out in 1811 in New York’s East Village.

The nearly eight-mile long Skyway bridge blows across the jumbled letters of the neighborhood, 125 feet into the sky. “It seems like it’s the last old-school place,” says Carroll, forty-one. “I know other South Side neighborhoods still have the corner bar, but maybe it’s the families here that have stuck around for years. There were bars on every corner, and then with the mills on the other side of the bridge, they were everywhere. I remember growing up, there were parades down the street in front of us [the bar]. Once the mills shut down it messed everything up. We opened in the morning during the mills. I know my mom had Nancy’s Breakfast Club. She’d open up at 6am for the guys from U.S. Steel, Wisconsin, Inland.”

Inland Steel ran from 1893 until 1998 out of East Chicago, Indiana. Wisconsin Steel, along Torrence Avenue, south of 106th to 109th, closed in 1980. Ray Walsh (1929-2023) worked at Wisconsin Steel for most of his life. He was friends with Carroll’s father Pat, who died in March 2024 at the age of seventy-two. Walsh was a Crow Bar regular. When Wisconsin Steel closed, he took a large metal bell from the plant and bequeathed it to the bar. Customers now ring the bell for a special event such as a Chicago Blackhawks goal or a Bears touchdown.

The renegade spirit of the Crow Bar has made the news a couple of times. The tavern is two blocks from the Indiana border. When Illinois established a smoking ban in 2008, Carroll defied the ruling. Smoking laws are more liberal in Indiana and his business was being hurt with customers crossing the border for a drag. The Crow Bar was fined twice and Carroll paid up. “We had a smoke jug and people put dollars in to pay the fine,” he says. The free-smoking movement ended during COVID.

Mostly. Chico had his April 2023 victory party at the Crow Bar. He grew up with Carroll. The online Block Club reported that nearly 150 people celebrated at “a smoke-filled Crow Bar.”

The Crow Bar also sued the now-defunct Crobar dance club, 1543 North Kingsbury, for name infringement. “We tried to get them to change the name and they wouldn’t stop,” Carroll says. “We were getting weird calls. They would ask about rock night and bondage night. Dennis Rodman was supposed to have his birthday party there and we got so many calls about that that he apologized to us through the newspaper. He said he was going to come here for a beer and sandwich. He never did.”

Carroll attended Bethlehem Lutheran Church, 103rd and H. The vacant church was destroyed in a 2023 fire. “The churches have been closing,” he says. “St. George’s closed. St. Kevin’s. Annunciata. So they combined them and it’s Our Lady of Nazareth.” Carroll was a quarterback and cornerback for Annunciata on 112th Street and then attended Mount Carmel High School. After suffering a football knee injury, he played golf at Mount Carmel. “I’ve been working here since I was fifteen,” he says. “Dick Butkus’ kid comes here for our annual [August] Nest Fest. He looks like his father. A big dude.”

The Crow Bar is known for its corned beef recipe, which of course, is a deep South Side secret. “I can’t tell you why it’s so good,” Carroll says. “It’s the way we prepare it. A lot of people will cook it and cut it right away and it turns to mush. You have to let it chill out. We wrap it, and I don’t want to give away everything. The meat is cut right. It’s a perfect mixture of the fat, the meat and we have a good rye bread. Keep it simple.”

The Crow Bar used to roll through 2,000 pounds of corned beef on St. Patrick’s Day. Carroll says, “Now they cut it better so there’s not a lot of fat, we still do 1,200 to 1,500 pounds just on that day. Even old-school people that have moved away come back for it.”

Over kolaczkis in her East Side living room, historian Podkul-Murphy struggles to make sense of the H and M and L streets in the area. She says, “I can’t tell you about the initials.” She has lived in the same two-story, three-bedroom wood house since she was fourteen years old. “I’m much older now,” she says with a smile. “I was born just before World War II. I think the letters were from farther north [in the city] where the name starts with the letter. You have several M streets together and so on. Here, it starts with the state line which is also Avenue A.”

Though locals seem oblivious to the presence of Airbnb rentals around them, Podkul-Murphy points out there used to be a hotel on Ewing Avenue. “The building is still there,” she says. “It’s not a hotel anymore. It’s next to the tavern that was owned by the famous wrestler [Cholak]. We have his moose in the museum. One day we were close to closing, the door opened and four guys came in with this moose head. ‘Did anyone order a moose head?’ They plop it down on top of a case. Then a fifth guy comes in and he’s not very happy-looking. He says, ‘This was in my basement. My wife says it is either me or the moose.’ We didn’t have an option to say no. So the moose head is still there with information on Mr. Cholak.” Cholak was known for wearing his moose head into the ring before a match.

Podkul-Murphy and her late husband Kevin Murphy were on the Steelworkers Park planning committee. Murphy was a journalist who covered theater for the Northwest Indiana Times. He wrote the play “Unfriendly Fire” about the 1937 Republic Steel massacre in South Chicago.

In a more mellow time, sixteen years ago, Carroll started booking beloved neighborhood troubadour Mario Zavala. “I just met him in the bars because he was playing guitar everywhere,” he says. “We became good friends. Every Sunday is his regular thing.” Angotti sometimes drives down from the North Side to sit in.

Zavala hands out a plastic five-by-nine-inch folder that features songs he can play: “Ticket to Ride,” the late Brenton Wood’s soul hit “Gimme a Little Sign,” Steve Miller’s “The Joker,” the Texas Tornados’ “(Hey Baby) Que Paso” and the classic Mexican ranchera “Volver Volver” for what he calls “Taco Tuesday.”

I knew Zavala from the playful East Side pop-rock band the Bedbugs, a staple of the bar Weeds, 1555 North Dayton. Angotti met Zavala in 1979 when he was playing a neighborhood basement party on Green Bay Avenue. They hit it off on their mutual love of the Beatles. “He didn’t know I was becoming a musician,” Angotti says. “The first thing I noticed about Mario was the black frame glasses and the necktie. I said, ‘You look like Elvis Costello.’ He said yeah, but that his band was playing heavier stuff and he’d rather be playing the Beatles. It was the music we loved the most. It drew us together as friends.”

Zavala adds, ““We didn’t do much Beatles because as easy as they are, they are complicated to play. You gotta have good vocals and good harmonies. And you have to know what you are doing. At the time we were playing AC/DC, Santana. Maybe we played [the Beatle-ized version of Larry Williams’] ‘Dizzy Miss Lizzy.’ Everybody played that.”

One of Zavala’s biggest hits was getting disqualified from the annual Beatlesfest. “We did a medley of Beatles songs,” he says. “We linked one right into another. People screamed every time they heard [a bit of] their favorite song. We were the Bedbugs spelled backwards.” And there’s that East Side letter thing again.

Angotti attended St. George grammar school at 96th and L and George Washington High School, 3535 East 114th. He was in school when the mills closed. “It was upsetting to the neighborhood,” he says. “Everybody knew it was going to break the economy and break businesses. A lot of us in high school, our dads were steelworkers and we thought, ‘That could be our career,’ and that thought was gone.”

The neighborhood was sprinkled with diners and restaurants. Angotti recalls the Golden Shell, 10063 Avenue N, where the restaurant hosted fashion shows at lunchtime. He met Zavala there once in a while. The Golden Shell was also known for its “gypsy platter.” In its previous incarnation as the Shipyard Inn, mass murderer Richard Speck lived upstairs in a ten-dollar-a-week room in 1966. He raped and robbed a woman in his room a few days before his murder spree. The building was demolished in 2004.

It took a long time for the neighborhood to shake the Speck story. On July 22, 1966, the twenty-four-year-old Speck broke into a townhouse at 2319 East 100th Street and murdered eight nursing students. One woman hid under the bed and survived the attack. Speck was arrested two days later at the single-room-occupancy Starr Hotel, 617 West Madison. He died of a heart attack in 1991 while in Stateville in Joliet. Speck was one day shy of his fiftieth birthday.

In the excellent 2016 book “The Crime of the Century” by former Tribune reporter Dennis L. Breo and assistant state’s attorney William J. Martin, the authors wrote, “By the time of Speck’s death in 1991, historical forces had transformed many of the key scenes in the killer’s dark drama. And many of the key actors in the story and those most affected by the mass murders had for twenty-five years been trying to come to terms with the consequences.”

Podkul-Murphy’s next-door neighbor was a Chicago cop who helped arrest Speck. “That’s how close this was to the neighborhood,” she says. “My mom was visiting relatives in Philadelphia and I was home alone. I was in high school. The news came over the radio and I locked every door. I turned the lights out. That’s what everybody did. It was a night of terror. People were afraid that he was still around. It got us closer to each other because we were all scared. The cops were out to protect everybody.”

Podkul-Murphy’s mother Tilli Lorenc Podkul was recruited from Poland at age twelve to do housework in New Jersey. She later moved to the Southeast Side and ran a restaurant in Chicago’s Last Liquor Store (before the Indiana border) at 106th and Indianapolis. Her daughter will never forget how the night’s neighborhood skies were rust-colored. “It was part of our life,” she says. “The outer drive used to meander through our neighborhood. I was a kid and my older brother was back from World War II. He took me everywhere; the Art Institute, wherever. We would take the drive. And we would go past the mills. It was terrifying. We were a stone’s throw from these buildings with smoke coming out of the windows and chimney and you could see flames. And there was housing across the street. Even after the mills closed the buildings were still there.”

She was a social studies teacher at Bowen High School between 1965 and 2005. Podkul-Murphy has a front-row seat to the neighborhood’s changes. “As the area on the other side of the South Chicago Avenue viaduct became developed, we had a lot of professionals moving in and they didn’t mind sending their kids to us,” she says. “Most of them were Jewish. Over time, that area changed radically. It was mostly Black. But a kid is a kid.” Notable Bowen alumni include jazz drummer Gene Krupa, former major-league pitcher Eli Grba, and the late, great WGN-AM, WIND-AM overnight host Eddie “Chicago Ed” Schwartz.

Schwartz might have dug the original Angotti composition “Sunny Day in the East Side” from his 2017 release “Such Stories.” He includes it in his East Side sets. The original recording features John Jamroz on accordion. On this night, standing alone, the song contains grounded tones of The Kinks’ “Village Green Preservation Society” era. Angotti sings about “…crazy kids with the radio sit on the rocks/nowhere else to go…”

Angotti is sixty-two years old. He is one of the most tireless musicians in Chicago. He has released sixteen full-length albums since 1986. He plays at FitzGerald’s, City Winery, Goldyburgers in Forest Park, among other places. He carries the East Side ethic like sweat on a brow. Between 2006 and 2019 he owned and operated Avenue N Guitars on North Avenue–on the North Side.

Angotti’s father Frank and his four brothers were steelworkers. They lived behind Pietrowski (Sylvester) Park, 9650 South Avenue M. “We know it was Avenue N in the 1940s,” he says before his set. “There were seven Angotti brothers total. The first three were from a different mom. My grandfather’s first wife died, then he remarried and had four more boys. Our cousins are still around.” Angotti is so Chicago, his father’s second cousin was former Chicago Blackhawks sparkplug Lou Angotti (1938-2021).

The East Side appears in several of Angotti’s compositions besides “Sunny Day on the East Side.” His 2010 release “People and Places” includes “Railroad Angel,” about the railroad bridge adjacent to the Chicago Skyway. The brilliant 2006 album “East Side Soul” contains the “95th St. Bridge Song” that acknowledges the Blues Brothers film shenanigans in the neighborhood and the title track, “East Side Soul #27,” is a romping Dylanesque (sort of “Subterranean Homesick Blues”) where Angotti sings, “There’s holes on the Skyway, holes in the knees of my jeans, there’s holes just about everywhere and I still don’t know what it means and I just have to rock ‘n’ roll got half a hole of East Side soul.” Angotiti also pays tribute to the neighborhood on the ballad “Avenue L” with his longtime chum Casey McDonough’s keyboards shaping the ambient look at a neglected era.

Angotti grew up at 9729 Avenue L.

“I don’t know the history of the letters, but my dad, [Frank] who is eighty-eight years old, lived on Avenue N when he was a kid and it was nicknamed Goat Street,” Angotti says. “Many Italian immigrants on the block kept goats in the backyard. When I was younger I didn’t do too many songs closely associated with the neighborhood even though it was on my mind.”

Frank and his friends used to frequent the Crow Bar with fellow steelworkers. “My Dad did the plumbing here years ago,” Angotti says. “Sometimes I bring my mom here for the lake perch dinner.”

These are deep connections to the past.

“They always talk about new things in this neighborhood,” he says. “They’re going to build on the coastline. They’re going to do this. Nothing happens. A lot of the land here is kind of polluted so developers come and say they can’t do anything. We were aware for a long time that air pollution in this neighborhood wasn’t the greatest. Especially when you go down Indianapolis Boulevard over the border line, the Lever Brothers [soap factory] was smelly. And the Amaizo corn plant. But on the East Side, we were aware of steel mill pollution. I couldn’t tell you how many people I know that were lost to cancer because of it, but I’m sure there were several. We knew a lot of the bar owners and families. We’d play in these bars and hop from bar to bar. A lot of us have moved away. Lots of my buddies live in Northwest Indiana. Lots of them.”

The State Line Boundary Marker, near the end of Avenue G and just west of the State Line Generating Plant of Hammond, Indiana denotes the divide between Illinois and Indiana. It was erected in 1838, “probably making it the oldest landmark in Chicago,” according to Rod Sellers’ 2001 “Chicago’s Southeast Side Revisited.” The marker achieved Chicago Landmark status in September 2002.

Angotti says, “This [Crow Bar] is one of the bars we will meet at. And Paddy O’Hara’s at 106th. It’s one of the few bars we went to as kids that is still open. There was Slide Inn. Mario came to see me play in a band at an outdoor summer show.”

The Crow Bar was originally called The Cro Bar as a nod to the community’s Croatian population. “When we bought it from Matt Saskor in 1981 my parents changed the name to Crow Bar,” Carroll says. His father Pat Carroll died on March 1, 2024 at the age of seventy-two. Mike’s grandfather lives above the bar and Carroll lives in the neighborhood. The Crow Bar is now co-owned by Carroll, his mom Nancy, and his brother John.

The tavern can hold 158 people and is popular with ironworkers, electricians and neighborhood kids. Stickers on the bathroom hand dryer honor Chicago Local 281 sprinkler fitters (est. 1901) and in big bold black letters the pledge to “NEVER CROSS A PICKET LINE.”

Chico suggests that the union work of his grandfather led him to where he is today. “He’s probably the reason I’m the alderman,” he says. “As far as me and him talking at an early age about politics and his role in the community. He represented thousands of people. That’s how people put a roof over their heads. We would go out on Saturday mornings for breakfast at [the recently closed] C&G on Commercial and I remember people coming up to him to say hello. I’d ask my dad, ‘How does Grandpa know all these people?’ It’s crazy when you think about him working on the same piece of land that we’re developing now. And him being the union leader and me later trying to usher in this new technology on this campus. Sometimes I get emotional talking about it.”

The glitter rain has stopped. There is promise in the sunrise. Regeneration is on course for one of the most fascinating sections of Chicago.