History of the Southeast Side is instructive as students fight against General Iron
When she approved a deal to move General Iron from Lincoln Park to the Southeast Side, it looked like Mayor Lori Lightfoot had given Chicagoans a lesson in shrewd politics.
Its North Side neighbors were furious about the scrap-metal processor’s violations of environmental regulations. Its new neighbors seemed unlikely to make a fuss. The East Side neighborhood is one of a string of far South Side communities long accustomed to the sight of an industrial plant — or so it may have seemed from the perspective of City Hall.
Two years later, the situation is a mess. Perhaps that could have been avoided had the mayor run the plans before Donald Davis, who teaches history at George Washington High School.
“I would have told her we’re still cleaning up after earlier polluters,” Davis said recently, sitting on a bench outside the East Side school. It’s near the site for the metal-shredding facility, since purchased by Ohiobased Reserve Management Group.
The East Side is a narrow sliver of Chicago east of the Calumet River. Along with other far South Side neighborhoods and Northwest Indiana, it formerly housed one of the largest concentrations of steel mills on Earth.
“Chicago steel output higher than Britain,” a 1952 Tribune headline proclaimed. It was also larger than that of France or Germany’s Ruhr district.
Steel mill workers gave the surrounding neighborhoods the look of Eastern Europe, the Tribune observed in 1909: “Hungarians, Austrians, and Slavs of various denominations, like Macedonians, Croatians, and Slovaks, do most of the ‘plodding labor’ in the iron and steel industry of Chicago,” it said.
Some lived in “alley woodsheds and barns (turned) into lodging houses,” and all of them inhaled pollutants that poured out of the mills’ smokestacks. The laundry on their clotheslines was oily to the touch.
Eventually the workers enjoyed a decent standard of living — though that required a bitter, sometimes deadly, struggle. During the Great Depression, organized labor demanded a more equitable share of the steel makers’ earnings. Other companies reluctantly agreed, but not Republic Steel.
Republic Steel’s workers rallied at Sam’s Place, an East Side tavern, and marched on the mill accompanied by their supporters. Among them was Dorothy Day, the founder of the Catholic Worker Movement, who wrote about it in the organization’s newspaper:
“On Memorial Day, May 30, 1937, police opened fire on a parade of striking workers and their families at the gate of the Republic Steel Company, in South Chicago. Fifty people were shot, of whom 10 later died; 100 others were beaten with clubs.”
The Tribune blamed the victims: “Moreover agitators went among the strikers at the mass meeting which preceded the attack Sunday,” the paper claimed. But newsreel footage supported Day’s version of events, and the Memorial Day Massacre became a hallowed chapter in labor history.
Though the strike failed, better times were soon to come to the Southeast Side.
World War II fueled the demand for steel, and wages grew. Residents bought the tidy, single-family homes that line East Side streets.
Of course, more blast furnaces meant more pollution, but immigrants continued to see the neighborhood as a place where jobs could be found. As older residents moved on, shop windows and “For Rent” signs were rewritten in Spanish.
That equation prompted Marcie Pedraza to join the movement to keep General Iron out. Five generations of her family have worked in area mills. Until recently, massive uncovered piles of petcoke, a byproduct of petroleum refining, were stored in East Chicago.
“My house would be covered in florescent dust,” Pedraza told me, as she walked her dogs past the high school.
In her forebears’ day, there was a trade-off for breathing polluted air: Workers made good wages. As a union electrician, Pedraza still does. But for decades, jobs in the steel mills have been vanishing. Foreign competition took its toll, and technological innovation means a mill can operate with fewer workers.
That brings us back to today.
The mayor’s deal over General Iron began to unravel in October 2020, when students chalked the words “We Can’t Learn If We Can’t Breathe” across the steps of the high school’s main entrance.
“We are tired of the city treating us like a garbage can,” Trinity Colon and Gregory Miller explained in a Teen Vogue op-ed piece. “We grew up believing everyone had to deal with asthma.”
Activists have kept pressure on Lightfoot ever since.
Davis gave me a driving tour of the neighborhood, and we passed two steel monuments. One commemorated the martyrs of the Memorial Day Massacre. The other was an enormous pyramid of scrap metal awaiting a decision on the recycling facility’s fate.
“What I don’t understand is this,” Davis said. “If General Iron wasn’t suitable for an affluent community how can it be suitable for a blue-collar neighborhood?”