Razed for railroad
Hundreds of Englewood homes were torn down for an intermodal yard. Those who remain on South Side want clean air, green space and jobs.
By the time Ald. Jeanette Taylor got to the house on 58th Street, workers hired by the railroad were stuffing an Englewood family’s possessions into a truck parked outside. Hundreds of homes in the South Side neighborhood had already been bought and razed by Norfolk Southern to make room for a proposed expansion. Joyce Edwards was the last holdout, and Norfolk Southern acquired her home — purchased by her father in 1963 — through eminent domain.
Edwards had stayed in the house for four years after losing it to Norfolk Southern. On that day, the railroad’s patience had finally run out.
According to a lawsuit filed by the family shortly after the August 2021 eviction, Edwards and her daughters were only allowed back into the house to do their own packing at the insistence of the 20th Ward alderman.
The lawsuit alleges one son with cerebral palsy spent an hour in a wheelchair outside the house, sobbing and screaming in the sweltering heat. According to the lawsuit, a Norfolk Southern security officer allegedly pointed a gun at another son, shoved him violently, and with another Norfolk security officer, several Cook County sheriff ’s deputies and one Chicago police officer, threw him to the ground before arresting him. Family members captured video of the arrest on their cellphones.
The family’s two dogs ran off and nobody’s seen them since, Taylor said in an interview in November.
“Who would do that to an elderly woman and a disabled son, knowing how hard it was for Black people to get a home in the ’50s and ’60s?” she asked. “And you took it from them to do what, to park trailers?”
Norfolk Southern acquired Edwards’ house and 500 other lots to double the size of its intermodal yard at 47th Street and the Dan Ryan Expressway. This intermodal yard is the railroad’s biggest in Chicago. It’s a crucial stop on its high-speed tracks that connect Chicago with East Coast ports that are growing rapidly as container shipments through California decline, according to a Wall Street Journal report.
The railroad announced record quarterly profits in
October, and executives expect intermodal traffic through yards like 47th Street to be their most significant growth driver in coming years, according to a railroad presentation to investors last month.
But Norfolk Southern’s location in the heart of Chicago means it can’t avoid withering debates over who benefits and who doesn’t from the city’s prominence as a freight hub, what happens when the railroad displaces longtime residents, and whether it’s doing enough to promote green space and clean air for those still living near the tracks.
For the past decade, politicians ranging from Taylor’s predecessor to Mayor Lori Lightfoot have backed Norfolk Southern’s expansion.
Former Ald. Willie Cochran asserted the expansion would boost not just Chicago but the national economy.
He went to prison in 2019 after admitting he’d used charitable donations to pay personal expenses. Norfolk Southern had been contributing regularly to his community improvements and political campaigns.
In July, Lightfoot introduced an ordinance that transfers streets and alleys south of Garfield Boulevard to Norfolk Southern for its expansion. After decades of industrial job loss, the city can help its remaining businesses by providing land they need to expand at reduced cost, Lightfoot’s ordinance said.
But while providing such support, the city still has to regulate corporate behavior, Taylor said.
“We’re talking about a billion dollar company that got rich off the backs of slaves, and now they’re mistreating Black and brown communities,” she said.
As required by the city of Chicago for all contractors, the ordinance transferring streets and alleys to Norfolk Southern listed by name hundreds of slaves that the railroad’s corporate predecessors owned prior to the Civil War.
Norfolk Southern supports educational efforts about the history of railroads and the Black community, said Norfolk Southern spokesperson Connor Spielmaker in a statement.
“Diversity, equity, and inclusion are part of our culture today, and we’re committed to continued progress,” he said. “We’re proud to be a majority-minority employer in Chicago, where more than 30% of our local workforce is Black.”
The expansion proposal is now in the final stages.
Taylor said she blocked a vote on Lightfoot’s ordinance for five months to pressure the railroad to conduct a study on the longterm health impacts of diesel soot from trains and trucks and to hire more Black contractors and employees, including from Englewood. She dropped her opposition to a vote last month, and the City Council is expected take up the measure Jan. 18.
On Tuesday, the railroad will hold a community meeting in Englewood to answer questions from the public, Taylor said.
In addition, she said, the railroad told her instead of just growing to the south, it now wants to buy homes and businesses near the yard’s northern entrance at 47th Street.
“This ain’t the end. They need to come to me again,” Taylor said, referring to the discretionary authority aldermen have over zoning and land use issues in their ward.
Spielmaker said Norfolk Southern is concentrating on the southward expansion of 47th Street and has no details to share about anything that might come next.
The 2018 documentary “The Area,” created by Minneapolis-based sociologist and photographer David Schalliol, chronicles five years of unsuccessful community efforts to halt the sale of blocks and blocks of homes to be bulldozed to make room for the expanded freight yard.
Generations of Englewood residents called The Area home. The documentary shows neighbors brainstorming in living rooms and banding together at City Council meetings.
“I thought I was gonna stay here forever. It’s a raggedy thing to you, but it’s my home,” Deborah Payne, the film’s central protagonist and co-producer, told the Tribune in a 2021 report.
Norfolk Southern officials say the railroad has tried to be a good neighbor.
“Expanding this in-town facility eliminates the need for residents (to) commute
out of the city for work, creates new jobs, and reduces urban sprawl while directly reinvesting in the communities we have long been a part of,” Spielmaker said in a statement.
At a public meeting in September, Herbert Smith, the company’s government affairs vice president, pointed to the $3 million Norfolk Southern allocated in 2013 for environmental and community developments inside and near the expanded 47th Street yard.
He touted the railroad’s efforts to make sure its Chicago workforce is diverse, and its contribution to the proposed Englewood Nature Trail.
In 2013, Norfolk Southern agreed to transfer to the city a long-abandoned, 1.75mile rail embankment to be used for the trail. In return, the railroad got city property it needed to expand a second intermodal yard on 63rd Street.
The trail will end a few feet to the west of the expanded 47th Street yard, and Lightfoot calls it her biggest infrastructure priority. By 2020, the city had allocated $1.1 million out of the railroad’s 47th Street environmental fund to remediate land and a railroad overpass along the trail’s route.
But Anton Seals, the trail’s lead organizer, said he’s disappointed that Norfolk Southern has played no role since then.
“They haven’t engaged with the community at all,” said Seals, executive director of Grow Greater Englewood, the nonprofit group developing the trail.
Spokesperson Spielmaker defended the railroad’s environmental record, saying that inside the 47th Street yard, Norfolk Southern has installed all new equipment for lifting containers, including diesel-electric cranes that produce fewer emissions than prior designs.
With federal and state help, the railroad bought a new generation of cleaner-burning locomotives for the yard, and it built a new track that reduces how much time they spend idling, Spielmaker said in the statement.
Spielmaker made no mention of cutting emissions from trucks that haul containers in and out of the yard, other than saying that expanding an innercity facility will mean fewer truck trips across the Chicago suburbs, and therefore less pollution.
In addition, Spielmaker said, Norfolk Southern has spent $20 million to help the city replace crumbling sewer and gas lines near the 47th Street yard.
Regarding the Edwards case, the railroad makes no apologies for evicting the family, according to its court filing in response to her lawsuit.
By staying in the home, the railroad said, Edwards had for years been openly defying the Illinois state court system. The railroad cited a judge who’d ruled that it had fairly compensated her by depositing $35,000 for the house and $174,900 in relocation expenses that included moving and closing costs, storage expenses and rental assistance if necessary into a court-supervised account.
“If Ms. Edwards had not ignored Norfolk’s efforts for years to ensure she had suitable replacement housing, she and her family would be living comfortably in a safe and secure home,” the filing said.
Norfolk Southern is now finalizing a settlement with Edwards, even though the railroad still believes her lawsuit has no merit, Spielmaker said. He declined to disclose the terms of the settlement. Edwards declined to comment.
Living among vacant lots
Jeff Frizzle was driving nearby when Edwards got evicted, and he said he saw the shipping containers police used to block streets near her house.
Frizzle, 44, owns a car repair shop with two employees a block west of the Norfolk Southern tracks on 59th Street. He also runs a snow removal business. He and his wife, Alicia, who works as a faith and lifestyle coach, live near a second set of tracks nearby. His mother, Marilyn, who is 75, lives five doors away.
When Marilyn Frizzle and her family moved from Mississippi in 1961, they rode north aboard an Illinois Central train called The City of New Orleans. They stepped off the train — like many thousands of African American migrants — at the now-demolished 12th Street station at the southern end of Grant Park.
Marilyn Frizzle remembers feeling scared at first about living in such a big city. But she quickly fell in love with Englewood.
Many Black people were earning union wages in the stockyards, steel mills, and even in the metal fabrication shops that lined 59th Street, according to memories passed down to Jeff Frizzle from his family and friends. Some attended integrated schools and lived on the same block as white people, he said. Some managed to pierce a wall of discrimination to buy their first homes.
“It was sort of an elite neighborhood,” Marilyn Frizzle said. “The shopping district on 63rd Street was like being downtown on Michigan Avenue. Everything you needed was there.”
She found her way to WCEV radio, which billed itself as “Chicagoland’s Ethnic Voice.” For 35 years, her gospel music show aired Monday through Friday alongside programming aimed at Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Moravians, Irish, Mexicans and Arabs.
Her son joined her in the studio as an engineer.
The radio station helped Jeff Frizzle survive the collapse of union jobs in Englewood and a wave of gun violence. He remembers a scourge of predatory lending during the run-up to the 2008 financial crisis.
Soon afterward, Norfolk Southern started buying homes to expand the 47th Street yard without announcing its intentions, according to Naomi Davis, founder of Blacks in Green, a West Woodlawn environmental group.
The population was dropping so fast that by 2015, a fifth of the land in Englewood was vacant, according to Asiaha Butler, president of the Resident Association of Greater Englewood. R.A.G.E. is a nonprofit group that promotes grassroots activism.
Only about half of Englewood’s remaining housing units have people inside, she said.
Today the Frizzles live amid vacant lots and abandoned buildings, with trucks, they said, that sometimes roar by at 70 mph.
“You wake up at 3 a.m. and the whole house is shaking,” Marilyn Frizzle said. “There’s too much heavy industrial stuff on the trains. You hear the screeching of the wheels as they stop and the banging of the iron as they disconnect the carriages.”
Marilyn Frizzle bought new windows a few years back. She said the people who sold them said they were airtight, but she doesn’t believe that. “You see dust in here, so you know we’re breathing fumes from all these trucks. I don’t know what the long-term health effects will be.
“But what are you going to do?” asked Marilyn Frizzle. “I’ve been here so long I really don’t know where else to go.”
The Frizzles have taken advantage of collapsed property values to buy a string of houses and vacant lots along 59th Street.
They’re hoping the railroad will buy them out or, if this doesn’t happen, to find other ways to participate in an Englewood resurgence they see as inevitable.
Jeff Frizzle, who followed in his father’s footsteps more than a decade ago to work as an auto repairman, has lived close to the tracks all his life. He’s never met anybody with a railroad job.
“They’re the neighbor you don’t know,” Jeff Frizzle said.
Seeking a diverse workforce
In September, Norfolk Southern held a community forum at Kennedy-King College to discuss the proposed expansion.
“For the railroads, for Norfolk Southern, Chicago is a most important city,” said Smith, the railroad vice president.
“It basically is the handoff, a baton if you will, almost in a relay race, with railroads coming from the East Coast, the West Coast, Canada and Mexico,” he said.
Chicago is the country’s largest freight hub, handling half of all U.S. intermodal trains and a total of $3 trillion worth of cargo each year, according to the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning.
Smith said that ensuring the Chicago workforce is diverse is a railroad priority. He didn’t provide specific numbers but said the railroad employs 500 to 600 workers in the Chicago region at any given time. He showed a pie chart indicating that about two-thirds are Black, Latino or Asian.
Norfolk Southern won’t be able to break ground on its 47th Street expansion, he said, unless it complies with a city of Chicago requirement that 24% of the work will go to firms defined as minority-owned.
The city adopted its first so-called set-aside program for minority- and women-owned contractors in 1984. But today, minority-owned firms still capture a far smaller percentage of business opportunities than their proportion of the population, both in the private sector and at City Hall.
During the quarter that ended June 30, the city of Chicago’s procurement department made 26% of its payments to minority-owned businesses, according to city data. Yet, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, nonwhites made up more than 65% of the city’s population.
In a six-county area including Chicago, nonwhite firms capture just 4.5% of all private-sector construction payrolls, according to a 2021 report by Colette Holt & Associates. This Chicago company specializes in monitoring affirmative action programs. Nonwhite people account for about a fifth of the population in this area, which includes Cook, DuPage, Kane, Lake, McHenry and Will counties, according to census data.
Johnnie Bonds, who owns Dynamic Wrecking & Excavation Inc. in South Holland, and Kareem Broughton, owner of Structure Re-Right Inc. in Chicago, attended Smith’s presentation at Kennedy-King.
Weeks passed, they say, as they tried unsuccessfully to get Norfolk Southern officials on the phone. In November, they finally got a chance to bid on demolishing a house owned by the railroad.
The two African American men say they’re angry they never had a chance to bid on moving the dirt that Norfolk Southern needs to elevate its expanded 47th Street yard. This work, along with a contract for a new parking lot at 63rd Street, went to an Indiana firm.
Broughton is also president of Black Contractors United, a lobbying and training group for dozens of African American construction firms in Chicago. He said the railroad still hasn’t contacted him, as Smith promised at Kennedy-King, to help his members put together joint bids for large contracts.
“This isn’t confusing,” Bonds said. “If you want to do right, then do right. Just hire people and put them on the job. That’s all you got to do.”
Norfolk Southern spokesman Spielmaker said the
expansion of the 47th Street yard will generate $85 million in contracting opportunities. The railroad can’t open the bidding, he said, until the city transfers the streets and alleys needed for the expansion. Norfolk Southern is committed, he said, to “inclusive sourcing” and is looking forward to working with Black Contractors United and other interested groups.
As an example, Spielmaker said that when Norfolk Southern expanded its 63rd Street yard in 2021, the railroad required that 33% of the work go to minority- and womenowned contractors. This exceeded the city of Chicago’s minimum requirements by 5 percentage points.
Norfolk Southern is also working with a public-private partnership called CREATE, or the Chicago Region Environmental and Transportation Efficiency Program, to sponsor training, job fairs and other events to promote minorityand women-owned contracting and employment, Spielmaker said.
The five other major railroads in the United States, plus city, state and federal officials and union leaders, all participate in these CREATE events.
Today the dirt piles that Bonds said he never got to bid on stand 50 feet high over 57th Place and Normal Boulevard, just 100 yards from the vacant lot where Edwards once lived.
The streets for several blocks around are eerily quiet, with no pedestrians and almost no traffic, except for trucks carrying dirt. Small bulldozers run up and down the hills, shifting around the dirt.
Bonds is not the only person upset about the piles.
Alicia Frizzle said the piles have been there for at least a year, and she describes them as an atrocity.
She said they cover the exact spot where her father ran an auto repair shop for over 20 years. In addition, wind gusts frequently carry dust from the piles straight to the front door of her house. That’s in addition to fumes from the trucks.
“Seeing those piles makes me think, ‘what happened, and how is it that a community that once was vibrant has been turned into a rail yard,’ “Alicia Frizzle said.
Plans for a nature trail
Alicia Frizzle works hard at connecting with nature. She did a 17-mile hike in October and bikes regularly with her Labradoodle named Grace. But she said there’s too much broken glass near her house, so she has to load Grace and her bike into her car and drive 3 miles to the lakefront.
Alicia said she loves sitting quietly along a hiking trail, listening to birds chirping and looking up at the sunshine, as she tries to reconnect with her faith and with her long-term goals in life.
This kind of tranquility just won’t be possible on the Englewood Nature Trail, which will start a few hundred yards from her house, she said.
“The only way you can
come even remotely close to having a peaceful moment over there is to stop all the trucks from running up and down 59th Street,” she said. “The trucks are very, very noisy. They run all day and all night.”
She said she also worries about security on the trail.
The 1.75-mile trail would be built atop a weed-choked embankment that precursors to Norfolk Southern constructed in 1917 and abandoned half a century later, according to the city of Chicago.
Newly planted trees with rugged roots would soak up the creosote or coal tar used to coat railroad ties in the neighborhood for over a century.
But 59th Street, which the city has officially designated as a truck route, will still run parallel to and 200 yards south of the trail for its entire length. Moreover, two giant intermodal terminals — Norfolk Southern on the east and CSX Corp. on the west — lie at either end.
With construction expected to begin in 2026, a significant design challenge will come at the “lookout” organizers are planning for the trail’s eastern end.
They want an open, inviting space to welcome visitors up and onto the trail. But as these visitors look east across the busy Norfolk Southern tracks, they’ll encounter what, for many whose families previously lived there, will be painful memories.
Jeff Frizzle said he got a bittersweet feeling when he saw a preliminary map showing that a wetland area could replace his auto repair shop and an adjacent junkyard at the base of the lookout. He’d suspected something like this could happen, but he said he had received no official notice before seeing the map in November.
“I would love to see the neighborhood change and
I welcome gentrification,” Jeff Frizzle said. “I just wish they’d be more transparent about it so I can make better plans for my future.”
A long-term vision
Organizer Seals believes that transforming the abandoned embankment into a linear park, or rather, into a series of miniparks linked together by walking and biking trails, provides Englewood with its best opportunity in many years for respite.
He said that the city could try to limit traffic on 59th Street to electric trucks that are cleaner and quieter than diesels.
Seals said he hopes the trail will spark a network of vertical farms, restaurants, and food processing centers that can provide healthy and affordable alternatives to the Whole Foods, Aldi and Food 4 Less grocery stores closing up all around Englewood.
Along with incentives for the zero-emission industries the city will be trying to attract anyway, Seals said he hopes this “agroeco district’’ will create hundreds of jobs and project a “positive Black culture unprecedented in the U.S.”
At the same time, Seals said, community-controlled nonprofit groups will buy up land to restrain the kind of explosive gentrification that swept through Wicker Park when The 606 opened in 2015.
The city, which has extensive land holdings in Englewood, will also be working to address residents’ concerns about gentrification near the trail, Lightfoot said at a Dec. 2 news conference. At this same event, Lightfoot also said she’s committed to funding the trail in full. Organizers have raised $26 million in federal and city grants for the trail so far, and Seals said the total cost could be three times that amount.
Seals said Englewood residents may yet come up with better ideas for utilizing the long-abandoned railroad.
But he makes no apologies for the vision he and others have been refining for a decade.
These dreams are hard to transform into reality, he said, especially in the face of corporate and political hierarchies — including the railroads — rooted in the use of slave labor and the removal of Indigenous communities in the United States.
“You can’t just skip over that in terms of how we got here, and who you’re still negotiating with, and how they see communities that don’t look like them or don’t fit their interests,” Seals said.
“We see ourselves in the community of Englewood as salvaging what was left behind. We see value in what we have, which is making something out of nothing,” Seals said. “To us, this is the Black story in America.”