12/19/2023 0 Comments South works time out chicago![]() ![]() Before the steel mills got there, South Chicago had a lakefront amusement pier when South Works was torn down, the site was converted into a public park. The neighborhood's life cycle came full around. "The day before they shut us down we had a big meeting with the chairman of Envirodyne Industries, the company that owns it," Ralph Gomez told a Tribune reporter when Wisconsin Steel was shuttered in 1980. Steel’s South Works steel mill.In 1992, the closure of the massive mill devastated South Chicago. Often mistakenly referred to as South Side, South Chicago was once known as home to the U.S. Workers were discarded, sometimes without so much as a straight story. The ChallengeSouth Chicago is one of 16 lakefront neighborhoods near downtown. Mills were abandoned, a harbinger of America's deindustrialization. Three decades later, the bottom fell out. Initially wages were low and strikes frequent, but eventually steelworkers made a decent living - as can be seen in the tidy, brick homes built in the neighborhood after World War II. Accidents were frequent and many times fatal. ![]() In 1909, it noted that the ethnic map of Central Europe had been redrawn on the Far South Side: "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." "No matter how little English an immigrant may have at his command he is pretty apt to mention Chicago in the opening stage of his conversation after reaching America," the Tribune reported in 1895. A Tribune reporter who visited South Chicago in 1908 observed "the turning of alley woodsheds and barns into lodging houses." The neighborhood went from sparsely populated to greatly overcrowded as the mills recruited myriad workers, many from abroad. ![]() Steel, at one time the world's largest business enterprise. Other mills opened on the Far South Side - Wisconsin Steel, Republic Steel, Acme Steel, Youngstown Sheet & Tube - and Ward's South Works was incorporated into U.S. Chicago ended up losing the 2016 bid to Rio de Janeiro. Whether or not the product of nicotine intoxication, Dunne's words were prophetic. Preservation Chicago also singled out Chicagos 2016 Olympic bid as something that would have had a negative impact on most lakefront parks. South Works is situated in South Chicago, a working class neighborhood that has struggled with disinvestment and population loss since the decline of the steel industry in the 1970s. A Tribune reporter aboard discounted the mayor's prediction: "It may have been the effect of the 5 cent Hegewisch cigar, which he held between his lips, vainly trying to keep lit." ![]()
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