East Chicago: Steel, Lake, and the Price of Industry

You are skirting the southern shore of Lake Michigan in a zone that, for most of the twentieth century, defined what American industry looked like at full throttle. East Chicago, Indiana sits just across the state line from Chicago, and its origin story is inseparable from steel.

Inland Steel was founded in eighteen ninety-three in Chicago Heights, the creation of a businessman named Joseph Block and his son Philip. Within less than a decade the Blocks received an offer they could not refuse: fifty acres of lakeside land on the Indiana shore, free of charge, to any company willing to spend at least one million dollars building a steel plant on the site. The location was ideal. Lake Michigan could supply the cooling water a blast furnace needs in enormous quantity. Several major rail lines converged nearby, allowing raw ore to arrive cheaply and finished steel to ship out to the nation. Inland accepted the deal and established its Indiana Harbor Works in nineteen oh one.

What followed was one of the most concentrated bursts of industrial growth in American history. Blast furnaces rose along the lake. Open-hearth furnaces and rolling mills followed. By the mid-twentieth century the Indiana Harbor Works had grown into the largest steel complex in the United States, capable of producing roughly nine and a half million tons of steel per year. Employment at the East Chicago plant peaked in nineteen sixty-nine at about twenty-five thousand workers.

But the same industrial intensity that built the city also poisoned it. The chemical plants, oil refineries, lead smelters, and steel operations that made East Chicago famous left behind layers of toxic contamination. By the nineteen eighties, state and federal agencies had confirmed the soil was laced with lead and arsenic. In two thousand nine, the West Calumet Housing Complex and the surrounding blocks were declared an EPA Superfund site. Residents, many of them working-class families with nowhere else to go, lived for generations near one of the most contaminated patches of land in the Midwest.

East Chicago remains a study in the long bargain American cities made with heavy industry: jobs and prosperity in the short run, and a cleanup bill the community is still paying a century later.