A gas-fired power plant sits eerily in the center of a lakefront parcel now devoid of almost all other remnants of the great South Works steel mill that opened in 1880 and once employed 20,000 on Chicago’s South Side. Except for two massive sets of ore-retaining walls, rising an incredible 50 or 60 feet at points, the rest of these 573 acres has been flattened.
It isn’t until you stand on the western edge of the property, and look across at the deteriorating South Chicago neighborhood that once hummed to the same beat as the mill, that you realize how much history was built up on this site — the land sitting on fill that is about six feet higher than the grade at the residential street level.
Most people would look at the parcel and not be able to see beyond those remnants of a glorious industrial past. But Eileen Figel tours the site and has a vision of new homes for households of various types and incomes, a new school, lakefront parks, a bird sanctuary and a modern industrial business park. Instead of an outdated eyesore, she sees the immense ore walls along the site’s North Slip as a European-style arts and recreation district, with arches and grottos and festival grounds.
In short, she sees a completely new Chicago neighborhood.
As the project manager in the city’s Department of Planning, responsible for overseeing the redevelopment plan for the South Works site, Figel stands center stage in a process that will remake what is almost universally considered to be the most significant undeveloped urban parcel in America.
It is a complex undertaking involving the private sector in owner USX and potential new industrial users, the public sector in the city and state and federal governments, local community groups and civic organizations representing lakefront and park interests. It is a project that will take a decade to complete if everything goes perfectly, a project that will leave its mark on the city long after that. It is, as is anything this big in this city, a political bellwether as well.
“I never drank coffee until I got this job,” said Figel, 36.
Although Mayor Richard Daley has been known to make aides nervous, driving them to drink more than coffee, Figel says the mayor has been attentive to the opportunities for the site, even suggesting reading material to her from articles he has perused, and in general being a strong supporter of the planning process for the highly-sensitive site.
“What was critical was that we all worked together — the city, USX and the community. And now we have a plan that we can implement that the vast majority of the people are supportive of,” Figel said.
The negotiations with USX have always been delicate. The steel giant, which shuttered the South Works plant in 1992, has always said its first choice was to sell the entire parcel outright. But while officials say many developers from all over the country have toured the site, no one was ever willing to make a bid for the whole acreage.
“We always wanted not to become a developer,” said John Zaborske, USX Realty Developments Midwest regional manager. “But we are willing to listen to what makes sense. The city has taken a great lead in this. We’ve got to be comfortable with that.”
That was the way the only deal to be done on the property so far came into being. Solo Cup Co., which had all but decided to leave the city and move operations out of state, worked a three-way deal with USX and the city for 107 acres of the site for a new production facility. The deal met several objectives — establishing the industrial viability of the southern portion of the site, retaining manufacturing jobs in the city and giving USX some return on its land and the clean-up costs it has shouldered.
“The rest of this site will benefit tremendously from the Solo Cup deal. The actual per acre price we received wasn’t as important and the fact that somebody was buying and the public sector was going to be putting in all the infrastructure,” Zaborske said.
The Solo Cup deal might have happened without the framework document in place, the parties agree, but the fact that is was there made the sticky details easier to iron out.
For its contributions, the city is getting about 20 percent of the site donated as open space, 123 acres that will include a linear lakefront park 300 feet wide along the entire property from 79th Street to the mouth of the Calumet River.
“I think this is a good public investment,” Figel said. “It’s structured to link the first park donation (from USX) to the Solo Cup deal and then the rest of the land is donated in phases as the site is developed.”
But the city’s commitment to redevelopment will not stop at the gates of the former steel mill. The plans include an effort by the city to revitalize the surrounding South Chicago neighborhood, as well, with a program of acquisition of vacant lots and abandoned buildings that would pave the way for affordable housing development.
“Until the neighborhood starts getting revitalized and amenities are put in place, it is going to be difficult to develop the range of housing we want (on the northern portion of the USX site),” Figel said. “Right now there are 60 to 70 vacant acres if you add it all up in the neighborhood. But over time, we think this can be a strong market.”
For Figel, being in position to be tapped for a redevelopment effort like this one was simply serendipitous.
“I’ve been lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time a number of times,” Figel said.
Figel attended college at the University of California in San Diego, majoring in chemical engineering “for no good reason,” she said. “There were 10 kids in my family and almost all — including my dad and in-laws — are engineers. But I changed and got an economics degree — I just picked one where I could get out in four years.”
From San Diego she came to the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana and received a master of urban and regional planning degree in 1987. Early jobs included planning stints in Baltimore and Long Beach, Calif.
Her Long Beach experience included plenty of lessons in neighborhood economic revival.
“We had to organize community involvement across racial, ethnic and cultural groups and then build consensus on how to attack the problems,” she said.
“You go into it with huge hopes that you can solve all the problems in the community, even one where 95 percent of the households are below the poverty level. But I got a big bucket of cold water thrown on me. I realized that communities are never going to turn around unless they have jobs.”
But the work, which in one year alone saw her attend 123 community meetings, took its toll.
In January 1993, she came back to the Midwest as a senior planner for north suburban Highland Park and promptly got caught up in the redevelopment of Ft. Sheridan, arguably the most visible and potentially lucrative tract on the North Shore. The experience there, of working with Highland and Highwood village officials as well as private sector developer Richard Stein, served her well as preparation for the even more demanding task of planning for the USX site.
Figel has no plans of her own to change jobs again anytime soon. She would like to see the implementation of the USX plan further down the line, although she did say if the Navy–which still operates on a portion of the Ft. Sheridan land–were to leave that site she would like another crack.
But eventually, she says, she would like to turn her attention to another difficult redevelopment question, but one that is scattered about the city.
“I think the next challenge are commercial arteries. The city needs a clear and comprehensive strategy for dealing with them, especially along streets where there really is no market there anymore,” she said.
