The southeast side of Chicago was once a bustling and flourishing neighborhood. With boutiques, bars, and blue-collar jobs, the community was thriving. Situated between waterways, Lake Michigan, and just a hop, skip, and a jump away from the Indiana border, the neighborhood once employed 40,000 workers. However, by the time filmmaker Steven J. Walsh grew up in the neighborhood, it was a totally different landscape. “Everyone I knew was struggling and now I’m seeing why. My generation was a product of the aftermath of deindustrialization and disinvestment in our community. We were left to pick up the scraps after everything was gone and we were raised by the survivors of this devastation, hardened by what happened to them in life.” With the collapse of the U.S. steel industry in the 70s and 80s, the southeast side is now a relic of the prosperous life that once was.

Southeast Chicago was once a place where you turned in your high school diploma, picked up your hard hat, and started working at one of the mills. “There’s a spirit in my neighborhood that is as tough as the steel we produced,” says Walsh. Gomez worked at Republic Steel but lost his job after all the mills closed in the 80s. Thousands of blue-collar workers lost their jobs Folks had to discover new ways to survive. Walsh says, “A decent chunk of those men and women died shortly after losing their jobs from alcoholism or drug overdoses. Some folks, mainly white people, were able to leave the neighborhood for better opportunities elsewhere. But for most Black and Brown people, redlining prevented many of them from getting bank loans and leaving. And those that couldn’t leave had very little opportunity to provide for their families.” Deindustrialization impacted the area and expanded class inequality for everyone living there.

Residents are also actively protesting the Confined Disposal Facility (CDF), a site in Lake Michigan that contains toxic dredged material, which has been operating since 1984 and was supposed to close in 2022. Juanita Irizarry, the executive director of Friends of the Park, told me that they have been waiting for the CDF to be converted into a park for years. “Now, just a couple of years short of the date when it was scheduled to be closed and capped so it could become parkland, we have had to take up this fight to keep the Army Corps of Engineers from expanding and extending the life of this pollution dump both to make progress on our vision to complete the ‘Last Four Miles’ of connected lakefront park and path system all the way down to Indiana and up to Evanston, and to keep an egregious environmental injustice from continuing.”

“Even though the rest of the world gave up on us, we haven’t and never will,” Walsh says. “That’s what makes us southeast-siders. We don’t stop fighting, and we don’t let obstacles get the best of us.”   v