Conscious Choice: The Case for a Calumet National Heritage Area

January 2000 | News of the Earth

The Case for a Calumet National Heritage Area

by Dave Aftandilian

Picture a marshy land where tens of thousands of birds stop to rest and refuel on their spring and fall migrations; where over seven hundred plant species thrive, eighty-five of them rare; where you can find ecosystems as rare and diverse as sand prairies and wetlands; and where you can enjoy a canoe or bike ride or just a quiet stroll along a waterway.

Now picture a burned-out industrial wasteland, home to twenty-five Superfund sites and more than ninety other sites where the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) monitors the release of toxic materials; where the stench from the landfills and emissions from chemical wastes make your nose itch and your eyes burn; where abandoned, rusting factories seem to be more common than working ones; and where people suffer from a variety of illnesses likely related to the toxic materials in the air that they breathe, the water that they drink, and the dirt that their kids play in.

Believe it or not, those two places you just imagined are one and the same — the Calumet region of northeastern Illinois and northwestern Indiana. Stretching from the far south side of Chicago to Porter County in Indiana, and from the Illinois and Michigan (I&M) Canal National Heritage Corridor on the west to the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore on the east, the Calumet region is truly a land of contrasts, rich in both natural areas and industrial heritage, but imperiled by economic disinvestment, toxic wastes, and unscrupulous development schemes.

How can we preserve the natural and cultural heritage of the Calumet area, while also stimulating economic development there? How can we change people’s perceptions of the region from the perfect place to dump Chicago’s wastes to a great place to visit?

A number of dedicated area residents think they have an answer — create a park in the Calumet region. Then the endangered natural areas would be preserved, the history of the region would be showcased, and residents would have a reason to be proud to say they lived there. The Lake Calumet Study Committee began working on a proposal for such a park in 1985, and the standard was taken up by the Calumet Ecological Park Association (CEPA), which formed in 1993.

But it was not until 1996 that the park proposal received official recognition in Washington, when Congressman Jerry Weller (R-IL) inserted a provision into the Omnibus Parks and Public Lands Management Act requiring that the National Park Service (NPS) conduct a study of the feasibility of establishing a "Calumet Ecological Park." The NPS released their Calumet Ecological Park Feasibility Study in August, 1998. Among the study’s conclusions was the following:

"Today, the Calumet region exists as a unique mosaic of globally rare natural communities and significant historic features in juxtaposition with heavy industry. Heritage area designation would afford the rare opportunity to revitalize an industrialized region and protect natural communities, demonstrating benefits to both the built and natural environment."

A wide-ranging coalition of groups in both Illinois and Indiana that are interested in exploring the possibility of heritage designation for the Calumet region formed earlier this year, and is holding monthly meetings in Indiana. The coalition is called the Calumet Heritage Partnership, and is currently finalizing its by-laws; it plans to apply for nonprofit status soon. Another related coalition on the Illinois side is the Lake Calumet Ecosystem Partnership, which received approval last year to become part of the Illinois Department of Natural Resources’ Conservation 2000 program.

Why Protect the Calumet?

Before discussing the potential benefits of National Heritage Area designation, we should consider what’s so special about the Calumet region. First, there are the many important natural areas, which have somehow survived more than a hundred years of industrial abuse.

Take Gibson Woods and Ivanhoe Dune and Swale, for instance, which the NPS study says support 297 and 273 species of native plants, respectively; even though these sites are separated by less than a mile, they have in common only 62 percent of those species. Or the largest rookery of state-endangered Black-Crowned Night Herons in Illinois, with hundreds of nests extending across three privately-owned wetland areas. Or the Calumet City Prairie, which is cited by the Illinois Department of Natural Resources as one of the most important natural areas in the state.

But what truly makes the Calumet area unique is the fact that these high-quality natural areas exist side by side with heavily impacted industrial zones. As Betsy Mendelsohn put it in her excellent article "Rustbelt Hell or Redevelopment Heaven?" (available on the Illinois Sierra Club’s Lake Calumet Wetlands web site; see below): "This spent landscape is the flipside of all the impressive things Chicago has built over the years; without its grime, the glittering Oz of the Loop couldn’t exist."

While the Potawatomi Indians and early French trappers valued the Calumet marshes for their abundance of plant and animal resources, Chicagoans didn’t pay much attention to the region — except as a fun place to hunt and fish — until the railroads opened it up to industry in the mid-1800s, leveling the dunes and filling the wetlands. George Pullman built his railroad car factory and model town for his workers in the area in the late 1870s, which helped attract other industries, most importantly steel companies. By the 1920s, the Calumet region had eclipsed the Pittsburgh area as the leading steel-producing region in the United States.

Along with industry came thousands of workers, many of them immigrants from a wide variety of countries. They were housed in a number of factory towns such as Pullman and Marktown, as well in the Altgeld Gardens and Trumbull Park Homes public housing complexes built in the 1930s and 1940s. Two of the most important events in U.S. labor history occurred in the Calumet region — the 1894 Pullman workers’ strike and the 1937 Memorial Day massacre at Republic Steel, in which ten strikers were killed when club-wielding police officers broke up a picnic the strikers had organized.

During the 1970s and 1980s, many of the factories closed, leaving behind their heavy metals, PCBs, and other hazardous wastes, along with the sanitary landfills the City of Chicago has been building around the area since World War Two. To protest the continued dumping of wastes in this area, Hazel Johnson and others from Altgeld Gardens formed the grassroots group People for Community Recovery in the 1980s, which has served as an important catalyst to alert people locally and nationally to issues of environmental justice.

The City of Chicago, the EPA, and a variety of other groups are working to clean up the wastes and to redevelop brownfield sites for new industrial developments, but these projects suffer from a lack of funds and centralized planning. The region is still vulnerable to destructive development schemes, such as Mayor Daley’s proposal to pave the Hegewisch region for a third Chicago airport, which was defeated by local residents in 1991 (many of whom went on to form CEPA).

Potential Benefits of a Calumet National Heritage Area

Now, with the proposal to designate the Calumet region as a National Heritage Area, we have a golden opportunity to promote sustainable development based on highlighting the region’s strengths rather than dumping on its weaknesses. According to the National Park Service’s web site, "a‘National Heritage Area’ is a place designated by Congress where natural, cultural, historic, and scenic resources combine to form a cohesive, nationally distinctive landscape arising from patterns of human activity shaped by geography." As the NPS suggested in its 1998 feasibility study, that definition describes the existing mix of resources in the Calumet region quite well.

Though National Heritage Areas are a relatively new kind of national designation — the first such area, the I&M Canal National Heritage Corridor, was established in 1984, and only eighteen such areas have been created so far — they have already proven to be a powerful tool for preserving natural and cultural heritage through locally crafted and administered management plans.

"Local" is a key word for National Heritage Areas; when federal legislation is passed establishing such an area, a local management entity — often a nonprofit group representing a partnership of local stakeholders — is named to oversee it. That management entity receives funds and technical assistance through the NPS, but is solely responsible for crafting management plans and carrying them out. Property within the National Heritage Area remains with its original owners.

Designation as a National Heritage Area can help a region in a number of ways. First, designation brings federal dollars to the area to help preserve, restore, and manage its natural, cultural, and historic features. For instance, Phyllis Ellis, the Executive Director of the I&M Canal National Heritage Corridor Commission, said that $250,000 per year is provided directly through federal appropriations to the corridor; NPS provides additional assistance in the form of staff support.

As mentioned earlier, the I&M Canal Corridor was the first designated National Heritage Area, and according to Ms. Ellis, it receives the least money in direct appropriations from the federal government. The Ohio and Erie Canal National Heritage Corridor, on the other hand, has received $1 million per year in direct federal appropriations for the past several years (it was designated in 1996). Although funding amounts for National Heritage Areas vary widely, it’s probably a safe bet that direct federal appropriations for such an area in the Calumet region would be between $250,000 and $1 million a year for at least several years — certainly a significant amount by anyone’s standards.

But direct federal appropriations are only one way that National Heritage Areas can help bring in development money. As Ms. Ellis notes, National Heritage Area designation affects "not just the direct federal funding given, but to what extent you can leverage funds from other federal, state, and local sources." For instance, according to Emily Harris, vice-president of the Canal Corridor Association, the most money for the I&M Canal Corridor over the years has come from the federal Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act (ISTEA, recently renewed as TEA-21), which has funded $26 million worth of preservation and trail development projects along the corridor.

The Illinois Department of Transportation was interested in helping channel funds from ISTEA to the I&M Canal Corridor, says Ms. Harris, in part because "the projects all related to each other and made a broader whole" as part of the I&M Canal Corridor umbrella; "This really did help get funds" for the region. Several hundred thousand dollars were also made available through the Water Resources Act (which is the authorizing legislation for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers). While these particular federal laws might not be the best sources of funds for a Calumet National Heritage Area, the point is, as Ms. Harris puts it, that "once legislation [designating a National Heritage Area] is enacted, it becomes a vehicle for people to attach different pots of funds to."

Many National Heritage Areas also specifically seek to increase tourism revenues for their regions. For instance, the Steel Industry American Heritage Area of Pennsylvania, also known as the Rivers of Steel Heritage Area, wants to preserve and celebrate the story of Big Steel and related industries in the region "and to open it to tourists and other visitors." While data on tourist revenues brought in by existing National Heritage Areas are extremely difficult to come by, it is probably safe to say that development of a National Heritage Area in the Calumet region would help encourage tourism there.

But perhaps the biggest benefit of a Calumet National Heritage Area for the region’s residents would be giving them a sense of pride in their home. Bowden Quinn of the Grand Calumet Task Force in Indiana says that one of the main goals of the Calumet Heritage Partnership "is to restore regional pride; we want people to be proud of being from the Calumet region, to want to be there, and to participate in protection efforts."

Possibilities and Problems

After years of neglect, things may finally start to look up for the Calumet region if National Heritage Area designation is pursued for it. Unfortunately, this is far from a done deal.

Quinn, for instance, is not sure that such designation would help his group in their efforts to improve the land, air, and water quality of Grand Calumet River and its surrounding ecosystem. Part of the problem from the Indiana point of view, he says, is that "there is a significant group [in Indiana] who oppose any federal involvement to protect natural areas, who feel such involvement is a plot by the U.S. to take over the region." The same group has expressed opposition to the proposed Grand Kankakee National Wildlife Refuge, according to Quinn, and probably opposed the creation of the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore as well.

This presents a serious problem, because a significant portion of the Calumet National Heritage Area would be located in Indiana. The U.S. Congressman for this part of Indiana is Pete Visclosky (D-IN). According to Andre Gaither of the NPS in Chicago, Congressman Visclosky and his staff have been invited to all the Calumet Heritage Partnership meetings, but they have so far chosen not to attend. Thus, the Congressman’s position on the proposed National Heritage Area designation is unknown, and when I called his press secretary to ask him about this, my call was not returned.

One potential way to assuage the worries of those in Indiana who are opposed to any federal involvement in natural areas in the region would be to include language in the legislation for the Calumet National Heritage Area that specifically forbids the use of federal funding to the heritage area for the acquisition of property. Garnering more grassroots support in Indiana to outweigh those opposed would also help, and the Calumet Heritage Partnership is actively pursuing this strategy, according to Mike Boos of CEPA.

In fact, coalition-building is probably the most important activity that the Calumet Heritage Partnership could pursue right now. According to Quinn, the environmental groups in the partnership have been cohesive for a long time, but the recent participation of historical groups "has really invigorated us." Currently the partnership is trying to reach out even more to bring local government, recreational groups, and businesses on board. Diane Banta of the NPS in Chicago feels that forming such strong and broad local partnerships helps strengthen the case for National Heritage Area designation, and is also necessary for the designation process to run smoothly.

The good news is, as soon as the Calumet Heritage Partnership feels it has enough supporters on board, Congressman Jerry Weller of Illinois is prepared to introduce legislation to designate the region as a National Heritage Area. Congressman Weller’s press secretary, Ben Fallon, said that "Congressman Weller is waiting for a consensus between the folks on the Indiana side and the folks on the Illinois side. As soon as that happens, we will introduce legislation on it."

Considering Mayor Daley’s overall support for parks and brownfield redevelopment, it seems likely that the City of Chicago would support the designation as well. Another very positive sign in this direction is that "the city is interested in developing an environmental center on the southeast side that would be similar to the North Park Village Nature Center," according to Jessica Rio of the city’s Department of Environment. Rio further stated that this new nature center would "integrate in terms of programming and exhibits the natural heritage and also the industrial heritage of that area of the city, recognizing that both the natural environment and the industrial potential in that area are tremendous."

What You Can Do

The Calumet Heritage Partnership is always looking for new members, both individuals and organizations. You can contact any of the organizations listed below for more information about the partnership, including date and time of the next meeting.

Another very helpful action that Illinois and Indiana residents could take would be to contact your elected officials and tell them that you support designation of the Calumet region as a National Heritage Area. Let them know that Congressman Jerry Weller will be sponsoring the bill, and that they should contact his office for more information or to sign on as cosponsors.

Resources

Calumet Ecological Park Association; Marian Byrnes, 773-374-8543; Mike Boos, 773-646-6373

Grand Calumet Task Force; 219-473-4246; gctf@igc.org

National Park Service, Chicago; Andre Gaither, 312-353-1613

Sierra Club, Illinois Chapter; 312-251-1680; illinois.chapter@sierraclub.org

Congressman Pete Visclosky, 219-884-1177

Congressman Jerry Weller, 815-740-2028

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