Chicago’s other river: Planners dream of a recreational rebirth for Calumet River

For more than 150 years, the Calumet River has been a vital part of the Chicago economy.

It’s also polluted and not welcoming to recreational users. While it may take decades, a planning process by the city and pushed by community advocates could make the river more inviting.

That would be a big change.

Initially, grain elevators dotted the banks of the river, but in 1875, a steel mill opened near 109th Street, and that was the beginning of Southeast Chicago’s manufacturing heyday.

Chicago’s steel industry was formidable. Several mills employed tens of thousands of workers and cranked out steel to build major structures, including the Sears Tower.

By the time Elwood Blues (Dan Akroyd) jumped the raised 95th Street bridge in the 1980 movie “The Blues Brothers,” the steel industry in the United States was on the verge of decline. That same year Wisconsin Steel, a successor to the mill that opened along the Calumet in 1875, shut down.

With the collapse of the steel industry in the 1980s, the land along the Calumet River became populated with bulk storage, scrap metal, warehousing and other businesses that don’t fill the void of the high-paying steel jobs.

“Steel mills were the economic engine for this community,” says Rod Sellers, director of the Southeast Chicago Historical Museum. “People came for the jobs. They stayed for their whole lives.”

The industry brought three waves of new residents to the Southeast Side, Sellers says. The first wave included Northern Europeans, such as Germans and Swedes, followed by Polish, Croatian and other Slavic immigrants. Later in the 20th century, the mills attracted Mexicans and Blacks during the Great Migration.

Area residents are interested in seeing a transformation even though it will take time.

“What the community would like to see is more opportunity for residential and commercial development — to no longer be so inundated by industry,” says Yessenia Balcazar, senior planning manager for Southeast Environmental Task Force.

Her organization hosted a boat tour in October — documented here by the Sun-Times — to get a view from the river.

The tour started at Crowley’s Yacht Yard on East 95th Street, traveled south on the Calumet past the Ford Motor Co.’s Chicago Assembly Plant and then back north out to Lake Michigan and along the former U.S. Steel South Works site.

Chicago is reviewing its land-use polices in low-income communities following a federal civil rights investigation that led to a binding agreement in 2023 to reform the city’s practices.

Focusing on use of the Calumet will spark improvements, though it can take decades, says Adam Flickinger, planning director for Friends of the Chicago River.

“It’s really thinking now what that future looks like,” he says of the planning process.