Exit Zero by Christine J. Walley

Author:Christine J. Walley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
Published: 2013-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FOUR

The Ties That Bind

Despite having lived for many years in other places, I always return to Southeast Chicago. Members of my family still live there, and these are ties that bind. However, when I go back home now, the area where I grew up is very different. It is strange to think that, in only a few generations, my family witnessed the rise and fall of the steel industry in the Calumet region. From my immigrant great-grandfather’s first venture into the mills during their rapid expansion in the early twentieth century, to my grandfather’s struggles in a unionizing era, to the deindustrialization suffered by my parents’ generation, their lives were inextricably intertwined with that of an industry. This industrial way of life, once considered the bedrock of the US economy, has proven far more ephemeral than any of us could have imagined.

On these return visits home, I am struck, however, by the way the old steel mills continue to assert their presence, despite their physical disappearance. Immediately after the shutdown of Wisconsin Steel in the early 1980s, I would sometimes drive past 106th Street and Torrence Avenue with my dad. As we passed the abandoned buildings of the mill where he had spent so many years of his life, he would mutter bitterly about how he’d like to blow the place up. The empty buildings, overgrown with weeds, seemed to mock him. But it wasn’t until 2000, twenty years after the mill shut down, that the last of the buildings that had so offended my father were finally torn down. Even today, the enormous lot—like those of Republic and US Steel–South Works—remains largely vacant. Although there have been various plans for these spaces over the years, so far these vast brownfields have proved too polluted or too costly to convert to new uses.1 Through such open, gaping wounds on the landscape—and through their more invisible toxic legacy—the steel mills still manage to dominate Southeast Chicago.

When I go back to visit Southeast Chicago now and ask my mother for stories about the closing of Wisconsin Steel, she gently chides me: “That was a long time ago. Things have changed. You can’t keep hanging onto the past.” Despite the fact that I left long ago, I realize that for me it’s impossible to move on without a full reckoning with that past. For the country, I believe, it is the same. There is an unacknowledged national need to look back, to reevaluate how and why certain choices were made, and to consider the causes and consequences of deindustrialization and how it has transformed the class landscape of the United States. Without such a reckoning, the social dislocations and resentments set in motion by deindustrialization will continue take their human toll and will haunt the political culture of the United States in destructive ways.

Although I tend to think of my ties to Southeast Chicago as primarily familial or psychological, I’ve been forced to acknowledge, as an adult, another kind of tie that binds, one rooted in biology.

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