(Pre) Postindustrial Industrial Wilds and Northwest Indiana
jonah pruitt
(Pre) Postindustrial Industrial Wilds and Northwest Indiana
jonah pruitt
For my grandpa, with special thanks to Julie Bargmann and Matthew Jull
Contents
Preface
12
Part I: Precedent and Theories
14
IBA Emscher Park
15
Landschaftspark Duisburg Nord
17
Gardens, Landscape, Nature: Duisburg-Nord, Germany by Elissa Rosenberg
28
Industrial and Landscape Theories
44
Part II: The Calumet Corridor
56
History of Northwest Indiana
57
The Fallout
70
Interview with Richard Henderson
76
Part III: The Sites
88
Selection of Sites
89
NWI Rail System
90
Inland Steel
98
U.S. Steel Gary Works
108
U.S. Steel Midwest Plant
118
NIPSCO Michigan City Station
126
Part IV: Proposals
136
General Goals
137
Inland Steel
138
U.S. Steel Gary Works
140
NWI Rail System
142
NIPSCO Michigan City Station
144
U.S. Steel Midwest Plant
146
Part V: Conclusion(s)
148
Our Collective Wilderness
149
Looking Forward
150
Notes and Credits
154
- Social consequences (Strikes, community identity, culture.)
C. Calument Corridor
B. Region Context NWI
A. Postindustrial Landscapes
-Chicago industrial history (focus on 19th C on)
-Connective tissue and maps -Presence of National Park/ State Park/towns -Ebbs and flows (what’s moving)
A/2 Precedent
E. Urban Wilds
- Ecological Damage and response -Introduce sites (Gary Works, US Steel, Midwest Steel, NIPSCO, Rail)
-Economics of industry
G. Conclusions
8
-Summation of findings and Duisburg Nord -Plans for future research/design work -Hopeful statement
D. The Sites
F. Proposals
-History -Local Concerns -Adjacencies -Historic Importance -Specific Issues
-Collages -Artifacts -Reuse
E/2 Interview with Millworker (My Grandpa)
9
Production/Urban Wilds Design Phase Editing Phase
Phase I
Writing Phase
Research and Writing
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Urban Wilds Exhibition
Spring Break
Research Phase
Spring 2019
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Work Somewhere Continued Reading/Research/Documentation
Phase II
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Local Site Visit
Home/Site Visits
Summer 2019
Local Site Visit
Extended Research and Visits/ Thesis Plan
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Barcelona
Continued Reading/Research/Documentation
Phase III
Fall 2019
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Local Site Visit
Local Site Visit
Thesis Development
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Thesis Design
Phase IV
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Design
Thesis Excecution
Spring Break
Spring 2020
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ase
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Home/Site Visits
Local Site Visit
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Final Review
Exhibition
Print Book I
Finishing
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Write Thesis Methodology Finishing
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Print Book II
Visit Duisburg
Edits
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Write Thesis Documentation
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Graduation
Final Review
Finishing Print Book III
Edits
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Preface
Industry has been the backdrop for much of my life in the Midwest. The smokestacks and cooling towers of Northwest Indiana seemed like unchanging, mysterious bodies that were always on the periphery of daily life. Going to the beach in the summers, we could look in either direction and see steel mills or power plants framing the view to the blue water and white sand. With a mill-worker for a grandfather and high school built and funded by the same steel mill, I always felt that industry would be permanent. Last year, in 2018, I learned that the NIPSCO Michigan City Power Station was slated to be decommissioned within the next decade.1 This was a shock. The cooling tower of this plant is iconic, known in my family as ‘the cloud-maker’, and the idea of the power plant closing instantly felt strange. The plant is on the shore of Lake Michigan and occupies a place of prominence in Michigan City that feels almost ceremonial. Immediately next to the marina, the new Indiana Dunes National 12
Park, the outlet mall, and Main Street, the NIPSCO Power Station towers over the entire area. With it going away, what was coming next? The impermanence of such a massive site led me to this research. What will happen to Northwest Indiana if its main industrial areas are decommissioned? Are there different ways of closing sites like NIPSCO that do not result in a chained-off brown field in an area plagued by brown fields? It is only a matter of time before all the industrial sites of Northwest Indiana close down due to obsolescence regulation, and there needs to be a better plan than leaving the sites to decompose completely separated from the communities that depended on them for work. Landscape architects, urban designers, community activists, and politicians have been dealing with the de-industrialization of areas in fascinating ways for decades. The first part of this book is a case study of the IBA Emscher Program in the Ruhr Valley of Germany is used to show applications of these theories in the beautiful Landschaftspark Duisburg-
Nord. Next, the research looks at the pertinent theories and discussions around Decommissioned and abandoned sites. The writings of Croen, Braae, Berger, Kirkwood, Girot, and Geuze inform much of the positions taken in this research.
thesis that specifically looks at a possible design for the NIPSCO Michigan City Power Station after its closure.
The hope of this project is to start a discussion about what transformation of these sites could be beyond a simple leveling of the land and leaving With this background knowledge, it bare until there’s money to the specifics of Northwest build again. No industrial site is Indiana are analyzed. The truly ‘decommissioned’, they regional history, ecology, and have an afterlife that changes landscape of Northwest Indiana everything in its vicinity. If this reveal the complex relationship afterlife is not carefully designed between industry and its and researched, the results identity. An interview with my could damage communities and grandfather, a mill-worker with the environment for decades to a three and half decade long come. Please enjoy this book, it career in steel, contextualizes was an absolute joy to write and the feelings and attitudes of the research. people whose lives depended on the functioning of the mills. -jonah pruitt Five sites are then selected from this research that show the most B. S. Arch University of Cincinnati M. Arch Student at the University of potential for transformation. Virginia A brief history and analysis of each site builds towards individual proposals and ideas for redevelopment. These proposals, completed during my study of Urban Wilds with Julie Bargmann, are collages that suggest the potentials of each site. These proposals will inform an ongoing 13
Part I: Precedent and Theories
14
IBA Emscher Park, A New Type of Development
‘Chaos cannot be organized, it can only be understood in abstraction’ Peter Latz, Rust Red21
In the late 1980’s, the International Building Exhibition (IBA) Emscher Park sought to change the face of dilapidated industrial sites along the entirety of the Ruhr Valley in Germany. The area had seen the collapse of many of its mining and steel production facilities, with many massive sites standing empty for years at a time. The area spans seventy by six kilometers and is overlayed by active and inactive industrial sites, cities, parks, and a very complicated rail system.1 This decades long project sought to transform this region beyond ‘cleaning up’ the industrial areas and leaving them in wait for capital to decide they were worth redeveloping. The core of the IBA Emscher Park was five key tenets that seem simple enough, but they represented truly innovative goals for industrial landscapes that had rarely been implemented before. They were: ‘-Ecological transformation of the Emscher river system -Work in the park -New residential and 15
1
The Ruhr Valley Region of Germany, Research Gate
neighborhood development
industrial wastelands, one in particular being the Meiderich -Industrial monument Iron Works in Duisburg. This conservation and industrial site, with over a decade of culture continuous effort and love from Latz and Partners, would -New proposals for social, eventually become Landscape cultural and sports activities’ Park Duisburg-Nord. This project is the flagship design of the IBA Peter Latz, Rust Red2 Emscher Park, distilling many of the ideals and possibilities These principles have guided of industrial landscape over one hundred projects in transformation.3 It is provides a fascinating methodology that the region of differing scales will inform the proposals for the and uses. Integration of dozens Northwest Indiana sites later in of different governing bodies, agencies, communities, activists, this book. As a case study, few designs are better to begin the and design teams was key to the success of the IBA Emscher more general conversation about industrial wastelands and the Park. This increased the time frame of the projects but resulted role of wilds in current landscape design thinking. in more refined designs that ensured that all interested voices were heard. Many of these projects dealt directly with 16
2
Blast Furnace Square, Christa Panick
Landscape Park Duisburg- layers: the rails, planting plan, existing buildings/structures, Nord It is difficult to overstate the international importance of the Landscape Park Duisburg-Nord project in landscape architecture and how people think about industrial site management. The park represented a new type of thinking about these areas, where the history, structures, ecology, and social function of the site are integrated into a beautiful, functional whole. Latz’s concept for the park was to create a series of independent
water, and promenades. Each layer would be autonomous from the other, so that if one is altered by the city, the others can still function.4 This idea also can be seen as a microcosm of the IBA Emscher Park project as a whole, where a series of independent, autonomous parks and open areas are linked together into a cohesive whole. Latz even writes in his book about Landscape Park Duisburg-Nord, Rust Red, that the design team never wanted to show a map of the site 17
with all the layers shown. That map would be ‘chaos’.5 The stacking of layers, juxtaposing different systems against others to create meaning and interest, is a core rule of the design. The layers each have their own governing rules, and those rules have sub-rules, which builds the logic of each system independently. The simple operation of hierarchical rules creates a landscape that is rich in surprises and beautiful moments that cannot arise when working with such a massive site as one whole. Before discussing the layers independently to understand the methodology of Latz and Partner, it should be noted where they were working. One of the buildings on the site, ‘the Storehouse’, was used as the base for the whole office for nine months during the design of the project. They had daily access and contact with the landscape. The office was also entirely open to the public during this time to inspire and build trust with the public.6 This design was not shipped to a far away office then dropped back on the site. Continuous contact with the site was essential to the success 18
of the design. A deep, local understanding of the area paid dividends throughout the project. They occupied the material of the space as they designed what it would become. Railway Park The first layer of the park is derived from the expansive rail network that is interlaced with all areas of the park. When first documenting the site, the overgrown tracks provided quick means of movement through the site for the designers, and this aspect was maintained to the final design. The circulation of the site is based on the tracks because of their gentle slopes and easily maintained organization. Many of the stairs, bridges, and structures of the railways were reused to provide access to really interesting areas, such as the compartments of the bunker site.7 The logic of the railways dictated much of the organizing concepts for the rest of the parks while also making an interesting, hilly terrain based on the embankments of the tracks. Latz describes the tracks as a ‘linear system’ that makes it especially useful in connecting the different components of the park.8 The
3
Competition Railway Park Plan, Latz and Partner
4
Views from rails over the ore bunkers, Latz and Partner 19
aggressive recycling of the rails was the beginning of the massive recycling efforts of the site overall. There are thirty bridges that are part of the Railway Park, creating a deeply complex and interesting promenade to view the park.9
Promenades Connected to the Railway Park, the new Promenades of the park are connected to the entry and interpretation of the landscape. Latz writes that these more traditional ‘Town Promenades’ are meant to provide important connections between the industriallydemanded neighborhoods around the park.10 Larger, but not as pervasive as the Railway Park, the Town Promenades are the interface between the residential areas and the inside of the park. They are a different linear system that links the five main entrances of the park for pedestrians and cyclists. Latz writes about how the language of these promenades was established:
communication infrastructure with simple means and little information. The typical crosssection of the Town Promenade is a stone chippings path, five metres wide, lined with plane trees on both sides - a tree species which was able to withstand environmental pollution even at the height of industrial development in the Ruhr Region. There were several existing avenues in the park before development began. We extended some of them, for example, along Emscherstrasse and at Emstermannshof.’ Peter Latz, Rust Red11
This use of known languages of promenades from the 19th Century - avenues, rows of trees, etc. - allowed people to connect and use this new type of landscape in a more defined way. If there were anomalies along the path, the idea of the promenade allowed for an identifiable way to pass around.12 Looking at The Emscher Promenade, this concept is easily seen. The blending of old and new ideas and methods is a hallmark of the Landscape Park Duisburg-Nord ‘Our Town Promenades were designed using familiar elements: and will be seen in many of the other rules and systems that avenues, rows of trees, shade. Spaces with normal qualities comprise the park. - that was exactly what was needed. It meant developing a
20
5
The Emscher Promenade, Peter Latz in Rust Red
21
Water Park One of the central tenets of the IBA Emscher Park is the revitalization of the Emscher River ecosystem. The health of the river has been compromised by decades of industrialism and the Landscape Park Duisburg Nord design deals with this issue explicitly as one of its many systems that comprise the park. The Water Park of the site started as an open sewer and series of canals that once served the mill. Water was an essential part to the wants of the community, but the levels of pollution were extreme and working with the existing canal structure was difficult at best. Over many years, sewage pipes were added along the canals to collect the polluted water while clean water would stay on the surface. The clean water would come from multiple sources, the river, the groundwater below a neighboring cemetery, and collected rainwater from all the buildings on the site.13 This was by no means a small feat. Latz wrote: ‘This [filling of the Water Park] did not happen for a long time. Even after the wastewater pipe was installed the water did not flow. Only water in the central
22
Clear Water Canal showed some movement caused by the Water Trails. For over ten years the New Old Emscher had no source. Now a grilled concrete cube north of Ingenhammshof spouts water from the Oberhausen cemetery where the ground water table is constantly being lowered. Thus, the solution the Emscher Cooperative had initially proposed at the time of competition was implemented. The aquatics and floating plants, reeds and rushes had almost completely disappeared in the intermediate dry phases. They have fully re-grown and now trace the course of the New Old Emscher.’ -Peter Latz, Rust Red14 To get good results in these kind of projects, patience is necessary. Now that clean water flows, a beautiful water aeration feature, powered by an Archimedean screw and wind, spills water in the lush Clear Water Canal. The water that flows through the site becomes cleaner, helping the overall water system of the Ruhr Valley. The maxim ‘A park with no water is no good’ was the attitude of the public.15 Luckily they had the patience to wait for this beautiful implementation.
6
Clear Water Canal, Latz and Partner
7
Water retention, Latz and Partner
23
Planting Plan The next system of the park is the Planting Plan. When the competition began on the site, there were many different plants and microbiomes on the site created by the disruptions of industry. Inspired by how the site was initially found, with different phases of natural succession, Latz sought to build a planting plan that emphasized and showed this process. Documenting the existing different types of landscapes and the plants that comprised them, the creation of categories was possible. These categories led to ‘Vegetation Patches’ based on the existing plants, the type of soil, level of contamination, and eventual end use of that area. Six different soil and vegetation types were seen on the site. Different succession strategies and plant varieties are best suited to handle each level and type of contamination.16 The principles for the vegetation strategy are: ‘-Generally the development of the park is based on succession and the resultant diverse plant communities
-Green spaces are defined with trees and, if required, with shaped hedges. -Not only paths but large areas of gravel turf which can be used are provided.’ -Peter Latz, Rust Red17 These rules govern how each of the six areas are planted and maintained. It should also be noted that large areas of the park are left wild to grow naturally without much intervention. The blending of methods seen in the Promenades strategy is on full display here as well. Traditional gardens are used to act as ambassadors for the more wild and unkempt areas that are part of the plan. As the area succession takes place over time, the park is allowed to change and evolve as a dynamic process. The set, static gardens of the 19th Century are forgone for this more interesting approach. This allows for incredible biodiversity to continue from the time where the area was not managed.18
The use of succession can be seen all over the park and serves as both a great park model and -Gardens are used as intermediaries and as a symbol of means to maintain biodiversity and picturesque views. transformation 24
8
Sinter Park during Fall, Latz and Partner
9
Planting Plan Concept, Latz and Partner
25
Existing Structures The last and probably most famous system used by Latz and Partner is their use of the existing buildings with new programs that engaged the community in new and amazing ways. Most of the buildings are centralized on the site, where they come into contact with the other systems that control the park. The largest of these buildings is Blast Furnace 5, the iconic central viewing tower for the whole park. Latz describes it as ‘the most expensive and most complicated viewing tower in the world.’19 That complexity of the existing machinery, piping, and structures are allowed to remain, showing off the technical and industrial might that made the mill possible. Key areas are cleared for planting, new program, or sometimes completely inaccessible for safety reasons. The tension between where one can go and where one can only see (the Ore Bunkers) makes the park even more mysterious and worth exploring. Almost all of the buildings are open to the public and one has access to the entire park, all times of the day. This radical openness is key to the success of this design. 26
Some of the uses that have been inserted into the structures are: -Diving tank for scuba divers -Concert Hall -Skate Park -Meeting Place for young people -Rock Climbing -Playgrounds -Art Galleries -Outdoor Theater -Gardeners’ Shed The list goes on, but the playfulness and willingness to experiment and try some ‘riskier’ programs is a large component to the success of the park. Some structures serve as ‘Mega Signs’ that mark the site from a distance. Though this is not a specific program, their presence is essential to the park. The rust red double pipe that extends across the site, the smokestacks, blast furnaces, and new windmill all make up this category.20 The variety of scales from ‘Mega Signs’ to minuscule hidden gardens around the site add to the feeling of discovery and ownership that Landscape Park Duisburg-Nord is known for. The next part of the book is an essential essay about Duisburg written by Elissa Rosenburg.
10
Piazza Metallica, Latz and Partner
11
Ore Bunker Climbing Walls and Play Area, Latz and Partner 27
Gardens, Landscape, Nature: Duisburg-Nord, Germany Elissa Rosenberg This essay has been formative in the development of this research and this book could not give it proper justice without including it in its entirety. Many of the essential ideas of industrial landscape transformation are described in this essay and will help the next part of the book about landscape theories have a little more context with the case study of Duisburg-Nord.
In 1968 Robert Smithson wrote: “The ‘pastoral,’ it seems, is outmoded. The gardens of history are being replaced by sites of time.”1 Yet the pastoral landscape, with its bucolic imagery and its associated discourse of nature as a redemptive force, remains firmly rooted in the popular imagination and still operates as a default mode in landscape design. From its ancient origins, the pastoral ideal evolved into a uniquely American response to the accelerating pace of industrialization in the mid-nineteenth century,2 becoming the dominant aesthetic for the design of the expanding public landscape of America’s cities. But if the development of the pastoral aesthetic expressed our conflicted relationship to technology and industrialization at a particular moment in history, the current process of de-industrialization calls forth a parallel question: Is there a new landscape aesthetic emerging from industrial ruins? How, in this postindustrial age, do we re-imagine our relationship to nature, technology, and landscape? This is the question posed by Duisburg-Nord, the work of the landscape architects Latz +
28
Partner, which opened in 1994 on the site of the former Thyssen steelworks in the northern Ruhr district of Germany. The park has received much attention for its sensitivity in retaining the site’s strong industrial presence. The sense of decay has remained intact, vivid, and sometimes surreal. But unlike many other projects on former industrial sites which celebrate the architecture of production, at Duisburg-Nord it is the industrial landscape that is brought into focus. Not only does the design of the park play on the visual and spatial drama of the blast furnace itself—with its immense chimneys, gantries, and subterranean spaces—but, perhaps more provocatively, it takes as its subject the complex site surrounding the plant which, at first glance, appears as a chaotic landscape of rail lines, slag heaps, and volunteer species. The landscape design subverts conventional expectations. The decayed forms are not treated as romanticized ruins or as a spectacle meant to instill an experience of the sublime. The aesthetic of the sublime, as theorized in the eighteenth century by Edmund Burke, Immanuel Kant, William Gilpin, and others, celebrated the experience of the
divine and sense of the infinite inspired by extraordinary and terrifying natural landscapes— the rocky mountain tops, rushing waterfalls, or deep chasms that, by virtue of their immensity, power, and grandeur, would arouse deep emotions of wonder mixed with terror.3Though originally invoked by natural settings, the sublime was later expanded to include the constructed landscape in what became known as the “technological” or “industrial sublime.”4 While the tendency of artists and designers working in industrial sites has often been to cultivate an aesthetic of the “industrial sublime,”5 choosing to heighten the sense of awe inspired by the relics of industry, Peter Latz’s work suggests a different relationship to the industrial landscape. Discussing his approach, he writes, “The result is a metamorphosis of landscape without destroying existing features, an archetypal dialogue between the tame and the wild.”6 The power of this place lies precisely in the tension that exists between “the tame and the wild”: between intervention and neglect, between the ordinary and the bizarre. In this work, “nature” is not “wild”; it is inextricably 29
bound up with technology and shaped by social relationships and cultural memory. David Nye notes that the sublime is by definition something extraordinary—it virtually requires that one be an outsider. The dualistic vision of man and nature, implicit in the aesthetic of the sublime, has been replaced at Duisburg by the clear realization that nature, too, has become a human artifact. Just as the work avoids trading in the imagery of the picturesque ruins, so too does it argue against an aesthetic of the sublime. Latz’s work re-frames the “strange” through a dialectic with the ordinary.
site, and, more A knot garden in a former bunker subtly, how do they alter our relationship to the spectacle of decay and lay the ground for a new occupation of this space?
The garden is used variously as a counterpoint to the blast furnace and as a means of interpreting and re-framing the industrial landscape. The garden articulates the theme of time,8 understood at Duisburg in terms of the cycles of destruction and cultivation, as well as through its resonance with history and cultural memory. as such, it represents the antithesis of the sublime, which exists outside time and represents both This dialectic is expressed at an escape from history and a Duisburg-Nord most powerfully through the trope of the garden. retreat from physical nature into the realm of human spiritual A series of gardens have been values.9 On the other hand, the planted within and around the ruins of the blast furnace, using a garden celebrates physical natraditional horticultural language ture and the act of making; of clipped hedges, knot gardens, beyond the garden is the gardener—every garden holds the parterres, bosks, and rose garimprint of the human hand. Latz dens. The disjunction between this formal landscape vocabulary writes: “I believe that using gardens . . . is in fact the only and its industrial setting is both way of understanding a landunsettling and profoundly movscape. You have to work with the ing. Why the strange juxtaposition? What do the gardens mean, actual material.”10 The garden is or perhaps more important, what used to investigate, to express, and to experiment with the physido the gardens do?7 What is their role in remaking the Thyssen cal material of the site. 30
Perhaps more fundamentally, the use of the garden at Duisburg-Nord suggests an attitude to regeneration rooted in a social vision. In Latz’s notion of “metamorphosis,” site regeneration is bound up with cultural change. Regeneration begins by cleansing the site’s polluted water and toxic soil, but is meaningful, finally, in the transformation of the blast furnace into a new social space. Latz notes that “what is useless acquires new value as an element through its use.”11 The design of the park succeeds in preserving this strange landscape while transforming its meaning, ultimately by altering our relationship to it and absorbing it anew into our everyday lives. The Duisburg gardens tame and re-familiarize this alienating landscape so that it might become used and lived in new ways: metamorphosed into a new public landscape.
Landscape “Syntax”: The Structure of the Park The commitment to decoding, understanding, and representing the physical site is at the philosophical core of Latz + Partner’s work. The design of the park is based upon an analytic, almost
archaeological approach that seeks to investigate how the industrial landscape was made, how its various components functioned, and what impact production has had on the shape of the land. It is the landscape’s structure, not its imagery—however seductive or sublime—that ultimately establishes a sense of place and offers a record of the site’s history. The search for site structure, or what they call its “syntax,” leads Latz + Partner to reject the notion of a “master plan.” The park is designed as a series of autonomous sequences or “layers” that are linked at specific points. There is no unitary composition or unfolding narrative as we move through the park, but rather a synchronic experience of vertically stacked systems. Landform, in particular, plays an important role in the conception of the landscape, but not in a sculptural or object-oriented sense. The earth is not sculpted into a bizarre or extraordinary landscape, but instead is used to describe the ordinary landscape of production. Landform offers up clues to the systems that operated here, whether by tracing the patterns of the railroad through its embankments and 31
tunnels, or of the canal system typical of the region. The composition of the park is thus expressed in stratigraphic terms. Each linear system slices through the park like a datum, defining and “explaining” the section. The selective preservation of the site’s infrastructure serves to describe and map the history of industrial processes through their imprint on the land. The primary layers of the park include the sequences of promenades, the Bahnpark (or Rail Park), and the water park, consisting of canals and reservoirs. Each of these sequences is meant to make the existing systems coherent, legible, and usable once again. The intricate structure of the rail lines, a defining feature of the region’s urban form, provides the organizing principle for movement through the park. A new promenade has been built on the piers of the old railroad trestle that traverses the site. This elevated catwalk lets the body take the place of the machine, allowing a person to move through the park as the train once did—to experience physically the spatial logic of production, and to view the site from a new privileged vantage point. Other paths follow the imprint of 32
the harp-like railbed at the former switching yard, an elaborately engineered earthwork of ridges and depressions, now transformed into myriad parallel paths offering multiple choices of circulation. The second system that structures the park is the Emscher canal. Like the railway, the canal system has become a defining feature of the Ruhr Emscher canal after restoration. The polluted Emscher canal, which once functioned as an open sewer, was one of the most visible reminders of the ravages of industry. One of the site’s main transformations is a newly cleansed canal—now part of a closed recirculating system fed by rainwater, which is visibly captured from the buildings in existing overhead pipes and flows across pavements through a maze of open channels and rills that traverse the site.
“Accepting the Situation”: Experimentation, Disturbance, and Regeneration Latz’s stance toward the industrial history of this region is reflected by his simple assertion that “people have to accept the situation.”12 He approaches the proj-
ect without moralizing or judging history. His design aesthetic is based foremost on a careful reading of the site as it currently exists, and on an investigation of the exhausted industrial forms, the processes they evoke, and the disturbed landscapes they have left behind. The sense of depletion and decay is treated delicately, with full awareness of how easy it is to dilute the power of the existing landscape while redesigning it. Latz “accepts the situation” that nature has been disturbed and continually manipulated by man. This statement represents a profound shift in park design—from its roots in nineteenth-century progressivist ideology and its typically pastoral aesthetic, to the more contemporary ideology of the environmental movement of the 1970s. Implicit in this pragmatic attitude toward destruction is a significantly different approach to regeneration.
ways; and on the other hand, to search for new solutions to the problems it poses. “Everything is good,” says Latz, “even polluted soils (except toxic ones), since everything is recycled.”13 His approach is empirical, physical, and experimental, engaging all the materials of the site. Underlying this pragmatic position is an affirmation of the power of making—and remaking—and a sanguine belief in our ability to make choices. “Accepting the situation” is about being at home in the world—that is, in the physical, material world. It is about making, more than healing; it is about celebrating everyday life, not the sublime; it is about living with contradictions in a fragmentary world, and abandoning any notion of an idealized nature, apart from man.
This position leads Latz to reject the conventional goals of site restoration by taking a different approach to disturbance. Rather than attempt to restore the site to The design of Duisburg attests its prior condition, he accepts the to the fact that Latz’s notion of “accepting the situation” is not a site’s aberrant processes and materials, and works with them passive one, but just the oppoin order to encourage existing site; it is at the root of his invenformations to continue to evolve. tiveness. His acceptance of the existing reality impels him, on the Latz notes that the resulting fanone hand, to discover and exploit tastical forms could not be created by either art or nature alone its unique qualities in unusual 33
but lie somewhere in between. 14 This dynamic view of natural processes is in direct contrast to the notion of “stabilizing” a site, which would imply arresting the natural processes acting upon it. For example, Latz argues that “it is absurd [to] attempt to cover slag-heaps with vegetation.” Erosion is a natural principle of the material and should not be prevented but rather encouraged, to allow strange and fantastic formations to continue to develop and express the condition of disturbance. Reclamation efforts, he notes, are generally directed toward preventing this—by planting, sculpting, and regularizing disturbed industrial sites to ensure that nothing at all will change.15
is a serendipitous by-product of industrial waste. It is the discovery of such intriguing secondary phenomena that leads Latz to claim that “destruction has to be protected so that it isn’t destroyed again by re-cultivation. New places have to be invented, new places at the fault lines between what was destroyed and what remained, between structures still recognized as cultural landscapes and those that are historically devastated.”17
Underlying the work is a preoccupation with the meaning of history. Latz preserves the ruins on the site, to the greatest extent possible, as instruments of memory and as an evocation of a lost heritage—however fragmentary that representation has Latz + Partner have chosen become. He lets the objects tell to leave large parts of the site their own stories, without trying untouched. Most of the decayed to synthesize or summarize; he ironworks have remained intact. is not interested in creating a Extensive areas of successional monument to history, or a museforest have also remained, leav- um. The artifacts resonate with ing large birch groves that have real associations. But the furnace colonized the black waste mate- is no longer a furnace; it has rial of the coal-washing process. assumed another life. For Other non-indigenous steppeLatz, the site is meaningful as a like species grow on the thin soils park insofar as it transcends its of the coal-soot mixes, casting particular moment in history and sediments, and the sands and becomes open to the future. The slags of a former manganese ore key design strategy is to create a depot.16 This unusual vegetation new context for these artifacts so
34
that they lose their specificity and begin to undergo a process of metamorphosis. This sense of metamorphosis is the focus of most critical discussions of the work, and the surprising mix of new activities at Duisburg is, for many critics, the measure of its success as a public park. The fantastic qualities of the derelict structures have attracted imaginative new uses—for example, the huge twelve-meter-high walls of the ore bunkers now serve as climbing walls where an alpine club with over 2,000 members makes its base. A diving club has also established itself in the park, exploring the underground lakes that have formed in the groundwater-flooded chambers of the lower storage bunkers. Along the bunker walls, a play area has been created in which a huge winding metal chute snakes through the walls like an ironic, oversized serpent. Large fairs and festivals are held in the central public areas, and performances take place in a new amphitheater built against the backdrop of the blast furnace. (The amphitheater is constructed of concrete mixed with recycled brick gravel, made from the ground stones of the former sintering plant.) In addition to these large group activities, the
residential margins of A new play area along the bunker walls the park offer protected places for community gardens and children’s playgrounds, and the extensive successional woodlands provide a large area for walking and cycling. Just as “destruction has been protected” in the zones of the coal tailings to encourage exotic new forms of vegetation to take root, so too have the dreamlike destroyed forms of the old blast furnace been retained to inspire a new social space. Some of the new activities have established themselves spontaneously like colonizing species; others have been introduced intentionally through adaptations of the existing structures, or with the careful addition of new elements. But Duisburg’s vibrancy as a public space depends less on “programming” the park in a conventional sense—that is, predetermining a fixed set of activities for each space—than on a subtle design strategy of recontextualization. This strategy has created an open-ended, improvisational quality to the life of the park, encouraging a diversity of uses and users to colonize the landscape. The interventions on the site serve to re-frame the indus35
trial landscape by making the strange familiar—and, perhaps more poignantly, the familiar strange.
have succeeded in re-contextualizing the site without diminishing its strangeness or its scale. This is achieved by domesticating the space—that is, in the At first, there is a frisson in the sense of making us at home—by juxtaposition of foreground and inviting occupation, and invoking background—of Turkish mothers a sense of ownership through wheeling strollers against the im- subtle and strategic interventions probable, threatening backdrop that re-frame, rather than erase, of the blast furnace. But then the the decayed relics. The industrial passage of joggers and cyclists landscape becomes domesticatand rock climbers and strolling ed by implicating us in it. One of old couples establishes its own the foremost means of asserting rhythm, and we are shocked by a human presence within the site how unshocking are these juxta- is through the introduction of new positions. Why shouldn’t this be a ways of moving through it—with jogger’s path, or a baby’s playstairs, catwalks, and promeground? This alienated—and nades—so as to populate this alienating—behemoth becomes landscape and suggest an the new urban ground for casual alternate reading of its vastness. rhythms of encounter, dissolvBy inserting the human body into ing boundaries both physical the machinery of production and and psychological between the altering our physical relationship space of domesticity and proto it, its monumental scale is duction. This reorientation is transformed—as we touch the further reinforced by a larger ur- forbidding, rusting structure, ban strategy guiding the design: see it up close, or climb up inside the park is used to connect the it. The overpowering image of the once discrete surrounding towns, ironworks perceived from afar, which have now grown togethand all that it suggests as an icon er to form a continuous urban of sublime immensity, is chalfabric. What once operated as a lenged at the moment we enmarginal space outside the local gage it physically and experience residential realm now occupies it as occupiable space. the center of seven towns. The other strategy used to assert Yet remarkably, Latz + Partner a human presence within the site 36
is the planting of gardens. They first appear at the entrances to the park, beginning the process of re-contextualizing the site— at the main entrance, Cowper Place, as well as at the many secondary entrances that form critical thresholds between the site and the loose, amorphous fabric of disparate towns that surround it on all sides.18 These entrances, with their formal landscapes—circular clipped hedges around small parking lots, bosks, and allées—establish the urbane, civic language of a large city park. The visual paradox inherent in the use of such landscape codes and conventions is experienced most powerfully at the main entrance. Located in front of the blast furnace, the space of arrival is planted with a regular grid of blossoming fruit trees—a lavish, grand gesture evoking a public garden, played straight except for a single detail: the rusted COR-TEN stakes that support the trees.19 The juxtaposition of the flowering bosk and the furnace presents the argument of the garden for the first time, at the moment of our first encounter with the blast furnace. While it might be said that the new windmill serves as the most obvious icon for the park, almost manifesto-like
in its clarity and confidence as a symbol, it is the power and incongruity of the image of the garden and the blast furnace that most immediately conveys the essence of Duisburg-Nord. In her work The Garden as an Art, Mara Miller claims that the role of the garden is To mediate those tensions or polarities which are important for a given culture. . . . The garden is a way of framing the terms within which verbal or theoretical debate can take place. Every garden is an attempt at the reconciliation of the oppositions which constrain our existence; the act of creating a garden, however limited it may be, is not only an assertion of control over our physical surroundings but a symbolic refusal of the terms under which life has been presented to us and an insistence on determining the terms of our existence. As such it is always an act of hope.20 To be sure, the simple image of flowering trees set against the blast furnace evokes the idea of renewal. But the profound sense of hope that it inspires derives not only from the power of the image itself—the dramatic contrast of its lush delicacy against the brutality of the ironworks, of
37
new growth contrasted with the sense of decay—but from the conceit of the formal gesture, the civic language of the bosk as a portal to a grand public park. Latz+ Partner reach back to a traditional landscape design vocabulary of garden making to re-frame the Thyssen site as a public park, using a well-understood landscape convention to recode the site’s function and meaning. The use of the garden, then, establishes a measure of familiarity. It also recasts the site as a recognizable public space, in a long tradition of public spaces, thus recovering this landscape from the urban margins and granting it a new civic meaning. The twinning of the furnace with the bosk puts the forbidding strangeness of the site we are about to enter on new terms. Together, these images affirm the possibility of reinventing the site, projecting it into a new future. The act of creating a garden, as Miller states, is an assertion of control over our physical surroundings; it is a subversive act, and an act of hope.
and vernacular use; they also invent new forms that challenge accepted definitions of what a garden might be. Some of the gardens are used as signifiers of a civic landscape in bosks or allées; other gardens evoke the domestic scale of the front yard, composed of commonly used plants such as roses, boxwood, and hydrangeas (in the bunker gardens), muscari and scilla (in the SinterpLatz). This is the plant palette of local vernacular gardens, used here to establish familiar domestic tropes and resonate with a sense of the everyday. In other cases the gardens become a physical manifestation and elaboration of the conditions of disturbance. Pioneer species21 adapted to disturbed soils are used to form bosks and allées: a bosk of ailanthus was planted near the former sintering plant, and at the neumühl entrance we find an allée of fastigiate black locust.
Gardens have also been planted in the ruins of the bunkers that once held piles of ore and coal deposits. Viewed from a catwalk The gardens are used expansive- above, they form a series of garden rooms that have been insertly and eclectically at Duisburg, mixing the strange with the famil- ed into the massive two-meter walls. New openings have been iar. Latz + Partner ground their sawed through the concrete to gardens in historical traditions 38
create a series of doorways, allowing the visitor to occupy and move through the rooms in sequence. Some of the gardens are effectively roof gardens, growing above contaminated soils that have been transferred to the bunkers and capped to preserve the exotic vegetation that became established in these disturbed soils. Soft-textured, brilliant-colored lichens and mosses have taken hold in the extremely acidic soil in one of the bunker structures. Others are more self-consciously designed, suggesting garden follies: a formal knot garden fills one bunker “room,” alongside an installation made from logs of indigenous birch, reminiscent of the work of Andy Goldsworthy. Some gardens express the ecological disturbance of the site; others seem to defy it by replaying traditional garden forms in this incongruous setting. The eclectic quality of the bunker gardens speaks to the artifice of the garden, whose materials might equally be prized horticultural specimens or the volunteer species of toxicity—“everything is good,” and so, in some ways, interchangeable. This message is even clearer at a small garden hidden in the
woods, near an abandoned orchard. Here we discover a series of garden plots filled with assorted industrial detritus— rusty screws, gravel, and other construction materials—laid out among the grid of apple trees. This industrial giardino segreto highlights the experimental nature of the garden, illustrating Latz’s point that “we understand ways of managing the environment through the garden, like a scientist’s research plot.”22 In this case, the garden is quite literally a research plot of scrap materials arranged to create a new scrapyard taxonomy, sorting, measuring, and testing the recycled materials of the new garden. There are utilitarian gardens at Duisburg, too: the gardens that most directly manage the environment are the “working gardens” that have been designed to actively regenerate the site, such as the water gardens that are planted to filter and purify storm water. Here the garden takes on an explicitly regenerative function of biofiltration, which gives physical form to the natural processes active on the site. The analogy of the garden as a “scientist’s research plot” reinforces the idea of the garden 39
as a site of experimentation rather than a static work of art, whether intended for ornamental or instrumental purposes. True experimentation is defined by its open-ended quality, and the unpredictable results that often challenge the initial hypothesis. Here, the aesthetic of experimentation assumes, as its starting point, the dynamic flux of natural processes. Natural disturbance is accepted as part of that flux; it is neither aestheticized nor romanticized for the strange forms it produces. It is understood as a natural process that can be managed like any other within the overall design strategy—and should be manifested like any other. These processes are managed to different degrees; while some of the end states are predetermined, others are left open to natural succession and chance. This view rejects the commonly held belief in nature’s constancy and stability, an idea that is deeply ingrained in Western culture, and one that has dominated environmental thought.23 Latz + Partner’s conception of natural systems reflects the shift that has taken place in ecological theory in which the metaphor of equilibri40
um has been displaced by that of nonequilibrium, or flux. The definition of ecosystems as highly ordered, steady states, closed systems, has been challenged by recent reevaluations of the role of disturbance. In the earlier “equilibrium paradigm,” disturbance was viewed as external to the system; when it would occur (usually as a result of human activity), succession would restore the system to an equilibrium condition, which characterized the mature state of any system. This theory was first articulated by Frederic clements, in his 1916 work Succession, through the highly influential concept of the climax community, which was to dominate ecological research for the first half of the twentieth century. Implicit in this theory is the idea that the activities of humans are not part of the natural world and are often in conflict with its operation.24 While Clements’s concept of climax community has been questioned since the 1950s,25 the equilibrium paradigm was challenged most forcefully in the 1980s by statistical and probabilistic approaches that have revealed disturbance to be a frequent, intrinsic characteristic of ecosystems. Findings point to a wide range of adaptations
to disturbance, suggesting that succession is a highly probabilistic and contingent process, not the deterministic, universal, and linear process it was first thought to be. The nonequilibrium paradigm emphasizes “process rather than end point,”26 focusing on how systems actually behave. This fundamental revision to the understanding of ecosystem dynamics resonates with Latz’s fascination with the phenomena of contingency, chance, and adaptation. With a deep understanding of ecological processes, he embraces the dynamic flux of nature, including the forces of disturbance, which he insists must not be erased to fit a preconceived image of what nature should look like. Just as there is no inherent “balance of nature,” there can be no idealized conception of beauty in the landscape. Latz writes, “Our new conceptions must design landscape along with both accepted and disturbing elements, both harmonious and interrupting ones.”27 For Latz, nature cannot be thought of as pristine or autonomous, since natural processes are inextricably intertwined with the technologies that create and maintain them. This position undermines the idea of
nature as a redemptive force, a consistent motif of park design since the mid-nineteenth century and still alive today in various guises. Consider dieter Kienast’s proposal for Mechtenberg, another Ruhr site not too far from Duisburg-Nord. A group of artists, architects, and landscape architects met in the summer of 1992 in the Mechtenbergseminar to create a vision for the future of this steep landscape, a former mine. A small garden had been laid out at the top of the mountain at the turn of the century, surrounded by hawthorne hedges. This area, untouched for ninety years, gradually grew into a wood that swallowed up the original monument in the garden. This image gave rise to the new vision, which was dubbed “Sleeping Beauty”; the idea was to create a series of gardens that would be surrounded by tree trunks, preventing public access until the trunks would rot and fall down, “allowing the wood to grow undisturbed in this place for the next twenty years . . . it will remind us that the Sleeping Beauty eventually awoke, and tall and healthy trees will have risen from the polluted ground.”28 41
The contrast between the designs of Mechtenberg and Duisburg highlights the widely divergent meaning of regeneration in the two works. Kienast’s proposal withdraws the site from human use, based on the assumption that regeneration will occur when nature is simply “left to itself,” undisturbed by human intervention: the site will be “healed” as a body heals itself. Kienast’s proposal is a poetic interpretation of the notion of recovery inherent in the “balance of nature” metaphor. At the same time, it draws upon a deeper mythic meaning, evoking the recovery of a lost paradise. In the work of Latz + Partner, the idea of the garden has been pried loose from the Edenic narrative. The Duisburg gardens do not gesture toward a state of ideal perfection or harmony; they are not compensatory or utopian or filled with a sense of loss. Latz has suggested that the metaphor of the oasis is a more fitting metaphor for the garden than paradise, evoking a sense of tension rather than harmony. Regeneration is distinguished from recovery, if we mean that recovery of the mythic fullness of nature for which Sleeping Beauty yearns, in her long, deep sleep. The sense of loss and destruc42
tion that permeates our experience of the contaminated industrial landscape is allayed at Duisburg by the profound sense of possibility that comes with the belief in recycling, reuse, and, ultimately, reinvention. The gardens express a sense of the complexity of human engagement with nature, which is both destructive and regenerative. Yet their spirit of experimentation is inherently optimistic, based on an openness to new solutions, new forms, and new definitions that run counter to essentialist ideas of nature. The acceptance of disturbance and flux replaces the myth of recovery with an ethos of experimentation and making, and a renewed belief in human action. The gardens affirm that by “accepting the situation” of worldly imperfection and incompleteness, we also take responsibility for the repair of the world.
12
View from the secessional forest, Latz and Partner 43
Industry and Landscape
Industrial Wilds With the precedent of Landscape Park Duisburg-Nord in mind, we can now survey the writing and ideas that guided that project and imagine how they can be applied to the sites in Northwest Indiana. There is so much to learn and pull apart about not just Duisburg-Nord, but the entire IBA Emscher Park plan. This research indicates that the guiding principle of this series of projects was the idea of transformation on multiple scales. Small changes and transformations, when coupled with other changes, can change how an entire region is understood and used. Starting from a place of contamination and mystery and creating a new landscape that is cleaner and open is an incredible goal that takes many years and parties. Even when these projects are ‘done’, their transformation is never complete, they are always evolving with their surroundings and environment. Before exact 44
ways to transform areas can be discussed, we need to see how society’s vision of obsolete, empty, and wild industrial areas has evolved over time. There are still many conflicting views over how to talk about these relatively new types of spaces. The uniting principle to most of these discussions is the role of the wild and unhindered in industrial landscapes. These ‘Industrial Wilds’ are areas like the Ruhr Valley before the IBA Emscher Park took on revitalizing them. Expansive, closed off, mysterious playgrounds for plants to grow in and animals to call home. They exist next to urban areas all over the world, and they are beyond our control, they are wild. The concepts of Urban and Industrial Wilds have caught on in landscape architecture in recent years and there are many different ways of talking about this type of space. The limits to how people perceive wilds is not just in the landscape architecture world, the concept is widely explored in film, photography, literature, urban planning, and architecture. The interdisciplinary nature of wilds and how to deal with them is a rich discussion that goes so much further than real estate value or land use policy.
13
Concept art for Castle in the Sky, Studio Ghibli
One great example of wilds in art is the film Castle in the Sky (1986) by Studio Ghibli. The film centers on two kids as they search for the titular Castle in the Sky, a mysterious floating island that has not been occupied in a millenia. The mysteries and possibilities of the castle draw all sorts of pirates, governments, and explorers to search endlessly for it. Upon arriving after a difficult journey, the kids find a lush landscape in the clouds. Plants have taken over and extended natural succession has taken place, leaving the basic structure intact but almost indistinct from the plants that have engulfed the castle. The wild quality of the castle is amazing and the artistry that this film has in showing it brought tears to this researcher’s
eyes. The industrial wilds that we pass every day are similar. They are mysterious, closed off, and often full of unexpected moments of succession and lushness. Sometimes, there is no boundary between the wild and the built. Maintaining this feeling of wildness is where Landscape Park Duisburg Nord excels, making it an amazing tourist and cultural destination for the town. The core ideas of this research are: terrain vague, Berger’s ‘Dross’, Gueze and Girot’s ‘Second Nature’, and the concept of Urbs Fluxus as models for how to conceptualize industrial wilds and how possibly to think of new ways to integrate them back into our cities, environment, and lives. 45
Drosscape, Horizontal Wilds In his seminal text Drosscape: Wasting Land in Urban America (2006), Berger writes: ‘Dross characterizes the landscape leftovers, or waste landscapes, typically found in-between the stims and undervalued for many reasons (pollution, vacancy, natural conditions unsuitable for building, unprofitability, etc.). Plugging in Lerup’s terms—dross can be seen to be what I have been calling the “in-between” of a city’s urban fabric.’ -Berger, Drosscape1 This straightforward definition of a type of landscape that industrial wilds cleanly fits into is a good place for this research to start. Based on a manifesto written by Lars Lerup, Dross is the unused area between the programmed spaces of a city, called Stims. Berger uses aerial photography and satellite imagery to show how American cities exhibit their dross and stim spaces. The full depth and breadth of Berger’s research would be difficult to summarize in its entirety for this research, but 46
there are several key points to this theory that help define some of the contours of industrial wilds: -Empty spaces in cities are natural byproducts of growth and are unavoidable with how cities grow in the United States.2 -Horizontal expansion of American cities has drastically changed how landscapes are understood and creates empty, waste space.3 -Sprawl is a common term for this horizontal expansion, which has become the norm despite many issues associated with it.4 -The liminality, or in-betweenness, of many urban sites has come to define cities and their growth.5 -Dross can be any disused space, abandoned industrial sites, junkyards, parking lots, oversized infrastructure, empty lots, and other wild areas. The designer’s role in this process is undefined at best. Designers must create their own framework of understanding these sites and how to reintegrate them into their context. This theory is helpful for the same
reason that it is limiting to how we think of industrial wilds. Dross is a general way to think about a type of spatial condition and use. The aerial photography, though incredibly helpful in illustrating the pervasive nature of the liminal spaces in cities, does not show the peculiarities and do not comment on the individual qualities of spaces. They remain abstract and distant. Berger’s writing also does not provide new social programs that could help fill the voids of dross. Berger is much more interested in the
14
general state of cities that Fordist thinking created and now does not have an answer for. In a market economy with tight regulations and high barriers of entry to change and program dross, creative ideas and designers are needed. The generic quality of dross is very helpful in looking at the macro scale, but more lenses are needed to see what specifically about each site can be changes for the better.
Example of Dross in Drosscape: Wasting Land in Urban America (2006) 47
Terrain Vague Slightly older than Berger’s Dross but fairly new to architecture and landscape architecture is Ignasi di Solà-Morales’ concept of Terrain Vague from his 1995 article of the same name. Terrain Vague describes an unclear coding of disused space, where there is no clarity of use. It is less of a type of place and more of a way to look at and experience cities. They are areas that are difficult to decode yet are enticing to visit and photograph because of how history and the site are completely interlinked.6 ‘Spaces as internal to the city yet external to its everyday use. In apparently forgotten places, the memory of the past seems to predominate over the present.’ -Solà-Morales7 The phenomenological aspects of this theory cannot be overstated and has had a hand in many artists work, such as Danish sculptor Willy Ørskov. The general city matters less than the specifics of the site. How light behaves, what vegetation is there, marks of human occupation, signs of transformation, and signs of times forgotten are all parts of 48
this very complex and nuanced idea.8 The subjective focus on senses and the specifics of the areas in question place terrain vague and the concept of generic Dross in apparent opposition to each other. In the context of this research, it might be possible for these concepts to exist simultaneously in thinking about industrial wilds. Berger even briefly writes about terrain vague in his book. Both deal directly with ‘in-between’ spaces, dross takes a wider view and terrain vague provides a way to think about the moment scale of each site. Together, they introduce a dialectic of how to think about empty, waste areas. Where terrain vague and dross overlap is their ambiguity in how architects and landscape architects can apply them. As soon as a design is implemented on a site, the untouchable, ephemeral qualities of unused space vanish; rendering architecture as an unwelcome guest in the continuity of connotations of the site.9 SolàMorales writes: ‘Today, intervention in the existing city, in its residual spaces, in its folded interstices
can no longer be either comfortable or efficacious in the manner postulated by the modern movement’s efficient model of the enlightened tradition. How can architecture act in the terrain vague without becoming an aggressive instrument of power and abstract reason? Undoubtedly, through attention to continuity: not the continuity of the planned, efficient, and legitimized city, but of the flows, the energies, the rhythms established by the passing of time and the loss of limits... We should treat the
15
residual city with a contradictory complicity that will not shatter the elements that maintain its continuity in time and space.’ -Solà -Morales10 The oddities of industrial wilds are their best qualities in this lens. When designing for these areas, acknowledging this is essential to create interest and love for the site.
Sydhavnen - a Terrain-vague photo, 1964. Photo: Grethe Grathwol 49
Urbs Fluxus The relationship between terrain vague and dross is further expanded upon by Ellen Braae in her book Beauty Redeemed: Recycling PostIndustrial Landscapes. Though these two theories are very helpful in framing the discussion of wasted space, the idea of ecology and people’s future in the sites are downplayed or altogether ignored. Working from the economic, urbanistic view of dross and the individuality of terrain vague, Braae posits a new set of ideas under the banner of Urbs Fluxus. As its name suggests, this network of ideas works with they dynamics and flows of a city as an integral part to the future of recycled landscapes. Recycled areas can have huge effects on the surrounding areas, changing the incentives and increasing the chances of the surrounding areas being recycled. In a way, this sheds the basic urban planning way of thinking of cities as fully thought out plans implemented by architects. The city becomes a single, vast ecosystem in this way of thinking, where all flows are connected and change how one 50
another operates. Waterways, electricity lines, money, people, infrastructure, animal life, plant life, and many other types of movement fall into what is part of the great flow of Urbs Fluxus.11 The idea of a full integration breaks down the ideas of man vs. nature or even dross vs. stim, because all sites and actors are part of the same systems. For instance, the waste areas of cities are often hotbeds for biodiversity in cities and can escape the monoculture of traditional urban parks. The value created by ‘waste’ areas cannot be ignored when planning ways to re-integrate them into the urban system.12 Another interesting part of these ideas is how people are contextualized. People are part of the system of the city. The subgroups of people and their needs are also part of this system. By opening and recycling industrial lands, people are better served with more complete open space that can serve as heterotopia in the city. Much of the ideas about IBA Emscher Park are based in this idea of opening up new public space in cities to better serve the people who live there and
16
The Highline changed the entirety of its context, Tagger Yancy IV
provide access to previously mysterious areas.13 In Urbs Fluxus, the history of the site is also part of the flow of information and cultural capital. The idea of what a monument can be is challenged. Monuments are usually massive works of architecture that are meant to project a positive, controlling version of the past on its viewers. With adapting industrial landscapes, a new type of heritage can emerge.14 A heritage based in the
environment of workers and their daily lives with the massive machines and dangerous conditions. This conversation of what can be a monument is very interesting, and including it within the context of the flows of the city makes it even more fascinating.
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The Second Nature Though there are dozens more theories and polemics about industrial wilds, the concept of a Second Nature has had a long grip on contemporary discussion. Popularized by Geuze and Girot, this theory is more action-based than dross but not as small in scale as terrain vague. It is a directive to landscape architects and urban planners that the time of the perfectly planned park is over. In the modernist mode, nature could be controlled in neat parks with no spill into the urban sphere. The tight delineations of urban life would not allow for such a disturbance.15 As we have changed nature for hundreds of years, we have created a new kind of nature that is not based in true wilderness. This Second Nature demands to be part of the city, and in many ways always was there. A nature that is feels foreign, but is a byproduct of human development. The grove of pines in an industrial site, the ivy on a ruined wall are part of this Second Nature. Designers have a hand in helping this Second Nature develop and grow in cities. To push past the contrived 52
and ‘over-designed’ suburban parks that have dominated modern town planning.16 Geuze suggests that nature cannot be kept in a box, and when it is part of how cities grow and change, a Second Nature can be realized.17 Central Park, despite is value and beauty, is firmly grounded in the bordering off of nature from the city. It is a simulacrum of nature in a city. Girot writes this about the Second Nature: “It will be a landscape in mutation, a natural mirror or our civilization, that we all have to learn to accept, manage, and cherish whether we want it or not” -Cristophe Girot, Vers Une Nouvelle Nature18 As the climate changes and the very fabric of cities is forced to adapt, the presence of a new kind of nature will grow ever more apparent. In Vers Une Nouvelle Nature, Girot is explicit in narrating how the second nature is a man-made environment, a product of two hundred years of industrialism and change. The next two hundred will be defined by responding to these changes.
17
Central Park 1879, Wikipedia Commons
18
The Cheonggyecheon River promenade, Seoul, Korea by Girot, Harvard
Design Magazine 53
What It All Means
organizers have to contend with
There is no single way to think about landscapes and what they could be. The best designers can hope for is to help edit and slowly maximize the potential good from each site environmentally, socially, and spatially. These landscapes predate their industrial uses and will be here long after we are gone, so the best we can do is to help them transform into a better state in the time being. These theories are not tied in as deeply to the science of remediation and the technical side of how to clean areas.
-The future of cities depends on the management and recycling of industrial areas that have become wild.
There are several very important lessons to garner from the research of Landscape Park Duisburg-Nord and the theories discussed so far: -Landscapes are complex systems at the intersection of ecology, urban planning, social norms, infrastructure, and other smaller factors. -Industrial areas occupy a distinct area in the imagination of the landscape and are a fairly new type of landscape that we, as designers, architects, planners, and community 54
-The steps to actually perform this change in a generative and beneficial way takes the combined knowledge and willpower of ecologists, planners, architects, designers, communities, and activists. Just like the Castle in the Sky, there are massive areas for new experiments and development just out of our grasp. But instead of flying in the clouds, these areas are the abandoned lots and factories of almost every city in the world. The untapped potential of these landscapes in the worlds of ecology, green cities, and the daily lives of people is hard to fully imagine. The next part of this book delves into the history and geography of Northwest Indiana, also known as the Calumet Corridor, in an attempt to find these potentials in a specific context. Much of the patchwork of Northwest Indiana is wild in one way or another, and with these frameworks, an image of a new region begins to appear.
19
Michigan City Home in the shadow of the NIPSCO cooling tower, photo by
author 55
Part II: The Calumet Corridor
56
Complicated Territory Reading the history of Northwest Indiana, especially the Calumet Corridor, is like reading the history of industry in America. From a wilderness of dunes and swamps to the largest steel producing area in the world, the story of the Calumet Corridor is full of conflicting stories and players. For this research, the Calumet Corridor extends from the Western border of Indiana, along the shore of ‘This region, within a few Lake Michigan, to the border of miles of the eastern city limits Michigan. The unifying systems of Chicago, lay dormant of this area are the lake shore during the nineteenth century and the railways that follow the waiting for electricity and the coast to Chicago. The oscillating machine age to give it life.’ waves of development and land use changes have created a fractured landscape. Massive -1939 Writer’s Program industry and National Parkland Calumet Region Historical 1 exist side-by-side. Shrinking Guide cities are immediately next to booming suburbs and new towns. It is a complex place, and that complexity is directly caused by the industrialization of the region. To understand how Northwest Indiana came to be such a financially and geographically fractured area, knowledge of its history and geography is necessary. 57
1
Satellite imagery of Northwest Indiana, Google Earth
Dunes, Swamps, Wilderness The geology and formation of the greater Chicago-land area along Lake Michigan began thousands of years ago when the glaciers receded. As they shrank north, the glaciers carved a massive path, creating what would be Lake Michigan and leaving the deposits of white sand along its coasts. The massive swamps, towering dunes, and dense forests, and many rivers that were created from this geology are the defining characteristics of the area.2 Because of the difficulty of large scale cultivation, the Calumet Corridor was able morph into what we see today. The mysterious, foreboding aura of the area from its natural 58
formation was a common theme for people as late as the 1830’s.3 Despite this traditional sense of ‘wilderness’ and ‘foreboding’, people occupied this region for hundreds of thousands of years, eventually becoming the Pottawatomie tribe. Subsisting on agriculture and hunting, the Pottawatomie tribe were a small, semi-nomadic group. The geography and natural limits to the area prevented the formation of a massive group of people in a permanent settlement. Communication with other nearby Algonquin, Chippewa, and Ottawa tribes was common and the area was largely peaceful. The well-worn and extensive footpaths of these
small nations eventually became the main trading routes during colonial times. After many more years, these routes became the highways from Detroit all the way to Chicago.4
downtown Chicago. This left the largely ‘empty’ area of the Calumet open for the native Tribes of the area. Different ruling bodies rose and fell, but the area remained mostly free of much colonial meddling well into the In the mid-17th Century, French 1830s.5 Much could be written explorers began arriving in the about the French and Indian War, area. The natural geography the Battle of Tippecanoe, or the prevented much penetration role of the area in the early days into the region, but many of America, but none of those trading and trapping outposts events had as drastic of an effect were established. Most of the as the arrival of one key type of colonization efforts were focused technology during the middle of at Fort Dearborn, on land that the 19th Century: The Railway. would eventually become
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1795 Map of The Northwest Territory, Encyclopedia of Chicago
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The Rails It is safe to say that Northwest Indiana would not exist in its current form without the introduction of rail roads in the early 19th Century. The oldest rail map the Library of Congress has of this is from 1844, and it shows several lines running through the Calumet area on their way to Chicago. Rails came earlier to this part of Indiana than almost any other because of this connection to Chicago, even though these rails could only be used in winter due to flooding. This first completed connection 3
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to Chicago was carried out by the Michigan Central. Soon, other smaller railways would link to this main artery. The ‘Joliet Cut-Off’ connected the rails to Dyer and other more rural communities. And with that, the area’s population grew because materials could be brought in via the rails. The overall population remained fairly small despite this influx of rails.6 Over the next short decades, the rails would be consolidated, expanded, sold, and bought all over again many times over. One of the earliest was adjoining
1844 Rail Map of the Midwest, Library of Congress
4
1888, First Building of the Whiting Refinery Complete, NWI Times
this system to the Vanderbilt’s New York Central in the late 1850s. The profits of going in and out of Chicago were high and many rich companies wanted to participate. The exact transactions are not as important as their final effect: a region that had many different rail lines passing through it and a low density of people outside of the small towns that clung closely to the tracks.8 The nation was growing in industrial power after the Civil War, and Northwest Indiana was about to be the site and testing ground of this new modern age.
Ground Zero Though several tried to make
small industries work in Northwest Indiana, none were successful until Rockefeller located a new Midwest oil refinery in Whiting, Indiana in 1888.9 Then everything started changing very fast At the time the population outside of Hammond but in the area closest to the refinery (what would become Gary and East Chicago) was around 800 people. Almost immediately after the refinery was built, a new canal was proposed. Soon after, A tank works which would supply the oil company with tanks had established itself nearby. By 1898, the American Steel 61
Foundries and the W. B. Conkey Company had built plants in Hammond.9 The new age of industrialism came to Northwest Indiana and took stranglehold of the area in less than two decades.
The Last Boom Town After a few years of Standard Oil’s reign as the number one industry in the region, a new player came to the scene. In 1901, Inland Steel founded a new mill on Indiana Harbor. Instead of expanding inward, they decided to build out into the lake. This outgrowth would become one of the largest geologic features of the coast of Lake Michigan, completely built by man.10The images on the page opposite show the process of dredging the Main Canal and West Branch to bring a 900 foot long dock to the Inland Steel Mill. People flocked to the area to build this new harbor and mill, but the boom that was coming next would establish the area as the final boom town of the frontier. On March 12, 1906, on a site less than two miles from Inland’s massive new mill, U. S. Steel broke ground on a mill. Founded by Elbert H. Gary, a new city 62
was to be built next to the mill to supply workers for the bold venture. The population at the time was 336, and by the end of the next year, the population would exceed 10,000. As the mill was growing, canals were being dug, sand dunes were leveled, trees cleared, and a new town was growing almost overnight. This town was known as Gary, and it represented one of the last boom towns of the 19th Century in America.11 Workers came from all over the world to work on building the mills to eventually working in them. Notably, steel workers from England and the Ruhr Valley of Germany came in droves to be part of the new mill. Housing this massive influx of people was every bit as difficult as building a new steel mill. The company bought an extra 60,000 acres and started plotting out the land. In one of the best examples of pure, from the top town planning, Gary was built under these principles: ‘1. Streets of the new city were to be broad, longer in their northand- south direction than in their east-and-west, and bisected by spacious alleys. Sewers, water, and gas mains, telephone and
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1909, 1910, 1912; Dredging of Indiana Harbor, Inland Steel Archives 63
electric power cables were to be laid under alleys. 2. Zoned residential lots were to be 30 ft. to 50 ft. wide and 125 to 150 feet long with fixed building lines.
8. All avenues and streets were to be constructed in all the Gary Land Company subdivisions, the cost of these improvements included in the selling prices of the lots.
9. Homes and buildings by the 3. Streets running north and hundreds were to be built; the south on the west side of, and selling prices of the lots were parallel to, Broadway were to be to be determined by adding named after the presidents of the price of land, the cost of the United States in the order of improvements, and a three year their election. The streets east of, carrying charge. and parallel to, Broadway were to be named for the States. The 10. Black soil was to be brought thoroughfares running east and from Illinois to spread over the west, to be known as “avenues,” residential sections of the first were to be numbered subdivisions. ‘ consecutively. -Calumet Region Historical 4. Areas in the center of town Guide, 193912 were to be reserved for public Interestingly, these tenets were parks. exceptionally modern in attitude. Sewers, parks, and schools took 5. The sewer system was to the primary role in how the city be laid out so adequately that enlargements or changes would was to be laid out. This was a city for the modern mill man and be unnecessary. his family, and the gridiron plan 6. A water system that would not with shipped in soil indicated only take care of any subsequent a dedication to efficiency that only a corporation could love. enlargements of the steel plant More and more land was given but also would supply a city of 250,000 was to be constructed. to U. S. Steel for town or mill building. Hundreds of homes 7. Ample provision for model were being built, and by 1910, schools was to be made. just four years after the founding 64
Print this item: Foundation of Electric Power Station in Gary, Indiana
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1907, Foundation of Electric Plant for Gary Works, IHS Archives
of the mill, the Gary census reported 16,802 residents.13 That’s fifty times more people than when the project began. The overwhelming growth left the town looking like a gold rush area from fifty years prior. After all the building, Gary Works first produced steel February 3, 1909. The 1910’s saw an increase of people to 55,739
people. During that period, the company was the benefactor of everything. The YMCA, churches, roads, schools, parks, playgrounds, housing, libraries, hospitals, civic buildings, and theaters.14 The company was the center of life in this new modern city, and it would remain that way for decades. By the mid-1920’s, U.S. Steel 65
Gary Works was the largest steel mill in the world with 12 blast furnaces and 16,000 employees.15 This monumental growth and presence in the area did not happen in a bubble. Subsidiary businesses and other steel-related services began coming in droves to the area to take advantage of the proximity to the lake for shipping and the steel mills for raw material. American Bridge Company, Youngstown Sheet and Tube, Universal Atlas Cement Company, and American Sheet and Tin Plate Company are all examples of companies drawn by steel in the mid 1910s. By the end of the 1930’s, one quarter of all steel made in America came from the Calumet Region, and Gary Works was the crown jewel of it all.16 The need for workers drew thousands of people to the area from all over the world, making it a diverse place. This, combined with terrible working conditions, mounted tension between the mill workers and the management. Many of the early workers’ rights strikes and victories happened around Chicago and in this area throughout the early years of the 20th Century. Collective 66
bargaining and unionization were common practice and powerful forces after the 1930’s. The area was a haven during the Depression, drawing poor workers from all over America to the region for machining and steel jobs.17 ‘During the 1930s, in the midst of the Great Depression and the reforms of the New Deal, steelworkers in the Chicago area and across the nation finally won substantial gains through unionization. The successful unionization efforts of the 1930s brought together tens of thousands of workers of various ethnic backgrounds. At the turn of the century, most steelworkers in the Calumet and Indiana mills had been immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe. During the 1910s and 1920s, large numbers of Mexican and African American men found work in the mills. Often, area steel companies attempted to exploit ethnic differences among workers to fight unionization. For many years, steelworkers were divided by ethnicity and craft distinctions. But in the late 1930s, after New Deal legislation made unionization easier, workers were organized across the industry. In Chicago and elsewhere, Amalgamated joined the Steel Workers Organizing Committee
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1919, Police march by strikers, Encyclopedia of Chicago
of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in launching a 1936 organization drive that won recognition by U.S. Steel in 1937.’
similar model to Gary, without a centralized plant mill. Burns Harbor, Miller, and Furnessville all grew from the mass migration of people to the area. Highways began connecting these small -David Bensman and Mark towns to the mills and Chicago, R. Wilson, Encyclopedia of cutting through the woods and Chicago18 dunes along the shore.19 The whole area began to be read This win was a massive victory for as an extension of the Chicago labor in a notoriously anti-labor Metropolitan Area, a condition industry. The unions remained that continues to this day. strong for many years and helped The patchwork development bring labor issues into the fold as based around steel work was a major component of American a common theme all along life. the shore. When the National Lakeshore was established in As the size and power of the 1966, the odd organization and mills increased, so did the non-contiguous shape of the amenities and endowments park is due to this type of patchy to public programs also grew. development. Rails, industrial Other towns were able to yards, park, empty lots, bedroom spin off and grow based on a
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Print this item: 0091 4237745 A RosietheRiveter during World War II, ca. 1943
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1943, Women worked the mills during wartime, Inland Steel Archives
communities, downtowns, and small hamlets dotted the sporadic landscape.
The Bubble By the time World War II began, steel felt like an inextricable part of the Calumet Corridor. At the time, steel and its support industries ran the show and the steel needed for the war effort supercharged the need for production and growth. Postwar, the United States made half of the world’s steel, and twenty percent of that came from the 68
Calumet Corridor.20 Into the 50’s and 60’s, more mills and smaller finishing plants came to the area like Youngstown Sheet and Tube. The last major mill to be constructed in this area was Bethlehem Steel, just outside of Burns Harbor in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s. Other projects like National Steel’s Finishing Plant, right next to Bethlehem and U. S. Steel, were common.21 The linking of small shops and huge mills makes much of this area read as a continuous, industrial mesh.
For years, this paradigm of generations of steel workers and public patronage continued. The identity of Northwest Indiana became the Rust Belt, a center for steel in America, where men were tough and unions were tougher. Irreversible environmental damaged went on uncontrolled for many years, even after the establishment of the EPA. My mother has stories of orange fogs that would roll through Chesterton, Indiana, a few miles from most of the mills. On cloudy nights, you can see the orange reflection of the open hearths on the undersides of the clouds. Smoke bellowed and people worked round the clock, and everything seemed like it would remain that way. All signs pointed to Northwest Indiana being the steel hub of America for generations to come, with jobs for all who wanted them.
companies that still depended upon large numbers of older, inefficient plants failed to withstand the combination of a decline in demand and the rise of international competition in the 1970s. The sudden decline of American steel stunned the employees of mills across the Chicago area. Between 1979 and 1986, about 16,000 Chicago-area steelworkers lost their jobs. Wisconsin Steel closed abruptly in 1980 after attempts at a financial bailout failed. South Works endured a prolonged shutdown before closing its doors in 1992. Inland Steel cut thousands of workers. Republic Steel dismissed half its employees. In 1984, it merged with LTV Steel, which declared bankruptcy in 1986. The closures left many steelworkers without jobs or health care and decimated communities in northwest Indiana and the Calumet district.
Nothing is meant to last, even steel.
During the final years of the twentieth century, the Chicago region continued to be a leading The Encyclopedia of Chicago center of production in an sums up the chain of events fairly American steel industry that was well: much weaker and smaller than it had been before. By the mid‘During the 1970s and 1980s, 1980s, the area was home to the U.S. steel industry suffered several “mini-mills,” small-scale a sudden collapse that threw plants that used sophisticated thousands out of work. U.S. electric furnaces to recycle Steel and other American steel scrap metal. By the end of the 69
1980s, mills in Northern Indiana were making about a quarter of all the steel produced in the United States. While the region remained a center of steel production, the industry was no longer the powerhouse that had been a crucial part of the Chicago-area economy for over a century.’ -David Bensman and Mark R. Wilson, Encyclopedia of Chicago22 Steel is still a large part of life in Northwest Indiana, but it no longer employs the same numbers it used to. People have transitions to service jobs or other light industry. The communities of Gary and East Chicago never truly recovered from this drop in employment. When the center of a community vanishes, it has to evolve or die. Currently Gary is still limping along, with vacant buildings dotting every street and smoke continuing to rise over the mills. Companies like ArcelorMittal and Ispat have bought the original mills and are keeping them operating, but the overwhelming feeling is that the steel days are numbered. It may be fifty to one hundred years from now, but someday these landscapes will need to transform once again. 70
The creativity, engineering prowess, determination, and hard work that went into not only building the mills, but making them the largest in the world in a matter of around twenty years is incredible. The people of these companies transformed the landscape around them into something no one had ever seen before. This transformation came at a massive cost that the residents of the region are still paying for. The steel industry will never be the same, and now is the time to begin looking to what this land could be for future generations.
The Fallout Until now, I have not mentioned the disastrous environmental effects the steel industry has had on the ecology and people of Northwest Indiana. With the decline of the mills and new regulations brought about during the late 70’s, some aspects of the environment have improved, mainly in air quality. The area still remains at 16th in the country for most polluted.23 It took well over fifty years before many of the mills saw any amount of environmental regulation, so these levels of pollution are historic and systemic. People of
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Smoke rises daily from Gary Works at illegally high levels, NWI Times
color and poorer communities bear most of the damage done daily by these industries. For example, in 2002, African Americans in the area are over seven times more likely to be exposed to toxic chemicals as Caucasian people.24
much interference, and the Clean Air Act drastically changed the air quality for the better. It has been a long process to get to where the Calumet Corridor is today, and Lake, Porter, and LaPorte Counties all receive ‘C’s or lower on their air quality reports from the American Lung The environmental damage Association.25 Heavy metals, can be broken up into three particulates, smog, VOCs, and separate sectors: air, water, and a laundry list of many other soil pollutions/contamination. Air pollutants hang in the air of Contamination Northwest Indiana from not just the steel mills, but refineries, car traffic, and other industries. Air Pollution Lead, in particular, has been When the Clean Air Act passed in released into the atmosphere at the 1990’s, areas like Northwest illegal levels from Gary Works as Indiana were targets for change. recently as 2017.26 Unsurprisingly, the CO2 emissions of the area The mills, power plants, and leave much to be desired. other industries had been Fighting climate change polluting for decades without 71
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Lead contaminated soil near East Chicago, NWI Times
depends on areas like Northwest Indiana changing and taking care of its atmosphere. Planting trees, regulating industries, and closing down polluting equipment are the only ways forward for the area. Things have been getting better, but a lot of work needs to be done to clean the air of the region.
dangerous. The most pervasive problem with soil is with heavy metals leaching into the soils. Heavy metals are the byproducts and ingredients of many different steel processes, and they are released as smoke, ash, slag, or into the water. Heavy metals, a primary one being lead, are in very high concentration in the area. Some area might even be as damaging as Flint, but not Soil Degradation reported or tested.27 When the East Chicago Steel Mill closed, The original disturbance to this many developers wanted the area was moving massive sand lake-front property, but the dunes and other soils to make way for the mills, and the damage damage done to the soil was too severe to be remediated kept getting worst after that. into land proper for residential Without specific site testing, it use. Soil is also fairly difficult is difficult to know exactly how to remediate in-place without much damage has been done extreme cost.28 The pollutants to the soils of the area. Points will exist there for generations. close to the mills, especially Other pollutants present different the slag heaps, are especially 72
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ENVIRONMENTAL GEOLOGY OF LAKE AND PORTER COUNTIES INDIANA
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Likelihood of groundwater contamination, Environmental Geology of Lake
and Porter Counties, Indiana An Aid to Planning 73
concerns, like industrial acids, ash piles, and petroleum-based substances. Like air, the area has gotten better in recent years, but with soil degradation, the damage has largely already been done after years of no regulation. The soil in some places might even have to be deposited in a land fill it is so toxic.
Water Contamination Lake Michigan is the largest body of water in this area, but many underground and surface level waterways are deeply changed by the presence of so much contamination. In 2004, eighty to ninety percent of all water bodies in Lake County were classified as impaired or threatened.29 In 2017, U.S. Steel dumped sixty pounds of chromium into the Lake, violating the Clean Water Act. Violations have been common since 2011, and as the equipment ages, spills will only get worse.30 The threat to water in the area is not only tied to industry, farming in the southern parts of Porter, Lake, and Laporte county contribute toxins to ground water.31 The map on the previous page, from 1975, shows this danger. Generations of dumping, runoff, and poor water treatment 74
strategies have left water systems in Northwest Indiana completely compromised.
What’s Next? The challenges facing this area are diverse and complicated. Many of them trace back to the role industry has played in shaping the culture and environment of Northwest Indiana. A perfect storm of opportunities and ambitions created the most prolific steel region in the world. Issues like contamination, inequality, wage stagnation, emigration, brain drain, and on and on will require energy and ambition on a similar scale to mediate. We changed the world with our steel, and now we can change it again. The last section of this part is a discussion I had with my grandfather, Richard Henderson, about his time working at National Steel Midwest Division. This was one of the smaller plants built in the 1960’s, and he was there at the beginning. I found the conversation to be insightful and it grounds the research in real world experience.
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Landfill fire in East Chicago, Lloyd DeGrane
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Indiana Dunes National Park, NPS
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An Interview with Richard Henderson Richard Henderson, my grandfather, was a millworker for close to 40 years and saw the rise and decline of steel in Northwest Indiana firsthand. He was the foreman for the Custom Annealing line of National Steels Midwest Division Plant in Burns Harbor, Indiana. He retired in 2002. Known as ‘Hollywood’ for his good looks and charm, Richard was a prominent figure in the mill. I grew up five blocks from my grandparents, and getting to talk to them about the changes of this area has always been an inspiration and has helped this research immensely. His stories of the mills have been omnipresent in my life and I hope to share a few here.
JP: Could you just give me your background with steel, like how you got started in it and what did you end up doing? RH: Well, I started in the fall actually a summer - of 1957. And I started working in a labor gang, right out of high school and from there going - Well, you know what a labor gang is? JP: No, not really. RH: A Labor gang is, I think we had something like 50 people in Labor. Every day when we report it to work, there was various jobs throughout the mill. The company right there, it needed to be taken care of with a supervisor, like a foreman. They would send us off in groups to work in different parts of the mill doing various jobs such as clean, brick work cleaning snow, whatever they needed. Yeah, that’s what we did. We took care of all the different things that, you know, people that were on a higher up in the, in the whole part of the mill didn’t do. We did. JP: Right. And what mill was this for?
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RH: This was for Youngstown Sheet and Tube in 1957 JP: How did you transition into the CA line and then to the Midwest Plant? RH: As time went on, I realized there was another company that was going to open up a plant on the lake called National Steel. And so my decision, at that point, was that I was going to leave there, or at least I was going to go over to National Steel and apply for a job. You understand that when I was with Youngstown Sheet and Tube, about a year after I went to work there, a company official came out and he got us all together in this room before we went out on our assigned jobs and asked if anyone was interested in transferring into a job at the new tin mill, which had just been completed at Youngstown Sheet and Tube. Me and three other guys held up our hands and said ‘yes.’ And from that point they took me out of the Labor gang and I started working in the new tin mill. And once I was in there, it was a whole different concept of work because I was now assigned to do jobs that were associated with production units, recoil
lines, temper mills and Tin Lines. And once I started doing that, I realized that when National Steel came along and was hiring people when they opened the mill, I decided to go out there and just applied for a job. And so I went to Valparaiso, I was probably 22. JP: So that would’ve been in 1961 RH: It would have been in the spring of 1961. In fact, I think I did it in April. Yeah, it’s a matter of fact, I’m pretty sure I did right before it was the end of March. I went to work right in April at National Steel. I was accepted there. And it was funny because at first they were not going to. They were very happy that I had applied for a job. My background was such because of how I started with Youngstown Sheet and Tube, I had gained a lot of experience working in a mill because of how I started in the Labor gang and worked my way up into a tin mill. That was almost four years. And so at that point they wanted to hire me, but they didn’t want to take the chance because I was eligible for the draft in the United States Army. And so he had told me that he 77
had to think about it and he that he’d give me a call if they wanted to see me again. I stood up and said ‘okay,’ and we shook hands. About that time, the superintendent of National Steel’s tin side business walks through the door. As he walked through the door, I couldn’t believe my eyes because he and I worked for Youngstown Sheet and Tube and he was an assistant to a general foreman. For some reason, I just happened to be the guy who was there interviewing for the job. Back at Youngstown, He and I actually set up all the knives, all these big, big wheels side trim steel. We actually set it up together. And this guy, he came to work in a tie and a sport coat and when he’d come out there and he’d take his sport coat up, take his tie off, roll his sleeves up, and he and I would just climb in there and get dirty together. Well here he is, walking through the door when I’m getting ready to leave and he sees me and he hollers at me and says ‘Dick!’ And I said, ‘Oh Mr. Wells’, he said ‘Yes’. He said, ‘You’re looking for work?’ I said, ‘Yes sir, I am.’ He turned to the guy just told me they couldn’t use me because of the draft and 78
said, ‘Make sure we get him out there today.’ So the guy says, ‘Why don’t you come back? Sit down again Mr. Henderson, we needed to talk.’ And that afternoon I had a physical and plan to go to work the next day. [Laughter] JP: So then the rest is history pretty much. You working there up to the CA line. RH: Well, when they hired me they didn’t [put me on the CA line right away], they just hired me based on my knowledge. See, at the time there were nothing was running there. Everything was still being built! I think I was the 194th person they hired at the plant that would, at one time, have over 1200 employees. So that tells you where I was. You know, I was right on the ground floor. Well, when they got me out to the A and E buildings, which were their administration buildings, and they get me the physical. They had an assistant superintendent of tin finishing come over in his car and pick me up, and he took me back into the tin mil. And Lo’ and behold! It was the CA line. They were interested in me working on the CA line because I had
experience with welders that weld steel on the move. And so I started out as their [National Steel’s] very first, number one welder. Now that’s crazy. So I literally started out at the bottom and when I retired I had the top job. That’s quite an interesting story. I moved up to coiler, then I moved up to assistant operator and then I became an operator. Well, I operated the line for roughly 30 years. Actually, there’s an interesting story on this too. In 1961, when I went to work there, when the line was completed and they brought in some coils - coils being sheet we were going to run through the line. I was number one on the entry end where they make the weld. And so, I worked with the people, the electrical people and the mechanical people on setting the welder up. Once we had set the welder up and the line started to run, and this was strictly, we weren’t using heat, we were just trying to get off of the speeds correct. I made the first weld on the line when it actually started to produce. The weld was when you weld steel together and it makes it a continuous sheet to run through the line. I was the first weld on the first run of steel at Midwest.
JP: That’s so amazing. I’ve been reading about your plant and how all the steel was coming from Gary Works right next door. You’d get the raw steel and finish it out at Midwest. RH: Yeah, we did for a while. Then we started producing our own steel, but not in where I worked. That was done at another plant somewhere else. We weren’t fully integrated to produce, we didn’t have blast furnaces and open hearths where I was at. JP: All for the better. Those things are really filthy. RH: Yeah, we didn’t have anything like that. We took the steel after it went through a hot mill and was brought to Midwest and then it went through our ‘Pickle Line.’ Now, the ‘Pickle Line’ would use acids and different materials to clean the product. So they cleaned the sheet steel before it goes through the rolling mill, which reduces the gauge on the CA line. We used to, at one time, actually run the [CA] line at 2000 feet a minute. The line is roughly an eighth of a mile long. When I became a full time 79
annealer, I discovered that the speed was all wrong for the product because we couldn’t anneal it properly. Annealing means you have to reach a certain rock-well using heat and cooling in order for your customer or your client to be able to produce their product. JP: Yeah, it seems like a custom steel finish that deals with the strength and malleability of the steel. RH: In order for your customer and for your next process to happen you have what they call a rock-well. And that’s annealing done by the use of natural gas, hydrogen, and nitrogen. So you had to be very careful as to how you produce the product so that your customer can actually use the steel to produce the proper product, the end result for him to sell his product to the public. Now, one of the big things when I went to work there, all of the steel industry in the United States was the same way: production was your goal. They would want you to run as fast as you could run and produce as much steel as you can produce. And we were making a transition 80
from ingot steel to aluminum kilned steel. Aluminum kilned l was a lot better because it was cheaper to produce. But what we found out was the annealing process was very difficult because your rock-well says that you were doing the job right, but the actual product that there was produced, the Rock-well wasn’t good. It wasn’t right. Something was wrong. So I actually changed the whole system because I made a decision to slow the line down almost 500 feet and start creating annealing curves that would cause the whole thing that changed dramatically. The number I got for a Rock-well basically stayed the same. But when they did the cross cut on our Rock-well samples, we were now actually annealing the plate properly. And this was aluminum kilned steel, which was much harder to anneal than ingot because of its ingredients. And we were the very first to come up with this new idea, and it worked. Believe it or not, it was my idea, and it worked! The crazy thing was we were producing less steel, but our demand for steel was through the roof. Everybody was trying to buy steel from National Steel, Midwest Division Finishing Mill,
which was really a big, big deal. I didn’t realize how big a deal this was until, oh, I’d say 10 years before I retired. One time I was out there, and we started running products for U.S. Steel customers, for different, various reasons because of whatever their problems were, their customers would end up with us. Well, one day I was out there and I had met this superintendent of their finishing business more than one time. He’d been in out three or four times. He came in with a couple of clients and he introduced us to his new clients and they introduced me, Jonah, as ‘The number one Annealer on the Great Lakes.’ That was, that was absolutely an honor, man, because that put me off way up above everybody else, including their own people. JP: You were the man to beat. RH: Yeah, I was. They really liked the way I did it. Give me another question. I don’t want to go on and on. JP: No, this is good. This is all good groundwork. I’m going to do some more like kind of rapid fire questions to kind of fill out the interview. So how long have you
lived in northwest Indiana? RH: Yes, I was born, you know, out by Leroy, Hebron on a farm. I went to school in Crown Point. And from there I went to work in the industry. JP: So you’re a lifer, you’ve been there forever. RH: Yeah. Yeah, I have. JP: Thinking about Northwest Indiana in general, what do you think steel means to this area? How important is it to how everyone thinks of the area? RH: Well, I think steel is extremely important. Steel hires a lot of people in Northwest Indiana. And the ripple effect of that can, you know, goes out for quite a ways. You might say involving more than just the state of Indiana. JP: Well, I think I read that think about 27% of all steel made in America is still made here. RH: Yeah, that’s right. When you think about all of the companies that supply the steel business in Northwest Indiana with everything from rolling roles to all the machinery 81
that’s needed. It comes from somewhere besides us. We don’t make those products, somebody else does it for us. So there’s a lot of people employed in companies that do a lot of work with steel in the state of Indiana and in other parts of the country too. But really, Northwest Indiana is a big part of steel in this country, maybe more than any place else.
modern steel facility in the United States. It had just gone through the transition and not many steel mills at that point had gone over into using, you know, computers and stuff like that to produce their steel and to run their product. But National was built in 1961 and National, fortunately, thought ahead. And I think that we had kind of put ourselves a step up from everybody else in modernizing. In order for the industry to continue, you have to modernize, you have to keep up with the times. And that’s not cheap to do, that’s not easy to do. As far as Northwest Indiana is concerned, as to what might happen, I would think the most impact would be felt for U. S. Steel in Gary.
JP: A lot of signs are indicating that quite a few of these mills could be closed down in decommissioned. So chances are U. S. Steel will move somewhere else or shrink operations. And that’s going for a lot of places up in Northwest Indiana in steel. So when these areas close down what would you, as a former steel worker, like JP: It’s interesting because the to see done with these areas? proportion of people actually working in mills has dropped off RH: Oh boy. I think that kind of a lot. I think only about 6,000 depends on what can be done people out of Gary are still there, based on what’s been employed there. So it’s funny there all these years and what how steel still has this really problems that can arise from oversized presence in all of trying to even populate the our minds being from there as area that where the mills used being the most important part of to be. That’s a huge amount Northwest Indiana. of area. I guess I can go with National Steel, which is now RH: Well it’s like I was saying U.S. Steel. That was the most before, it’s because of all of 82
the ripple effect, right? Once the industry went with the more modern equipment, like for example, like we went with computers and printers and then just everything, well that whole process has been greatly enhanced since then. So there’s companies out there who are producing the tools which are computers, printers, and our communication abilities within the mill. I think that that’s a lot of the people are working in that business now,
which was quite a compliment. Anyway, I think there’s going to be some sort of Steel there [on the steel mill sites] all the time. Now, as to how much, you realize we can produce so much steel with so few people today. That’s because of all the modernization that’s been going on. We also are very capable of handling environmental stuff. I’m sure they’re still doing the same things [for the environment]. I hope they are.
JP: Like service industry of the steel mills.
JP: Last August, I think U.S. Steel Had a big dump of chromium.
RH: Yeah. I remember when I was the guy who shut the unit down so they could actually make the changeover to computers. They had a guy walking around with me and he was writing everything down. One day, I walked over and made a couple changes and he said, ‘Why did you do that?’ I made changes because I felt like it just entered my mind that I need to do this and this and this. I can’t say why I did it just seemed to me that I needed to do that, you know? And he said to me: ‘Boy, I wish I could just plug into your brain.’ That’s what he told me,
RH: I was going to suggest that because, I know that happened. Well, I shouldn’t say I know him because that wouldn’t be fair. But since they’ve [U.S. Steel] have taken over and bought National, I think that’s the second incident where they’ve had some sort of an issue with something being dropped in the Lake. I was there over 40 years and we never had trouble one time. I know that they’ve lifted some of the restrictions, you know, and I don’t know if that’s what they should be doing because all people who live around here and the future depend on them 83
not lifting those restrictions.
steel’s going to be here for the long, long time.
JP: Right, right. Absolutely. RH: The future of this part of the state depends on them not lifting those restrictions, but I think some of them have been changed. JP: It feels like a transformation of some kind is imminent. RH: Yeah. It always seemed to me steel would always be here because this is one of the larger producing areas in the United States. We also have the Great Lakes so we can ship out the steel. I don’t know. I think steel is going to be here for many more years to come. But how much longer? JP: Who’s to say? RH: I don’t know. It’s all based on the ability to move the product. You know, this part of the United States is centralized for the whole country. So when we produce steel for example here, it can go east, west, north, south, and it has the ability to be shipped by ship to foreign consumers right through the Great Lakes, you know? So it seems to me like 84
JP: This is sort of like a side question, but what do you think of the National Lakeshore being turned to the National Park? That’s pretty big news. RH: Yeah. That’s a pretty big deal really, because it was my understanding that changes the whole perimeter for the national park. RH: It’s supposed to make it actually a lot better. The park district should receive a little more money and that would give them the ability to do things they weren’t able to do. JP: This whole project [my thesis] was inspired by NIPSCO closing. I’m looking at this whole area as a system and what could it look like one day. This is 30, 50, 100 years from now. This isn’t even the next decade, I’m trying to really think ahead. RH: It’s conceivable that the National Park could grow depending on what NIPSCO would like to do with the property
JP: -and what Michigan city wants from that property.
come and see where you worked? People could, in like a more museum way, see all RH: Well, I don’t know. I don’t the work that you guys did and know what NIPSCO much - look actually experience what it’s like what National Steel did with there. that piece of land they gave the National Parks System, you RH: You know, one time I know, I don’t know if you’ve remember we were laughing ever been up there and seen it and kidding each other about but it’s quite an achievement. this when we were on a break And they literally cleaned it all for maintenance. We said we up and gave it to the National should all retire and then one Park. day when they’ve closed the steel industry down, we could JP: When I’m back, I want to be the tour guides that take go for a long ride out to see if everybody through and show we could get in and see what them what we used to do. Well, we could see. From what I can yeah, that would be interesting. tell, the Midwest plant is one of I think people wouldn’t believe the cleaner spots of this whole what it’s like on the inside. area. I think that the way that you I actually think that could guys ran National shows. It’s a happen, but I think it’s gonna lot greener; It looks a lot nicer take quite a few years for that than the other parts of the steel to happen here. Because it’s system. just too big of a deal. I think the state gains a lot of revenue RH: Oh yeah, definitely. from this part of the state, the county, especially Porter and JP: The steel mills really mean Lake County. There’s a lot of a lot for this area and everyone money being made by them knows them. But what I find really because of this, Jasper too. But fascinating is that so few people I do think everything has its day, who live there have ever really let’s say expiring date. been inside the mills. I know I haven’t. I only abstractly know JP: Right. Nothing lasts forever. them. Would it be interesting for you see a way to have people 85
RH: That’s right. And how they’re going to replace that, I don’t know. It does seem like there would be a way, especially now because we’re a National Park. JP: Maybe there’s some more possibilities that the park can integrate these really industrial landscapes into how the park functions. It would be really radical for a National Park to do such a thing. Honestly, they’re really about pristine ‘nature.’ Adding these industrial landscapes to the park, I think, would only be a benefit. RH: Yeah. I would think it would be. JP: When you read about decommissioning people treat it like: ‘Oh, when you take down this plant, it goes away and it’s not as toxic anymore. It’s fine.’ But nothing ever goes away. It has an afterlife. It’s still there. What I would be afraid of is these places closing down and there being no plan. These huge areas then become even more mysterious than before and even more cut off from the places that they’re in. That’s my big fear. That’s what we’re trying to think about in this project. 86
RH: I do like the idea though on one day, like you mentioned that this could become an open park area. Because I think it would attract a lot of people to see what the industry was like in its heyday. No one really understands these places, you drive by a steel mill and all you see is the building, you’re lucky if you see a person! They’re just so much going on inside those places. There’s people doing so much work, you know? I know years I worked there and people had no idea. When you said you work in a steel mill, they thought you were just going to work and picking up the check. They had no idea what you did. JP: It’s like a black box. RH: Yeah. They just see it from the outside, but that’s all they know. So, yeah. I like your idea Jonah. I really do. JP: I think it could be something because it’s important to respect the history and all the work that did go on that all you guys did. Demolishing all of it and just turning it into like a brown field just seems cruel. Just forcibly forgetting all of the work. One of my last questions is: are you proud of all the work that you did
as part of the steel mill? Do you think fondly on your time there? RH: Oh yeah, absolutely. I feel very good about what I did. I think that I had a big part in really teaching other young men who came up under me how to do the job that I did so they could replace me like I wasn’t gone. And that’s what happened. That’s the name of the game. You want the business to continue. I felt so good that I was one of the few people that started sweeping floors and worked my way up to foreman. One more thing to tell you though real quick. I made the first weld at National when it opened. Well, that was in 1961. When 2000 came around, and the scare was out there about how no one knew what a computer was going to do when it went from 1999 to 2000. Well, New Years Eve, they shut the line down at 11 o’clock, then they scheduled me and my crew to come out at midnight, and as soon as we got there and it went to 12:01. My job was to hit run, and the line took off, and we just had a normal day the rest of the night. Interesting thing was: I made the first weld on a coil that was produced off that line and sold
to a customer AND I made the first start of that line for the year 2000 that then produced the coil for the customer. Now that’s interesting! That’s very interesting! No one holds that honor, but me. [Laughter] JP: You’ve been around steel forever. What is the one thing you want people to know about the steel mills, about living there that people don’t often get to see or know about? What would be like the one thing that you would want the world to know about? It’s a tough question and could be anything. RH: Oh boy, well, I think people need a - I’m not sure people really appreciate everything that we do because I think people somewhat resent the steel industry because of anything from pollution, you know, to noise. I guess I would, I would like everyone to understand that the people that work in the steel mills are their neighbors, and they’re the very same people who want everything to be good for everyone. JP: That’s a perfect answer. You did great. Thanks Grandpa. 87
Part III: The Sites
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How to Pick, Where to Start?
‘From 1900 to 1950, these special interests forged patterns of public and private land use persisting today in a patchwork quilt of woodlands, wetlands, beaches, steel mills, and pockets of housing that comprise the Lake Michigan shore. Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore is just one part of this patchwork.’ NPS, Indiana Dunes National Park1
With the history and geography in mind, the next question is what should be done and where should efforts be focused. The current paradigm of sharp barriers between park, mill, and residential will not exist forever. Now is the time to plan for a future where the mills are closed and the boundary between industrial landscape and park becomes blurred. Sites were selected with this eventual blurring in mind, and therefore all border the Indiana Dunes National Park or other that could one day incorporate the industrial landscape into the parkland. In general, these sites are associated with heavy industry right on the shore of Lake Michigan, where remediation will be crucial to protect the water quality of the area. More details about why each site was selected will be part of their biographies. The sites are: 1. The Railways of Northwest Indiana 2. Inland Steel Indiana Harbor 3. U. S. Steel Gary Works 4. National Steel Midwest Division Campus 5. NIPSCO Michigan City Power Station 89
Inland Steel
Na M U.S. Steel Gary Works
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NIPSCO Michigan City Station
ational Steel Midwest Plant
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Railways 1940 Railroad Map, Library of Congress
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1916 Map of Calumet Corridor Railways, Library of Congress
Railways As seen in the last part of this book, much of the reason Northwest Indiana is so industrialized is because of the presence of the railroad. Railways were built as early as the 1840’s. The connection to Chicago was vital to the growth of the area and allowed for companies to move their large industries out of the city and onto the open dunes. Chicago currently handles roughly 25% of all rail traffic in America.2 Despite this, there are many abandoned lines in Northwest Indiana that could provide interesting 94
moments of access and travel. Many of the lines coming in and out of Griffith are shuttered. The most abandonment of railways was in the 1980’s.3 The internal lines on each site can also be reclaimed to serve as paths or bike-ways, much like the Landscape Park Duisburg-Nord. The importance of railways to any kind of transformation project in Northwest Indiana cannot be overstated. The transformed landscapes need to be connected to allow access and flow from one site to another by bike or trail, and railways can play a significant role in making
Figure 2.10. Active and Abandoned Rail Lines in Indiana
Source: Columbus Public Library 2 RailsandTrails.com, 2018 Map of Abandoned
rail lines, Indiana Department of Transportation
this far easier. The rails cut through every patch of the area: 2—The State’s Existing Rail System farm, industry, park, forest, and city. A commuter rail known as the South Shore Line runs along the Calumet corridor, connecting Northwest Indiana to Chicago.
Commuter rail in all of Indiana is dwarfed by the amount of 4 P a g e | 39 commercial and industrial traffic. Reconfiguring the lines could be an amazing way to change how people interact with the whole region. 95
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South Shore Line running through the National Park, NITCD
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South Shore Line route, SCV.org
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Coal train in U.S. Steel Gary Works, Industrial History Blog
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State Line Switching Yard, Hammond Indiana, 1987, Industrial History Blog 97
Inland Steel 41°40’23.57”N 87°26’15.60”W
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Inland Steel Co.
United States, its workforce grew to about 7,000 people. In 1935, when annual output Starting the furthest west, Inland stood at two million tons, Inland steel is less than 30 miles away purchased Joseph T. Ryerson & from downtown Chicago. Inland Son, an old Chicago wholesaler was built starting in 1901 to take of steel products. Like all steel advantage of Indiana Harbor, companies, Inland had all the a lot of open land, and access business it could handle during to rails. Inland dredged and World War II; annual output reformed the entire face of the passed 3.5 million tons. During lake shore to suite the ships that the 1950s, when Inland was would take product in and out of among the 10 largest steel the mill.5 companies in the United States, annual sales grew to nearly Chicago’s leading homegrown $700 million.6 A new Chicago steel company, Inland was headquarters, the Inland Steel founded in 1893 in Chicago Building on Monroe Street, was Heights by Joseph Block and his built in 1957.7 During the 1960s son Philip. The Blocks’ company and 1970s, about 25,000 people started small after Philip had worked at the Indiana Harbor purchased the plant of the plant. Like most American steel defunct Chicago Steel Works, companies, Inland declined and a maker of farm equipment. In laid off thousands of workers 1897, it had about 250 workers during the 1980s. In 1998, it was and only about $350,000 in purchased by Ispat International, sales. But in 1902, when it a large corporation based in the built a large new open-hearth Netherlands that specialized steel mill at Indiana Harbor in acquiring under-performing (in East Chicago, Indiana, 27 companies. Operating under a miles southeast of downtown new name, Ispat Inland Inc., the Chicago), Inland Steel suddenly company cut almost one-fifth of became a big business. By 1910, its workforce by 2002, to 7,800 the Indiana Harbor facility had employees. At that time, as the about 2,600 workers; by 1917, sixth-largest integrated steel annual output passed one million producer in the United States, it tons. During the 1920s, when produced about 5 percent of the Inland made about 2 percent country’s steel.7 of all the steel produced in the 100
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Coke Delivery at Inland Steel Co., Art Institute of Chicago
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Aerial view Canal at Indiana Harbor, Northwest Indiana Times
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1972, Canal at Indiana Harbor, Hardscrabble Photography
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1965, Inland Steel Co. Building by SOM, SOM
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Canal at Indiana Harbor, Hardscrabble Photography
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1982 Outside Blast Furnace 7, Viktor Macha
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Blast Furnace 7, Flickr
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1982 Inland Steel, Viktor Macha
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U. S. Steel Gary Works 41°37’0.10”N 87°19’3.78”W
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U. S. Steel Gary Works Once the largest steel mill in the world, U.S. Steel Gary Works is a colossal tract of land with a scale of industrialization rarely seen. The site is so large that the border between it and the neighboring Inland Steel site is difficult to determine. With this scale comes an equal scale of ecological damage. Essentially, U.S. Steel Gary Works is a functional Superfund Site along ten miles of Lake Michigan.8 After close to seventy years of unregulated operation, the environmental damage has accumulated to unlivable levels. Of all the sites, this may be the most difficult to remediate and will most likely be compromised for generations. In recent years, the mill has been laying off workers and shrinking in operations. At one point, 30,000 steel workers swarmed the plant, but today around 6,000 are left.9 x All of U.S. Steel’s plants closed down except for U.S. Steel Gary Works, forcing it to bear the ecological damage and declining productivity. The worst of both outcomes. Not only the mill, but the community of Gary, Indiana has been suffering as the plant limps on. Predominately a black 110
community, the residents of Gary have been exposed to the worst pollution of the whole region because of this steel mill. It is difficult to state how inexorable the mill is from Gary. They exist side-by-side, showing their entwined history as an industrial boom city.10 The other adjacency of the mill is the Indiana Dunes National Park, touching the far eastern side of the site. The sharp jump from steel mill to dunes is jarring to say the very least. The physical components to the site are similar to Inland Steel. There is a large, central canal used to bring in coal coke, blast furnaces, leeching pools for ash, miles of train tracks, and dozens of nondescript rolling mills for the steel. As of 2017, U.S. Steel launched a plan to invest $750 million in the mill, ensuring its survival for at least the next decade.11 It is difficult to guess what the future will be on a site so contaminated and charged with continuing the industrial heritage of Northwest Indiana.
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U. S. Steel Blast Furnace, IU Archive 111
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U. S. Steel Central Hall, Uwe Niggemeier
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U. S. Steel Tracks, Uwe Niggemeier 113
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Panorama of Gary Works, 1908, U. S. Data Repository
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Map of U. S. Steel Garyworks, Industrial History Blog
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View of U.S. Steel over Lake Michigan, Chicago Times
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Blast Furnace, Chicago Times
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Furnace Feeders, IU Archive
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Ore Processing, NWI Times
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National Steel Midwest & Bethlehem Campus 41°37’58.10”N 87° 8’32.17”W
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National Steel Midwest & Bethlehem Campus
industrial use, the National Steel Midwest Plant is probably one of the best candidates. This site Earlier in the book, I spoke to my also has the distinct honor of grandfather who was the Custom being one of the most visible Annealing Line Operator at the book-ends to the National Park. National Steel Midwest Finishing No matter the weather, you Plant. This site was where rolls can always see the towers of of steel from U.S. Steel and Bethlehem Steel when you go to Inland could be finished with the beach. When driving along various processes for further Highway 12, it is difficult to tell manufacturing use. Its proximity where the park ends and the site to other steel mills is a massive begins until the smokestacks bonus. Right next to this site is become visible through the trees. the youngest steel mill along the Lakeshore: Bethlehem Steel Now National Steel is owned by Burns Harbor, founded in the U.S. Steel and the Bethlehem early 1960’s.12 Together, they Steel Mill is owned by a company form a rather large, patchy site called ArcellorMittal.14 Like that is surrounded by the towns U.S. Steel and Inland, they of Burns Harbor, Portage, and a were experiencing financial wing of the National Park. trouble and were acquired by international companies. For Overall, the site is not as densely now, the sites are stable and packed with industrial buildings will be active for years to come. as Inland or Garyworks. Being When the site does close, the younger and built at a time of opportunities of new kinds of more regulation, there is also interfacing between the site less possible contamination and the National Park will be on the site. Visually, there is fascinating. The park cups more green signs of life than around the site to continue the other sites. Smaller finishing further west, and filling in this and independent service shops hole using an industrial wilds also litter the site, showing strategy would make the most that the ‘micro-mill’ strategy of sense. small producers focusing on niche products is already being implemented. 14 Of all the sites that could be saved for further 120
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Bethlehem Steel, NWI Times 121
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Midwest Steel Processing Plant under construction, NWI Times
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Smokestacks,
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Aerial view of Burns Harbor, NWI Times
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Central processing, NWI Times 123
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View from Indiana Dunes National Park, NWI Times
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NIPSCO Michigan City Power Station 41°43’5.89”N 86°54’39.20”W
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NIPSCO Power Station Michigan City
production. Ball jars came from this sand extraction.16 This site is also the eastern cap to the The Northwest Indiana Power Indiana Dunes National Park and Service Company’s Michigan is visible along every section City Power Station is where much of the beach. Three retention of the inspiration for this project ponds are on site and could came from. As of late 2018, have interesting uses after the NIPSCO announced that it is plant closes. This site is also planning to decommission the the smallest of all the selected plant within the next decade.15 sites for this research, but its The reason for its closure is that placement in relation to Michigan NIPSCO wishes to transition City and the National Park makes to more renewable forms of it every bit as important. Also energy over the next decade. It near the plant is the Michigan is also plausible that economic City Marina, Washington Park, pressures of running an almost an outlet mall, Blue Chip Casino, century-old plant could make and the main street of Michigan closure and selling of the land City. It has an oddly ceremonial an easy decision. The mayor’s and dramatic placement for office of Michigan City have a power plant. This drama is already began speculating on heightened by the 200 foot tall what they would like the new cooling tower that dominates the mile of lakefront property to be. site visually. Built in the 1970’s, All these speculations, however, the cooling tower is an icon of have complete demolition as a Michigan City and is commonly prerequisite. known as the ‘Cloud Maker.’16 There is less written about the history of the power plant compared to the other sites in this book. It began construction in the 1920s where it’s main building and three smokestacks comprised the plant. To make room for the power plant, the ‘Indiana Slide’, a 200-foot tall dune on the site, was removed and the sand was used in glass 128
Though the specific buildings on the site may not be the most architecturally inspired, the site’s placement makes it an essential project for Michigan City. Compared to the other sites, the remediation of this power plant will be less intensive. The next book for this thesis will take a much closer look at this site.
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Entrance to NIPSCO, photo by author
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Michigan City Harbor, NWI Times
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New ArcellorMittal NIPSCO plant fromEquipment, above, WSBT NWI Times
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Winter by the plant, NWI Times
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Guess what it’s still a power plant, NWI Times 131
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New ArcellorMittal Equipment, NWI Times
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View of NIPSCO Plant, NWI Times
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Part IV: Proposals
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Where the Wild Things Grow
“The industrial landscape becomes domesticated by implicating us in it.” Elissa Rosenburg Gardens, Landscape, Nature: Duisburg-Nord, Germany1
Armed with the history and some of the character of each site and the region, some proposals of how to think about the future of these industrial areas as wild parks can be proposed. For this research, they are not concrete, standard proposals for specific architectures or master-plans. Instead, each site proposal was translated into a collage to create a ‘step 0’ to begin conversations about what the thesis could become. Each site will need specific remediation strategies for their different levels of contamination. These strategies such as phytoremediation and soil leeching are complex and deserve their own book to cover their intricacies. At the very least, a survey of every site will be necessary to even begin to grasp what the technical responses should be. These proposals are meant to provide a new way to think about the afterlife of these projects, and future research will discuss ways to make these aspirations tangible.
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Part V: Conclusion(s)
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Our Collective Wilderness In his essay Vers une nouvelle nature, landscape architect Christophe Girot writes:
‘Everything dies, baby, that’s a fact But everything that dies, someday comes back.’ Bruce Springsteen Atlantic City1
‘Much of this nouvelle nature will not be made visible at once, it will require both faith and patience over decades and will undoubtedly provoke a fundamental shift in our understanding of the architecture of landscape. It will be a landscape in mutation, a natural mirror of our civilization, that we will all have to learn to accept, manage and cherish whether we want it or not.’ -Girot, Vers und Nouvelle Nature2 We are rapidly entering a new age of landscape means. Every corner of the Earth has been affected by human activity and our idea of ‘nature’ as a pure, attainable reality is in fact a construct of decades of romanticism combined with industrialization. Our new nature, that we created, is a mutant. It is a patchwork of empty spaces, cities, roads, tracks, industrial ruins, homes, golf courses, parks, and on and on. The massive system of how humans use land has resulted in climate change and a looming ecological 149
disaster. But in this world we have built, unlike any time before, allows designers, planners, and communities to take back and redefine their landscapes. Postindustrial lands can act vectors for ecological, social, and urban change on a scale we can hardly imagine. Looking at Northwest Indiana alone shows how fruitful and fascinating these new landscapes could be and how they can become integrated into a new, more wild future. We are watching the infancy of what will be an amazing change in how we repopulate cities and regions, where the wastelands and industrial leavings of our past are recycled into new landscapes. Industrial areas have been foreign and wild to us since their arrival during the industrial revolution. The black smoke, faceless buildings, fences, locks, and pollution kept people from experiencing and seeing these places first hand. Despite their importance in growing the Rust Belt and other places, their role as new landscapes has been unexplored. Now, as these areas close, their wild mystique grows. As Landscape Park Duisburg Nord shows us, opening these areas, landscaped as well as wild, draws people to see what 150
t as there and experience a type w of land that was segregated from daily life. Industrial wilds are the new wilderness of modern life, and using them to better our communities and environment should be on all of our minds as designers. They will have an afterlife when they close down, and we have to dream and design what that will be. Under modernism, machines and industry were the salvation of humanity, now, their skeletons and brownfeilds are the venue for a new way forward.
What’s Next This phase of research has been incredibly helpful in defining what the issues and concerns Northwest Indiana has as a soon to be post-industrial landscape. Though industry is still a major part of the area, designers and planners need to look to what the corridor will look like after industry has died completely. The next area of study will focus specifically on the NIPSCO Michigan City Generation Plant. This power plant is slated to close in the next decade and could provide a template for how to deal with these issues in the concrete world. The thesis will be to devise a competition brief
for the site and then to create an entry based on that criteria. With luck, the planning department of Michigan City could get involved to start a dialogue about how the University of Virginia could get involved to change the area for the better. The chance to change the conversation about the site is an amazing way to build a thesis. I hope to write another book about just the NIPSCO plant and then one last book that summarizes the thesis and projections created within the next year.
Epilogue This book has meant much more to me than a design research exercise. It has been a chance for me to connect to my home in a way I never have before. I was once told that all research projects act, in some way, like autobiographies of whoever is writing them. The inspiration for this project came at a time where I was missing home. I felt alien and out of place in Virginia and longed to be back in the Midwest. I wanted to give back to the place that had been an active participant in my growing up, for better and for worse. The beach, the forests, the smokestacks, and industry
all were omnipresent in my life and I cannot imagine growing up anywhere else. I also know that this is a place that is hurting. People are out of work and the cities built on the mills are dying out. Even with these challenges, Northwest Indiana is a complex place worthy of study, and I wanted to give it the attention it deserves. I knew I could do something to contribute as an architecture student. My blood is in this project, and I cannot wait to see it through. One of the common jokes I tell about the Northwest Indiana sunset. On summer nights, the sunset will have astounding colors that are hazy and unique to the area. Greens, violets, reds, and dusky oranges all hang in the sky over the lake. These colors are only possible because of the highly contaminated air. There is beauty in waste, and despite the ugliness in how we have treated the environment, something small and lovely can still happen. We have to contend with these issues, but there are moments like these sunsets that make me excited to build a better landscape. I love my home, thank you for reading.
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A sunset over Lake Michigan, photo by author 153
Notes
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Forward 1. 219-933-3351, Sarah Reese sarah.reese@nwi.com,. n.d. “Michigan City Residents Imagine a Future without a Coal-Fired Power Plant in Their Neighborhood.” Nwitimes.Com. Accessed January 19, 2019. https://www.nwitimes.com/news/local/laporte/ michigan-city-residents-imagine-a-future-without-a-coal-fired/ article_500eb622-e5e9-5886-b456-b08b6f7fedb2.html.
Part I: Precedent and Theories 1. Latz, Peter. 2016. Rust Red: Landscape Park Duisburg-Nord. Translated by Caroline Ahrens. Munich: Hirmer. 30. 2.Latz, Peter. 30. 3.Latz, Peter. 32. 4. Latz, Peter. 38-42. 5. Latz, Peter. 160. 6. Latz, Peter. 37. 7. Latz, Peter. 45. 8. Latz, Peter. 47-49. 9. Latz, Peter. 55-56. 10. Latz, Peter. 62-81. 11. Latz, Peter. 62. 12. Latz, Peter. 75. 13. Latz, Peter. 83-103. 14. Latz, Peter. 103. 155
15. Latz, Peter. 82. 16. Latz, Peter. 104-129. 17. Latz, Peter. 114. 18. Latz, Peter. 117. 19. Latz, Peter. 181. 20. Latz, Peter. 249. 21. Latz, Peter. 34.
Gardens, Landscape, Nature: Duisburg-Nord, Germany by Elissa Rosenberg 1. Robert Smithson, “a Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects” (1968), in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flam (Berkeley and Los Angeles: university of California Press, 1996), 105. 2. See The Machine in the Garden (new York: Oxford university Press, 1964), Leo Marx’s influential work on the pastoral as an enduring American ideal. Marx writes: “The pastoral ideal . . . is located in a middle ground somewhere ‘between’ yet in a transcendent relation to the opposing forces of civilization and nature” (23). The controlling theme of the pastoral, according to Marx, is the conflict between art and nature. In the mid-nineteenth century this was expressed as the conflict between an idyllic natural world and the “counterforce” of industrialization, represented by machine technology. 3. The 568-acre park is one of the best known public spaces within the 80-kilometer-long corridor known as Emscher Park, the site of a unique planning initiative coordinated by the International Building
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Exhibition (Ia). The IBA program (Internationale Bauaustellung) was established in 1989 as a ten-year improvement program, following in a long tradition of building exhibitions in Germany. The regional redevelopment strategy was based on the creation of a 300-square-kilometer “landscape park” with a combined focus on economic and ecological improvements as well as the preservation of the unique industrial architecture (The Emscher Park International Building Exhibition, IBA, 1996). 4. Edmund Burke wrote in 1757: “Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the idea of pain and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotions which the mind is capable of feeling.” Quoted in Denis Cosgrove, Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape (Madison: university of Wisconsin Press, 1984), 227. 5. This concept, developed most extensively by David Nye in his book The American Technological Sublime (Cambridge, Ma: MIT Press, 1994), refers to the sense of awe inspired by great feats of civil engineering, such as the railroad, great bridges, dams, and machinery of production. Nye writes: “The industrial sublime combined the abstraction of a man-made landscape with the dynamism of moving machinery and powerful forces . . . (evoking) fear tinged with wonder. It threatened the individual with its sheer scale, its noise, its complexity and the superhuman power of the forces at work” (126). The term “technological sublime” was coined by Perry Miller in The Life of the Mind in America (new York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1965), and also developed by Leo Marx in The Machine in the Garden, John Kasson in Civilizing the Machine (new York: Grossman, 1976), and others. 6. Peter Latz, “The Idea of Making Time Visible,” Topos 33 (2000): 97. 7. Here I am referring to W. J. T. Mitchell’s fundamental question regarding landscape: “not just what landscape ‘is’ or ‘means’ but what it does, how it works as a cultural practice.” This follows from his understanding of landscape “not as an object to be seen or a text to 157
be read, but as a process by which social and subjective identities are formed.” See his introduction to Landscape and Power, ed. W. J. T. Mitchell (Chicago: university of Chicago Press, 1994), 1–2. 8. As Mara Miller wrote, “Gardens articulate space in the interests of articulating time.” See The Garden as an Art (Albany: State university of new York Press, 1993), 39. 9. See William Cronon’s discussion of wilderness, which was expressed in terms of the “sublime”: “Wilderness represents a flight from history. Seen as the original garden, it is a place outside of time, from which human beings had to be ejected before the fallen world of history could properly begin.” Cronon goes on to discuss the dualistic vision implicit in the idea of wilderness, in which the human is entirely outside the natural. See “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong nature,” in Uncommon Ground, ed. William Cronon (new York: W. W. Norton, 1995), 79–80. 10. Peter Latz, “ ‘design’ by Handling the Existing,” in Modern Park Design: Recent Trends (Amsterdam: Thoth, 1993), 97. 11. Latz has commented that it is impossible to understand the Ruhr region without recognizing the role of the railway network in shaping the landscape. It was a functional system that not only served the industrial plants but also influenced the layout of the towns. The railroad was laid out as a rational system, providing direct connections, in contrast to the street system, which was typically more haphazard and circuitous, and sectionally separated from the rail system. 12. Peter Latz, personal interview, June 1997. 13. Latz, interview. 14. The Piazza Metallica at Duisburg is an example of this postindustrial hybrid, where the machine becomes an extension of nature. In a former work yard of the ironworks, the production of iron is represented in both its molten and hardened states by a massive grid of forty-nine eight-ton iron plates that had been discovered in the pig158
iron casting works. The intensity of the industrial processes gives them the primordial quality of natural geological forces; the eroded surfaces of the plates, which had been subjected to temperatures of 1,600 degrees, are like earth forms eroded by fluvial processes. 15. Udo Weilacher, Between Landscape Architecture and Land Art (Basel and Boston: Birkhäuser, 1996), 131. 16. Anneliese Latz and Peter Latz, “new Images: Metamorphosis of Industrial areas,” Scroope—Cambridge Architectural Journal 9 (1997): 39. 17. Peter Beard, “Peter Latz, Poet of Pollution,” Blueprint 130 (1996): 35. 18. The once distinct towns of Duisburg, Meiderich, Hamborn, Kreuz, and neumühl have now merged imperceptibly to form an almost continuous urban fabric around most of the park. However, the neighborhoods are demographically distinct, and the facilities located near the various entrances are meant to reflect specific neighborhood needs. 19. These original stakes were removed by the park administration after several years. 20. Miller, The Garden as an Art, 25. 21. A pioneer species is an early occupant of newly created or disturbed areas. It is a member of the early-stage communities in ecological succession. 22. Latz, interview. 23. See Daniel Botkin, Discordant Harmonies (new York: Oxford university Press, 1990), 12–13, for a discussion of cultural metaphors of nature that have influenced ecological thought—from divinely ordered, organic, and mechanistic models to a new model influenced by computers in which the distinction between organic and inorganic 159
is no longer very clear. See also Daniel Simberloff, “a Succession of Paradigms in Ecology: Essentialism to Materialism and Probabilism,” in Conceptual Issues in Ecology, ed. Esa Saarinen (dordrecht: d. Reidel, 1980), regarding the impact of Greek metaphysical philosophy—Platonic idealism and Aristotelian essentialism—on ecosystem ecology. 24. For a discussion of this paradigm shift, see Daniel Simberloff’s influential “a Succession of Paradigms”; and S. Pickett, V. T. Parker, and P. Fiedler’s “The new Paradigm in Ecology: Implications for conservation Biology above the Species level,” in Conservation Biology, ed. P. Fiedler and S. Jain (new York: Chapman and Hall, 1992); and Robert McIntosh, The Background of Ecology: Concept and Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge university Press, 1985). For a discussion of ecology’s new paradigm and its meaning for designers, see Robert cook, “do landscapes learn? Ecology’s ‘new Paradigm’ and design in landscape architecture,” in Environmentalism in Landscape Architecture, ed. Michel Conan (Washington: Dumbarton Oaks Research library collection, 2000), as well as R. Pullian and Bart Johnson’s “Ecology’s new Paradigm: What does It Offer designers and Planners?” in Ecology and Design, ed. Bart Johnson and Kristina Hill (Washington, dc: Island Press, 2002). 25. See Michael Barbour’s “Ecological Fragmentation in the 50s,” in Cronon, Uncommon Ground, for a discussion of the debate between Frederic clements and Henry Gleason over the concept of ecological communities. 26. P. M. Vitousek and P. S. White, “Process Studies in Succession,” in Forest Succession: Concepts and Applications, ed. D. C. West, H. H. Shugart, and d. B. Botkin (new York: Springer-Verlag, 1981), quoted in Fiedler and Jain, Conservation
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Industry and Landscape 1. Berger, Alan. 2006. Drosscape: Wasting Land in Urban America. 1st ed. New York: Princeton Architectural Press. 37-38. 2. Berger, Alan. 40. 3. Berger, Alan. 22-23. 4. Berger, Alan. 25. 5. Berger, Alan. 26. 6. Braae, Ellen. 2015. Beauty Redeemed: Recycling Post-Industrial Landscapes. Risskov : Basel: IKAROS Press ; Birkhäuser. 47. 7. Braae, Ellen. 42. 8. Braae, Ellen. 42-43. 9. Berger, Alan. 35. 10. King, Jason. 2011. “Source: Terrain Vague - de Sola Morales.” Landscape+Urbanism (blog). July 21, 2011. http:// landscapeandurbanism.blogspot.com/2011/07/source-terrainvague-de-sola-morales.html. 11. Braae, Ellen. 78-83. 12. Braae, Ellen. 86-93. 13. Braae, Ellen. 89. 14. Braae, Ellen. 98.
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15. Adam, Hubertus, Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich, and Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich, eds. 2005. Landscape Architecture in Mutation: Essays on Urban Landscapes. Zürich: gta Verlag. 19-21. 16. Schäfer, Robert, ed. 2010. Landscape Urbanism. Topos, 71.2010. München: Callwey. 40. 17. Schäfer, Robert, ed. 42. 18. Adam, Hubertus. 32.
The Calumet Corridor 1. Workers of the Writers’ Program of the Work Projects Administration. 1939. Calumet Region Historical Guide: Containing The Early History of The Region as Well as The Contemporary Scene Within The Cities of Gary, Hammond, East Chicago (Including Indiana Harbor) , and Whiting. Gary, Indiana: Federal Works Agency. IX 2. Hartke, Edwin J, John R Hill, and Mark Reshkin. n.d. “Environmental Geology of Lake and Porter Counties, Indiana An Aid to Planning,” 4-6. 3. Workers of the Writers’ Program. 27-28. 4. Workers of the Writers’ Program. 10. 5. Workers of the Writers’ Program. 22-29. 6. Workers of the Writers’ Program. 67-81. 7. Solutions, Tribune Content. n.d. “Driving Economic Engines: Refineries, Steel Mills Had Huge Impact on Northwest Indiana.” Chicago Tribune. Accessed February 7, 2019. https://www. chicagotribune.com/suburbs/advertising/progress/ct-ss-progdriving-economic-engines-refineries-steel-mills-had-huge-impacton-northwest-indiana-20160621dto-story.html. 162
8. Workers of the Writers’ Program. 87. 9. Solutions, Tribune Content. n.d. 10. Keyes, Jonathan. 2005. “Inland Steel Co.” Encyclopedia. Encyclopedia of Chicago. 2005. http://www.encyclopedia. chicagohistory.org/pages/642.html. 11. Workers of the Writers’ Program. 97. 12. Workers of the Writers’ Program. 147-150. 13. Workers of the Writers’ Program. 152 14. Workers of the Writers’ Program. 186. 15. Mohl, Raymond. 2005. “Gary, IN.” Encyclopedia. Encyclopedia of Chicago. 2005. http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/ pages/503.html. 16. Bensman, David, and Mark Wilson. 2005. “Iron and Steel.” Encyclopedia. Encyclopedia of Chicago. 2005. http://www. encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/653.html. 17. Bensman, David, and Mark Wilson. 18. Bensman, David, and Mark Wilson. 19. Workers of the Writers’ Program. 87-88. 20. Bensman, David, and Mark Wilson. 21. Bensman, David, and Mark Wilson. 22. Bensman, David, and Mark Wilson. 23. Reese, Sarah. n.d. “Region’s Air and Water Quality Have Improved, but Work Continues.” Nwitimes.Com. Accessed April 23, 163
2019. https://www.nwitimes.com/news/local/lake/region-s-air-andwater-quality-have-improved-but-work/article_0853f272-a96c5179-bca3-3f8a55df8eb4.html. 24. Hannon, Allison. n.d. “A New Northwest Indiana: A Cleaner Economy and Environment,” 57. 25. Reese, Sarah. 26. Hawthorne, Michael. n.d. “Indiana Steel Mill Emits 18,000 Pounds of Lead a Year. Is It Blowing toward Chicago?” Chicagotribune.Com. Accessed April 23, 2019. https://www. chicagotribune.com/news/ct-met-burns-harbor-steel-mill-leadpollution-20180723-story.html. 27. Hannon, Allison. 12. 28. Hannon, Allison. 10. 29. Hawthorne, Michael. n.d. “U.S. Steel Dumps More Toxic Chromium near Lake Michigan, Faces Lawsuit.” Chicagotribune. Com. Accessed April 23, 2019. https://www.chicagotribune.com/ news/local/breaking/ct-lake-michigan-toxic-chromium-20171114story.html. 30. Hannon, Allison. 17-18. 31. Hartke, Edwin J, John R Hill, and Mark Reshkin. n.d. “Environmental Geology of Lake and Porter Counties, Indiana An Aid to Planning,” 14.
The Calumet Corridor 1. NPS. n.d. “Residential Development of the Indiana Dunes, 1870 - 1970 - Indiana Dunes National Park (U.S. National Park Service).” Accessed April 23, 2019. https://www.nps.gov/indu/learn/ historyculture/residential_development.htm. 164
2.Indiana Department of Transportation. 2017. “2017 Indiana State Rail Plan.” State of Indiana.28. 3. Indiana Department of Transportation. 54-55. 4.Indiana Department of Transportation. 23. 5. Keyes, Jonathan. 2005. “Inland Steel Co.” Encyclopedia. Encyclopedia of Chicago. 2005. http://www.encyclopedia. chicagohistory.org/pages/642.html. 6. Keyes, Jonathan. 7.Keyes, Jonathan. 8. Hannon, Allison. n.d. “A New Northwest Indiana: A Cleaner Economy and Environment,” 33-37. 9. Mohl, Raymond. 2005. “Gary, IN.” Encyclopedia. Encyclopedia of Chicago. 2005. http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/ pages/503.html. 10. Mohl, Raymond. 11. Pete, Joseph. n.d. “$750 Million Gary Works Investment ‘Will Ripple throughout the Region for Many Years.’” Nwitimes.Com. Accessed April 24, 2019. https://www.nwitimes.com/business/lakenewsletter/million-gary-works-investment-will-ripple-throughoutthe-region-for/article_ebb8fe50-8755-5b68-b27c-0c3f7b54fdfe. html. 12. Solutions, Tribune Content. n.d. “Driving Economic Engines: Refineries, Steel Mills Had Huge Impact on Northwest Indiana.” Chicago Tribune. Accessed February 7, 2019. https://www. chicagotribune.com/suburbs/advertising/progress/ct-ss-progdriving-economic-engines-refineries-steel-mills-had-huge-impacton-northwest-indiana-20160621dto-story.html. 165
13. Chicago Tribune. 14. Chicago Tribune 15. Pete, Joseph. n.d. “Michigan City Hopes to Open Lakefront up to Public When NIPSCO Plant Decommissioned.” Nwitimes.Com. Accessed April 23, 2019. https://www.nwitimes.com/business/ local/michigan-city-hopes-to-open-lakefront-up-to-public-when/ article_9158af45-43c8-53c1-833f-b3a285217773.html. 16. Pete, Joseph. 17. Pete, Joseph.
The Calumet Corridor 1. Rosenberg, Elissa. 2009. “Gardens, Landscape, Nature: Duisburg Nord Germany.p... ×.” In , 209–30.
Conclusions 1. Springsteen, Bruce. 1984. Atlantic City. 2. Adam, Hubertus, Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich, and Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich, eds. 2005. Landscape Architecture in Mutation: Essays on Urban Landscapes. Zürich: gta Verlag. 19-21.
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Part I: Precedent and Theories 1. Viétor, Birte & Hoppe, T & Clancy, Joy. (2015). Decentralised combined heat and power in the German Ruhr Valley; assessment of factors blocking uptake and integration. Energy, Sustainability and Society. 5. 1-16. 10.1186/s13705-015-0033-0. 2. Panick, Christa. n.d. “Landschaftspark Duisburg Nord by Latz + Partner « Landscape Architecture Platform | Landezine.” Accessed April 22, 2019. http://www.landezine.com/index.php/2011/08/postindustrial-landscape-architecture/. 3. Latz, Peter. n.d. “Duisburg-Nord - The Railway Park.” Accessed April 22, 2019. https://www.Latzundpartner.de/en/projekte/ postindustrielle-landschaften/duisburg-nord-bahnpark/. 4. Latz, Peter. n.d. “Duisburg-Nord - The Railway Park.” Accessed April 22, 2019. https://www.Latzundpartner.de/en/projekte/ postindustrielle-landschaften/duisburg-nord-bahnpark/. 5. Latz, Peter. 2016. Rust Red: Landscape Park Duisburg-Nord. Translated by Caroline Ahrens. Munich: Hirmer. 56. 6. Latz, Peter. n.d. “Duisburg-Nord - The Waterpark.” Accessed April 22, 2019. https://www.Latzundpartner.de/en/projekte/ postindustrielle-landschaften/duisburg-nord-wasserpark/. 7. Latz, Peter. n.d. “Duisburg-Nord - The Waterpark.” Accessed April 22, 2019. https://www.Latzundpartner.de/en/projekte/ postindustrielle-landschaften/duisburg-nord-wasserpark/. 8. Latz, Peter. n.d. “Duisburg-Nord - Sinter Park” Accessed April 22, 2019. https://www.Latzundpartner.de/en/projekte/postindustriellelandschaften/duisburg-nord-sinterpark/ 9. Latz, Peter. n.d. “Landscape Park Duisburg-Nord” Accessed April 22, 2019. https://www.Latzundpartner.de/en/projekte/ postindustrielle-landschaften/landschaftspark-duisburg-nord-de/. 177
10. Latz, Peter. n.d. “Landscape Park Duisburg-Nord” Accessed April 22, 2019. https://www.Latzundpartner.de/en/projekte/ postindustrielle-landschaften/duisburg-nord-hochofenpark/. 11. Latz, Peter. n.d. “Landscape Park Duisburg-Nord” Accessed April 22, 2019. https://www.Latzundpartner.de/en/projekte/ postindustrielle-landschaften/duisburg-nord-spielpunkte/. 12. Latz, Peter. n.d. “Landscape Park Duisburg-Nord” Accessed April 22, 2019. https://www.Latzundpartner.de/en/projekte/ postindustrielle-landschaften/landschaftspark-duisburg-nord-de/. 13. Epic Life. n.d. Castle in the Sky Theme. Accessed April 22, 2019. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrTu7BAjjCA. 14. Berger, Alan. 2006. Drosscape: Wasting Land in Urban America. 1st ed. New York: Princeton Architectural Press. 176-177. 15. Sydhavnen - a Terrain-vague photo, 1964. Photo: Grethe Grathwol Orskov, William. n.d. “Willy Orskov.” Accessed April 22, 2019. http://willyorskov.dk/. 16. “High Line, Section 2 by James Corner Field Operations « Landscape Architecture Platform | Landezine.” n.d. Accessed April 22, 2019. http://www.landezine.com/index.php/2014/01/high-linesection-2-by-james-corner-field-operations/. 17. Taylor, Will L. 1879. English: Detail from the Taylor Map of New York Showing Central Park. http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.gmd/g3804n. pm005990. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Taylor_ Map_-_Central_Park.jpg. 18. “Harvard Design Magazine: Immanent Landscape.” n.d. Accessed April 22, 2019. http://www.harvarddesignmagazine.org/ issues/36/immanent-landscape. 19. Photo by Author. 178
Part II: The Calumet Corridor 1. Map showing location of Northwest Indiana. Google Earth, earth. google.com/web/. 2. “Map of Northwest Territory, 1795.” n.d. Accessed April 23, 2019. http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/6407.html. 3. “Guide through Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, Wisconsin & Iowa; by J. Calvin Smith, Engraved by S. Stiles, Sherman & Smith.” n.d. Image. Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. 20540 USA. Accessed April 23, 2019. https://www.loc.gov/ item/98688387/. 4. “Gallery: Whiting Refinery History.” n.d. Nwitimes.Com. Accessed April 23, 2019. https://www.nwitimes.com/digital/photos/gallery-whiting-refinery-history/collection_15eb6cee-fed2-5277-bf0d5921b70b14ef.html. 5. “0031 87676 Views of West Branch, Indiana Harbor Ship Canal, 1909, 1910, 1912 :: Inland Steel Company Image Collection.” n.d. Accessed April 23, 2019. http://ulib.iupuidigital.org/cdm/ref/collection/IS/id/42. 6. “Foundation of Electric Power Station in Gary, Indiana :: Assorted Images from IHS Collections.” n.d. Accessed April 23, 2019. http:// images.indianahistory.org/cdm/ref/collection/V0002/id/2287. 7. “Soldiers in Gary during Steel Strike, 1919.” n.d. Accessed April 23, 2019. http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/6345. html. 8. “0091 42-3774-5 A Rosie-the-Riveter during World War II, ca. 1943 :: Inland Steel Company Image Collection.” n.d. Accessed April 23, 2019. http://ulib.iupuidigital.org/cdm/ref/collection/IS/id/105.
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9. “Indiana Steel Mill Emits 18,000 Pounds of Lead a Year. Is It Blowing toward Chicago? - Chicago Tribune.” n.d. Accessed April 23, 2019. https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-met-burns-harborsteel-mill-lead-pollution-20180723-story.html. 10. Hartke, Edwin J, John R Hill, and Mark Reshkin. n.d. “Environmental Geology of Lake and Porter Counties, Indiana An Aid to Planning,” 24. 11. Lydersen, Kari. n.d. “Toxic Tour of Northwest Indiana.” Chicago Reader. Accessed April 23, 2019. https://www.chicagoreader.com/ chicago/toxic-tour-of-northwest-indiana/Content?oid=3189482. 12. “What Are the Indiana Dunes—Dunes 101.” 2018. Indiana Dunes. August 13, 2018. http://www.indianadunes.com/travel-blog/ dunes-101-orientation/.
Part III: The Sites Image on Pages 90-91. Map showing location of Northwest Indiana. Google Earth, earth.google.com/web/. With Overlay Image on Pages 92-93. “Indiana Harbor Belt Railroad.” n.d. Accessed April 23, 2019. http://www.ihbrr.com/. 1. Debruler, Dennis. 2015. “Industrial History: C&GE: PRR’s Chicago and Great Eastern Railway (Panhandle).” Industrial History (blog). February 22, 2015. http://industrialscenery.blogspot.com/2015/02/ prrs-chicago-and-great-eastern-railway.html. 2. 2017 Indiana State Rail Plan. n. d. Accessed April 23, 2019. https://www.in.gov/indot/files/2017%20Indiana%20State%20 Rail%20Plan.pdf 3. “Home.” n.d. Accessed April 23, 2019. https://www.mysouthshoreline.com/. 4. “Northwest Indiana Railroad Map | South Shore Trains & Schedules.” n.d. Accessed April 23, 2019. https://www.southshorecvacom/ region/transportation/train-map/. 180
5. Debruler, Dennis. 2015. “Industrial History: US Steel: Gary Works.” Industrial History (blog). November 13, 2015. https://industrialscenery.blogspot.com/2015/11/us-steel-gary-works.html. 6. Debruler, Dennis. 2016. “Industrial History: State Line Tower: IHB vs CSS+C&WI+NKP vs BOCT+Wab+Milw vs Monon+C&O+Erie.” Industrial History (blog). July 7, 2016. https://industrialscenery.blogspot.com/2016/07/state-line-tower-ihb-vs-cssc-vs.html. Image on Pages 98-99. Map showing Inland Steel and Indiana harbor, Northwest Indiana. Google Earth, earth.google.com/web/ 7. “Inland Steel Co., Stockyard with Blast Furnace.” n.d. The Art Institute of Chicago. Accessed April 23, 2019. https://www.artic.edu/ artworks/100386/inland-steel-co-stockyard-with-blast-furnace. 8. 219-933-3316, Joseph S. Pete joseph.pete@nwi.com,. n.d. “Gary Works, Indiana Harbor Steel Mills Big Reasons Indiana Third Worst in Toxic Chemical Releases.” Nwitimes.Com. Accessed April 23, 2019. https://www.nwitimes.com/business/local/gary-works-indiana-harbor-steel-mills-big-reasons-indiana-third/article_f8fdd1a5-429a5539-ab17-c88e86764277.html. 9. “Railroad Slide Gallery: Inland Steel.” n.d. Accessed April 23, 2019. http://www.twinplanets.com/rr/slides/R_IHB_ IL.GA__71.07.26.03_L.html. 10. “Inland Steel Building.” n.d. SOM. Accessed April 23, 2019. http://www.som.com/projects/inland_steel_building. 11. Ostberg, Kristin. 2015. “Two Careers in Rolling Steel.” The Hardscrabbler (blog). September 22, 2015. http://thehardscrabbler. blogspot.com/2015/09/. 12. Mácha, Viktor. n.d. “ArcelorMittal Burns Harbor, Indiana | Viktor Mácha - industrial photography.” Accessed April 23, 2019. https:// www.viktormacha.com/galerie/arcelormittal-burns-harbor-indiana-297/. 181
13. “Comfortable Blast Furnace No 7 This Is The Largest Blast Furnace At.” n.d. Veterinariancolleges. Accessed April 23, 2019. https:// veterinariancolleges.org/photo/blast-furnace-no-7-this-is-the-largest-blast-furnace-at.html. 14. Mácha, Viktor. n.d. “ArcelorMittal Indiana Harbor, Indiana | Viktor Mácha - industrial photography.” Accessed April 23, 2019. https:// www.viktormacha.com/galerie/arcelormittal-indiana-harbor-indiana-304/. Image on Pages 108-109. Map showing location of U.S. Steel Garyworks. Google Earth, earth.google.com/web/. 15. “U.S. Steel Photograph Collection -- Photographs, Blast Furnace, USS Gary Works.” n.d. Accessed April 23, 2019. http://webapp1.dlib.indiana.edu/ussteel/results/item.do?itemId=/nw/cra/ ussteel/CRA-42-118-019. 16. “Industriefotografie, Industrial Photography.” n.d. Accessed April 23, 2019. http://www.stahlseite.de/galeriearchi1.htm. 17. “Industriefotografie, Industrial Photography.” n.d. Accessed April 23, 2019. http://www.stahlseite.de/galeriearchi1.htm. 18. “Gary-Works-1908.Jpg (2375×420).” n.d. Accessed April 23, 2019. http://www.us-data.org/in/graphics/gary-works-1908.jpg. 19. Debruler, Dennis. 2015. “Industrial History: US Steel: Gary Works.” Industrial History (blog). November 13, 2015. http://industrialscenery.blogspot.com/2015/11/us-steel-gary-works.html. 20. Hawthorne, Michael. n.d. “U.S. Steel Dumps More Toxic Chromium near Lake Michigan, Faces Lawsuit.” Chicagotribune.Com. Accessed April 23, 2019. https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/ct-lake-michigan-toxic-chromium-20171114-story.html.
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21. Channick, Robert. n.d. “U.S. Steel to Invest $750 Million to Revitalize Flagship Gary Plant in Wake of Trump Tariffs.” Chicagotribune. Com. Accessed April 23, 2019. https://www.chicagotribune.com/ business/ct-biz-us-steel-tariffs-gary-plant-20180816-story.html. 22. “U.S. Steel Photograph Collection -- Interior Blowing Engine House Furnace 5 To 8.” n.d. Accessed April 23, 2019. http://webapp1.dlib.indiana.edu/ussteel/results/item.do?itemId=/nw/cra/ ussteel/CRA-42-116-119. 23. (219) 933-3316, Joseph S. Pete joseph.pete@nwi.com,. n.d. “Iron Ore Arrives at Gary Works.” Nwitimes.Com. Accessed April 23, 2019. https://www.nwitimes.com/business/local/iron-ore-arrivesat-gary-works/article_80785450-f797-5d48-a8d8-83d38655151e. html. Image on Pages 118-119. Map showing location of Midwest Steel and Bethlehem Steel Plants. Google Earth, earth.google.com/web/. 24. “Wheeling-Follansbee Steel Related Keywords & Suggestions - Wheeling-Pittsburgh Follansbee Steel Long Tail Keywords.” n.d. Accessed April 23, 2019. http://www.keywordbasket.com/d2hlZWxpbmctcGl0dHNidXJnaCBmb2xsYW5zYmVlIHN0ZWVs/. 25. “Gallery: Burns Harbor’s Early History | Northwest Indiana History | Nwitimes.Com.” n.d. Accessed April 23, 2019. https://www. nwitimes.com/news/history/gallery-burns-harbor-s-early-history/ collection_5228d720-b6eb-5b67-b49e-f6e7b42757a2.html. 26. “Power Problems Idle ArcelorMittal Burns Harbor Plant - Post-Tribune.” n.d. Accessed April 23, 2019. https://www.chicagotribune. com/suburbs/post-tribune/news/ct-ptb-steel-mill-call-st-032120150320-story.html. 27. “Gallery: Burns Harbor’s Early History | Northwest Indiana History | Nwitimes.Com.” n.d. Accessed April 23, 2019. https://www.nwitimes.com/news/history/gallery-burns-harbor-s-early-history/collection_5228d720-b6eb-5b67-b49e-f6e7b42757a2.html. 183
28. “Gallery: Burns Harbor’s Early History | Northwest Indiana History | Nwitimes.Com.” n.d. Accessed April 23, 2019. https://www. nwitimes.com/news/history/gallery-burns-harbor-s-early-history/ collection_5228d720-b6eb-5b67-b49e-f6e7b42757a2.html. 29. Bostock, Mike. 2006. Burns Harbor Steel Plant. Built by Bethlehem Steel, Now Owned by Mittal. Cropped from Original Version. mittal steel, burns harbor. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/ File:Mittal_Burns_Harbor.jpg. Image on Pages 126-127. Map showing location of Midwest Steel and Bethlehem Steel Plants. Google Earth, earth.google.com/web/. 30. Photo by author. 31. “NIPSCO Cuts 11 Percent Rate Hike Request | Northwest Indiana Business Headlines | Nwitimes.Com.” n.d. Accessed April 23, 2019. https://www.nwitimes.com/business/local/nipsco-cuts-percent-rate-hike-request/article_742d6279-ed94-567b-8a48-5eb9c1a6e6fd.html. 32. Reporter, Veronica Ortega, WSBT 22. 2018. “NIPSCO Announces It Plans to Shut down Its Michigan City Coal-Fired Power Plant.” WSBT. September 25, 2018. http://wsbt.com/news/local/nipscoannounces-it-plans-to-shut-down-its-michigan-city-coal-fired-power-plant. 33. “Michigan City Hopes to Open Lakefront up to Public When NIPSCO Plant Decommissioned | Northwest Indiana Business Headlines | Nwitimes.Com.” n.d. Accessed April 23, 2019. https:// www.nwitimes.com/business/local/michigan-city-hopes-to-openlakefront-up-to-public-when/article_9158af45-43c8-53c1-833fb3a285217773.html. 34. “A Breath of Cleaner Air on the Lake Michigan Shore.” n.d. Accessed April 23, 2019. https://www.powermag.com/a-breath-ofcleaner-air-on-the-lake-michigan-shore/?printmode=1. 184
35. “Michigan City | Mapio.Net.” n.d. Accessed April 23, 2019. https://mapio.net/a/5659983/. 36. “Michigan City-Industrial Landscape.” n.d. One Region | Northwest Indiana. Accessed April 23, 2019. http://www.oneregionnwi. org/our-featured-artist/michigan-city-industrial-landscape/.
Part IV: Proposals Image on Pages 138-139. Collage by Author. Image on Pages 140-141. Collage by Author. Image on Pages 142-143. Collage by Author. Image on Pages 144-145. Collage by Author. Image on Pages 146-147. Collage by Author.
Part V: Conclusion(s) 1. Photo by author.
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