One of the last, best vacant industrial sites in Chicago is on the Southwest Side, a few blocks south of Marquette Park. There are 60 acres–a huge expanse by city standards–and those acres are just five minutes from the soon-to-be-expanded Midway Airport. The property is bracketed by two active rail yards and by major truck routes such as Western and Cicero Avenues, 79th Street and Southwest Highway.
These’s just one not-so-small problem with the property.
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It’s buried under a small mountain of broken concrete, asphalt chunks, roofing shingles and some nasty stuff called automobile “fluff.”
I climbed the mountain of waste Thursday with an old friend, James Capraro of the Greater Southwest Development Corp. “Cappy,” as he is known to many at 63rd Street and Western Avenue, had phoned earlier in the week out of sheer frustration. His organization, a not-for-profit group that fosters commercial and industrial development, is trying to promote a deal for this site. It hasn’t been easy, for, as you already may have guessed, it’s one of the urban dumping grounds made infamous by the U.S. Justice Department’s “Silver Shovel” probe and prosecution.
For months, Capraro’s group has been working with a small but fast-growing manufacturer/distributor of plastic storage boxes called StyleMaster Inc. It’s a 7-year-old company founded by an African-American woman named Martha Williams. A 25-year-veteran of the plastics industry, Williams has nurtured her startup into a $13-million-a-year enterprise, earning along the way such honors as this year’s Kmart Corp. “Minority Supplier of the Year.” New orders are coming so fast that StyleMaster, now located in northwest suburban Niles, is looking to expand and consolidate at the same time. Williams wants her company to do all of its own manufacturing (as opposed to buying from contract manufacturers) and expand its product lines. More important to Capraro, she wants to build a modern factory with 400 new jobs.
The emphasis is on new because most urban economic development projects involve saving jobs that already exist (as at the Nabisco Bakery modernization nearby) or shifting jobs from one place to another (the convenience mall craze). StyleMaster would bring the kind of jobs that Marquette Park/West Englewood craves–good pay and benefits for skills that can be learned relatively quickly. (Greater Southwest already is eying a closed Catholic elementary school as a skills training center.)
But it’s not going to happen.
Or, at least, it’s not going to happen unless the owners of this tortured property agree to the deal that Capraro and the city have cooked up.
It gets complicated, but the situation boils down to this: The principal owners of the land, a family trust managed by Loop attorney Samuel T. Cohen, are playing hard to get. His son, David, told me from his offices in Santa Fe that he was “optimistic” but couldn’t go into detail. Others familiar with negotiations say the Cohens feel as victimized as anyone by John Christopher, the wheeler-dealer (and later, government informant) who brokered the illegal “Silver Shovel” dumping. The elder Cohen, the story goes, thought he was leasing the trust’s land to a concrete reprocessing facility. Instead he got thousands of cubic yards of construction debris and a massive helping of automotive fluff. A mixture of vinyl, rubber and other car debris, including toxic battery innards,the fluff was allegedly dumped there by Pielet/Tang Enterprises, a metals recycler.
Whether victim or victimizer, the Cohen land trust is among the parties being sued (along with Christopher, Pialet/Tang and others) by the City of Chicago and the State of Illinois. The governments are demanding a complete cleanup of the site plus fines accruing at the rate of $25,000-a-day.
None of which is apt to accomplish much anytime soon. The case could drag on for years as the courts sort out which of the construction firms and trucking companies did the dumping.
City planning officials say they’re offering the Cohens a quick way out of this morass. The ownership trust is being asked to split with the city the cost of cleanup (from $4 million to $6 million or higher, depending on the level of toxicity found in the waste). The Cohens would recover their costs from the proceeds of a direct land sale to StyleMaster. The city would use the proceeds of TIF bonds to be serviced over time from the new factory’s property taxes. And presumably, the governments would drop the Cohens as defendants in the lawsuits.
“They (the Cohen family trust) could end it now and get out from under this,” said David Doig, the city’s assistant commissioner of planning, “or they could end up in litigation for years.”
StyleMaster, however, is not waiting. Capraro said the company has been made an attractive offer by property owners in Will County, and that while Williams would rather move her company into the city, she needs an answer within two weeks.
That’s why Cappy called. He wanted someone to lay it out in plain English so someone else might read it and see the light.
So if you do read this, Sam Cohen, don’t get angry. Get on the phone to your kids. Tell them it’s time to do the right thing. The smart thing, too.
They might not get their asking price but they can get out from under a mountain of trouble.