An overflow crowd packed into a South Side union training hall Thursday night and loudly rejected the plan sketched out by Amtrak officials for a massive new maintenance center in their neighborhood.
The company’s presentation was punctuated by boos and groans from hundreds of Chinatown, Bridgeport and Armour Square residents.
Most people said they worried about potential pollution. Many also complained the surrounding communities were not consulted, and that they first heard about the project in August when Amtrak announced it secured nearly $700 million in federal loans to develop the facility.
“This kind of facility does not belong in a residential neighborhood, period,” said Elizabeth Riddle. “We are not accepting this. We will continue to fight.”
Amtrak’s proposed maintenance yard would stretch for about 2 miles along Canal Street between Cermak Road and 38th Street on the current Union Pacific railyard just west of the Chicago White Sox’s Rate Field. The plan includes a multistory train shed, a train washing facility and other storage areas. It would replace Amtrak’s current railyard along the South Branch of the Chicago River at 14th Street, just across from The 78, a mixed-use development and site of the Chicago Fire’s new stadium.
Steven Segerlin, Amtrak’s head of commercial development, said the company held a series of community meetings in Chinatown starting this summer and will hold others in the affected communities as the $900 million project moves forward.
“We appreciate the community is hearing a lot of this information in great detail right now,” he said.
More Top Picks Best Reading Glasses For Women
Amtrak is in the midst of a multibillion-dollar, nationwide reconstruction effort, he added, and the Bridgeport facility will play a key role in modernizing the company, speed up repair and maintenance operations, and curtail train delays out of Union Station and across the country. Amtrak considered staying at and renovating the 14th Street yard, Segerlin said, but found it no longer met its needs.
“First, our yard at 14th Street is old,” he said.
It’s also too cramped, and to improve operations, Amtrak needs to service whole trains at once, rather than splitting them up the way it’s forced to do at 14th Street, Segerlin said.
“That requires a singular building large enough to contain an entire train,” he said, and the long stretch of Bridgeport railway controlled by Union Pacific can accommodate a massive train shed.
Amtrak is currently negotiating a purchase of the Union Pacific yard, Segerlin said.
Segerlin’s explanations fell flat with the crowd. They said returning a 24/7 train operation to the Union Pacific property, little used for at least 15 years, would bring back diesel fumes and noise to now-quiet streets and schoolyards.
“There are families here that can reach out and touch the train tracks,” said Sarah Tang, director of programs for the nonprofit Coalition For a Better Chinese American Community.
Nick Desideri, political director of the Chicago Federation of Labor, along with several other union representatives, tried to make the case for Amtrak’s new facility, saying it would create thousands of construction jobs, but was shouted down.
Hanging over the entire controversy is the possibility that an Amtrak move would give the White Sox an opportunity to abandon Rate Field.
Canal Edge, a company controlled by billionaire Justin Ishbia, a minority owner of the White Sox who could purchase majority ownership in the near future, was selected to develop Amtrak’s new facility. Ishbia is kicking in $125 million toward the Amtrak project. Earlier this month he also unveiled plans for a new riverfront White Sox park on Amtrak’s current site near 14th Street.
The team’s lease at Rate Field expires in 2029.
Ishbia would need to buy Amtrak’s 14th Street facility and a neighboring railyard to complete his new development, called The Railyards. It would include a privately financed stadium, new healthcare facilities occupied by Northwestern Medicine and a new Metra station. An Ishbia-controlled company has applied for a $1.8 billion federal loan, similar to the one secured by Amtrak, to help fund the vision.
Ishbia did not speak at the Thursday community meeting.
“The 11th Ward is united in opposition to this,” said Ald. Nicole Lee, 11th, one of many elected officials attending the Thursday night meeting. “Look around you, these numbers keep getting bigger.”
The passionate opposition has taken many by surprise. U.S. Sens. Richard Durbin and Tammy Duckworth both praised the proposal in August after the company secured federal funding. But both have partly backtracked since then, saying Amtrak needs to be more transparent in its dealings with Bridgeport and Chinatown neighbors.
Bridgeport resident Carmine Giso got the loudest cheers Thursday night when he denounced Amtrak’s proposal as “a nasty real estate deal.”
The loudest jeers came when Amtrak officials and its consultants explained why the company was recently given an exemption by the Trump administration from conducting in-depth environmental assessments of the project and its potential community impact.
Several preliminary assessments were done, said Susannah Campbell of BFW Engineering & Testing, including studies of the railyard’s soil, possible air pollution, and how much noise a new maintenance facility would create.
More Top Picks Best Bookshelf Speakers For Vinyl
“What the study found was that there would be no severe noise impact,” Campbell said, followed by a chorus of boos.
The noise assessment did find that some homes near Canal Street, mostly on the far southern end of the proposed maintenance facility, would experience a moderate noise impact, Campbell said. Amtrak could likely solve that problem, possibly by constructing noise barriers, she added.
Bridgeport resident Catherine Isely asked Segerlin if Amtrak would commit to reducing noise impact to zero.
“All we need is an assurance from you that you will do it,” she said.
Segerlin said noise mitigation efforts such as barriers were under consideration. He added that Amtrak deserved the federal exemption, partly because the Canal Street property has been a railyard for more than 100 years, so Amtrak’s maintenance facility would not be a major transformation. It will also generate less noise and pollution than typical freight train operations.
Amtrak has published online summaries of the environmental studies. Several Bridgeport and Chinatown residents, including Dr. Gregory Ellis, who said his family lives near the railyard, asked Segerlin to make the full studies public.
“Overall, the summaries are really sparse,” said Hannah Dembosky, founder of Bridgeport Environmentalists, a community group. “They have no metrics, no actual details and no methodology.”
Segerlin said Amtrak will publish the detailed studies soon.
Lee scoffed at the notion such a large-scale project deserved a federal exemption.
“Don’t tell me there isn’t going to be an impact,” she said. “The (federal exemption) was created for things like new bus stops.”
She told Segerlin she appreciated the details shared at the meeting, but said Amtrak needed to do much more before breaking ground. She also acknowledged city officials don’t have much control over major railyards, typically governed by federal law.
“We still don’t have an actual rendering of what the (main) building will look like,” or its capacity, she said. “It’s not asking too much to pump the brakes. We want transparency. We’ve known that you had federal exemption powers. Just because you have a power, doesn’t mean you have to use it that way. There’s a right way to do it and a wrong way to do it.”
Segerlin said Amtrak will share more details when it completes the purchase of the Union Pacific property. The company will also voluntarily coordinate with city officials on the project’s design and compliance with fire and safety codes, he added.