A Contaminated Riverside Lot in Chicago’s Bridgeport Neighborhood Is Poised for Cleanup by Peoples Gas

CHICAGO—A vacant lot along the south branch of the Chicago River where harmful chemicals from a long-gone gas facility remain in the soil will be cleaned over the next few months to meet residential standards.

Peoples Gas representatives met this week with residents of the Bridgeport neighborhood to explain its remediation plan for 3.7 acres that were part of a company-owned industrial site on the South Side. Adjacent parts of the property were sold years ago to the city of Chicago and turned into a park. Residents want the new cleanup to add to existing parkland.

The gas site, closed in 1944 and decommissioned in 1961, contains polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) and other chemicals in its soil that are health hazards. 

Bridgeport suffers disproportionately from the effects of pollution from Chicago’s heavy industry, and South Side neighborhoods, with large Black and Latino populations, have long sought remedies for air and soil pollutants linked to businesses that operated along the river.

Peoples Gas is voluntarily remediating its Bridgeport property, where gas was produced from coal and oil.  

Residents met with gas officials at the 11th Ward aldermanic office, many of the neighbors hoping to find out what will happen to the land after it’s cleaned up. Gas company officials said they were executing the remediation but have no knowledge of land use plans beyond that.

The site will be restored to a residential standard rather than an industrial one, the officials from Peoples Gas said. That doesn’t necessarily mean that housing will be built on the lot, they explained, but the land will be cleaned to a high standard.

The cleanup will begin as early as October. It will continue throughout the winter, Peoples Gas officials said. 

“From our perspective of executing a project like this, it’s better to start in the colder months,” said Patrick Kenny, principal environmental consultant at WEC Energy Group, the holding company that operates Peoples Gas and other energy companies. “There’s less traffic in the area, and by the time springtime rolls around, it will be a well-oiled machine.” 

About three dozen residents, in person and via Zoom, attended the meeting. Several expressed concern that the cleanup itself is a polluting endeavor, a worrying consideration for those living in an area already overburdened by pollution. 

Alderwoman Nicole Lee told the neighbors that safety is a priority. With a number of other planned or ongoing construction projects in the area, including the demolition of the century-old Damen Silos grain elevators, “we want to make sure that people are safe,” she said. 

“This is a net good thing,” Lee added. “That the space is being remediated, … that takes us one step closer to potentially getting a park.” Lee added, however, that the purpose of the meeting was to outline the remediation process, not to litigate the future of the site. 

Peoples Gas constructed its facility in 1874. The site then covered eight acres. The company remediated half the land in 2006 and sold the remediated portion to the city of Chicago, which developed it into a park and boathouse, known as Park 571. 

Many people at the meeting said they want the land about to be cleaned up to be added to the existing park.

The former manufactured gas plant is not listed on the National Priorities List (NPL), the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s most high-priority sites identified for long-term cleanup. But the EPA considers the property an “NPL-caliber site,” one with an owner willing to handle cleanup.

Properties that use this approach are not eligible for federal remedial cleanup funds. The potentially responsible party—in this case, Peoples Gas—voluntarily finances and conducts the cleanup with EPA oversight. 

Matt Hildreth, senior environmental consultant at WEC Energy Group and the project manager for the remediation effort, told residents Tuesday that the plan for the site involves cleanup of over 65,000 cubic yards of soil beneath the surface. The site will be backfilled with more than 10 feet of clean soil, the depth required for future residential use. The work will be conducted by Chicago engineering and construction firm Burns & McDonnell.

“Excavation and offsite disposable is the primary method of clean-up here,” Hildreth said, “which means excavators removing soil, loading them into trucks and taking those off to landfills that are licensed to appropriately dispose of that material.” The process will involve a technique called in situ solidification/stabilization, which traps contaminants in the soil and prevents leaching by mixing the soil with stabilizers and binding agents. 

“Where it’s safe to do so, we’re going to have folks mixing a special grout with the soils that are deeper at the site,” Hildreth said. “This is something that has been done at many sites like this and many other sites that are impacted from other industrial uses.” 

The method’s main advantage, he said, is that it reduces the amount of material that must be hauled offsite by truck and is less disruptive to the community. Workers will also be constructing earth-retention systems, sheet pile walls that will protect the river edge and other infrastructure adjacent to the site.

Real-time perimeter air monitoring and 24-hour sampling will be conducted to monitor dust and particulate matter, Hildreth said. 

“The team working out there will be getting readouts of these air monitoring devices constantly. If any of those reach a point where we’re alerted there’s a problem, they could take action to mitigate that,” he said, either by stopping work or deploying dust-control methods. 

Peoples Gas has set up a dedicated phone line for residents to report excessive noise, dust and odors, Hildreth said. That number is 877-380-0522.

Many people at the meeting were concerned that dust from the remediation work could blow over the adjacent park and a playground across the street. Some asked the alderwoman why the Chicago Department of Public Health wasn’t invited to the meeting, and how information would be shared between the EPA and CDPH, which typically monitors and enforces limits on emissions of particulate matter.

“I apologize for not having them here, but we’re going to get those answers,” Lee said. “All CDPH regulations for air quality monitoring will be followed on this site.”

Tara Hoffmann, executive director of Recovery on Water, leads a rowing team for breast cancer survivors that operates out of the docks at Park 571. “The key for me is when it’s going to be safe for our athletes to be in the area, on the water practicing,” she said. She said she already tracks water and air quality, but she wanted Peoples Gas to provide additional data that could timely inform residents. 

Hoffmann said she hoped for “anything we can add to our toolkit so we can see if physical activity in the area is safe, not just for the general population, but for individuals with potentially compromised immune systems.” 

Kristen Larson, who joined the meeting via Zoom and runs a children’s playdate group in Bridgeport, asked about real-time access to the air quality monitoring data. Peoples Gas officials said they would investigate the possibility of providing the data but acknowledged that there are difficulties with handling and distributing raw data readouts. 

Larson made sure the gas officials knew why she and others worried about air quality. “We have a number of immunocompromised children in our group,” she said, adding that her children regularly frequent the playground across the street and a recently built nature space within Park 571. “I have one kid who’s going to be obsessed with watching this thing happen, and one kid who’s going to have an asthma attack.”

Other residents wanted to know more about quality control measures of the cleanup. “I know the administration, in terms of the federal EPA, is going more for speed versus quality in terms of Superfund cleanup,” said Ben Moroney, who lives in Bridgeport. “Let’s say the burden of quality diminishes over the next year. Are you beholden to personal standards as a company, or to an original plan?”

“At the end of the day, Peoples Gas is a regulated utility,” said Kenny, the company’s environmental consultant, “and the dollars we spend as part of this cleanup to address some of our legacy are dollars that our ratepayers are paying.” 

Whatever the EPA might or might not require, he said, “when we go to do these cleanups, we want to be as comprehensive and complete as we can be so that we don’t have to come back to the sites, because it’s just going to cost our ratepayers more money in the future.” Kenny noted that the EPA project manager for the site has worked with Peoples Gas for the past five years and for multiple administrations.

Lauren Bumba of the EPA joined the meeting via Zoom and clarified some issues about the site’s future. The initial soil remediation work precedes a required “record of decision” outlining the full remediation plan, she said.  

Bumba said that record will determine the additional work that must be done after the initial soil remediation. The site’s future likely won’t be clear until the remediation work is complete, but Hildreth, the environmental consultant, said a sale could occur after the first part of the cleanup.

Kate Eakin, managing director of the McKinley Park Development Council, a neighborhood nonprofit group that advocates for equitable development, said she wanted the property to become part of the Chicago Park District or for a land trust to purchase it with the eventual goal of turning it over to the public. 

Claudia Latapi, a spokeswoman for Openlands, a land trust alliance that works across Northeastern Illinois to advance nature-based solutions to climate change, said after the meeting that the cleanup was a chance to do better for a broad section of Chicago residents. 

“Cleaning up this site to the highest standards offers a rare opportunity to turn a once-contaminated parcel into safe, accessible green space,” Latapi said in an email. “Its location next to Park 571 makes it especially important for connecting South Side neighborhoods to the South Branch of the Chicago River.”

Eakin said the Park 571 plans included a sidewalk that ended at the fence at the perimeter of the Peoples Gas-owned lot. That, she said, suggests that the city always intended to reunite the two lots.

“We really want to see this ultimately for public use, with community-driven amenities,” Eakin said. “We know that people want public boat storage, expanded docks to decrease conflict between fishers and boaters and the rowing crews, and also some kind of gathering space, like a pavilion. But how do we actually lay the groundwork for that [to] happen?” 

Lee, the alderwoman, responded that she too has big hopes for the land once the cleanup is clinched. 

“I would love to see this space be an extension of the park,” she said. “It’s beautiful waterfront property that should be made available to everybody.”