<span class="text"><font color="#333333" class="text"> <p> <meta content="" name="Title"> <meta content="" name="Keywords"> <meta content="text/html; charset=utf-8" http-equiv="Content-Type"> <meta content="Word.Document" name="ProgId"> <meta content="Microsoft Word 11" name="Generator"> <meta content="Microsoft Word 11" name="Originator"> <link href="file://localhost/Users/garycialdella/Library/Caches/TemporaryItems/msoclip1/01/clip_filelist.xml" rel="File-List" /> <!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <o:DocumentProperties> <o:Template>Normal</o:Template> <o:Revision>0</o:Revision> <o:TotalTime>0</o:TotalTime> <o:Pages>1</o:Pages> <o:Words>2128</o:Words> <o:Characters>12134</o:Characters> <o:Company>Carr Cialdella Photography</o:Company> <o:Lines>101</o:Lines> <o:Paragraphs>24</o:Paragraphs> <o:CharactersWithSpaces>14901</o:CharactersWithSpaces> <o:Version>11.1282</o:Version> </o:DocumentProperties> <o:OfficeDocumentSettings> <o:AllowPNG /> </o:OfficeDocumentSettings> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:WordDocument> <w:Zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:DoNotShowRevisions /> <w:DoNotPrintRevisions /> <w:DisplayHorizontalDrawingGridEvery>0</w:DisplayHorizontalDrawingGridEvery> <w:DisplayVerticalDrawingGridEvery>0</w:DisplayVerticalDrawingGridEvery> <w:UseMarginsForDrawingGridOrigin /> </w:WordDocument> </xml><![endif]--> <style type="text/css"> <!-- /* Font Definitions */ @font-face {font-family:"Times New Roman"; panose-1:0 2 2 6 3 5 4 5 2 3; mso-font-charset:0; mso-generic-font-family:auto; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:50331648 0 0 0 1 0;} @font-face {font-family:Optima; panose-1:0 2 0 5 3 6 0 0 2 0; mso-font-charset:0; mso-generic-font-family:auto; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:50331648 0 0 0 1 0;} /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-parent:""; margin:0in; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman";} table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-parent:""; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman";} @page Section1 {size:8.5in 11.0in; margin:1.0in .75in 1.0in .75in; mso-header-margin:.5in; mso-footer-margin:.5in; mso-paper-source:0;} div.Section1 {page:Section1;} --> </style> <!--StartFragment--> <span style="font-family: Arial;"><strong>The Calumet Region: An American Place</strong></span> </meta> </meta> </meta> </meta> </meta> </meta> </p> <p> </p> <p> <meta content="" name="Title"> <meta content="" name="Keywords"> <meta content="text/html; charset=utf-8" http-equiv="Content-Type"> <meta content="Word.Document" name="ProgId"> <meta content="Microsoft Word 11" name="Generator"> <meta content="Microsoft Word 11" name="Originator"><span style="font-family: Optima;"><i><o:p></o:p></i></span> </meta> </meta> </meta> </meta> </meta> </meta> </p> <p><!--[if supportFields]><span style='font-family:Optima'><i><span style='mso-element:field-begin'></span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>CONTACT _Con-3F7C50B91 \c \s \l <span style='mso-element:field-separator'></span></i></span><![endif]--><span style="font-family: Arial;"><!--[if supportFields]><span style='font-family:Optima'><i><span style='mso-element:field-end'></span></i></span><![endif]--></span><span style="font-family: Optima;"><i><o:p></o:p></i></span><span style="font-family: Arial;"><i><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--><!--[endif]--></i></span><span style="font-family: Optima;"><i><o:p></o:p></i></span></p> <p style="line-height: 150%;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Arial;"> As I write this essay the <i>Chicago Tribune </i>reports that Union Tank Car in East Chicago, Indiana has abruptly closed, moving its operation to non-union shops in Louisiana and Texas, an all too common story in the Calumet Region. The <i>Chicago Tribune</i> article noted that since 1979 northwest Indiana has lost more than two-thirds of its 89,000 jobs. Today, the mostly Hispanic and African American population of East Chicago earns a median household income of $26,500. I grew up in a different time, when the Region was considered a manufacturing center and anything you could imagine was made in, or in some way connected, to the Calumet. </span><span style="font-family: Optima;"><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p style="line-height: 150%;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Arial;"> My family’s house was on Artesian Avenue and 120<sup>th</sup> street in Blue Island, Illinois. This neighborhood of mostly post-war homes was on Blue Island’s north side, a block from the city of Chicago. When my parents had this three bedroom brick home built, we moved from the Italian east side of town. Blue Island’s Italian community was close-knit and the move, although only a mile or so away, was a break from tradition. For my parents, who experienced the Great Depression, the move grew out of the desire to raise my sister and me in the mainstream of American life, to take our place in the growing middle class.</span><span style="font-family: Optima;"><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p style="line-height: 150%;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Arial;"> The neighborhood we left remained an important part of my childhood. My grandparents on both sides lived there, and we visited them on Sunday afternoons. The drive, although short, was exciting to a child. I eagerly anticipated crossing the Western Avenue wooden plank bridge over the Calumet Sag Channel. Riding in the back seat with my sister in our used 1953 Ford, with the sound of the car wheels over the loose planks and the murky water visible between the openings, was an adventure to a six year-old boy. </span><span style="font-family: Optima;"><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p style="line-height: 150%;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Arial;"> The Cal Sag Channel runs just south of Blue Island’s business district on Western Avenue. The house where my mother was raised is on Grove Street, two blocks east of Western Avenue. At the bottom of Grove Street hill, just before you reach my grandparents’ home, are the Rock Island and the Illinois Central (today Metra) rail lines. My grandfather, in his later years, would sit in the car he no longer drove, keeping tabs with his railroad watch of the trains that passed by his house. In his working days, my grandfather walked to his job at the Indiana Harbor Belt Railroad Blue Island Yard. Before we moved to Artesian Street we lived on Canal Street, on the opposite side of the Cal-Sag from my grandparents. To visit we crossed the canal on the pedestrian Penny Bridge, so named for the fare once paid to walk it. </span><span style="font-family: Optima;"><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p style="line-height: 150%;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Arial;"> A few blocks northeast of Grove Street is Division Street, the home of my father’s family. Just down the block from their house is St. Donatus Church, where my dad was an altar boy and where our family attended Mass. Like my maternal grandfather, Grandpa Cialdella also worked for the railroad. Blue Island is a tangle of railroads. Looking back it seemed we were always stopped in the car waiting for a train to pass. A couple of miles from the rail lines on Artesian Street are the modest houses, with small yards and garages off alleys, where I spent my childhood. Mostly of brick, somewhat varied in style, these well-crafted homes can be found throughout the Region. Years later, I would trace the origins of my photographs of vernacular architecture to these houses in Blue Island. </span><span style="font-family: Optima;"><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p style="line-height: 150%;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Arial;"> It was a sunny day in the summer of 1955 when I became more fully aware of the wider region I lived in. While I was playing outdoors with friends, we noticed a large mushroom shaped cloud in the blue sky directly to the east. Immediately my thoughts were of atom bombs, but the reality was an explosion and fire at the Standard Oil Refinery at 129<sup>th</sup> Street and Indianapolis Boulevard in Whiting, Indiana. The size of that cloud and its apparent closeness to my neighborhood simultaneously shrank and expanded my world. The day after the explosion I saw newspaper photographs of the disaster showing twisted and melted steel and the rubble where homes once stood. Years later I photographed the homes in Whiting that bordered the renamed Amoco Refinery. </span><span style="font-family: Optima;"><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p style="line-height: 150%;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Arial;"> Photographing the Calumet Region was an idea that evolved over time. Since graduating from college my wife and I made our home in Kalamazoo, Michigan, where I was teaching photography. At the time I was photographing rural landscapes of Michigan and the Mid-west. In 1979 a friend and I, for a change of pace, took a day trip to photograph industrial subjects in East Chicago, Indiana. The waltz tempo landscape of Michigan and Indiana turns operatic when you enter the Region. The steel mills of Gary and East Chicago and the oil refinery at Whiting grab your attention as you drive. The eye notices one set of forms coming into the field of vision that are quickly filled by others. Smoke from the mills, iron bridges, oil tanks, moving trains, and the roadway stream pass like a sequence from Vertov's <i>Man With A Movie Camera</i>. I find the panoramic view from the highway dreamlike, a bit intoxicating. That day I photographed the construction of Cline Avenue, the raised highway being built adjacent to Inland Steel, and I made a few photographs of the bridges at Calumet Harbor. It would be seven years before I returned to begin this series.</span><span style="font-family: Optima;"><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p style="line-height: 150%;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Arial;"> I have heard the Calumet Region described as a “bewilderingly complex” place. This is an apt description: the Region is intertwined with numerous communities, railroad lines, waterways, natural environments, interstate highways and increasingly brownfields. The Calumet Region encompasses the far south side of Chicago, adjacent south suburbs in Illinois, and the area eastward across the state line into Lake and Porter Counties in northwest Indiana. Defined by three geological moraines from the last ice age, these lowlands are now the site of aging industrial communities juxtaposed with delicate sand dunes and beaches. Little known outside the area, a large portion of the waterfront is designated a National Lake Shore, an important natural area saved from development years before the environmental movement we know today existed. Small lakeshore communities like Beverly Shores and Ogden Dunes are serene suburban places. Various photographers and painters have found their subjects in the sand dunes and marshland of this part of Indiana. My interest is elsewhere, in the industrial places, where the brash and confident American past meets the indecisive present.</span><span style="font-family: Optima;"><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p style="line-height: 150%;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Arial;"> Lake Michigan is the setting for the Region’s industry– the lake’s expanse a kind of balm to industrial sprawl. The belt of industry and neighborhoods hugging the shore defines this place and holds the most interest for me. Beginning in the Chicago neighborhood of South Chicago, 87<sup>th</sup> Street and Lake Michigan, the home of U. S. Steel’s South Works from 1880 to 1992, industrial development follows the contour of the Lake’s south shore eastward to the surviving U. S. Steel Works at Gary, Indiana. In between these two points, and three or four miles inland, is where most of the photographs in this book were made. The interplay of industry and domesticity I found here fascinates me.</span><span style="font-family: Optima;"><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p style="line-height: 150%;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Arial;"> Memory and place are inherently linked. When I began working on this series in 1986, I started in Whiting, Indiana. At the time I was producing a series of photographs of vernacular architecture. The homes bordering the Amoco (now BP) Refinery seemed like a logical extension of that work. The Standard Oil explosion of 1955 was certainly in my mind the first days I photographed on the streets next to the refinery. More significant was the uncanny sense of familiarity I felt. I knew those homes, not specifically the ones I was facing, but their type, and this experience simultaneously placed me back in my childhood and the present. In <i>“The Poetics of Space”</i> Gaston Bachelard writes that a “house is imagined as a concentrated being. It appeals to our consciousness of centrality.” That summer I made numerous excursions to Whiting, and the nearby neighborhoods of Hammond, Indiana walking the streets with my 4x5 field camera photographing houses. The sense of place I experienced spoke to me and without quite being aware of it I began this project. </span><span style="font-family: Optima;"><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p style="line-height: 150%;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Arial;"> The first impression you have in these neighborhoods is one of sameness. It appears that there is little to distinguish one house from another. One could say the same about a crowd of people. It is the specific case that exemplifies. I photograph homes straight on, facing them as I might a person whose eyes are looking directly back at me. Objects seen in this way emphasizes their particularity. </span><span style="font-family: Optima;"><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p style="line-height: 150%;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Arial;"> Whiting calls itself “the little city on the lake”. At the north end of town is Lake Michigan. Located at the water’s edge is Whiting Park and immediately to its west is Wilhala County Park. Looking west across this narrow portion of the Lake you can see the skyline of the Chicago Loop. To the east jutting out into the Lake on a peninsula of landfill are the mills of East Chicago, Indiana, and due north is the seemingly infinite sweep of the Lake. When you are standing on the beach at Whiting Park the appeal of this little city is more apparent. </span><span style="font-family: Optima;"><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p style="line-height: 150%;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Arial;"> The beauty of the Lake is in stark contrast to other realities of life in the Region. In 1991 the stench of oil brought the residents living near Amoco’s refinery to a forum to question company officials. Amoco had revealed earlier that a 16.8 million gallon pool of oil was located beneath the company’s property, and that some of it was leaching under the nearby homes. The company sank test wells in Whiting streets to determine the extent of the spill. Amoco estimated it would take twenty years to clean up their property. After reading about this incident, I drove to Whiting to see it for myself. The residential street bordering the west side of Whiting is Schrage Avenue. I found it barricaded, although rather subtly with drooping yellow tape. I could see crews on the street apparently drilling test holes. A few years later I photographed the empty lots where homes had once stood. At a corner where a pair of houses had been removed a play area had been built. </span><span style="font-family: Optima;"><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p style="line-height: 150%;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Arial;"> In the late 1970’s I was introduced to the writings of cultural geographers. Particularly influential were D. W. Meinig, Yi-Fu Tuan and J. B. Jackson, as well as the writer and critic John Berger, whose unique insights arise from a different tradition. Their ideas not only helped to shape my thinking about landscape and place, they confirmed what I had felt but not articulated, that ordinary places are important and worthy of our serious attention. When I started working in Calumet it felt as if I had found the perfect place to photograph. </span><span style="font-family: Optima;"><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p style="line-height: 150%;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Arial;"> An industrial landscape possesses a place in ways that, for example, farmland or town squares do not. Calumet is a hodgepodge of conflicting values. It is an aggressive way to construct a place; it is about commerce and production above all else, and on the surface, it is anything but inviting. Superimposed on this over crowded landscape are the effects of popular culture. There is a harsh and affective poetry to the advertising, murals, and personal ornamentation that decorate the streets and neighborhoods. A church mural and a billboard advertisement for a rock radio station may be poles apart in intention, but to me they read the same, as time capsules of our culture, saying as much about us as our national parks or our monuments do. </span><span style="font-family: Optima;"><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p style="line-height: 150%;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Arial;"> <span style="color: black;">Photographing in the city of Gary, Indiana revealed to me the most poignant emotional extremes.</span> Gary’s boom years peaked in the 1950’s. The turbulence of the 1960’s, white flight, and the riots following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. brought the city to its knees. When the financial resources fled Gary for the suburbs, the city was left with serious problems. These many years later, painfully slowly, the city is making its way back. A minor league baseball park and new housing projects are replacing parts of the largely abandoned center city, and on Lake Michigan a casino brings in the revenue to fund these new developments.</span><span style="font-family: Optima;"><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p style="line-height: 150%;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Arial;"> I photographed numerous buildings in Gary, mostly those dating from when the city was thriving and that today reveal loss and decay. Looking at them is to see history in the present moment, a perplexing duality of past stature and current demise. I see my work as both authenticating and elegizing this process. When I was photographing along Broadway Avenue, citizens of Gary often stopped to ask me why I was taking pictures. I told them about my project and of my interest in the old buildings. Invariably they would tell a little bit of history, or direct me to other “important” buildings in the community. This attitude is not limited to Gary and it speaks to the identification with place and the importance of historical memory imbued in the things we have built. </span><span style="font-family: Optima;"><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p style="line-height: 150%;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Arial;"> With every year that passes pieces of the region’s distinctiveness disappear. Familiarity with our surroundings is comforting. It is the source of our sense of place. However, we live in a society of constant change. Americans build and tear down and build again as no one else has before. We call this progress. Even though today we are more conscious of preserving places than we once were, the creed of progress seems firmly intact. Bachelard again, in <i>The Poetics of Space,</i> writes that consciousness rejuvenates everything; that things cherished are born of an “intimate light”. I must have driven past the Inland Steel blast furnace adjacent to the Indiana Harbor Canal a dozen times or more before I photographed it in 2002. That day, for some reason more than others, I felt the presence of the dormant furnace, its weight. One of the oldest furnaces in the Region it was in operation from the first decade of the 20<sup>th</sup> Century until the late 1980’s. A year or so after I made the photograph it was torn down, the land where it stood now a void.</span><span style="font-family: Optima;"><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p style="line-height: 150%;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Arial;"> I have organized this book in the manner I experienced the place, from the neighborhoods outward to the adjacent industry and to the expanse of the Great Lake. It is a place I know, and one that continues to surprise me. I have tried to put into pictures the complexity of my feelings for it. To this day I go out of my way to drive through the Region and take it in. Like so much of America, it is both sad and hopeful. I see the Region as a unique place, but I see it also as a metaphor for the contemporary American landscape. Calumet is a real place, and is home.</span><span style="font-family: Optima;"><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p style="line-height: 150%;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Arial;"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--></span><span style="font-family: Optima;"><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p style="line-height: 150%;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Arial;"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--></span><span style="font-family: Optima;"><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p style="line-height: 150%;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Arial;"> </span><span style="font-family: Optima;"><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p style="line-height: 150%;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Arial;"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> </span><span style="font-family: Optima;"><!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></span></p> <!--EndFragment--> </font></span><br>
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