Life after steel on the South Side of Chicago can be surprisingly beautiful.
On a peninsula in Lake Michigan carved out by shipping inlets sits Steelworkers Park, a serene space on the southeast edge of the city that once held the roaring furnaces of US Steel’s South Works. Shoreline trails take visitors past giant industrial artifacts dropped in the landscape like Claes Oldenburg sculptures; a 26-ton blast furnace bell and an iron ingot mold the size of a go-kart. At its peak in 1944, the mill employed 20,000 people. The complex closed in 1992, and today, only eroding remnants of its 2,000-foot-long ore walls mark its footprint, monuments to a shuttered industry, and perhaps to a past version of Chicago.