I’ve driven through Pilsen multiple times a week for six years now and the changes seem to just keep piling up. It’s been such an interesting experience to learn about it’s history while observing these current changes. Safe to say that tradition is the delusion of permeance and nothing in this city stays the same for long. Who would have guessed what Wicker Park and Bucktown would be as trendy as they are now if you’d seen it in the early 1980’s, or that the west loop would go from skid row in the early 1990’s to the yuppie row of high end everything it is now? Pilsen is different however with it’s working class, family rich community. It’s nice to see the neighborhood will get some relief from the power plant that was once a tourist attraction a hundred years ago but of recent decades been the cause of health problems for the surround community. So lets see if Mayor does the right thing and make the company that was enriched by plant and responsible for it’s current polluted state to do the right thing and clean it up and not but on the back of the city or worse let it linger for decades to come. From my understanding a dozen or so jet engines would be turned on during to crank out pollution on hot days when the plant needed to produce larger amounts of energy. I’m not a scientist but from what I’ve read jet fuel is about the worst thing you can put into soil. So lets see if we can use this as an example of how to properly clean up this brownfield and not let it slide on to the community and the city and tax payers down the road…
City wants to replace closed power plants with industrial facilities – Chicago Tribune.
