Sometime, the folks in Waukegan hope, the day will come when they won’t have to answer questions for articles like this one.
In the 1880s, the city fathers of Waukegan, the seat of Lake County, convinced Congress to fund the creation of Waukegan Harbor as a frankly commercial enterprise. It turned out to be a fine investment. About 40 miles up the lakeshore from downtown Chicago, Waukegan became the only deep-water port between here and Milwaukee; as industry settled there, a town of fewer than 10,000 souls grew to a bustling manufacturing city of better than 50,000.
“I think there is a great desire here to see Waukegan experience a rebirth,” Wood says, “to create a new image and a new reality.”
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Also in the works, according to Freeborn, is a retail-office-restaurant development on the shore of the new harbor, which Wood calls an example of just the sort of “public-private partnership” needed to revitalize downtown Waukegan. Other projects are in progress or planned: the Commercial Club of Chicago estimated last spring that more than $500 million in private and public funds are being pumped into the area.
Perhaps Wood’s most successful brainstorm to date has been the “Lake Michigan Circle Tour,” an updating of Daniel Burnham’s 1909 proposal for a trail around the rim of the lake. You may have spotted the Circle Tour signs on Sheridan Road in Evanston, or along the dunes highways in Indiana.
“If there is a ‘the problem’ to be solved,” Wood says with a sigh, “it’s an image problem: the Rust Belt. The PCBs are both a reality and a symbol, and part of that image problem.”
In 1966, a Swedish chemist discovered PCBs in the environment–including his own family’s hair–while monitoring for DDT, a dangerous pesticide similar to PCBs. In 1968, more than 1,000 people in Kitakyushu, Japan, came down with skin lesions, swollen limbs, abdominal cramps, and other problems; mothers in the area gave birth to undersized, sickly infants. Five people died before the problem was traced to PCBs accidentally mixed into rice oil in a local rice-milling plant.
