One of the last industrial facilities in the fast-gentrifying Clybourn Corridor looks more like a set from “Mad Max” than the glittering, tech-friendly utopia portrayed in videos promoting Chicago for Amazon’s second headquarters.
Nearly every day, claw-mounted cranes at the General Iron Industries scrap yard feed flattened cars, twisted rebar and used appliances into hulking shredders that reduce the metallic waste into chunks the size of a coffee can. Smoke pours out of the machines as semis and pickup trucks back into piles of metal, scrap is plucked off barges moored along the Chicago River, and tower-mounted sprinklers spray a fine mist across the wreckage.
Operating a scrap yard wasn’t that unusual when steel mills, leather tanneries and other industries dominated the area. But the Clybourn Corridor has changed so much during the past three decades that General Iron’s neighbors now include a Trader Joe’s, a Patagonia store and Goose Island’s first brewpub.
Bordering the scrap yard on three sides is property recently acquired for a mixed-use development dubbed Lincoln Yards — one of the sites city leaders are pitching for a potential Amazon campus that could employ up to 50,000.
As the area has gone upscale, neighbors have increasingly complained about metallic odors and noise from the scrap yard. Last month, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency ordered General Iron’s owners to conduct detailed air pollution testing within the next six months, the first step in what could be the third federal crackdown on the scrap yard since the late 1990s.
The EPA demanded the tests after Ald. Brian Hopkins, 2nd, revealed that a University of Illinois at Chicago researcher had found alarming levels of lung-damaging particulate matter downwind from the facility. The researcher was enlisted by a Lincoln Park man who said he was fed up with pollution drifting into his neighborhood.
Hopkins welcomed the federal intervention. He also urged Mayor Rahm Emanuel to target the scrap yard with the same public outrage that helped force a company owned by conservative industrialists Charles and David Koch to remove dusty piles of petroleum coke from the Southeast Side.
Emanuel recently announced the city plans to hire 10 new health inspectors to crack down on polluters — a job the mayor says Chicago needs to take on as President Donald Trump’s administration rolls back enforcement of environmental laws. Yet the mayor has been silent about General Iron, Hopkins said.
“The city has dragged its feet on this for years,” Hopkins said. “An increasing body of evidence suggests that continued operation of this facility in a densely populated residential area represents a threat to public health.”
City officials temporarily shut down General Iron last year after a fire in late 2015. But health inspectors dispatched in response to neighborhood complaints since then have found nothing wrong at the scrap yard, according to city records.
Last year the Emanuel administration renewed a special waiver that allows General Iron to collect scrap around the clock and operate the shredders from 5 a.m. to 10 p.m. daily.
The mayor’s office did not respond directly to written questions from the Tribune. In an email, the Chicago Department of Public Health said city officials plan to discuss the UIC research with Hopkins in early 2018. The waiver is “currently under review,” the department said.
During the past seven years, the family that has owned General Iron for four generations has spread more than $500,000 in political contributions among Emanuel, aldermanic candidates and other local politicians, according to campaign finance records.
The Labkons also have hired a dozen City Hall lobbyists, including John Borovicka, who worked for Emanuel when the mayor was a congressman; Victor Reyes, a former political operative for Mayor Richard M. Daley; and John R. Daley, son of Cook County Commissioner John Daley and the former mayor’s nephew.
Adam Labkon, who is listed in court records as the scrap yard’s day-to-day operations manager, said his family plans to eventually relocate General Iron from the site it has owned for more than a half-century. He declined to elaborate.
“We will continue to operate responsibly and to respond to any issue in a timely and effective manner,” Labkon said in an email. “As in the past, we will fully cooperate with the U.S. EPA and give them the information and access they are requesting.”
Members of the Labkon family are suing one another in Cook County Circuit Court, in part over a potential sale of General Iron. Howard Labkon accuses Adam and their parents, Marilyn and Mark, of turning down a $100 million offer for the scrap yard; Adam, Marilyn and Mark countered with their own lawsuit, accusing Howard of undermining the business by working with competitors.
General Iron has been on the EPA’s radar since at least the late 1990s, according to records obtained by the Tribune through a Freedom of Information Act request.
A 2006 legal settlement required the scrap yard to finance $750,000 in environmental projects and pay a $250,000 fine for shredding appliances during the previous decade without removing ozone-depleting refrigerants. Another settlement in 2012 required General Iron to install pollution controls on its scrap shredders.
The EPA’s latest probe was prompted by air testing commissioned by Warren Baker, a commercial developer who lives near the scrap yard.
Baker said he was eating outside a Clybourn Avenue restaurant in August 2016 when his eyes and throat began to burn. He suspected the metallic odors in the air came from General Iron, and a Google search led him to Serap Erdal, a UIC air pollution expert who agreed to oversee a monitoring project by one of her graduate students.
The researchers posted air monitors rented by Baker near General Iron and collected samples on 10 days in October and November 2016. They found levels of particulate matter near the scrap yard were up to twice as high as the amount measured on the same days at the closest state air monitoring station, about 3 miles west of the scrap yard.
“This suggests there are increased risks to the health of residents in the surrounding neighborhood,” said Erdal, who urged the EPA to follow up with a more comprehensive study.
Baker said he tried to reach out privately to General Iron’s owners, hoping that sharing the test results would persuade them to take more aggressive steps to reduce pollution.
But smoke from the scrap yard kept drifting into the neighborhood.
“We’re dealing with a business that isn’t being responsible,” Baker said. “Enough is enough.”
Whatever Amazon decides about its new headquarters, General Iron is one of the last holdouts as the developer Sterling Bay dramatically overhauls the area for its Lincoln Yards project. Andy Gloor, Sterling Bay’s managing principal, declined to comment on the EPA investigation or his company’s potential interest in the outcome.
During the past two years, Sterling Bay has brokered deals for the former site of A. Finkl and Sons, a steel mill that relocated to the South Side; Sipi Metals, another steelmaker on Elston Avenue; a sprawling fleet management building the city sold before a planned move to Englewood; and several smaller parcels stitched together well before Seattle-based Amazon set off a frenzy for its second corporate campus.
Renderings from Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, the prominent Chicago architectural firm, highlight glass and steel buildings on the site framing riverfront green space and an extension of The 606 elevated trail, one of Emanuel’s pet projects.
Sterling Bay recently announced it also plans to build youth soccer fields and a 20,000-seat stadium across the river from General Iron that would host concerts and sporting events, including a United Soccer League team.
The city already has cleared the way for redevelopment by eliminating industrial zoning protection for General Iron and other properties along the North Branch. Hopkins said he would like to see the site cleaned up and turned into a riverfront park.
“They’ve been involved in a dirty industry on that site long before there was an EPA,” he said. “The neighborhood deserves better.”
Chicago Tribune’s Ryan Ori contributed.
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