For generations, the steel mills of Southeast Chicago supplied jobs and a way of life to tens of thousands of families. Giant plants such as U.S. Steel, Republic Steel, Inland Steel and others ran three shifts a day, 24 hours a day, offering demanding but steady work that produced the material needed to build the nation. MIT anthropology professor Christine Walley grew up in the neighborhood where her father worked for Wisconsin Steel. As U.S. manufacturing contracted, her father’s plant shut in 1980 and the mills gradually disappeared from Chicago.
Walley’s 2013 book Exit Zero: Family and Class in Post‑industrial Chicago documented the economic and psychological toll of plant closures on workers and their families. A documentary of the same name, directed by her husband Chris Boebel, followed. The next step was the Southeast Chicago Archive and Storytelling Project, an online repository supported in part by MIT, the National Endowment for the Humanities and other sponsors. In partnership with the Southeast Chicago Historical Society – which opened a steel‑working museum in 1985 – the project digitizes and displays more than 1,100 items from the museum’s collection: clothing, photographs, scrapbooks, news clippings, recreational objects, oral‑history recordings and more.
The core idea is to use “evocative objects” to tell history, echoing MIT scholar Sherry Turkle’s notion that “we love the objects we think with.” By surrounding family artifacts and photos with narrative, people experience history in everyday terms rather than through academic texts.
Highlighted stories include:
-
Kitty Kalwasinski Markovich, who immigrated from Poland in 1913, became a welder at U.S. Steel’s South Works during World II, was photographed by Warner Brothers as a “Rosie the Riveter” figure, and continued welding for 23 years after the war, retiring in 1967. Her family donated a hard hat, her brothers’ military insignia and other memorabilia, preserving a rare female perspective on steel‑mill labor.
-
A hard hat donated by James Stapay, paired with a cut from the last beam ever rolled at South Works before its 1992 closure, anchors the documentary video The Closing of the Mills and symbolizes the end of Chicago’s industrial era.
-
A 1937 photograph of the “Mayas” softball team, contributed by the Cordero family, illustrates recreation in the steel‑working neighborhoods. Immigrant Justino Cordero started as a steelworker, later became an electrician and radio‑shop owner, coached youth sports, wrote for The Daily Calumet, and after retirement earned degrees to work with children with disabilities.
-
Labor conflict material such as posters and oral histories from the 1937 steel‑workers’ strike and the “Memorial Day Massacre” at Republic Steel, where ten workers were killed, shows how local families have preserved the memory of pivotal union battles.
The project demonstrates that any community can collect and interpret its own objects to build a living history, keeping the past vibrant for future generations.
Review: This initiative offers a replicable model for community‑driven public history, especially valuable in regions facing deindustrialization and job loss.