Funeral home shocker, pollution, mad bomber: Far South Side neighbors have been through a lot

Jim Kinney has seen just about everything in his Far Southeast Side neighborhood: industrial waste that lit up the sky, the crime of the century, a mad bomber and a business that’s been allowed to fill the air with a stench that smells like rotting flesh.

Recently, just across the alley from his longtime home on 95th Street near Commercial Avenue, it was discovered that a funeral parlor neglected to care for dozens of dead bodies that were in various stages of decomposing.

“You can’t enjoy any outdoor things in the summer,” he says. “It smells like something died.”

Kinney is not describing South Chicago Chapel funeral home just behind his house, which was recently closed after the discovery of rotting bodies. He’s detailing a longtime nuisance that plagued the Far Southeast Side for decades: a feed-additive plant now operated by Pullman Innovations, which is being sued by residents and city and state authorities.

This is the community of South Deering, or as locals know it, Vet’s Park or Slag Valley — a nickname with roots in the steel-making heyday of Chicago. Decades ago, companies dumped molten metal left over from steelmaking into sites across the neighborhood. The waste product is known as slag, which is still prevalent throughout the area.

“We’d see the whole sky light up like a volcano,” Kinney says.

The 74-year-old Kinney, his dad and his grandfather all worked in the nearby mills, which mostly closed by the 1980s. There was Wisconsin Steel just to the south and U.S. Steel north of the home where he grew up along with 16 family members. You can’t talk about the Southeast Side without noting the legacy of the steel mills.

Only about 20% of the larger South Deering neighborhood, which stretches from 95th Street on the north to 130th Street south, is residential. The remaining parts are industrial land, brownfields, wetlands or land reclaimed after the steel industry all but destroyed much of it decades ago.

The Slag Valley neighborhood and nearby Jeffrey Manor were also rocked by some of the most brutal crimes of the 20th century. Mass murderer Richard Speck killed eight student nurses in 1966 just a little more than a mile southwest of the funeral home.

In 1969, Frank Kulak, who lived across the back alley from Kinney’s family home, was arrested after a shootout with police that killed two officers. Kulak had planted homemade bombs across the Southeast Side, killing and injuring multiple people over a 20-month period.

Over the past several decades, many neighbors complained about horrendous smells from the plant now run by Pullman.

In South Deering, bad smells are a way of life. So is air pollution and industrial operations that have historically been given preferred status over the tens of thousands of residents who live in the city’s 10th Ward, which also includes East Side, Hegewisch, Riverdale and part of South Chicago.

“It’s just gagging. I have to run inside because I can’t handle the smell,” says Andrea Martin, who has lived in the neighborhood for almost 30 years. She describes the smell from Pullman as garbage sitting for a long time or rotten fish.

Pullman officials didn’t respond to requests for comment.

“It’s been a problem in the neighborhood for some time,” says Ramon Valles, who lives up the street from Martin, “for as long as I can remember.”

Asked this week how the smell of dead bodies went unnoticed at the South Chicago Chapel funeral home at 2939 E. 95th St., Ald. Peter Chico said his office gets many complaints about foul smells.

“The stench from Pullman was so strong and putrid that the funeral home never came up,” Chico says.

Some residents have had enough.

“I’d like to see them close,” says Peggy Salazar, referring to Pullman.

Salazar, now retired, led environmental fights against Pullman and other polluting businesses, including a plan for the General Iron scrap metal operation in nearby East Side and large stockpiles of toxic materials.

It still has longtime residents. The area around South Chicago Chapel counts seniors as almost a third of the population. The area around the chapel is largely Latino, though more than 60% of South Deering is Black, census data show.

The area was the site of legal and illegal dumps. It has two active Superfund sites. The Calumet River, used primarily for commercial purposes, can stink. Residents fought and won city laws that provided tougher oversight of heaps of pet coke, manganese and other harmful materials that blew across the Southeast Side.

Pullman refines vegetable oils for use in chicken feed at farms that source eggs for the Dutch Farms brand.

The city has received numerous complaints over the years about odor from Pullman and a predecessor operator at the site known as Agri-Fine. Neighbors battled Agri-Fine for more than 20 years until it declared for bankruptcy protection more than a decade ago. Pullman was established in 2015.

Pullman Innovations, 2701 E. 100th St., is roughly a mile from the funeral home. Yet wind direction can push the smell throughout the larger South Deering area.

“People are desensitized by smells,” says Anna Johnson, who lives in Jeffrey Manor closer to the Pullman plant. “You can’t even smell a dead body.”

Contributing: Alden Loury