Built like an English village in the middle of Northwest Indiana’s

Rust Belt skyline, Marktown might soon exist only in dreams.

British Petroleum, which owns an adjacent petroleum refinery,

wants to use the land where Marktown’s 219 homes now sit

for a parking lot.

By Ron Grossman

 

For almost a century, Marktown has looked like an English village plopped down in the middle of Northwest Indiana’s Rust Belt skyline. The architect behind Marktown loved Victorian ruffles and flourishes, building cottages with steeply pitched gabled roofs punctuated by sawtooths of peaks and valleys.

His client was an enlightened captain of industry who believed that providing workers decent housing would ensure a loyal workforce for his East Chicago steel mill.

Dubbed the “Brigadoon of industrial housing” by boosters, Marktown is on the National Register of Historic Places and has been cited in ‘Ripley’s Believe It or Not.’

But like the mythical village of the Broadway musical, Marktown might soon exist only in dreams.

British Petroleum, which owns an adjacent petroleum refinery, wants to use the land where Marktown’s 219 homes now sit for a parking lot. Though a formal offer is not yet on the table, BP has announced it is shopping for a real estate agent to determine the fair-market property values of Marktown houses.

Many residents have deep roots in Marktown and are trying to keep the little village alive. “I have 54 years of memories in my home,” said Kimberly Rodriguez. “How can they buy the memories?”

Born in Marktown and the area’s Democratic Party precinct captain, Rodriguez has been urging her neighbours to stay, carrying that message by walking the streets — literally. Marktown’s narrow lanes, like their British prototypes, reverse the place for pedestrians and parked cars.

“Here we walk on the streets and park on the sidewalks,” Rodriguez said.

Not all residents wax nostalgic about Marktown, a few square blocks cut off from the rest of East Chicago by the refinery on one side and steel mills on the other three. According to BP, residents initiated the company’s plan to buy the land.

“One of the larger property owners approached the company indicating a willingness to sell,” said BP spokesman Tom Keilman. “That led us to consider acquiring property in Marktown, just as we have bought up homes in Whiting, on the other side of the refinery.”

A second major property owner subsequently indicated being open to a sale. Marktown being a tight-knit community, lots of folks claim to know who made those offers.

They’re reluctant to point fingers, but they suspect several neighbours who have been acquiring and renovating Marktown houses. When the real estate bubble burst, that left them in need of a buyer.

The only business of note in Marktown is George Michels Bar and Grill, owned by the same family for three generations. The tavern hasn’t served food for years. A fountain and formal garden is also gone. It was intended to anchor a group of shops piggybacked by apartments that never got built.

Plans for those shops bear a striking resemblance to Lake Forest’s Market Square, a Tudor Revival-style shopping mall. Both were the work of Howard Van Doren Shaw, a high-society architect who built mansions in Chicago’s North Shore suburbs.

The economic booms and busts of the early 20th century kept Marktown, originally planned as a 190-acre village, to about one-quarter that size. But what was constructed remains virtually intact. That was noted by the National Register of Historic Places, which cited Marktown for having “the charm of a northern European village.”

Paul Myers, director of the Marktown Preservation Society, said that of the 200 original homes, and 20 subsequently added, only one has been torn down. But a number of homes are vacant, and he estimated Marktown’s population at 500 to 600 residents.

“But this isn’t just about those houses,” Myers said. “It’s about the inhumanity of forcing families out of those houses.”

BP’s Keilman said the company isn’t going to “force anyone out of their homes.”

“We want to work with willing property owners,” he said. “For us, this is a long-term project.”

Myers fears that if some owners sell, other residents will feel pressured to get out, too. Living in this residential enclave has bred a strong sense of togetherness, residents said. But they say the same sense of isolation could lead to panic selling if homes start being demolished.

Marktown’s population is a mix of Latino, African-American and European-stock residents. Over the years, many have mixed, and it would take a skilled genealogist to figure out family lines.

“Basically, we’re all family here,” said Lourdes Hicks, whom everybody calls “Lulu.” “I tell the kids, ‘Don’t say you’re someone’s half brother or half sister. You’re brothers and sisters.’ “

Some Marktown residents are only too conscious that their way of life is increasingly rare in a suburbanised America. If the town disappears, old-timers like Hicks say they’d be lost.

“Where would I go?” Hicks asked. “Where could any of us live like this?”

Myers, a fifth-generation resident, noted devotion of that sort was what inspired Marktown’s creation. “Clayton Mark wanted his workers to have decent housing that would inspire them to stick around,” he said.

When Mark started building a steel mill in 1916, many industrial workers still lived in slums and tenements. They would drift from job to job, meaning employers were constantly having to train new workers. In some factories, the annual turnover rate was more than 100%.

Mark was a member of The Commercial Club of Chicago, an elite businessmen’s group, which sponsored a study that revealed a link between poor housing and footloose workers. So he reasoned that better housing could give his mill a more stable, and thereby more productive, workforce.

“Strictly speaking, Mr Mark wasn’t a social reformer,” Myers said. “But at the time, the ‘Garden City’ concept was in vogue.”

Originating in England, the Garden City movement was an effort to curb the sprawling growth of industrial cities by building smaller, satellite villages offering decent housing surrounded by “green belts” of a countryside environment.

Mark imported that idea to Northwest Indiana — hardly a bucolic setting — but added an alternative inducement:

“He promised employees that, if they stayed with the job for five years, they’d get a discount on purchasing homes in Marktown,” Myers said.

That part of his vision went unfulfilled. Only a few years after his steel mill and the adjoining Marktown were built, Mark ran into financial difficulties, and his plant and the homes were acquired by other businesses.

The mill is still there, having passed through successive owners. Residents eventually were able to buy the homes designed by Shaw, who shared Mark’s vision, having participated in a study of the housing needs of Chicago’s workers.

Shaw brought an aesthetic logic to Mark’s vision, being a devotee of British historic architectural styles. Critics have seen Marktown’s homes as scaled-down versions of the mansions of his upscale clients — designs that echoed the great manor homes of the country where the Garden City concept was born.

Now Marktown is among a handful of surviving company towns that were built in the great age of industrialisation — and one of a still fewer number not just preserved as a museum, but still lived in.

It’s been in danger before.

In the 1950s, there was a proposal to tear down Markdown in favour of industrial expansion; in the 1970s, for a highway. Getting listed on the National Register stopped that plan, since the federal government funds highway construction.

Hoping to get ahead of similar proposals, residents have been campaigning for the city of East Chicago to undertake a redevelopment plan for Marktown.

“They made the study; the numbers are there,” Rodriguez said. “We had a community meeting, and they asked what we wanted them to do. We said: ‘Actually do the redevelopment.’ They said they’d get back to us, but we haven’t heard a word since.”

East Chicago Mayor Anthony Copeland did not respond to a request for comment.

Whatever comes of the present situation, Rodriguez is sure of one thing.

“Others may sell, fine, but not me,” she said. “I understand there’s an easement on
Marktown Park, that it’s got to stay open as long as there is single resident. So, at the worst, I’ll still have the park.” — Chicago Tribune/MCT