Life Was Tough On The Island Called `Little Hell`

January 04, 1987|By June Sawyers.

It is a forbidding place, even on a bright day. Grimy smokestacks, cluttered railroad yards and mud-encrusted trucks crisscross its roughhewn face, where illicit whiskey stills and taverns once stood. It is called Goose Island, a largely unknown, ugly and forlorn patch of land on the fringes of downtown Chicago that nonetheless has played a big role in the city`s growth as an industrial center.

Set in the North Branch of the Chicago River, the oval-shaped island starts roughly at Chicago Avenue at Halsted Street and stretches northwest with the river to just below North Avenue at Magnolia Avenue. It is connected to the mainland by east and west bridges on Division Street, which cuts across its middle, two bridges on Halsted Street, which runs north and south across its southeastern tip, and the Cherry Avenue railroad bridge that leads from it into North Avenue.

Since the 1950s the 160-acre natural island, which William B. Ogden, Chicago`s first mayor, acquired for the city in 1853 for $600, has been an industrial area. Tanneries, soap factories and lumberyards flourished there. In the 1860s, when flames from the large coal plant that the Peoples Gas, Light & Coke Co. operated there cast an unearthly glow on the night sky, the island was nicknamed ``Little Hell.``

Among its first inhabitants were Irish immigrants who had been evicted from their Kilgubbin, County Cork, farms at the height of the 1840s potato famine. Living in crude shacks, they kept cows and raised chickens, keeping to themselves and rarely venturing onto the mainland except to attend early mass on Sundays. They also raised geese, which roamed the river channels by the hundreds and gave the island its name. After the Great Chicago Fire, the island became a temporary haven for thousands of refugees.

In the 1870s, after the Chicago and Pacific Railroad built a terminal at its south end, new businesses moved to the island. Among them were the tanneries, their raw hides coming by rail or water from the burgeoning South Side stockyards.

The plants provided plentiful but demanding jobs. The island`s workers toiled from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. six days a week hauling hides, lumber and coal or working inside the factories. With the hard work came hard drinking. On Saturday nights, weary workers would sit on the stoops of their cottages drinking beer from buckets--``shooting the pail``--at a nickel a throw. Often enough, punches would be thrown and brawls erupt.

The new plants, however, kept pushing the islanders, already isolated from the mainland, farther north, and when several violent mob incidents broke out on the island during a period of labor unrest in the 1870s, it earned a reputation as a breeding ground of thieves and thugs.

At the turn of the century the island became a battleground for the so-called grain wars waged by speculators seeking to corner the grain market. In the 1890s Chicago entrepreneur Philip D. Armour, seeking quickly to store and move vast quantities of Western wheat destined for Eastern markets, had grain elevators built in record times on the island. On a couple of occasions hundreds of carpenters worked round the clock for days at a time, completing elevators just as the wheat came pouring onto the island, and thereby contributing not a little to the success of Armour`s ventures.

When Armour`s company, after his death in 1901, was taken over by Eastern bankers, Chicago ceased to be a grain-trading center and the grain elevators on the island were torn down (the last one was destroyed in a fire in 1930). Then, as the stockyards disappeared from the South Side, the tanneries closed down or moved away along with other industries and many island residents. By 1937 only about 30 families, and by 1974 no more than six persons, still lived on the island.

No one lives there anymore, but about 30 businesses are still there, and some developers have proposed that Goose Island be turned into a modern multimillion-dollar industrial park. (In 1934 politician George Gillmeister proposed that it be used as an airport.) Other developers want to convert its industrial buildings into residential lofts for artists and upscale professionals. If these developers have their way, Goose Island could well become a gentrified area with gleaming new plants, sleek loft apartments and well-groomed yuppies strolling in and out of fancy bars--a far cry, indeed, from its old days as ``Little Hell.``