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Be prepared with the most accurate 10-day forecast for East Chicago, IN with highs, lows, chance of precipitation from The Weather Channel and Weather.com. QuickFacts East Chicago city, Indiana. QuickFacts provides statistics for all states and counties, and for cities and towns with a population of 5,000 or more.
| East Chicago is the home port to Resorts East Chicago, a 400-foot boat containing a 53,000-square-foot casino. It opened in 1997 and features 1,900 slot machines and 71 gaming and live poker tables, but is not the first 'full-service' casino to operate in the city. That honor probably belongs to Indiana Harbor's famous 'Big House' which operated from 1929 to 1950 at 3326 Michigan Avenue. |
1910 view of building | 1950 view of building | Click here for short biography of 'Tiger' |
| The Big House was reported to maintain '...a free taxi service to and from Chicago's southside... One of the midwest's most lavish gambling emporiums...[it was also] the racing wire nerve center of all bookie establishments in the county. It boasted oriental rugs on the floor of the second story, which housed costly mahogany roulette and dice tables...Roughly 125 persons were employed in the place... The Big House also had 15 branch handbooks, six in Hammond, two in Whiting and seven in East Chicago.' Virgil Peterson, head of the Chicago Crime Commission, reported to the Kefauver Committee in 1950 that the Big House had a gross take of $9,000,000. Its closure that year did not seriously harm the timely communication of racing results to Hammond, East Chicago or Whiting because the wire service continued from a hideout in Cedar Lake. Historian Archibald McKinlay called the Big House, '...Chicagoland's casino of casinos, thanks to the early backing of Frank Nitti.' |
| Matchbook advertising for the Big House at 3326 Michigan Avenue, Indiana Harbor, Indiana. The name 'Big House' c.1940s |
Two views of downtown East Chicago (1953 and 1956) with the 825 Club building on the right. East Chicago was one of the very few cities with a passenger train tracks and service in a central downtown location from 1906 to 1956. This provided easy access to gambling in East Chicago for customers from Chicago, Hammond, Gary, Michigan City and South Bend. Exchange Street as shown here in 1929 or 1930 was renown for another gambling den, next to one of East Chicago's most popular eateries, 'Hot Dog John's' that opened in 1929. |
'Hadie' | TELEFLASH wired telephone PA |
| The 825 Club (aka: 'South Shore Smoker') located at 825 West Chicago Avenue was one of the successors to the Big House and was in continuous operation (except during occasional police raids) from about 1949 to the 1970s. One reporter wrote, 'I found myself in one of the biggest and best-equipped gambling joints I had ever seen. It was a long room, brilliantly lighted with overhead lights, and there must have been 40 or 50 men milling around listening to race results coming in over a loudspeaker.' This was in reference to the Illinois Sports News service using the Teleflash technology. See above. The '825 Club, like other similar places throughout the Calumet Region, operated under the unofficial permission of local authorities. But, to be safe, its rear door was equipped with a two-way mirror and a look-out post was staffed in the front lobby area. Police raids occurred often, usually just before a political election, and were a benevolent ritual that included advanced notice by friends of the Club. In fact, Indiana along with most other states, has had a very long tradition of police raids on gambling establishments, dating as far back as 1870 (See illustration below). The Hammond Times newspaper regularly published the locations of East Chicago gambling joints and their owners, who were required to have federal gambling stamps. The total number of gambling stamps issued in 1954 was 29. As published in 1967, these stamps revealed addresses and owners, including The 825 Club, 825 Chicago Avenue (Harold L. Layer and William Gardner); The Forsythe Club, 4610 Indianapolis Blvd. (Angelo Papalambro); The Elks Club, 4942 Alexander Avenue; The Sportsman Club, 3215 Block Avenue; The Auditorium Grill, 3436 Michigan Avenue (Joseph Kovich); Palace Recreation, 4605 Indianapolis Blvd--next to Hot Dog Johns (George Anaston); and The L&N Club, 3407 Michigan Avenue (Johnny Nan). | |
Raid in progress at Mason Long's Faro Room Fort Wayne, Indiana, c.1870 | Rear entrance of 825 Club always used when 'the heat was on' after raids, 1950s & 1960s. |
| About thirty miles from East Chicago in Long Beach, Indiana, Johnny 'Fix-'Em' Condon established in 1901 a gambling establishment , 'The Long Beach Turf Exchange' that used a special train to bring gamblers from Chicago. Its invitation read: 'You are invited to the finest equipped and only Monte Carlo in America, delightfully situated in Lake County, Ind., near the Standard Oil Company's Works at Whiting. No 'interference' from county or State officials. Open the year around...Ample accomodations for 5000 people... Why go to the race tracks when you can come here and play all the races at...Washington Park, Brighton Beach, Fort Erie, Newport, St Louis, Harlem and Hawthorne...All the finest brands of wines, liquors and cigars...'Herbert Asbury wrote that it was .'the most extraordinary gambling house ever projected in the United States--a castle protected by stockades, barbed wire and picket fences, armed lookouts in sentry boxes, alarm boxes, ferocious bloodhounds...and with tunnels leading outside the grounds and arrangements for setting fire to the place if the police succeeded in gaining an entrance.' However, its size and notoriety caused by its advertising doomed it from the beginning. The Long Beach Turf Exhange lasted only a few months before being closed by Indiana authorities and by opposition from other vested interests in gambling, such as the Chicago race tracks themselves. The Big House was its Lake County successor in the 1920s or early 1930s, but on a smaller scale. |
I would like to hear from anyone who has any photographs,
stories, or information about these enterprises.
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| e m a i l | © 1998/1999/2006 H. Layer, all rights reserved |
EAST CHICAGO—Until Carmencita Robinson received a letter last July stating that her public housing complex would need to be evacuated due to toxic levels of lead and arsenic in the soil, she’d had no idea she’d been living on contaminated land for nearly a decade.
“I felt betrayed,” she said. “They knew that there was lead, and they misled the families that were there because they continuously accepted our rent and gave us no notice of lead.”
A month later came the second blow. When Mayor Anthony Copeland learned the extent of the damage, he directed residents to evacuate the West Calumet Complex and announced plans to demolish it. Residents received Section 8 housing vouchers and were told they had 60 days to secure housing.
“I felt like I was just pushed out of some place that I took a lot of pride in,” says Robinson, who had planned to grow old in her apartment. “Nobody said, ‘We apologize for putting you all through this,’ or ‘I am sorry that this has to be done that way.’ No remorse, no anything. That hurt. I could have lost my life there. My kids could have gotten sicker there. How can you do people like that?”
Robinson was one of thousands of residents of West Calumet whose homes were sitting on top of the USS Lead Superfund Site. But her East Chicago complex is hardly a unique case. Studies dating back decades show waste sites, landfills, and hazardous facilities are disproportionately located in poor and minority neighborhoods. And with continuous slashes to Superfund’s budget over the years (it gets $1.1 billion a year, about half of what it did in 1999), cleanups have moved at a glacial pace.
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East Chicago fits the pattern. The city is host to dozens of refineries, coal plants, gas storage tanks and other industrial facilities. The majority of its 30,000 residents are black or hispanic, with nearly a third living below the poverty line. “This is a low-income community of color and officials chose to neglect this community, there’s no getting around it,” said Debbie Chizewer, an attorney at Northwestern University’s Environmental Advocacy Clinic representing residents in proceedings with EPA.
The West Calumet Complex was built in 1972, just north of a USS Lead refinery and directly on top of a different demolished lead smelter and an old metal-processing plant that were never properly cleaned up. The Indiana State Department of Health first flagged the site as contaminated in 1985 and forced the USS Lead facility to close. Representative Pete Visclosky asked the EPA to initiate a hazardous waste removal action under the Superfund law, which secures funding from polluters to pay for the cleanup of the most contaminated sites in the country.
Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, the Indiana Department of Environmental Management, the Indiana Department of Health and EPA conducted lead screenings and soil sampling in the area, slowly gathering alarming evidence of elevated levels of lead and arsenic in children’s blood and people’s homes. The site was finally added to Superfund’s National Priorities List in 2009, joining 1,322 others. Only then did the EPA formulate a plan to secure funding, investigate, and execute remediation, or cleanup, of the site.
“The health department recommended [EPA] do something [throughout those decades], but it didn't and there's no explanation for why,” Chizewer said.
The EPA did not fully grasp the magnitude of the contamination at the USS Lead site until it began undertaking more extensive testing, between 2014 and 2016. The data revealed some areas of the site had lead levels as high as 91,000 parts per million of lead in the soil, and 32,000 ppm indoors. The EPA’s action-level for cleanup is 400 parts per million of lead in the soil.
Lead ingestion affects IQ, ability to pay attention, and academic achievement, and effects of lead exposure cannot be corrected. “I had to read up on lead and how that affects me and my children,” said Robinson, who has three children that grew up in the public housing complex, one of whom has a diagnosed learning disability. “There are just so many things that I look at now that I know that we had lead—I had no clue that it was just that bad.”
Those risks are what led the Mayor to decide to evacuate the complex. The housing authority eventually extended the 60-day move-out deadline to April 2017. But for many residents, the dislocation came as an additional trauma, compounding the difficulties they faced.
“On the one hand, it was a decision that potentially prevented residents from being further contaminated,” says Chizewer. “On the other hand, it put residents in a situation that may have led to more contamination because they were moving in a rush to other homes that are contaminated with lead or arsenic. Or to homes where there might be gang violence and their children would be at risk.”
Robinson was especially concerned about moving away from her doctors—her breast cancer is in remission—and her local school, where her daughter receives services for her special needs. “I didn't look at it like a low-income complex,” she said. “I looked at it like home.” While Robinson was ultimately able to find a small two-bedroom house nearby, many were not as lucky. Some residents left for places as far-flung as Las Vegas and Houston. Others had trouble finding a place to move, and stayed in the contaminated complex beyond the April deadline.
Demetra Turner’s family was among the last remaining. For months she unsuccessfully tried to secure safe housing while working the night shift at a gas station and taking care of her two children. She said she runs on two to three hours of sleep a day, which she squeezes in after picking up her daughter from school, cooking dinner, and looking for apartments.
“I have an account with every apartment website you can think of,” Turner said in April. “When I call it’s always the same thing: They don’t accept Section 8. You know, I want to leave, I don't want to stay here. But the only thing I'm asking is, allow me to find somewhere to go, and allow my kids to finish school.”
The city had already begun fencing the place off and turned off the street lights by the time Turner left in early June. The housing authority helped relocate her family to the other side of town, in an area known as the Harbor that she says has a long-standing rivalry with the Calumet neighborhood. She is still looking for permanent housing, and fears for her 18-year-old son’s safety.
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Meanwhile, the cleanup of the East Chicago site drags on, eight years after it was formally added to the Superfund list, and three decades since Visclosky’s initial complaint. EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt recently issued a new directive to prioritize Superfund cleanups and established a Superfund task force. But President Trump’s budget proposes to cut the program’s funding by 30 percent. Residents of East Chicago and other places home to contaminated sites are skeptical Pruitt’s efforts will lead to results.
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“When you think about this case and the number of impacted residents and the money that it takes to clean this up and then you look at the possibility of EPA not having funding to do this kind of work at this site or around the country, it's extremely upsetting,” Chizewer said. “We would continue to have cases like East Chicago for many decades to come.”