Learning from the Damen Silos Demolition

On one unseasonably hot night this past June, an audience of community members gathered in the auditorium of the Arturo Velasquez Institute in McKinley Park on Chicago’s Southwest Side. The purpose of this meeting, organized by the City of Chicago, was to provide information on the complex demolition of two concrete grain elevators that had been located off the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal since 1906. Sold by the State of Illinois to MAT Limited Partnership in December 2022 for $6.5 million, the City of Chicago was prepared to approve a demolition permit for the grain elevators known as the Damen Silos. The Chicago Department of Public Health, the Department of Buildings, and the demolition contractor, Heneghan Wrecking Company, showed photos of graffiti covering each of the structures, calling particular attention to their old, abandoned, and dilapidated nature. Processes for the planned sequence of demolition, dust control measures, and site logistics were explained in detail. Representatives from the City of Chicago assured the crowd that every precaution would be made to protect the community from issues related to the demolition, and that they would have the authority to stop any work if needed.

Yet, as the meeting shifted from presentation to public comments and questions, it was clear that those speaking felt that the City of Chicago, as well as the State of Illinois, had authority that they did not utilize much earlier in the process than the preparation of a demolition permit. Community members spoke of their disappointment that the silos would be demolished, their regret that an opportunity for the site to serve the public good had been squandered, and their concern that whatever would ultimately replace the Damen Silos would exacerbate the environmental justice issues the community of McKinley Park was already experiencing.

The State of Illinois, which was not present at the meeting, had allowed the publicly owned Damen Silos to deteriorate for decades under their stewardship, and had then declared that the structures on the site were unsalvageable before placing them up for sale. The State ignored the community’s interest in adaptively reusing the Damen Silos and then sold them to a private sector owner notorious in McKinley Park for polluting the environment. The City of Chicago was complicit by inaction—it did not intervene in the sale to MAT Limited Partnership. Questions regarding the demolition process or the permit were dominated by assertions by the community that what was happening to the Damen Silos was a clear process failure, despite representatives from the City of Chicago asserting that they did not have a say, and multiple attempts to refocus the crowd on the complex demolition. When confronted by a speaker stating that the process was not a democratic one, Chicago Department of Public Health Commissioner Dr. Olusimbo Ige responded, “You are correct; this is not a democratic process. This process is really to provide information about what happens during the demolition. What happens to the site…what it will be used for…I don’t know.”

An investigation by Borderless Magazine into MAT Asphalt, the asphalt manufacturing arm of MAT Limited Partnership, found that the Chicago Department of Public Health received more than two dozen air pollution complaints and at least twenty-seven environmental citations. A 2020 class action lawsuit filed by McKinley Park residents alleged that odors and fumes from the company’s operations were a nuisance to the community, leading to a $1.2 million settlement and facility upgrades to capture emissions. A separate settlement with the Chicago Department of Public Health in 2023 alleged dust control violations and air pollution citations. Yet, MAT Asphalt was simultaneously being awarded multi-million-dollar municipal contracts to provide materials to pave Chicago’s streets and was permitted to purchase the Damen Silos from the State of Illinois as the highest bidder.¹

Two weeks after the June meeting, Heneghan Wrecking Company began razing the site structure by structure. Storage and warehouse buildings were brought down by excavators with grapples and buckets, while a steady stream of water flowed where the excavator made contact with the materials. The shorter of the two bundled reinforced concrete silos, the eighty-foot-tall elevator annex, was torn down, leaving a curtain of rebar and concrete dangling from the façade. The tallest of the structures on the site, an 80-foot-tall elevator with a 110-foot-tall tower adjacent to the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal, the most complex of the structures on the site due to its proximity to the canal, remains for now, an unmanned skyscraper on the Southeast Side and a cynical reminder of community disengagement—when another future was both possible, and feasible.

The Damen Silos were a result of Chicago’s growing dominance within the grain industry and its connection to nationwide railroads at the turn of the twentieth century. The Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railway, one of the nation’s largest freight railroads, needed a facility to store and transport grain that was proximate to both a navigable waterway and rail infrastructure within an area of the Southwest Side that was dominated by brickyards, iron, and steel mills, as well as meatpacking and grain operations. The newly built Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal, completed in 1900—an industrial marvel that would establish technologies that would allow the construction of the Panama Canal in 1914—was a deeper, wider navigable channel than the existing Illinois & Michigan Canal, completed in 1848. The grain facility would also have to be fireproof—a lesson the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railway learned after a wood structure previously located on the site burned in 1905.

In February 1906, it was announced in the Chicago Tribune that the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railway would build a “big elevator” with the capacity of 1.5 million bushels of grain. This elevator, which included a working house and an annex, would be designed by engineer John S. Metcalf, and would be built alongside a new slip, named the Santa Fe, for the accommodation of large shipping vessels, and “the entire plant will be completed in time to handle this year’s crops.”² It was Metcalf’s patented design for moving concrete forms that would cut both labor and time, but would also enable greater height.³

“The Damen Silos were a remarkable technology developed within a very important industry in the Midwest and Chicago,” shares Phil Enquist, FAIA, University of Illinois at Chicago Faculty in the College of Urban Planning and Public Affairs, in a phone interview. Enquist was one of many Chicago architects who signed an open letter to Governor JB Pritzker expressing their dismay at the State of Illinois’s sale of the Damen Silos to MAT Limited Partnership. “The grain storage and the shipping of grain was tied to the river and its reengineering,” adds Enquist.

The Armour Grain Company, a subsidiary of the Armour & Company known for animal processing and meat packing, operated the grain elevator for the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railway until 1928, when an investigation determined that representatives from the Armour Grain Company were unfairly dominating the Chicago Board of Trade, a futures and options exchange that established the price of grain.⁴ The State of Illinois purchased the property in 1928, licensing it to a private operator, the Santa Fe Elevator Corporation, under the Illinois Department of Agriculture. The State added three additional buildings to the site to support grain operations and storage before ceasing grain operations at the elevator in 1977. In the next decades, the State’s Department of Transportation used the site for storage and to prepare road construction materials. In 2005, the State turned the property over to Illinois Central Management Services for disposal.

Over time, the Santa Fe Elevator acquired a more colloquial name, the Damen Silos, due to their location on South Damen Avenue, which was renamed from Robey Street in 1927 to honor Father Arnold Damen. The infrastructure surrounding the Damen Silos would change as well. In 1964, the Southwest Expressway, later renamed the Adali E. Stevenson Expressway opened just a quarter mile south of the Damen Silos, using a portion of the right of way of the Illinois and Michigan Canal. Industries like brickyards, iron and steel mills, as well as meatpacking and grain operations—once a cornerstone of the economics of McKinley Park and Chicago—would become less prevalent. Yet, the structures that these industries built would remain, particularly along the south and north branches of the Chicago River, the Sanitary and Ship Canal, and on Chicago’s industrially oriented Southeast Side, where the kind of multimodal movement of goods that initiated the construction of the Damen Silos in 1906 still occurs.

In 1952, the Illinois state legislature established the Illinois International Port District, an independent municipal corporation with title to marshland at Lake Calumet, the largest body of water within Chicago city limits, located on the far South Side. The purpose of the port was to provide a modern distribution point for goods moving through Chicago. In 1958, Lake Calumet was dredged to provide deeper slips for freighters and ships. On the site rose two massive bundled concrete silos with the capacity to store fourteen million bushels of grain. The port’s silos remain active.

It was grain elevators like the Damen Silos that would inspire creative thought in Chicago and beyond. Six years before founding the Bauhaus in Weimar, Germany, in 1919, Walter Gropius published an article titled “The Development of Modern Industrial Architecture” in the German Werkbund, the print publication of a group of German architects and artists, which included images of the grain silos and factories of the US, and a declaration from Gropius that United States’ industrial buildings “almost bear comparison with the buildings of Ancient Egypt.”⁵ Images of these structures would inspire the Modern Movement in both form and material.

In Chicago, writer and reporter Carl Sandburg published the iconic poem “Chicago” in 1914. Inspired by Chicago’s industrial nature and brawny—but beautiful—resilience, “Chicago” painted the city in such iconic form that several of its lines are contemporarily used to describe the city’s very nature. It is easy to apply “Chicago” to the sight of structures like the Damen Silos:

“Hog Butcher for the World,
Tool maker, Stacker of Wheat,
Player with Railroads and the Nation’s
Freight Handler;
Stormy, husky, brawling,
City of the Big Shoulders:”

According to Kate Eakin, Managing Director of the McKinley Park Development Council—the neighborhood organization that would lead the charge on the future of the Damen Silos—Illinois Central Management Services was interested in selling the Damen Silos as early as 2008, when former Chicago Department of Buildings Commissioner Matt Bodet was serving as Assistant Director of the state agency. According to Eakin, Bodet’s negative perception of the Damen Silos set the stage for the City of Chicago’s disinterest in engaging with the sale from the start. In 2014, the State of Illinois initiated an auction of the Damen Silos, with officials making it clear to the Chicago Tribune that the auction would have a community benefit. “The sale of this surplus property will generate significant economic opportunities in Chicago’s Lower West Side and McKinley Park Communities while also saving the State the cost of annual operating expenses.”⁶ Concerns over costs associated with demolition and environmental remediation, coupled with limited participation in the auction, caused the State to ultimately cancel the auction.

After the sale was announced, the community of McKinley Park took action and organized. The twenty-three acres constituting the Damen Silos site were a large section of land within the neighborhood—almost a third of the size of the neighborhood’s namesake municipal park, William McKinley Park. The McKinley Park Development Council, formed in 2017, led an effort to acquire information from the State of Illinois and Illinois Central Management Services and advocate on the neighborhood’s behalf, an extension of work that the McKinley Park Development Council had already been doing. Working with the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning, the McKinley Park Development Council created the first ever neighborhood plan for the community in 2021. Among the recommendations were to activate the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal and to ensure that new development or property improvements within 100 feet of the Chicago waterfront are consistent with the 2019 Chicago River Design Guidelines, a document created by the City of Chicago’s Department of Planning and Development to provide a framework for the revitalization of the river system.

The Damen Silos had tremendous potential, particularly as the early 2000s had seen portions of the Chicago River system transform into recreation destinations. Downtown, the confluence of the Main, North, and South branches of the Chicago River had been fitted with a riverwalk system that included park space, floating gardens, and fishing piers. The Chicago Riverwalk would continue to expand along over a mile of the river. In McKinley Park and neighboring Bridgeport, portions of riverfront property at the confluence of the South Branch of the Chicago River and the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal, as well as the Santa Fe Slip, became the Canalport Riverwalk Park. Bubbly Creek, the South Fork of the South Branch of the Chicago River, once notoriously “bubbly” due to the presence of waste from the stockyards, was now clean enough to support two new urban parks at its turning basin, Canal Origins Park and Park No. 571, complete with a recreational boat launch. By 2016, new townhouses had developed along Bubbly Creek. “Now we have this motion towards greenspace, so the situation surrounding the sale of riverfront property is different in 2022,” shares Eakin.

Video by Fred Frederiksen.

The McKinley Park Development Council coordinated with neighbors in McKinley Park and the surrounding communities, area aldermen, and advocacy groups working in both environmental justice and historic preservation. But no community groups were consulted as the process to sell the Damen Silos moved from bids to a buyer.

The sale of the Damen Silos was governed by the Illinois State Property Control Act for the Disposal of Surplus Real Property, which provided no basis for award that related to any factors except price: the highest bidder would become the new owner of the Damen Silos, regardless of who that bidder was, or what they would ultimately use the site for. While the State claimed in 2014 that the sale would benefit the surrounding neighborhood, community members had no opportunity to participate in discussions with Illinois Central Management Services about who would ultimately own the Damen Silos. Eakin pushed the State to explain their process. “Ironically, the reason the State gave for only looking at the numbers was to prevent any appearance of favoritism that would happen from considering qualitative factors in the sale,” she shared. “And I would argue that perhaps they succeeded in that! But it’s ironic because instead, they ran over thousands of residents that clearly thought this was not okay.”

In November 2022, the State of Illinois announced that the “DOT Maintenance Yard” at 2900 South Damen Avenue, the site of the Damen Silos, would be sold to the highest bidder: MAT Limited Partnership, a known community polluter. In an article published in the Chicago Tribune on November 3, 2022, MAT Limited Partnership owner Michael Tadin Jr. stated that the silos would be demolished for a new corporate headquarters, as well as infrastructure to support its trucking fleet.⁷ The community worked in good faith to connect with Governor JB Pritzker, writing in a letter on December 5, 2022, “We are disappointed that this sale process has been conducted with no qualitative review of plans for the site and no community input. Failure to engage community stakeholders is a social and environmental justice issue for communities like ours, who face historical inequities and will be directly impacted by development on this site for generations to come.”⁸ The State of Illinois closed the deal with MAT Limited Partnership on December 20, 2022. City of Chicago offices were notified three days later, on December 23, 2022, a date when many city offices were closed for both the Christmas holiday and a crippling winter storm.

Principal to the interests of the community, in particular the McKinley Park Development Council, was both the past and the future. As the Damen Silos were sold, would the silos be adaptively reused, or demolished? If they were to be demolished, what would replace them? In 2023 McKinley Park, a community historically affected by outdated environmental and development policies whose residents bear a disproportionate burden, was designated as an Environmental Justice Community by the City of Chicago. While the Illinois State Property Control Act dictated that Central Management Service’s selection criteria would solely be related to bid price, an alternative process allowed the State to adjust the price criteria if a local government—like the City of Chicago—was interested in a given property.

Yet, the City had not expressed interest in the Damen Silos during the bid process. According to the McKinley Park Development Council, in the beginning of 2023, representatives from then Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s office explored legal angles to overturn the sale but determined that they did not have enough evidence to pursue further action. Former Department of Planning and Development Commissioner Maurice Cox engaged in discussions with MAT Limited Partnership regarding the possibility of eminent domain, but according to a source at City Hall, the Department of Planning and Development ultimately decided that the liability and remediation issues were too costly for the department to continue the effort.“⁹

As the sale was finalized, the McKinley Park Development Council continued to work towards feasible community-oriented outcomes, even as MAT Limited Partnership continued moving toward demolishing the silos. Principal to their plans was an idea from neighbors that the Damen Silos could become a park and dedicated festival grounds, particularly as the Chicago Park District was being scrutinized for holding large festivals such as Lollapalooza and Riot Fest in public parks. Blue Star Properties, one of the bidders in the sale process, were interested in operating the space to create an event venue similar to Chicago’s Salt Shed, a concert venue on the North Side adjacent to the Chicago River. Advocates for this plan highlighted its equitable nature, both in terms of environmental justice and economics.

“Even though grain silos are difficult, unique structures, there are many examples of repurposing and reimagining them if we demonstrate imagination and creative thinking,” shares Phil Enquist, who provided the McKinley Park Development Council with a plethora of examples of adaptively reused silos. Enquist cites Silo City in Buffalo, New York, a complex including adaptively reused grain elevators and industrial buildings from the turn of the twentieth century, as a precedent for what could have been done at the Damen Silos.

Brandon Johnson was elected mayor in May of 2023, and the City of Chicago continued to avoid intervening, with city departments following suit. The Chicago Landmarks Division would not support Chicago Landmark Status for the Damen Silos, which would have prevented MAT Limited Partnership from demolishing them. Chicago’s Department of Buildings held its first meeting on the demolition of the Damen Silos on August 22, 2023. Like the second meeting on demolition in June 2025, the public comment period consisted primarily of neighbors and community members expressing dissatisfaction with the process.

As the proximity to the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal, a navigable US waterway, required a nationwide permit, the US Army Corps of Engineers, as the lead federal agency granting the demolition permit, was required to review the demolition of the Damen Silos under Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966. The State Historic Preservation Office had determined that the Damen Silos were eligible to be listed on the National Register of Historic Places. That eligibility determination required MAT Limited Partnership to work with consulting parties, including the McKinley Park Development Council, Landmarks Illinois, Preservation Chicago, and the City, to determine ways in which MAT Limited Partnership would be required to recognize the historic status of the Damen Silos even after their demolition. The resulting Memorandum of Agreement, signed on December 16, 2024, determined that MAT Limited Partnership would create educational displays at the site of the Damen Silos. Despite this process being centered on mitigating the demolition of the Damen Silos as historic assets, written comments provided by the consulting parties as well as advocacy groups who wrote the US Army Corps of Engineers were overwhelmingly in favor of an outcome where MAT Limited Partnership would rethink their decision to demolish the Damen Silos. Organizations like Landmarks Illinois and the Chicago Chapter of the American Institute of Architects offered pro bono structural analysis of the silos. Yet, MAT Limited Partnership would not reconsider.

While the process with the US Army Corps of Engineers would not ultimately affect the outcome, it did include community input. “We had been at this for a year and a half, and this was the first time that any authority figure listened to our neighbors,” shares Eakin. “Everything that we did get, we got out of the Army Corps process, and it came from neighbors.”

Once the federal demolition permit was issued on December 16, 2024, the City of Chicago moved ahead with their own permitting process, culminating in a public meeting at the Arturo Velasquez Institute on June 27, 2025. At the point of sale, MAT Limited Partnership had stated that the site of the Damen Silos would become the company’s new corporate headquarters, yet at the June meeting, an attorney for MAT Limited Partnership stated that no plans had been made public for the site. The City of Chicago approved five demolition permits for the Damen Silos on July 3. Wasting no time, MAT Limited Partnership began demolishing buildings on the Damen Silos site on July 14.

Kate Eakin ultimately places the onus on the State of Illinois. “If the State had any mechanism for public input into the sale of property we would not be here. The State said that they would sell the property to the highest bidder. They were only looking at numbers. Once there were protests, they said that they weren’t allowed to consider anything else, but that’s not true. There is no statutory requirement that requires them to only consider the numbers—they designed a process that says we are only going to look at numbers.” Eakin points to the City of Chicago’s processes regarding the sale of public property as an example of a governmental body that considers qualitative factors such as intent and community input.

“The whole thing could have been programmed as a very vibrant cultural park, and the silos could have been an extension of that vision,” laments Phil Enquist. “[Spanish architect] Ricardo Bofill turned silos into housing and his own office. That all should have been pursued before they were torn down.”

Despite the outcome, Enquist believes that McKinley Park holds a key into how a community could be fully engaged—if their voices are ultimately heard. “I was very impressed with how collaborative the community was. They invited civic leaders and nonprofits to join them at the table. I really believe that community authorship has to find its way into the design process. We need to talk about and advocate for the community voice in design. Here is an example of that, but all of it went unheard.” Enquist remains optimistic that there may yet be an opportunity for MAT Asphalt to do right by the community but also believes that there are ways in which the City and State could improve their processes, working together towards community good. He adds, “there should be some assessment of this process, and some corrections should be made so this doesn’t happen again.”

Public property, be it buildings or structures, land or natural resources, is bought and sold with public money—this process is routinely described as one that benefits the public, particularly in terms of the financial benefits of the sale of public property, or the proceeding taxes that it will generate if the property is transferred from public to private ownership. Yet without a process that provides the public with an opportunity to weigh in on the sale, the only entity guaranteed to benefit is the buyer.

The Damen Silos have been whittled down to one, and cranes are poised to destroy the last silo. While the structure will soon be gone, there is an opportunity to honor their history and the unwavering efforts of the community to work towards the best possible future. It’s not a plaque at the site explaining their history, or a photograph during the final days, or an epitaph on the loss, but building collective and political will toward a State-level policy change that prevents what happened from happening again, not to the Damen Silos but to the community that both visioned and worked for the best possible outcome for its people.

“I don’t think anyone is happy with this outcome,” continues Eakin, “but if there is somewhere to improve the process, it’s ultimately at the State level. We are talking about a process to prevent polluters who don’t have a community’s interest at heart from acquiring properties on the cheap. At the end of the day, that really is the uproar.”

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Kate Eakin of the McKinley Park Development Council for being interviewed and for providing access to documentation. Thanks to Phil Enquist, FAIA, for his interview and insights. The editors would like to thank Fred Frederiksen, Tom Rossiter, David Schalliol, and Noah Vaughn for providing photographs and videos of the Damen Silos.