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Industrial Buildings Metro East Venice, Illinois

North End of Venice

by Michael R. Allen

If you have not read the Riverfront Times cover story “Meltdown in Venice” by Keegan Hamilton, please do so. The photograph above shows one of the houses in the very north end of Venice whose residents literally have the former Dow Chemical plant in their backyards. There is a pocket literally surrounded by that plant on the west, the field where Dow and its successors dumped PCB-tainted waste on the north and a foundry on the east. At the foot of this neighborhood is the city’s elementary school. The creation of such a landscape is hardly unique, and its abdication by those who shaped it only commonplace.