By Ben Joravsky
“There are discarded industrial sites like that all over the southeast side,” says Shepherd, who was born and raised in nearby Roseland. “You had hoboes and vagrants in there, and there were fly dumpers illegally dumping. It’s contaminated land–what the EPA calls a brown field–so it’s hard to develop something there, ’cause of all the oversight. I don’t think the city had any concrete plans for developing. People in Pullman didn’t really care. To tell you the truth, it was a nice shelter from the traffic and noise of the expressway. We considered it ‘Pullman Grove.’”
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Meeks was known in the area for his efforts to transform Salem Baptist, which is now at 118th and Indiana, into one of the largest churches on the south side. “Of course we had all heard of Reverend Meeks,” says Shepherd, “though none of us had met him.”
Shepherd and other residents started calling city, state, and federal officials. On November 15 Meeks came to Pullman to meet with residents. “He showed up with some church officials, the environmental contractor who had done the tree clearing, and his attorney, Rochelle Jackson,” says Kate Chappell, a Pullman resident. “Ms. Jackson was the main speaker.” (Neither Meeks nor Jackson returned calls for comment on this story.)
The residents had hoped that the site would remain open, perhaps be converted into a park. “We had been developing a vision of how we wanted our community to go, taking into consideration its historical character,” says Chappell. “We hadn’t come to any specific decisions about the administration building, but one thing we had ruled out was a big-box development. Well, that’s pretty much what the church was proposing for its property. If a big-box project is inappropriate for the old administration building, why would it be right for the vacant land?”
But despite his conciliatory approach, the two sides remain far apart. “In some ways that meeting was dramatic evidence of the differences,” says Chappell. “Reverend Meeks talked with pride at the growth of the church. Our anxiety level is going up as we consider the scale of the project–and he’s getting excited about the number of souls saved for Christ.”
Yet the politics of the project are far from simple. Most of Pullman’s residents live in the Ninth Ward, and their alderman, Beale, endorses the plan. But the site itself is in the Tenth Ward, whose alderman, John Pope, hasn’t yet taken a position on the matter.
