Volunteers have struggled to remove the larger pieces of a homeless village discovered in the woods near the railroad tracks on the Midway Plaisance. [All photos DNAinfo/Sam Cholke]
HYDE PARK — The 59th Street Metra Electric station is getting some much needed work, but it is still unclear who is responsible for cleaning up the burned down remnants of a homeless village next to the station.
As part of a $200,000 revamp of the station, Metra crews Thursday cleared out the densely overgrown woods near where volunteers in April found five shacks built by homeless people.
“We are re-decking the platforms, replacing the warming houses, rehabbing the stairs and repairing the roof over the stairs, plus some new paint,” said Michael Gillis, a spokesman for Metra. “We hope to be done by the end of the year but it's possible we may have to finish some of it in the spring.”
Gillis said Metra crews would clear the western side of the tracks, but Canadian National Railway owned the eastern side where the shacks were found.
Though the shacks were nestled among the old railroad ties behind a chain-link fence next to Canadian National’s tracks, the company said the mess is not theirs to clean up, either.
“We have been in contact with the city on this issue,” said Patrick Waldron, a spokesman for Canadian National. “CN representatives have inspected the location and the complaint brought to us about the debris and determined the material is not on CN property.”
The responsibility would seem to then fall to the Chicago Park District. But in a strange twist of bureaucratic history, the Park District doesn’t actually own the Midway.
“We’ve actually never owned Midway Plaisance,” Jessica Maxey-Faulkner, park district spokeswoman, said in April after the structures were found. “We lease the land from [the Chicago Department of Transportation].”
But Maxey-Faulkner said the Park District continues to manage the Midway and on Friday said the shacks are not on land owned or leased by the Park District and believes the shacks are on land owned by the railroad.
For the past year, there were signs people had taken up residence in the woods on the eastern side of the tracks.
Chicago Park District garbage cans went missing from Jackson Park and turned up under the mulberry trees next to the tracks, stuffed with the belongings of the men who were living in the woods.
“I started pulling out vegetation, and under every leaf was another suitcase or another blanket,” Louise McCurry, president of the Jackson Park Advisory Council, said in April after an initial cleanup effort by neighborhood volunteers.
At the time, volunteers found five structures in the woods, at least two of which had collapsed and were full of empty liquor bottles and dead rats.
On Friday, there were some remnants — several old blankets, a shredded tent and empty bottles next to the burned shell of a shack — but the mattresses, old doors and dead animals, and the brush hiding it all from view, was largely gone.
Volunteers had removed much of the garbage and trimmed back the brush, which seems to be the only real solution while the question remains of who actually owns the land — and the pile of garbage on top of it — in the woods.
Volunteers have done much of the work to clean up a forest where five shacks had been built. Metra and Canadian National Railway both say they aren't responsible for the land.
Volunteers have removed many of the five structures, including this one, since their discovery next to the railroad tracks on the Midway Plaisance in April.
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