Hal Link, Furniture Builder, and Bridgeport Arts and Crafts

Hal Link builds custom furniture and cabinetry from a high-ceilinged basement studio in the Bridgeport Art Center, overlooking the river at 35th Street. Most of Link’s furniture costs from $2-10,000, which is about what you might pay for a hand-made bike. Then, every couple years, he gets a major commission.

One year it was a wall size buffet in the arts and crafts style. When he asked to see the architectural drawings for the house it would fit in, it turned out the client hadn’t commissioned them yet, so he helped them design their house.

This year, he’s building a chair modeled on the English coronation throne – a 13th century masterpiece first commissioned by King Edward I. Hal’s built other thrones, including one with a phoenix rising from the back, which he made from urban wood felled by the Emerald Ash Borer for the “Rising from Ashes” furniture show sponsored by the Chicago Furniture Design Association (CFDA). This one will rest on the backs of hand-carved griffins, finished in gilt.

Hal built this chair 18 years ago and it’s comfortably weathered by a life outdoors. (It is also feathered with sawdust in this picture.) He uses it as a camp chair at the Pennsic War, hosted by the Society for Creative Reenactment every year in Pennsylvania. Centuries ago, Hal says, the seat would have been made of slung leather, which stretches over time, so he used wood instead. It is remarkably comfortable to sit in – what it lacks in upholstery it makes up with ergonomics.

Hal’s specialty in medieval furniture and his other specialty, in arts and crafts style, are complementary, in a historical sense. John Ruskin, father of the English Arts and Crafts movement, was a champion of the gothic aesthetic. He thought its rude vigor reflected the rugged character of the Northern landscape, and he thought its abundance of fanciful detail reflected the vitality of the craftsmen who carved it.

Greek buildings were all smooth surfaces for reflecting the “peacefulness” of Mediterranean light. Ruskin thought their rational lines and repetition reflected the enslavement of the Mediterranean craftsman, “for the perfection of his execution can only be reached by exercising him in doing one thing, and giving him nothing else to do.”

The Arts and Crafts movement he helped inspire had the same complaint about factory production, where each worker was reduced to repeating one task over and over again. It promoted objects that were fashioned by craftsmen rather than assembled by pieceworkers. But the movement had natural limits – only so many workers could find employment supplying their cult of craft, because craft-made objects cost too much for the workers themselves to afford.

If that ever changes, global supply chains may help it along. They allow us to meet our basic needs with a superabundance of very cheap goods, so that even people with modest incomes can save to invest in a few very good things, if they’re inclined to do it. And the blogosphere hums with people who are. The dress-like-a-gentleman-movement and the fewer-better-things crowd – they’re informed by a densely cross-linked world of discovery agents, searching out tradition and craft in objects from knives to watches to well made shoes.

Their influence hasn’t necessarily shown up in employment stats yet – the number of small manufacturing companies has not shown a steady increase as far I can tell. But it does show up in the streetscape, where buildings abandoned by big industry have been steadily reclaimed for small ones, even when the rest of the real estate market held its breath.

Before Hal had a workshop in the Bridgeport Arts Building, he was in the Spice Factory on Cermak, just north of the river. This was in the late 1990s. The building was buzzing with artists, but it was also always getting pasted with liens and notices that utilities would be shut off. The owner had a reputation for promoting live-work space. Tenants would move in, then get evicted when she got caught. Link never lived in his workshop, but a poorly plumbed shower for people who lived upstairs used to leak into his space, ruining expensive materials, until he finally shut the water off and walled it off himself.

By 2001 he was looking for new space. John Edel had just bought the building that would be Bubbly Dynamics in the Central Manufacturing District east of the river, and Rick Price was renovating the Iron Studios to the west. Hal looked at both of them, but neither was quite ready to rent. He took a space in the former Spiegel ware house at 1300 W. 35th Street. It had just changed owners a couple years before. A large portion of it was still used for document storage. A teddy bear factory occupied the entire 2nd floor -- the American Bear Company still warehouses their stuffed animals there today.

Hal moved into the basement, sharing 2,800 square feet with Richard Zagorski, a pattern maker who was almost ready to retire. Eleven years later, they still share the space, Richard enjoys taking on small jobs. He makes patterns for decorative metal grills, or custom parts for old machine tools.

In 2006, when developers were still making big plans, the Metroplitan Planning Council and the Urban Land Institute published a proposal for a “creative industries district” on Cermak Road. It would incorporate the Spice Building with 2 of its neighbors to renovate a combined 800,000 square feet of studio and office space for artists, craftsmen and architects. It would cost $103 million to build, including a proposed $36 million in TIF subsidies.

Since then, something like that, but more sprawling, has continued to evolve organically in Bridgeport.

The building at 1200 West 35th Street, with 500,000 square feet, has steadily transformed itself from the East Bank Storage building to the Bridgeport Art Center. Hal was just the 2nd artist there when he moved in, in 2001. Today, over 40 artists occupy the 3rd and 4th floors. This year, the building launched a new Fashion Design Center, with studios, a shared cutting table, and an 18,000 square foot event space for fashion shows and other events. It has stunning skyline views; Hal laid its parquet floor.

The Zhou Brothers have housed artists at their 87,000 square foot building on 35th Street since 2004 – it boasts about 50 resident artists today. Ed Marszewski opened Co-Prosperity Sphere, a 5,000 square foot showroom and project launch pad in 2006. This spring, they launched SMALL, the Small Manufacturing Alliance, to showcase Chicago made goods.

John Edel renovated Bubbly Dynamics gradually, over 8 years, accumulating tenants in as he built the space out. It has 24,000 square feet of space and he calls it the Chicago Sustainable Manufacturing Center now. John bought his second building, a 90,000 square foot plant in The Stockyards, in early 2010.

Every 3rd Friday of the month, the Artists of the East Bank coordinate an open studio night with the Zhou Brothers building down the street. Just last week-end, the Bridgeport Arts Center hosted a launch party for Chicago Artist’s Month, together with SMALL, and Ed’s other new venture, Mash Tun, a magazine and craft beer festival.

This year, Chicago Artists Month aims to showcase how Chicago artists can serve as “essential building blocks in the development of vibrant and livable neighborhoods.” Bridgeport’s arts spaces demonstrate how the reverse is also true - neighborhoods can make room where artisans like Hal Link can build their business in stable, affordable space, and in concert with a community of peers.

More Bridgeport Bike Work

Michael Catano of Humble Frameworks at Work
photo by Rob Lomblad

Chicago’s hand built bicycle industry has gained momentum this year, and Bridgeport builders are still at the front of it. The custom builders at Bubbly Bicycle Works, the frame builders co-operative founded by Owen Lloyd [and described on The Hardscrabbler in January 2011], have been joined by Legacy Frameworks, a small batch manufacturing company.

Manufacturing jobs have a good reputation in the US, people sometimes forget they haven’t always been ideal. The industrial revolution was hard on workers. The jobs were dirty, dangerous, and poorly paid. They were also unskilled and tedious, labor was reluctant to give up their sense of craftsmanship and meaningful work.

Labor unions helped change that, but so did owners like Henry Ford. Ford’s great innovation as an automobile manufacturer had less to do with the efficiency of his assembly lines [similar efficiencies had been achieved before, at the Stockyards for instance] than the bargain he struck with his labor force, who agreed to show up reliably for impoverished jobs, in exchange for a higher wage. And paying better wages helped create the market for Ford’s new cars.

Ownership’s commitment to that bargain has wavered in recent decades, so it’s satisfying to see some of the labor force making its way back to the old way of work, even if their numbers are still pretty modest.

Alignment Table at Bubbly Bicycle Works, photo by Rob Lomblad

Nationally, the hand built bicycle industry grew gradually for decades, then took off around 2005, the year the North American Handmade Bicycle Show (NAHBS) launched its first event. Don Walker, NAHBS founder, estimates there might be 50 craftsmen earning a living building custom bicycles in the US today, and another 150-200 who supplement their income that way. In fact, a few US builders have grown to factory scale production, employing dozens of skilled craftsmen to build bicycles by hand. Jay Townley, whose market research firm Gluskin Townley Group, LLC tracks the bike industry, estimates US hand-builders sell 30,000 bicycles a year.

Chicago’s hand-built bike industry is still modest for a city of its size. Portland, a city of 600,000 people, has at least 25 bike builders; Minneapolis, a city of 400,000, can count 12.

Chicago has 2 full-time custom builders, and several who build bicycles part time. Garry Alderman of Method Bicycles and Michael Catano of Humble Frameworks each build 20-35 bikes a year. Method operates from a West Loop building shared with an art gallery owned by Alderman’s wife; Humble operates from Bubbly Bicycle Works, Bridgeport’s framebuilder’s co-op, alongside custom builders See-More Cycles, Comrade, and Lloyd.

What they charge can vary widely, depending on what a patron wants. A complete bike from Method or Humble typically falls within the $3-$6,000 range, though it could cost as much as $10,000 with rarefied wheels and wireless components.

A cyclist can buy a high quality mass production bike for a fraction of that price, and it may be superior, by some measures, to a hand-built frame. That makes it even more impressive that a growing base of customers will pay more to have something a craftsman has built by hand.

Bicycle by Humble Frameworks

“The mass production bike industry has done a very good job of defining certain criteria that a bike should be, and then excelling at them,” Catano observes. “A bicycle that I make will never be as light, or stiff, as a single-piece carbon molded frame…. But if lightness and stiffness are not the two things you care about most, then this whole other world of things opens up.”

Lightness and stiffness are often prized in bikes built to race. Steel frames flex slightly, that can make them more comfortable to ride over jolting terrain, because they absorb shocks, but they also absorb some of the power of the cyclist’s pedal stroke.

Catano, who races cyclocross, has been refining his design on frames he’s built to ride himself. Many of the design features in his bikes, like shaping of the tubing, are calculated to build stiffness back into key points of the bike. Others are more purely aesthetic, like his painstaking bi-laminate construction technique.

Humble Frameworks: Raw Frame with Shaped Tubing

Bicycles may be welded or brazed – welding is quicker, the material of the tubes is melted together. Brazing uses a softer metal, usually silver or brass, as cement, and requires a careful hand. The tubes must be mitered to fit precisely, or the joint will be weak; the heat must be controlled evenly, or the cooling material will deflect the angle of the joint.

Humble Frameworks: Carved Lugs

Many vintage bicycles are joined with lugs, or sleeve-like fittings. The braze seeps into the fitting to hold the tubes together. Fillet brazing joins tubes directly to each other with a ribbon of brass, which is then filed smooth. Bi-laminate technique combines the simple lines of fillet brazing and sleeves with hand carved embellishments. It’s a technique mass production builders don’t use anymore.

Humble Frameworks: Bi-Laminate Joint

Catano describes browsing photostreams posted by fledgling builders on Flickr, showing design features they’ve borrowed at random from various sources, without really offering anything to “the larger conversation” of what a bike should be. That conversation is often conducted in subtle variations rather than grand gestures. If you consider the progress of a master like Richard Sachs, those variations might not be visible from 10 feet away.

“He’s essentially built the same bicycle over and over again, working toward this perfected idea of what a bicycle should be,” Catano says. “I think that’s what people respond to – something resonates with what a particular builder is doing, and they want to be part of that, they want a piece of that themselves.”

Humble Frameworks: Seat Cluster Detail


Hand built bikes are still a small part of the US bicycle market. There were 15.7 million bicycles sold in the US last year, according to the National Bicycle Dealers Association, and over 99% of them were imports. Though the market is undergoing glacial shifts. Jay Townley, of the Gluskin Townley market research firm, says imports were down by 4 million bikes last year, but sales held steady in dollar terms, thanks in part to the resurrection of millions of used bikes.

Townley says affluent male baby boomers have owned the high end bike market for more than a decade, and mass producers have been pushing their price points upwards over the last 5 years by developing high tech bikes for pro circuit teams, and then making those bikes available for sale. As the high end price point has moved from $3,000 to the $6,000 range, the price gap between mass produced and custom bikes has narrowed.
The baby boomer males are the lightness and stiffness crowd, the demographic that buys the same bikes the pros ride, but they are aging out of the market. They represent just 80% of it now, they were 88%, Townley says.

Gen Y wants different things. They’re into green design, car-lite culture; they are unemployed, but entrepreneurial. The outlines of their consumer profile are not exactly crisp. “The brands are confused,” Townley says “they don’t know what to do.”
Some of Chicago’s Gen Y shoppers doubtless make their way through Tati Cycles, a 200sf boutique bike shop in Wicker Park.

Tati’s proprietor, J, describes 2 types of customers who are drawn to custom bikes – one is the 23 year old who went to art school and will spend a lot of money to have a few very good things. The other is the 35 year old architect, who has money to spend, but doesn’t want anyone to know. “He wants really, really nice things, but things that don’t look expensive,” J says. “The average person will look at it, and won’t be able to tell.”

J attributes their modesty partly to Midwestern conservatism. Friends in the fashion industry tell him that conservatism is echoed in the local market for men’s suits. It also suggests nuance to his motive for buying custom, or hand made goods.

The classic explanation for why a consumer will buy something that displays his discernment more than his wealth, is that he is showing off his cultural capital to sophisticated peers. That motive may be real, but it seems to be joined by a real desire for a more personal, less alien relationship with objects themselves. Some consumers want to participate in the production process, if possible, or at least to know everything they can about how the object is made.

J describes a recent encounter with a customer who came to Tati shopping for a jersey. Tati, a tiny shop, maintains a selective collection, so J had just 1 jersey, in black, by Search and State. Search and State is a small company that makes a couple, technically excellent garments from carefully chosen fabrics, in the actual garment district in New York. J and his customer had a 70 minute conversation about the jersey, the customer decided it was exactly what he was looking for, and bought it.

As customer tastes take new dimensions, the categories of custom and mass produced are blurred. Tati Cycles offers cyclocross frames built by Humble Frameworks, at cost, J says, because he wants to help Catano’s business grow to a sustainable scale. But he also sells bikes made to spec by Maxwei, a mass production builder in Taiwan – they are custom, but not built by a single craftsman.

Legacy Bicycle Detail

Legacy Frameworks sells manufactured bikes, but they are all hand built by Levi Borreson. He builds the same style in 2 sizes, in small production runs to make them more affordable. Legacy bicycles are carefully engineered for bike commuting, they are slightly less expensive than European commuter bikes, and they only weigh a third as much.

Borreson has been marketing Legacy Frameworks through big organized rides, bike swaps, and pop-up retail events like the Guerilla Truck Show that coincides with NeoCon, partly to avoid retailer mark-ups.

Legacy Bicycle and Rear Triangle Detail


Heritage Bicycles, Chicago’s other small production builder, has taken the opposite tack. Heritage builds very stylish bicycles, and sells them at a Lincoln Park general store, where you can also shop for accessories, and hang out at the store’s coffee shop. In fact, Heritage has developed its own line of waxed canvas panniers.

“I don’t see Heritage Bicycles as being a bike company,” owner Michael Salvatore says. “I see it being a lifestyle brand, and the bicycle is an entry way into that.”

Customer Suzanne Fox describes how Salvatore customized her Heritage bicycle by building it out with racks and panniers – she would have bought the Heritage panniers but they were still under development, “I liked the idea of having an all-Heritage bike.”

Prior to opening Heritage, Salvatore was co-owner of Bowery Bicycles of New York, which sells bikes with a similar combination of local construction and retro-aesthetics. He recalls that when Bowery Bicycles first opened, they expected their customer base to be hipsters and boutique shoppers, but it turned out to be broader – extending to other small business owners and the buy-local crowd. Something similar is happening in Chicago. Heritage opened its doors in January, and Salvatore said he expected to sell at least 10 bikes this year. By mid-August, they had sold 80.

In some ways, Humble and Heritage make very different kinds of bicycles, but Humble Framework’s Catano is enthusiastic about the profile Heritage is bringing to hand built bikes in general. At one point he says “I think they’re the most important thing that is happening right now, in terms of Chicago bike culture.”

“When I started building bikes in Chicago,” Catano recalls “I was really excited that there was a huge population of cyclists, with no one building custom frames here. I thought ‘I’m going to make out like a bandit.’”

He quickly realized the fact it was a wide open market also meant there was little awareness of handmade bicycles as an item someone might want. Heritage makes hand built bicycles accessible, and visible, to a much broader public. Catano hopes that will help other local builders as well.

“Every time someone sees a hand-built bike on the road, and says ‘Oh, that’s cool, hand-built bikes are a thing that I like,’ it’s got to help.”

photo by Rob Lomblad

Notes from Neighborhood Watch

I haven’t lived in Bridgeport all that long but I am already proud of the place as if I’ve lived here all my life, and sometimes a little defensive about its media image as a hold out of the uglier parochial sentiments. Living in Bridgeport really is like living in a small town. There are a lot of good things about that, though there are some things that are not so great. Some of both came out after a sensational murder last fall.

I hear there have been sensational murders in Bridgeport before, guys shot down outside their houses or tortured to death behind closed doors, but they often seemed to be criminals reaping the wages of their chosen careers. This was a 73 year old woman, bludgeoned to death in her garage on a nice block east of Halsted St. And it followed close on 2 startling incidents of people robbed at gun point in broad daylight around Normal and Parnell.

It was more startling because of where it was. Years ago, I’m told, Parnell was a tough street and the rail yard on Normal was inhabited by hobos who carried big sticks to beat the rats with. But since then the yard on Normal has been paved for White Sox parking and Parnell has been rebuilt with big houses with soaring atriums, in ground pools and second kitchens in finished basements (whose inhabitants still spend summer evenings sitting the garage, an unfamiliar custom that seems quaintly old world).

Our regular CAPS beat meetings used to be held at Wentworth Gardens, the public housing complex on the other side of the viaduct. After the Parnell murder in October, there was a special CAPS meeting held at Nativity of Our Lord on Lowe.

Over 400 people filled the church basement. The 9th District CAPS officer, the District Commander, the Alderman and the Chicago Police Department’s second in command, all came to address their fears.

The crowd was restive and suspicious, they seemed ready to boil over. They want to know what police were doing to address the crime wave in their neighborhood. The police seemed to be telling them there wasn’t a crime wave. At least Commander Jarmusz started out running through statistics of actual crimes for each of Bridgeport’s beats, in almost every category the number was down from the previous year.

Eventually a woman from the crowd told him, “I don’t care about statistics, I know crime is up,” a sentiment the crowd heartily approved. They told the CPD’s second in command “You’re not from here,” and they left muttering that the police were “lying through their teeth.”

The uglier sentiments were amplified through the ether in the months afterwards, through Facebook groups and reports on EveryBlock. Neighbors provoked each other with veiled, or not so veiled, references to people of other ethnicities who don’t share our values. “It’s Black Friday on Halsted Street” I see a friend post from a bar on the afternoon after Thanksgiving. He describes black youths walking Bridgeport’s quiet retail strip “in gangs of 3 and 4.” There were reports of crimes, and rumors of crimes that would never make it to the police blotter -- black men trying to lure young girls into cars and other creepy things.

I helped spread a couple of those stories myself. They were reports of home invasions I’d read about on EveryBlock this spring. In the first, a woman left the apartment building door unlocked for just a minute while she ran to the neighbor’s next door. While she was gone 2 black men walked in the building and pried open the lock on her apartment with a screw driver. Her son woke form a nap to find them in the kitchen. Luckily, when they saw him, they made excuses and left. In the second incident, a man answered his front door and 2 black men were outside. One of them punched him in the face, they grabbed everything they could get quickly and ran back to a waiting car.

These were both reported within doors from where I live – a block so confident in its security that the neighbors in my building are ideologically opposed to locking the building entrances. In fact my landlord likes to leave them standing open to let the breeze in, another custom I thought was quaint when I first moved in. It drives me nuts since I started reading EveryBlock.

Dan from Bridgeport Citizen’s Group made a point of asking about these incidents at the next CAPS meeting. The sergeant sent someone to check the database, and it turned out neither incident had actually happened. At least there had been no home invasions reported to the police on those blocks in recent months. It’s hard to imagine someone would get punched in the face and robbed in his own home and not call the police. But if he wouldn't, that’s another public safety problem.

There are people who believe the police are lying through their teeth. I don’t believe that – I think the police want us to keep our doors locked and our eyes open for trouble. I don’t believe Bridgeport’s crime wave is all hysterics either. But I wish some of that attention could be re-directed toward crime that originates here.

There was just a new murder on Friday night. A 30 year old man was gunned down on 31st and Wallace in broad daylight. Shortly after rush hour, Lynn from Bridgeport Citizen’s Group went by the police station as Commander Jarmusz was turning in. He flagged her down to tell her what was going on. He said it was a Satan’s Disciple who was killed, they didn’t have a suspect in custody yet, but he wanted her to spread the word. He asked that people stay away from the scene while police worked their investigation.

The loud complaints at the Nativity CAPS meeting last fall were balanced out by other voices. “If we’ve learned anything,” the CAPS officer reassured the crowd “It’s that statistics don’t mean anything if you don’t feel safe.” He went on to encourage us to make ourselves more safe by stepping up to participate. Come to CAPS meetings, call in tips to the police, join the Bridgeport Citizens Group, which coordinates a neighborhood watch. People in the crowd reinforced that advice, they urged their neighbors to act on their concerns and get involved.

It was April before I made it to my next CAPS meeting. By then, the beats had been redrawn and the monthly CAPS meeting was moved to the 9th District Station on Halsted Street.

I worried about the elderly ladies who had traveled from Wentworth Gardens to make the meeting, who probably face crime threats as serious as anyone in Bridgeport, and who now found themselves in a room full of white people, many of whom seemed to think all the crime that didn’t come through the viaduct came from those “Section 8 people” in public housing. One woman at the meeting asked if we couldn’t start a petition to just build a gate around the Bridgeport Homes, the public housing complex just beside the police station on 31st Street.

When the Wentworth Gardens ladies got up to leave, our CAPS Officer made a point of acknowledging them from the podium, and they explained they had to go because they’d paid a driver to bring them over, and the driver’s hour was up. But one of the ladies took the opportunity to describe some of the activities they were organizing over at Wentworth Gardens. When she’d finished, the room gave her a round of polite applause. They came back for another month or two, but I don’t see them at CAPS meetings anymore.

Dan and Lynn, who founded the Bridgeport Citizens Group, live across the street from Bridgeport Homes. They say they see more trouble coming from buildings run by absentee landlords than from public housing.

Last Spring, Dan had just gone to court to testify against a Latin King whom he’d witnessed chasing someone with a drawn gun. The police were delighted he’d do it – they thought they’d have to settle on more minor charges associated with violation of his parole, because they thought witnesses would be afraid to testify in court.

The guy went away for 6 months. While he was away, Dan and Lynn were reaching out to his grandmothers, who live on either side of the street, and an aunt who denies he lives with them, but then seems to admit he might. Dan says he and Lynn disagree to a certain extent on how to handle a situation like that. He says he has no problem pressing landlords to evict families if the family harbors a gang member who runs around with guns, though Lynn has more qualms about it.

But their strategy with landlords who harbor dangerous tenants has been to call the landlord and ask him to take responsibility first. If that doesn’t work, the alderman can sometimes send in teams of inspectors looking for violations. That might encourage a negligent owner to evict, or sell. Though sometimes, when you push a problem tenant out of one house, they reappear in a house down the block.

This summer the Citizens Group has been active on Carpenter Street. People say Carpenter has had trouble for a long time. There is nothing about the way Carpenter Street looks that would explain why that is. It has the same mix of cottages and 3 flats with pretty roof-lines as other streets in the vicinity. Neighbors can point out buildings whose 3 apartments were once occupied by 3 generations of a family, until the older generation died and the younger ones moved away. Now absentee landlords play a role here, like they do on Lituanica.

At the moment, there is one particular cottage that has been a hub of activity. The tenant in that house has a long resume with the corrections system, and it’s not just him, it’s all his friends. If you’d drive a strange car down that street they’d come out to peer in your windows when you slowed for the speed bump.

Neighbors have been calling the owner of the building, who lives in the suburbs. She’s been defensive, eventually she told them the tenant was going to move out at the end of July, though the date came and went and he’s still there.

The Bridgeport Citizen’s Group have used smoke-outs to good effect in other parts of the neighborhood. A smoke-out is a cook-out where neighbors assert their presence immediately in from of a safety hot spot. The neighbors on Carpenter had some trepidation about trying that on their street – they feared it would just rattle the hornets. But they went ahead and hosted one at the end of June.

The event itself was a success – neighbors rallied from across the neighborhood, and Commander Jarmusz came out to show his support. But once we were gone, the gangbangers held their own event, starting around 1 in the morning. And when the neighbors called the police, it took a half dozen calls and 3 hours for them to arrive.

The July CAPS meeting was acrimonious. One Carpenter Street neighbor has been working for several years to get criminals off her street. More than once she has seen bad neighbors pushed out of one house, only to have problem tenants reappear down the street. Her husband has been assaulted, they have had bricks and hand tools thrown through their windows. Now she’s alienating the CAPS officer by implying he’s personally ineffective, and she is skeptical about ideas from the Citizen’s Group, because she’s tried a lot of it before.

The police sound just as frustrated – they are understaffed, and overstretched, and Bridgeport isn’t the most dangerous part of the 9th district. Dan says when they first launched the Bridgeport Citizens Group a couple years ago, the 9th district had 9 CAPS officers. Now there are 2, 1 of them is part time, and they have to balance their policing duties with tasks like making wellness calls to seniors during heat alerts.

For his part, Dan’s not convinced police alone are the whole answer – didn’t Carpenter Street still have gang bangers when the police were fully staffed?

In the weeks since the smoke-out and the CAPS meeting where the frustrations all came out, representatives of the Bridgeport Citizens Group sat down with police to try to work out how the chain of communication might be improved. Among other things, they learned 911 calls are prioritized by an independent dispatch center. The officers responding in the car don’t know what time you first called. If they show up 3 hours later and you’re mad at them, they just absorb your frustration. The police helped the Citizens Group work out a script for following up on calls that don’t get a timely response.

The Citizens Group has also been brainstorming next step strategies for Carpenter Street -- creative ideas to make it harder to flee through gangways and vacant lots, and to hold landlords accountable. Call the landlord with problem tenants, but also call other landlords with apartments for rent to ask what their screening practices are.

And they can always use more volunteers for the neighborhood watch. On the neighborhood watch in my beat, we don’t see a lot of suspicious activity in progress. We report a lot of graffiti so no one thinks he can mark a spot and own it. Just as important though, we’re tied in to the activities of our neighbors in other beats, and to the kind of communication that might actually make the neighborhood safer, as frustrating as that process may sometimes be.

A Turn in the Local Waste Stream

Coming Soon to The Plant: A Brave New Day for Municipal Waste


Bridgeport might soon find itself in the near vicinity of not just 1 but 2 anaerobic digesters. They will transform tons of raw garbage into heat and power, with a by-product of potent soil enhancements, and they may change the local landscape for waste.

One of them, under development at The Plant, an adaptive reuse project in the Stockyards, would take in 32 tons of food waste per day, and fuel the generation of up to 500 KW of electricity per hour – mainly to power food processing, beverage brewing, and an aquaponic farm, all located on site. The Plant’s developer, John Edel, says he expects to break ground within a month, and complete construction within 8 months. Growing Power’s Iron Street Farm plans to develop a digester that would eventually consume 100 tons of food waste per day, though they are still working out the details, including where it will be located and how it will be financed.

Anaerobic digestion is a proven technology. European digesters consume a full spectrum of farm, industrial and municipal waste, often in some combination at co-digestion plants. Their use in the US is limited almost exclusively to waste water treatment plants, and to commercial farms where they are deployed mitigating the polluting power of oceans of manure. Building an urban digester, that will consume municipal solids, is still a tricky process. The contractors who build them vary widely in expertise, and the financing must be knit together from subsidies and tax credits, since biogas is still on the margins of our power grid.

But that’s not because the plants are not potentially lucrative. In fact, profits from the heat and power generated by burning biogas could be secondary to the profits to be had from consuming huge volumes of garbage.


In the US, anaerobic digestion is mainly a waste treatment process, much of the methane produced is simply flared. That’s especially true at waste water treatment plants – there are over 3,500 digesters in operation at such plants in the US, but just over 100 of them burn the gas to produce power. There are only 191 digesters at commercial livestock farms, but 186 of them use gas in combined heat and power plants. Illinois has 3 farm based digesters, with capacity to produce 2,243 MW of power. Wisconsin’s huge population of dairy cows lead the nation in farm-based generation, with 29 anaerobic digesters with 120,982 MW of electric generation capacity.

By contrast, municipal solid waste remains largely untapped. There are about 250 million tons of it generated every year, according to the EPA. Undigested food waste in particular has much more power potential than manure, which has already been depleted once. And municipal solids are a reverse commodity – there’s great value to be realized by taking it off people’s hands.

That’s been more true ever since the passage of the Resource Conservation Recovery Act in 1976. Prior to that, municipal waste was mostly disposed in open dumps, left to leak contaminants into ground water, and seep methane into the air. The Act didn’t eliminate the old city dump, but it did prohibit the opening of new ones. It established criteria for the location, design and operation of landfills, and linked federal assistance to resource recovery and sanitary practices.

Regulation made waste disposal a more capital intensive endeavor. Substandard local dumps gradually filled and closed over the years. They were replaced by large scale, state of the art, regional facilities – and a more elaborate supply chain of recycling centers and transfer stations, where waste is aggregated for long haul shipping.

A 20th Century Waste Transfer Station, also in the Stockyards


In 1988 there were 8,000 landfills in the US. By 2006, three were just 1,750. On average, they each handled four times the waste. Waste haulers underwent a parallel process of consolidation – today the biggest operate their own landfills to retain revenue from gate tipping fees.

In 1985, it cost $8, on average, to deposit a ton of waste at a landfill; by 2004, it cost $34, and the US waste disposal business was a $40 billion industry. Since then, consumption may have slowed with the recession, but tipping fees have continued to climb, to a national average of $49 per ton in 2011.

Organic waste buried in landfills already decays anaerobically – in the absence of oxygen, it produces methane gas, and less of the carbon dioxide exhaled in open air rot. Methane is more effective at creating atmospheric greenhouse conditions than carbon dioxide, so the new, reformed landfills use pumps to capture it. Some of it is simply flared, but it can also be pumped to co-generation plants.

Land and Lakes of Park Ridge is a typical new generation landfill operator. Founded as an excavation company in 1966, they are vertically integrated, operating a fleet of waste hauling trucks and transfer stations, recycling centers and landfills.

Land and Lakes reclaims methane from its landfills to generate power – it boasts that it sends enough to supply 52,000 households into the ComEd grid. It also boasts the first “bioreactor” landfill permitted in Illinois, at its River Bend Prairie landfill in Dolton. The biogreactor manipulates moisture levels to accelerate the decomposition process, and produce more methane faster.

Anaerobic digestion takes that process steps further. Digesters vary in configuration -- some farm based digesters are big, covered pits of slurry, brewing microbial reactions. Digesting solids is a more complex process. The digester at The Plant is engineered like a complete gastro-intestinal tract.

The solids, including food waste, brewers grains and possibly fats from rendering plants, will be fed through a mascerator to chew large pieces into smaller ones. The chewed solids will pass into the primary digester, a 100 foot horizontal tube, where bacteria will start a series of chemical reactions, as paddles gradually churn it through the tube over the course of a month.

Coming out the other end, digested solids will be separated from liquids with a screw press. The solids will pass out of the system into a covered pile, and eventually sold as rich organic fertilizer. The liquid will continue into the second digester, a 54 foot tank with a membrane roof. The membrane will expand as methane collects, some of it pumped in from the primary digester, and some of it exuded by the liquid digestate. The spent liquid can also be sold as soil amendment.

From there, the methane gas will be piped into the building where it will fuel a combined heat and power system. The Plant will consume both the heat and the power on site, the system is sized to meet the building’s needs. These are estimated to average 300KW per hour under normal conditions, but the system will be capable of generating up to 500KW. It will be used to power commercial food processing, breweries, and the grow lights for the aquaponic farm, all of which generate their own heat -- industrial buildings often have to be cooled off all year round. So the heat generated from The Plant’s combined heat and power system will be run through an absorption chiller to produce cooling power. They are adapting the existing, extremely well built ammonia cooling system the building came with to run cold water instead.

Every aspect of The Plant has a full-cycle logic like that. The building that was once a mass production meat processing plant is being converted to incubate small, sustainable food producers, and the indoor farm. The aquaponic growing system will recycle waste from fish to fertilize plant crops; the digester will fuel generators to make power from garbage. That will make it much more affordable to run grow lights for indoor farming. And it will all work within the regular cycle of carbon exchange that goes on all the time between biotic life and the atmosphere -- as opposed to releasing vast carbon reserves that have been sequestered underground for hundreds of millions of years by burning fossil fuels.

Building it will cost about $2 million. Most of it will be paid for with a Food Scrap Advancement grant (F-SCRAP) from the Illinois Department of Commerce, together with a Recovery Act grant (ARRA) and a loan from the Chicago Community Loan Fund. The Plant has contracted with Eisenmann Corporation to build the digester itself, and with Alcor Energy Solutions to build the combined heat and power system. Eisenmann is a family owned German engineering firm with North American headquarters in Crystal Lake. They have built at least 80 anaerobic digesters in Europe and hundreds of other kinds of facilities in the US. Alcor has also completed numerous combined heat and power systems, but its owner may be more accomplished as an engineer than as a project manager. Alcor is behind on its contract at The Plant, the delays have been costly, time will tell if they are the firm that actually finishes the combined heat and power system at The Plant.

But once it’s all up and running by spring 2013, early estimates show more than half potential revenues coming from tipping charges for accepting waste, and a smaller fraction earned by selling power to tenants. Edel anticipates the tipping fees will be quickly consumed by the cost of operations. The Plant will take on the role of waste hauler itself.

The estimates are also based on tipping charges less than half the national average rate. And there is a sub-trend in the municipal waste market that moves against the long term rise of disposal fees. New, creative users such as organic farmers, bio-fuel producers, and now anaerobic digesters, are creating value for the best organic waste products –a value not earned just by hauling it away. Brewer’s grains are one example.

Iron Street Farm: Possible Site of Greater Bridgeport's Next Anaerobic Digester

Josh Deth of Revolution Brewing says his recently expanded brewing operations generate about 8 tons of spent grains a week – all of which has been claimed as prime compost material by 2 urban farms, including Growing Power and City Farm. Deth says he pays the farms to haul the waste, because they are non profits with a mission he supports and he wants them to succeed, but he says Goose Island brewery is getting paid by farmers who want to use their waste, which can also be added to cow feed. In fact, bulk used cooking oil is already a commodity, its price tracks the price of corn. Aside from its potential use for making bio-fuel, farmers use it as an additive to soy feeds to make them more nutritious when corn costs too much.

Deth says Chicago’s other breweries still pay conventional waste haulers – probably for one of the reasons he pays Growing Power. Deth says as a business owner, he needs to be assured his waste will be hauled away consistently at regular times. But “it’s not garbage,” he says.

Still, the sources of organic waste are numerous, and plenty of producers pay to have it reliably shipped away. Edel says The Plant will offer the same service as the big waste haulers at the same price, “and you also get a gold start next to your name that says all of your waste is going to a sustainable business to make energy and food.”

The Plant is unlikely to face a shortage of fuel anytime soon. Food wastes aren’t the biggest component of municipal solid wastes generated every year, but after all the paper products are recycled, they comprise the biggest portion that goes to landfill. The EPA reports almost 34 million tons of food waste were generated in 2010, and only 3% of it was recycled. The rest could fuel a generation of urban digesters, and also help pay for them.