Harborside International Golf Course (Formerly Chicago City Dump)

11001 S. Doty (best viewed to the south from 103rd Street bridge over the Norfolk Southern Railroad’s Calumet Yard) 
Chicago, IL 60628 

(South Deering) 

In Martinez-Serros’ “Distillation,” the dump is the destination of the main character, his father, and his brothers, a Mexican American family in the 1930s. The father scavenges fruit and vegetables from the dump and conscripts his sons to help.  Martinez-Serros’ narrator, one of the boys recalling his childhood years later, describes the dump as follows:  …  read more

In Martinez-Serros’ “Distillation,” the dump is the destination of the main character, his father, and his brothers, a Mexican American family in the 1930s. The father scavenges fruit and vegetables from the dump and conscripts his sons to help. 

Martinez-Serros’ narrator, one of the boys recalling his childhood years later, describes the dump as follows:  

“The full stink of decomposing garbage, fused to that of slow-burning trash, struck us. Before us was the city dump—a great raw sore on the landscape, a leprous tract oozing flames and smoldering, hellish grounds columned in smoke and grown tumid across years. Fragments of glass, metal, wood, lay everywhere, some of them menacingly jagged where they had not been driven into the earth by the wheels of the ponderous trucks.” 

Earlier, the narrator describes his memory of the surrounding landscape from atop the 103rd Street bridge over the Norfolk Southern Railroad’s Calumet Yard, riding in the wagon his father pulled as it reaches the apex of the bridge:  

“We were at the summit and the world fell away from us far into the horizon. To the east, steel mills, granaries, railroad yards, a profusion of industrial plants; to the north and south, prairies, trees, some houses; to the west, main arteries, more plants, the great smoking heaps of the city dump, and, farther still, houses and a green sweep of trees that extended as far as the eye saw. Years have changed this area in many ways, but that landscape, like a photo negative, glows in memory’s light.” 

According to a 1971 Chicago Tribune article, the city stopped using this area for a garbage dump on March 1, 1971, after having previously so used it “for years.” In 1954, the South Side forum, “representing citizens living north of the dump,” had objected to both “odor” and the height of the “heaps” or “hills” of garbage at the dump, also according to the Tribune. Two such heaps, named “Mounts Pacini and Du Bois” for local aldermen, had attained heights of 45 feet, as estimated by both forum members and city officials.  

Owned by the Illinois International Port District, Harborside International Golf Center was opened in 1995 on the site of the former dump. According to a 1996 article in American City & County, the dump “originally used for disposal of municipal solid waste and, later, for incinerator ash and wastewater sludge. Another portion was used as a landfill for construction debris.” For conversion to a golf course “the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency required that the 225 acres that comprised the former landfill be capped with two feet of impervious clay to prevent runoff and seepage into groundwater . .  . above the cap, a two-foot layer of sand and topsoil formed a growing medium for grass.”  

East Chicago, Indiana native and University of Notre Dame history professor Emiliano Aguilar chose the golf course / former dump site as the place important to Martinez-Serros as part of the Midwestern literary journal The New Territory’s “Literary Landscapes” series. Aguilar’s essay was included in Lingering Inland, a compilation of the “Literary Landscapes” essays edited by Andy Oler and published in 2025. Aguilar’s essay notes that “Chicago’s South Side is littered with the remains of its industrial past.” While he sees Harborside International as evidence of the revitalization of a once-bleak post-industrial landscape, Aguilar acknowledges that “In some cases, rich historical sites . . . are under threat of removal in the name of progress. While some residents are content with this change, others view it as a loss of the shared heritage and history of the area.”  

While few would lament the improvement of the dump area, it would be easy to play a round of golf here without realizing that in in this very place families like Martinez-Serros’ once reclaimed others’ cast-off refuse for their own survival. 

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