Landmarks: Former sledding mecca now a grazing ground for goats

There aren’t any swimming holes left around here, and if there were, you probably wouldn’t want to swim in them.

Instead, our plunging place growing up in the south suburbs took advantage of the opposite season. We had a sledding hole, and it was epic.

With steep sides and riddled with nearly invisible obstacles, snowy days would deliver scores of kids to government property along busy 175th Street in Hazel Crest. There were no nearby places to park, no sidewalks leading to it, but the sledding hole was worth the extra effort. People would park at a sanctioned, Park District sledding hill a few blocks away and trudge through the roadside slush.

My friends and I still laughingly recount one trip down the steep slope when one of us was popped several feet into the air by an unseen snow ramp someone had piled up that subsequently became an icy and sudden ski mogul.

There were injuries. We often left with bruises, but the ski hole offered the best sledding around. Police would roust the crowds of thrill seekers from time to time, but we kept coming back anytime the weather was right. We were free range kids in the ‘80s, even in the wintertime.

Eventually a fence went up around the sledding hole. Undaunted by the prospect of chain link snags rending puffy coats, some kids still pitched sleds over the barrier before climbing over themselves.

Safety and liability minders had to resort to barbed wire to finally keep people out, and the Calumet Union Reservoir now is unpopulated even on the fluffiest snow days.

It’s been that way for years, but a friend emailed me last week to point out some activity in the old sledding hole at 175th Street and Governors Highway. Rather than keeping kids out, the barbed wire fence was now keeping in a herd of goats.

The nearly mountainous slopes that made the reservoir such a great place to go really fast on sleds likely makes landscaping there a hazardous chore. The goats enjoying the vegetative buffet recently at the Calumet Union Reservoir weren’t mountain goats, but they were sure-footed enough to graze the slopes unperturbed by gravity.

Patrick Thomas, a public affairs specialist with the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago, which owns and maintains the reservoir, said “the goats travel from site to site to help us trim back vegetation.”

Actually a mixed herd of goats and sheep, the MWRD began using the animals to help with landscaping in 2019, he said. They’re brought in by Vegetation Solutions, a company based in Wisconsin west of Madison, started to help control an outbreak of invasive garlic mustard on private property.

The herd of about 65 goats and sheep have since dined at upscale eateries such as the fields surrounding O’Hare Airport, cemeteries and parks. They’ve munched buckthorn at the Calumet Water Reclamation Plant in Chicago and other MWRD facilities.

Indifferent to garlic mustard induced halitosis, the animals also can ingest with impunity plants such as poison ivy, adding to the value of their services, district officials said.

Thomas said the partnership between the district and the animals is “critical because it provides an environmental alternative to maintain the ground outside MWRD facilities,” reducing the agency’s reliance on herbicides and fuel to power mowers.

“It’s also a more cost effective solution compared to other alternatives,” he said.

The animals’ nearly 44-acre dining room at 175th Street and Governors Highway can also hold plenty of drink. Ostensibly part of the shallow and meandering Cherry Creek bed, the reservoir has a water storage capacity of 163 million gallons, Thomas said.

It was placed into service in 1976, but is a direct result of planning decisions made decades prior.

A booklet touting the success of Harvey, “a Manufacturing Town of Chicago,” distributed at the World’s Columbian Exhibition of 1892 brags about the village’s “exceptionally good location, twenty-five feet above Lake Michigan on the Blue Island Ridge, where the water runs naturally like a mill race, with sufficient force and volume to carry off the most excessive rainfall into the Calumet.”

Perhaps those boosters weren’t being willfully deceptive, but they were wrong. Stormwater management, especially south of Harvey, was haphazard at best as development overtook the region at the outset of the 20th century. Natural systems that developed over centuries to gradually disperse groundwater from an exceptionally flat landscape were disrupted and altered in many small projects under no larger strategy.

Periodic calamity ensued. Floods regularly damaged homes, businesses and infrastructure. Cherry Creek and other small streams didn’t have the capacity to quickly channel rainwater to the Little Calumet River, which had flooding issues of its own.

After a particularly harsh stormwater event in 1904, the Calumet Union Drainage District No. 1 was formed to construct two open ditches that could relieve the suffering. The Calumet Union Drainage Ditch still goes about that business in the open air, an unnaturally straight creek flowing east to South Holland on its way to the Little Calumet. The other ditch was piped in and is evident now only in a grassy path traveling directly north from Markham, next to Robey Avenue.

That helped some, but not enough. A 1947 flood in the Hazel Crest area caused woe enough to elicit an emergency response from the Red Cross.

An extensive report from the Army Corps of Engineers on the Little Calumet River and its tributaries, commissioned in 1941, delayed by World War II and finally delivered in December 1950, outlined several proposals to alleviate the persistent problems. One that was rejected as too expensive involved digging a new channel along Kedzie Avenue from 183rd Street north to the Calumet River.

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It was cheaper to add to the Calumet Union system, officials decided. Soon afterward, the area became a nexus of roadbeds, with superhighways including Interstates 57 and 80 and the Tri-State Tollway all converging. It offered land redevelopment opportunities as well as huge swaths of problematically impermeable pavement.

Thus was born, or dug, the Calumet Union Reservoir, and a string of associated ponds that are silting in and unrecommended as swimming holes.

Stormwater concerns persist in the area, and as 100-year storms seem to threaten annually, MWRD officials continue to examine ways to better deal with runoff, including a $3.3 million project to refurbish Cherry Creek in Flossmoor.

A bit downstream, Cherry Creek meanders, as it’s done for over a century, through Calumet Country Club, which is under redevelopment consideration as a potential industrial trucking and warehousing development, trading grassy stretches and hundreds of mature trees for rooftops and vast parking lots.

A century of problem-solving efforts are sure to continue. For about a decade, they created a legendary sledding spot.

And years after that, a place for goats and sheep to graze.

Landmarks is a weekly column by Paul Eisenberg exploring the people, places and things that have left an indelible mark on the Southland. He can be reached at peisenberg@tribpub.com.