Photo taken from Cortland Avenue looking into Finkl & Sons

The word is that Depaul University has been considering the Finkl & Sons Steel Mills at Clybourn Avenue and Cortland Street as a place to build a new 10,000 seat basketball stadium so that it could be in the proximity of their Lincoln Park Campus. They are also considering an alternative site just south at Divison and Clybourn.

Site not suitable for Residential

There has been much discussion about a new Depaul basketball stadium in the media as of late, but it?s only recent that they have been naming site locations. The Finkl & Sons site is located on the east bank of The Chicago River at Southport Ave, and Cortland Street within steps of DePaul?s main campus and due to its heavy industrial use over the past 100 years the site is believed to be to contaminated for many real estate re adaptations. So it seems the current thinking is that instead of removing all the over-sized foundations so closely positioned by the rivers edge that it might be far simpler and safer to just remove all the top soil, pave over the site and any possible contamination.

Its has always been a touchy subject for DePaul athletes that their venue is 15 miles off campus in Northwest Suburban Rosemont over a more local stadium

Finkl to move to the South Side

Finkl Steel in the meantime will continue their move from their longtime site to the south east side of the city. In November they bought 13 acres of land in the Stony Island neighborhood from the City of Chicago for $1.00 (Glad I wasn?t their broker) Work had begun quickly after for their arrival. The $250 million a year Finkl and Sons is the world’s leading supplier of forging die steels, plastic mold steels, die casting tool steels and custom open-die forgings, processing over 100,000 tons of steel each year, and then distributed domestically and to more than 18 countries worldwide all while sitting quietly on the banks of the Chicago river between the beautiful neighborhoods of Depaul, Lincoln Park and Bucktown.

We’d like to thank Payton Chung for kindly sharing today’s photo via the Creative Commons’ License.