All that is left of the former Acme Steel plant on Chicago’s Southeast Side are a pair of soot-covered smokestacks and a few other graffiti-riddled ruins that draw curious passersby to the weed-strewn property.

       Two nearby industrial wastelands have been cleaned up and transformed into city parks. But the Acme site is still contaminated with a century’s worth of cancer-causing chemicals and heavy metals that endanger visitors, neighbors and wildlife.

       On Wednesday, more than two decades after federal officials first documented the extent of the pollution, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency proposed adding the 102-acre site to the Superfund program — a move that would direct a share of $3.5 billion in taxpayer funds secured by President Joe Biden to investigate and clean up abandoned industrial properties where owners have gone out of business or declared bankruptcy.

       Abandoned buildings sit on the old Acme Steel site along South Torrence Avenue on March 8, 2021, in the South Deering neighborhood of Chicago. (Erin Hooley/Chicago Tribune)

       The announcement came after years of work by community groups to cut through bureaucratic inertia at the EPA and navigate the changing priorities of four different presidential administrations.

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       “This site is absolutely not safe, but no one would necessarily know the full extent of the risks they are facing by walking through holes in the fence or wandering over from one of the nearby parks,” said Keith Harley, a Greater Chicago Legal Clinic attorney who represents the Southeast Environmental Task Force.

       In a 2020 report, the community group drew attention to long-forgotten EPA documents about the Acme site and urged the agency to clean it up. Located west of Torrence Avenue between 110th and 116th streets, the land could be turned into a park or other environmentally friendly development, the group suggested.

       Two other former industrial sites next to the former Acme property are now Big Marsh and Indian Ridge Marsh parks, among the city’s largest.

       [ Big Marsh bike park project aims to invigorate Southeast Side ]

       White-tailed deer at Big Marsh Park on May 7, 2020. (E. Jason Wambsgans/Chicago Tribune)

       Illinois health officials confirmed in 2007 that contaminated dirt and the remaining Acme buildings pose significant health threats. State investigators found high levels of two cancer-causing chemicals, benzo(a)pyrene and benzidine, and other toxic substances including arsenic, lead, manganese, mercury and cyanide.

       All of the pollutants are byproducts from the manufacturing of high-carbon coke used to fuel blast furnaces at steel mills. Giant ovens at the Acme site baked coal into coke from 1905 until 2001, three years after the company declared bankruptcy and a decade after the last steel mill on the Southeast Side closed.

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       The federal Superfund law gives the EPA power to take polluters to court seeking payment to clean up the messes they leave behind. But when there is no corporation left to go after, the burden is shifted to taxpayers.

       Money from several big infrastructure bills approved by Congress since Biden took office is rejuvenating that part of the Superfund program, as is the renewal of excise taxes on oil and certain chemicals to finance more investigations and cleanups.

       “Adding the Acme Coke site to the (Superfund list) gives Chicagoans a chance to cleanup a site with contamination nearly 100-years in the making,” Debra Shore, the EPA’s regional administrator, said in a statement. “This area of Chicago is already overburdened with legacy contamination. Cleaning up this site will be a huge environmental boon to the community.”

       The site is the second on Southeast Side slated in recent years for a Superfund cleanup. Federal officials also stepped in after Donald Schroud — a clout-heavy developer who bought a former Republic Steel dumping ground south of 126th Street for $50,000 in 1994 — repeatedly failed to follow through on promises to restore the land.

       [ Developer had big plans for land polluted by the steel industry on Chicago’s Southeast Side. Instead, he flipped the property for millions, and now taxpayers likely will pay for the cleanup. ]

       More money for Superfund means other neglected sites are closer to being cleaned up, including contaminated yards in neighborhoods near the former Federated Metals smelter in Hammond. The EPA officially added the site Wednesday to the list of the nation’s most polluted properties, enabling the agency to expand the excavation of soil laden with brain-damaging lead emitted during the last century by the now-defunct company.

       “We feel forgotten over here, so anything that can help is welcome,” said Thomas Frank, a local activist who in 2018 posted a Facebook video of a confrontation with Indiana Gov. Eric Holcomb and then-EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt while the officials visited one of the contaminated yards. “People here have lived with these environmental problems for generations. This is just one of many.”

       mhawthorne@chicagotribune.com