Homes for sale in
Hegewisch.

Hegewisch began as a planned industrial company town. In 1883, Adolph Hegewisch, president of the U.S. Rolling Stock Company, selected this far-southeastern site to build what he called an ideal workingman's community, laying out the town along a rail line and announcing ambitious plans for two canals, one to shorten the Calumet River and another to connect Wolf Lake with Lake Michigan. Those canal projects were never realized due to a lack of capital, and the grand industrial vision never fully materialized. In 1889, as part of the Hyde Park Township annexation, the area was absorbed into the City of Chicago. Not long after, Adolph Hegewisch died and his company was folded into the Pressed Steel Car Company.

What sustained Hegewisch through the twentieth century was steel and heavy industry rather than canals. In the early 1900s the surrounding Calumet region filled with steel mills, and large numbers of Polish immigrants arrived to work in them, later joined by Greek, Jordanian, Mexican, and other newcomers. The neighborhood was caught up in the labor struggles of the era, including the 1937 confrontation near Republic Steel during the Little Steel strike. When the steel industry declined from the 1970s onward, including the 1980 closure of Wisconsin Steel, Hegewisch suffered but avoided the severe devastation seen in some neighboring areas. It even survived a 1990 proposal by Mayor Richard M. Daley for a Lake Calumet airport that would have demolished the entire community, a plan residents fought and that was ultimately declared dead.