Proctor and Gamble plant...

[Cway]

Good day,

Out of mere curiousity,does anybody know when the Proctor and Gamble plant was closed down. I remember it being knocked down sometime in the late 90s,but it seemed like it had a decent amount of rail traffic sometime or another...Also,did the tracks on Wabansia feed the plant one time or another or was it just for the steel plant?

Cway

[TBurke]

The P&G plant faced North Avenue and was in business through the late 1980s.  My best guess is that it closed around 1992.  

The C&NW delivered tank cars to the plant from the south end on a spur that crossed Elston, went north on the east side of Magnolia, then crossed North Avenue and entered the plant on two tracks.  A remnant of the C&NW spur line is still in place to serve Morton Salt in the UP era.

There used to be dozens of tank cars behind the fence at the P&G plant as I recall.

It was a rough area around the P&G plant in the 1980s with hookers walking the street at night in front of P&G.

The Milwaukee Road entered the P&G plant from Wabansia.  The single track divided into two and each of the tracks then went into enclosed loading docks.  

There\'s an aerial view of the P&G plant where the Milwaukee Road entered in the book I did last year on the Milwaukee Road in Chicago.

Finished goods were sent out via the Milwaukee Road, while raw materials were brought in by the C&NW.  There was no physical connection within the plant between either line\'s tracks.

If you do a Mapquest entry for the location you can still see a track coming east down Wabansia and into the former P&G site!

[Cway]

Wow...Thanks for the info...It amazes me that all these huge factories all shuttered and were knocked down...From US Steel on the southeast side to the Dutch Boy paint factory to the far south side...Then Peerless and then what?

Cway

[TBurke]

The biggest concentration of North Side industries that we lost was in the Deering Industrial Area that was served by both the Milwaukee Road and the C&NW.  The biggest of them all, International Harvester\'s Deering Works along Clybourn, once had thousands of workers.  The plant sprawled from just north of Diversey all the way down to the C&NW North Line along the south side of Clybourn.

When IH closed it down in 1936 a number of other businesses moved in and occupied the buildings, including another Procter & Gamble plant, Motorola, and the parent of Tru-Value stores, Cotter & Company which had its HQ and distribution center there.  When Cotter pulled out in the late 1990s everything was bulldozed and replaced by strip shopping centers and parking lots.

Plus the former Guttman Tannery is gone too, on Dominick by Webster.