(upbeat music) - [Announcer] "Illinois Stories" is brought to you by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Illinois Arts Council Agency, and by the support of viewers like you.

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- Hello, welcome to "Illinois Stories."

I'm Mark McDonald in Springfield at the corner of 16th and Phillips, which used to be the main gate of the old Pillsbury plant here.

It's been over 20 years since it, it's actually operated as a business.

Now, it's, the history's changing even more, because a new group called "Moving Pillsbury Forward" has become involved, has taken ownership of this property, and we're gonna learn a little bit about what the future holds.

Chris Richmond, it's, it's been a fascinating trip - Yeah.

- For you and your colleagues, I'm sure, because through the years, it's been a, a, a matter of first getting a hold of the property, getting - Yeah.

- a deed to the property, - Yeah.

- And then figuring out, what the heck are we gonna do now?

(laughs) - Right, it's, it's been a, it's been quite a trip for us.

Number of years, the facility's been closed for 21 years.

The community's been trying to decide just what are the next steps for Pillsbury?

Unfortunately, the last seven, several years, it was tied up in court.

Just last month, our not-for-profit was able to take possession of the property, resolve the court case, and now we're taking steps forward to move on with the property.

- As we go through the next 30 minutes, we're gonna hear from you and your fellow board members here about what the plans are.

First, tell us what we're looking at, - Yeah.

- Because this is a sprawling complex of some almost 20 acres, isn't it?

- Right, right, it's almost 20 acres.

It, it started out in the 1950s, it was 785,000 square feet of work space, - Wow.

- Warehouses, and flour milling, and bakery mix facility.

And flour and, and bakery mixes went, went all throughout the country from this facility by rail and by truck.

So over 1,500 people worked here in the 1950s.

- 1,500, wow.

- And it was a bustling facility that was really the center of economic activity for this whole area on the northeast side of Springfield.

- What, point out the buildings for us of, of interest here.

What, what, what are they, - Yeah.

- What were they used for?

- Yeah, these, this warehouse right in front of us would have, would have warehoused flour that had been freshly milled in what was called the AB mill, this great big building behind us, - Mm-hm.

- behind the smokestack.

That's where the flour was actually milled.

They would mill 35,000 bushels a day - Mm-hm.

- On good days.

- Wow.

- Where the smokestack was, just beneath that, there used to be a great big boiler building.

It's since been removed and partially demolished.

And then as we move over, the very tall structure, the 14-story structure's called the Headhouse.

- Okay, is that the gray structure?

- The gray structure, - Okay.

- And that's where all the, the grain would come in off of truckloads and trainloads.

It would go up into the Headhouse and then get distributed to all of the silos on the north end of the plant.

In later years, another mill was added, and that's that, that far tall - Mm-hm.

- Red-brick building, and then beyond that to the, to the left is the bakery mix tower.

- Mm-hm.

- And that's where the bake, the, the cake mixes and the brownie mixes - Ah, okay.

Would have been made so all the ingredients would go in the top, and by the time it got down to the second floor, you had - Yeah.

- Brownie mix and cake mix that would get boxed up and shipped out throughout the country.

- We would need a two-hour documentary to go in and see all of this, but fortunately, we do get - Yeah.

- to go in during this 30 minutes and see some of it.

You can show us some of this in the, inside of the buildings.

- Yeah.

- We can also talk about the recent past and what happened to this after Cargill closed down, and we're gonna talk about the future, too, about what this site might be used for as we go forward, but let's go inside first thing, okay?

- Yeah, that sounds great.

- All right.

Well, Chris, we, we've entered one of the buildings.

Now this is not, not one of (feet crunch on rubble) the oldest, is it?

This is a, this is a little newer.

- Yeah, this, this one is.

It's a little newer, 1940s era - Mm-hm.

- Building and this is, this is part of the bakery mix facility.

And this is the test kitchen where they tested the mix on cakes and brownies - Mm-hm.

- And pancakes.

- Well, you can tell that somebody's been, gone through here and absolutely just taken whatever they could get and just left the rest in total disarray.

It's just a mess, isn't it?

- It is.

It's, it's really kinda sad to see it in this state.

But, you know, it really does, when you get up close, it really harks back to that era, mid-20th century, - Mm-hm.

- When there were dozens and dozens of employees working in here - Mm-hm.

- And baking those cakes - Yeah.

- and brownies that would go all, all home with many of the employees and they would - Yeah.

- they would go out to the children in the neighborhood who would pass by after school and, (Mark laughs) and get a test sheet a cakes or brownies to take home with - I'm sure they were - Them.

- Just fine, but you know a lot of people don't know what Pillsbury did here.

That, they made cake mixes, didn't they?

And brownie mixes, that's what the specialty was.

- [Chris] Yes, that, that became the specialty of, especially after World War II, - Mm-hm.

- When packaged goods became much more common.

They moved right into that Pillsbury's Best bake mix.

- Mm-hm.

- So it wasn't just flour.

It was bakery mixes, pancake mix, - Mm-hm.

- And, and my favorite, brownies.

- Let's, let's talk a little bit about what happened after Pillsbury sold the business to Cargill, Cargill closed the door, locked the gate, what happened?

- Right, right, so Pillsbury sold to Cargill in 1991, - Mm-hm.

- And then Cargills kind of mothballed the manufacturing aspect of the, of the facility here.

And they, they really just used the three million bushel capacity grain bins for their purposes.

- Mm-hm.

- [Chris] They did that for about 10 years, and in 2001, Cargill went ahead and then mothballed the entire facility.

At that point, they, they put it on the market.

They marketed it for several years.

Couldn't find a buyer.

So eventually, in 2008, they, they sold the facility for scrap.

- Mm-hm, mm-hm.

And then that's when a variety were, were, a number of people bought it and sold it and bought it and sold it - Right.

- Ransacked it.

- Right.

- In some cases, illegally tore some things up.

Asbestos got spread around and, - Right.

- I guess somebody actually paid the price for that, didn't they?

- Right, it really an unfortunate situation where there were two or three different owners between 2008 and 2015.

And, and in late 2014, one of those owners actually got into asbestos, got into trouble with the Illinois EPA, - Mm-hm.

- [Chris] And after the investigation completed, there, there ended up being a guilty plea in federal court and, and, and - Mm-hm, mm-hm.

- [Chris] One of those, those guys actually went to federal prison.

- Yeah, yeah.

And then there's this, at some point, you, you and your group, found a way to get the, the correct paperwork filed, and, and do all, dot all the i's and cross the t's, and you were able to, to get ownership of it.

- [Chris] We, we did; it took, took over two years.

About two-and-a-half years ago we put together a think tank of, of concerned citizens here in Springfield.

That think tank came, came up with a, a workable plan.

We had to work with a number of groups within, in the city, the city, the county, a lot of our government officials, and particularly, the IEPA and the attorney general's office - Mm-hm.

- But at the end of the day, we, we, we kept working toward a resolve that everybody could really live with and that resulted in, in ownership of the facility being turned over to our - Mm-hm.

- Not-for-profit, just - Mm-hm.

- this last month.

- Tony DelGiorno, excuse me for batching your name there, but every group like this needs an attorney because this could be a minefield for people who don't know the law to try to work through this, couldn't it?

- Yes, absolutely.

Luckily, I had a little bit of experience getting non-profits started up, and one of my first suggestions to Chris and Polly was let's get this incorporated, get 501c3 status and then - Mm-hm.

- we'd have a vehicle by which we could move things forward around here, hence our name.

- Mm-hm, the, the, the, yeah, Moving Pillsbury Forward.

- Yeah.

- But, but, but the problems are many because this was under different ownership, you know.

After Cargill closed it down, it was under a variety of ownerships, and in fact, the last one, the fellow paid the price for breaking the law, didn't he?

- Yes, absolutely.

Right out the, the building here where we're standing, he brought down a, a building trying to scrap metals, sent asbestos up in the air, the US EPA ended up coming in, doing their nearly three million dollar cleanup, and he actually spent time in federal prison because of it.

- Mm-hm.

- And so, what we found ourselves in the middle of trying to untie was the knot created by that and a 2015 injunction enforcement action by the Illinois Attorney General's office, - Mm-hm.

- And the Illinois EPA, trying to get the former owner to secure the site, and make sure that people couldn't trespass, make it, make it safer for the neighborhood, - Mm-hm.

- And that just wasn't happening, and so status hearing after status hearing, there was nothing to report to the judge, and it just - Mm-hm.

- Kind of sat there frozen.

- Mm-hm.

- So when I came in, I was never a party to that case on behalf of Moving Pillsbury Forward, but we were able to have the conversations necessary with the Illinois EPA, the US EPA, the Attorney General's office to try to see how we could move this in the direction - Mm-hm.

- That we need, and after - Mm-hm.

- Two years of work, that finally happened in March.

- Yeah, yep.

And we're standing in I, I think this was a warehouse area.

- Yes, yes.

- It looks to me like it might have been the area where, after all the milling done and the mixing was done and, and the packaging was done, then it, well, the packaged product would come in here to be shipped out, I guess.

- Right, so, this would be where, you know, your final flour product, cake mix boxes, that sort of thing would come in.

Actually, there is, there's some switches back here for the old conveyor belts.

You'll see pancake mixes and (Mark laughs) I don't know what else and so - Sure enough, sure enough, I'll be darn.

(laughs) - What would happen is as that would come through here, - Look a here.

- they would eventually take it to the rail yard which is on the other side of this building over there and then - Let's take a look.

- [Tony] Load it onto the, to the trains and then take it - Mm-hm.

- [Tony] On out for shipping across the country.

- [Mark] Tony, at, back to your, wearing your hat as a, wearing your hat as a lawyer, now that you have the deed and you have the property and you have the not-for-profit, what do they, what will a lawyer do in a case like this?

What will you help them accomplish?

- [Tony] Well, the next step along the way is to do our phase two environmental study.

- Mm-hm.

- Phase one, we had to pay in a grant before we even got ownership to get that started so that that could help limit our liability for taking over.

So in phase two, we'll find out exactly what kind of contaminants are on the property, what it would take to remediate and, and eventually take down what's now become an eyesore.

- Oh, my gosh.

- [Tony] And so, part of my role will be to make sure that we're in compliance with all of the grant requirements and any of the legal work associated with that, and I've - Mm-hm.

- I've had to do that in, in other situations.

I help some of our water cooperatives do grant applications to the government to build water lines for folks.

- Mm-hm.

- And so it's a similar process and as I explained that to our local officials, you know, you just plug and play.

You figure out how it's done in order to, you know, you identify the problem, it's the same type of solution to get it done for other entities.

- Mm-hm.

- And so, you know, Pillsbury, Moving Pillsbury Forward, we're actually very hopeful that if we are successful in the next three to five years in bringing this property back into production for the community, we might be able to use this as a model for other - Mm-hm.

- Parts of Sangamon County.

- Well, Polly, you and your colleagues have, have really bit off a lot here.

I mean, we can see as we look through here, we're in one of the oldest buildings on the Pillsbury Complex.

I understand this was built in the '20s.

- Mm-hm.

- And it would have been a warehouse area and there were tracks on either side of this building, but if you look at the, at the construction of this, you can see that they built it to stay, didn't they?

- It's, it's amazing.

Look at the beams.

You know, we were told they were 12 by 16, perhaps made out of oak.

- (laughs) Yeah, wow.

- Maybe fir.

- Yeah.

- [Polly] But look what they're holding up.

- Uh-huh.

- I mean, you know, they're holding up, and, and if it weren't for the, you know, dissolution of the, the roof, why these beams would still be-- - Uh-huh, probably hold for, for decades and decades to come.

You can see in some places here, they're, they're not, they're not doing so well, but that's because they've been weathered.

I mean, it's been, water's - Yeah.

- [Mark] Been pourin' on 'em for a, for 20 years now.

- Yeah.

- How did you get involved in this?

- Well-- - I mean, this is a, this is a big project.

- This is a big project.

I live in an older neighborhood.

So, and I just love the east and the northeast and southeast side of Springfield.

I mean, I just think this where so much history is, - Mm-hm.

- And I also think it's where so much neglect is.

I mean, I think this is an area that has been abandoned, and my involvement is really to let's uplift this neighborhood.

Let's uplift this northeast, - Mm-hm.

- Southeast, east side of town.

Let's shift the paradigm where development and improvement and people's pride in living needs to take place.

- Mm-hm.

When you, when you take up business like this, a plant like this, which, which hired what, 1,500 people at a time, and a lot of people, wanna live close to their work, and then that goes away, then you've got this neighborhood, this huge vacuum, don't you?

- [Polly] Yes, I mean, this plant drove the creation of this neighborhood, which was, you know, a viable, you know, positive, upbeat neighborhood.

You talk to people in this town, and this is where their aunts live, their uncles live, their - Mm-hm.

grandparents live; this is where they spent Sundays.

And we don't have that as much - Mm-hm.

- As we need it, and so, I think that if we don't change this, if we don't remove this, there's absolutely no opportunity for there to be a revitalization, not gentrification.

- Mm-hm.

- [Polly] Revitalization so that the people who take pride and live here, live in a better area of town, have, you know, just have more of a free flow of people from all over the town coming here, whatever retail could develop, whatever light industry could develop, - Mm-hm.

- You know, whatever uplift could happen here needs to happen.

- [Mark] Mm-hm, and we can see as, if you've been talking, we've been looking at some of the various, you know, signs of it, just how decrepit this, this place is that, that the real trick, I guess, Polly, is gonna be, okay, we gotta tear it down, but what the heck do we do with it, you know?

Because removing all of this is gonna be an enormous project.

- It can be done.

I mean, it's, it's massive.

- Yeah.

(laughs) Yeah.

- I mean, you know, these kinds of projects take place, they exist all throughout the Rust Belt.

- Mm-hm.

- You know, this is all the way from New York to the Mississippi River.

There are abandoned projects like this.

Now truly, this is a large one.

- Mm-hm.

- But the removal is really something that, you know, demolition companies and, you know, EPAs and that, they manage all the time.

So we don't want to think it's impossible.

We don't wanna think it's overwhelming.

We just think, need to think of it as a project that needs addressed, needs to happen, and something new needs to come with the area.

- Mm-hm, mm-hm.

- You know, it is 18 acres.

There's opportunity here.

We, as Moving Pillsbury Forward, we're not invested in the outcome.

That's why we have community meetings.

That's why we're collaborating, you know, with city, county, state, - Mm-hm.

- Other not-for-profits to think about what could happen on 18 acres.

It's a lotta land to work with.

- Mm-hm.

- And great location, so you know, there's, there's hope and possibility here and that's what I see, you know?

I see this that served its purpose, was an economic driver, lots of great memories for people in this community, and there can be new memories.

- Mm-hm.

- And there can be new opportunities, and that's what we need in Springfield in this area of town.

- Thank you.

- Thank you.

- [Mark] Well, Chris, okay, we've, we've left, we've left the test kitchen, come up, what, two, two stories, I guess?

- Yep, yep, two more stories.

- Two floors, okay, and, and this, this tower itself has probably got another little ways to go so nine stories tall or something?

- Right.

- And this was where a lot of the actual, well, not the mixing, but I guess they were mixing product here, weren't they?

- Right, right, this is, this is the, the area where the, the cake mixes - Mm-hm.

- And the pancake mix, the, the chocolate cakes, the, (Mark laughs) the white cakes, and the, and the brownies - Yeah.

- Would have been mixed at.

All the ingredients actually came together up on these level, this level of the building - Mm-hm.

- And, by the time it got down to the lowest level, it, it would be packaged into boxes and, and then shipped out.

- Mm-hm, mm-hm.

You know, we've been talking during the program, Chris, about, about this facility, but what I hear from people in the community is how does a community like Springfield get left with, with the responsibility to take care of this after, after companies have made their profits and sold the, and we get stuck with having to take care of this.

- Right, and that, that's, that's the tough thing about a, a lotta communities grapple with, with this same sort of facility throughout the Midwest.

This particular one, once it got sold for scrap and dealt off to the scrap operators and the, and, and those guys came in and did partial demolition, - Mm-hm.

- That's the point at which it it got difficult for the community because the asbestos that was in the plant wasn't dealt with appropriately.

- Mm-hm.

- The IEPA caught onto that - Mm-hm.

- And came in to regulate, do what they do, - Yeah.

- [Chris] And make sure that the community's safe, and that's when everything got locked up in the legal process.

- Mm-hm.

People like to blame Pillsbury, but Pillsbury sold it to Cargill, and it was a legal procedure, right, procedure, right?

- Right.

- Cargill sold it to the scrapper; that was a legal procedure.

And then it got messy.

- Right, right.

Pillsbury sold a, a perfectly good working plant to Cargill, Cargill operated that plant for 10 years, and then they mothballed it, and kept it in tact as a workable facility for another five years after that.

But it wasn't until it was sold off again - Mm-hm.

- And started to be parted out and scrapped out - Mm-hm.

- That things got difficult.

- Yep, yep, yep.

And then it fell to the community, and in this case, your group, somebody willing to move things forward - Right.

- [Mark] To, to deal with it.

Let's walk over here a little - Right.

- Bit; I wanna show, I wanna - Sure.

- [Mark] Show some things that we have not seen.

We're, we're across the way from the building that we were in with Polly earlier, which was a warehouse space, in the oldest part.

- Right.

- One thing we haven't seen are these massive silos.

I don't know how many there are, but can you imagine the amount of grain they handled here?

- [Chris] Right, these were the, the silos that were built in the 1920s.

The silos to the south end of the, the tall Headhouse structure, - Uh-huh.

- Have a million bushels worth of capacity, and then in the 1930s, two more sections of silos were built - Mm-hm.

- Such that the plant totals three million bushels of capacity - Mm-hm.

- by 1950.

- [Mark] Wow.

- [Chris] So when it was in full operation, three million bushels of, of grain capacity here at the, - Mm-hm.

- at the Pillsbury facility.

- [Mark] And, and, and one of the, the icon, I guess, is the water tower up at the very top.

That's, wouldn't that be sweet if you could save that?

- [Chris] It would be wonderful if we could save that.

I know, I've heard from, from folks all throughout the community that, that you can see that water tower for several miles around - All right, yeah.

- [Chris] Because it sits so high up, and that's sort of the iconic symbol - Mm-hm.

- [Chris] Of, of the facility and, and, and the, all of the good things that happened here.

- [Mark] I can only imagine what kind of a crane you would have to import here to get that thing off there.

- Right.

Just a, just a couple of weeks ago, I talked to a, a professional demolition contractor and, and he said, "You know, Chris, with enough money, anything's possible."

(Mark laughs) He said, "We could get a 500 "ton crane down here from the Chicago area "and pull that right off that roof if, if you had the, "the right amount of money."

- Yeah.

- [Chris] I said, "Well, how much would that, "would that be," and he said, "Well, "it would probably be between 50 and $100,000."

- Oh, nothin' to it, nothin'.

- Just, just to make that happen, so (Mark laughs) you know, if somebody's got an appropriate amount of money, we, we might have to start - Yeah.

- [Chris] Talking about savin' the, savin' the water tank.

- Well, Chris, we're in sort of a logistical area, well, it was very important to this plant.

- Yeah.

- I mean, because we've got double railroad on each side of this.

And you guys, you can see it goes down, and then I guess it would join up with the rail yard after it goes around the silos and all that down there.

But this was a, this was a key spot.

- Right, right, this was the key spot where the two sets of rails, back in the day they would be loading boxcars from either side warehouses such that those cake mixes, brownie mixes, - Mm-hm.

- Bags of flour could be shipped out all throughout North America.

So this was a strategic location for Pillsbury when it was built in the 1920s.

- Mm-hm.

- [Chris] Right, right in the heart of central Illinois, right in the heart of Illinois where we're right in the middle of the continent, - Yeah.

- And you can transport goods anywhere in the country - In the world.

- From here.

- In the world.

- In the world, yes.

- (laughs) Okay, well, we're still in central Illinois, right?

- Right.

- And we still have what could be a promising location for business, but not the way it is.

We gotta get rid of this.

- Right, right, and that's the whole idea is for us to work with the state and federal government, get those grant resources that we need to bring these structures down to a level where the property is then attractive for private investment to then redevelop.

- Mm-hm.

- It's got all those strengths that central Illinois has always had with being in a, a great geographic location to ship goods all throughout the world.

We just need to get it back to a place where private investment feels comfortable with coming in, setting a timeline, putting a cost figure on that, - Yeah.

- And getting it back into production.

- Is there enough grant money in the world to remove all of this?

- Well, there is, there is.

- Yeah.

- We're confident that there, there is a good pool of both state and federal money.

As, as many of us know that, that great big infrastructure package passed through Washington D.C. just last fall, and there's, there's quite a bit to be had there.

- Mm-hm.

- So we're doing our very best to take advantage of that with good timing, with a well-positioned facility, and with 12,000 people that with, live within one-mile radius of this facility, - Mm-hm.

- we've got an available workforce potential here.

- Yeah.

Be very interesting to see what would happen to this neighborhood if this became a very successful industrial area again.

- Right.

- And maybe not even industry, just commercial, a commercial - Right.

Area, yeah, yeah.

- Right, that'd be fantastic.

- Well, great luck to you and your colleagues.

I mean, you've already put a ton of work into this, but you're really just startin'.

(laughs) - (laughs) We really are, we're just starting, yep.

Acquiring the property was the first big step.

- Yeah.

- We've got several big steps to go.

- Okay, thanks, Chris.

- Thanks so much.

- I, I, I'm glad you got a chance to see the, the hugeness of this operation and what it was and what it still is.

Can you imagine bringing all this down and either getting rid of it or, or, or, or choppin' it up to end, towards usable materials to build on?

That's what they're talkin' about, and they're talkin' about the best case scenario is within three years.

This'll all be gone and we can start talking about this is a commercial area again.

(upbeat music) With another Illinois story in Springfield, I'm Mark McDonald.

Thanks for watching.

(upbeat music) - [Announcer] "Illinois Stories" is brought to you by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Illinois Arts Council Agency, and by the support of viewers like you.

Thank you.

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