udith Landeros is 35 and has lived in Cicero for almost all of her life. Cicero’s rail yards, factories and warehouses — with names like Kropp Forge, Corey Steel and Koppers — have been around for so long that they seemingly blend in with the scenery. Growing up, she didn’t pay too much attention to the steel mills and heavy machinery that dot Laramie Avenue.
That all changed three years ago when Amazon took over a vacant lot and built two so-called “last-mile” fulfillment centers, totaling 1 million square feet of space, just a block from Landeros’s home — drawing the ire of environmentalists and residents who questioned why Amazon received millions of dollars in tax increment financing from the town in exchange for a promise of a few hundred jobs.
While air pollution isn’t new to Cicero, residents say, it’s beginning to feel worse. Mornings in the town are “dusty,” as Landeros describes it, and summers feel like “you can’t really see.”
“We never really ever get to talk about things like the air quality or the environment here in Cicero,” Landeros said last spring, while she sat on her front porch. “We’re aware of these things, but we don’t have actual data or facts to talk about it.”