After living in the West Calumet Housing Complex for the first eight years of his life, Lamont Anderson Jr.'s blood tested high for lead. Embraced by his father, he and his siblings still visit his grandmother in the complex, though they moved to neighboring Gary, Indiana, earlier this summer.
The West Calumet Housing Complex, which is currently home to about 1,200 people, is located on a 79-acre Environmental Protection Agency Superfund site where a USS Lead facility was located in East Chicago, Indiana. Up until 1985, a lead refinery, a copper smelter and a secondary lead smelter were also in the area. The houses were built between the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Photo by Alyssa Schukar
