Seven years ago, that visitor would have beheld a 35-year- old illicit dumpsite adjacent to these tracks. A heap of construction debris two stories tall told a silent story about a community that didn't know how to to fight the indifference that allowed such abuses.

What the community needed was a catalyst, a cheerleader, a dedicated facilitator. It found one in Michael Howard.

Download an audio clip featuring Michael Howard of Eden Place

"It was very exciting to get friends and neighbors together," Howard says of the resurrection project. "We borrowed bulldozers, borrowed backhoes, borrowed trucks, and took 23 tons of concrete out of here to make this into Eden Place.

"I think the words say it straightforward: this was a site that has been lost for 35 years, and we were able to look past that. What we're doing now is sculpting out of this tragedy something that is a thing of beauty, a place of peace and solitude. A lot of the senior citizens, they just like to come and sit and watch the plants grow, they like to watch the children when they're in there learning."

In Eden Place, Howard has found a platform from which a resurgence of community involvement can be launched. It is a vital component of Fuller Park Community Development, a bootstraps organization for which he is executive director.

When he first proposed the idea of a place dedicated to nature here, Howard had the feeling that for most southsiders, nature was always someplace else, somewhere outside the city.

"In my neighborhood," Howard says, "the issues of environmental concerns do not matter. We have used Eden Place as a tool to educate southside residents about environmental matters. We are retraining the children in our community to understand that nature is everywhere and they can have a piece of the nature that they see in their mind's eye -- right here in their own community."

Environmental matters were important in the southside for another reason: the area had the dubious distinction of being the number one lead poisoning community in Chicago.

"For the last five to six years we've been fighting a battle of getting that information out to our families," Howard says. "We have been using Eden Place as a format to bring children and their parents in to teach them what's in the environment that's detrimental to children and how to remove that impediment so that children can perform better in school and socially.

"Lead issues were things that we didn't even understand," he says, noting that lead was in the water, and the playground, and the empty play lots that the children would play in, the dust they would breathe.

"Parents didn't understand that even the dirt was contaminated and was causing problems in their children's learning and behavior," Howard says, glad that Eden Place provided a venue to teach citizens how to create a healthier environment.

And, as he did in Eden Place, Howard mobilized volunteers to remove lead paint from the community's old homes, and repaint them with non-toxic pigments.

"Eden Place is the soap box, you might say, that we stand on to say 'Listen up, we've got to start taking more involvement in environmental issues in our community so our children can grow up and be healthy and strong and can compete in the world economy that we live in today.'"

"Edens Lost & Found", Howard muses: "we fit right into that category because what once was lost is now found. We're just thankful that good people are there to help us."

THE FOUR CITIES OF EDENS LOST & FOUND:
Chicago
Los Angeles
Philadelphia
Seattle