February 20, 2019

MARCH 1–10, 2019 oneearthfilmfest.org

14 SOUTH SIDE SCREENINGS: March 2— Jackson Park Fieldhouse March 3—St. Benedict The African Parish March 3—Windsor Park Lutheran Church March 3—Museum of Science and Industry March 3—St. Paul & The Redeemer Church March 4—Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago March 5—The Ancona School

March 6—Beverly Arts Center March 6—University of Chicago Laboratory School March 7—University of Chicago, Green Line Performing Arts Center March 8—Catholic Theological Union March 9—Trinity United Church of Christ March 9—Experimental Station

SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY The South Side Weekly is an independent nonprofit newsprint magazine written for and about neighborhoods on the South Side of Chicago. We publish in-depth coverage of the arts and issues of public interest alongside oral histories, poetry, fiction, interviews, and artwork from local photographers and illustrators. The South Side Weekly is dedicated to supporting cultural and civic engagement on the South Side and to providing educational opportunities for developing journalists, writers, and artists.

Volume 6, Issue 17 Editor-in-Chief Adam Przybyl Managing Editors Emeline Posner, Sam Stecklow Deputy Editor Jasmine Mithani Senior Editors Julia Aizuss, Christian Belanger, Mari Cohen, Bridget Newsham, Olivia Stovicek Chief of Staff

Manisha AR

Politics Editor Education Editor Music Editor Stage & Screen Editor Visual Arts Editor Food & Land Editor

Ellen Mayer Rachel Kim Christopher Good Nicole Bond Rod Sawyer Emeline Posner

Contributing Editors Mira Chauhan, Joshua Falk, Carly Graf, Ian Hodgson, Maple Joy, Sam Joyce, Ashvini Kartik-Narayan, Amy Qin, Jocelyn Vega Staff Writer Kyle Oleksiuk

Data Editor Jasmine Mithani Radio Exec. Producer Erisa Apantaku Social Media Editors Bridget Newsham, Sam Stecklow Director of Fact Checking: Sam Joyce Fact Checkers: Abigail Bazin, Bridget Newsham, Adam Przybyl, Sam Stecklow, Tammy Xu Visuals Editor Ellen Hao Deputy Visuals Editors Ireashia Bennett, Siena Fite, Lizzie Smith Staff Photographers: milo bosh, Jason Schumer Staff Illustrators: Siena Fite, Natalie Gonzalez, Katherine Hill Interim Layout Editor J. Michael Eugenio Deputy Layout Editors Fabienne Elie

Yazmin E. Dominguez Webmaster Operations Manager

Pat Sier Jason Schumer

The Weekly is produced by an all-volunteer editorial staff and seeks contributions from across the city. We distribute each Wednesday in the fall, winter, and spring. Over the summer we publish every other week.

IN CHICAGO

A week’s worth of developing stories, odd events, and signs of the times, culled from the desks, inboxes, and wandering eyes of the editors

Enter the Sand Trap At the very end of 2016, it emerged in a public email dump that Rahm Emanuel and Mike Kelly, the superintendent of the Chicago Park District, had orchestrated a secret push to consolidate the Jackson Park and South Shore Golf Courses into a larger, single links—“the strongest urban golf site the PGA Tour has seen in 25 years,” as Kelly put it. After some cajoling from Barack Obama, Tiger Woods committed to designing the now-eponymous course. (A sopping Tribune lede, written just before Rahm’s emails were released, recounted Tiger plaintively asking where all the kids were during his dozen-cart tour of the existing courses.)

The planned course serves no significant purpose and was, by all indications, largely unasked for. (Though Kelly did write “that the community should initiate the request”— his request, that is—“to improve the golf courses.”) And now, Chicago golf journalist Bill Daniels has written an article for SwingU Clubhouse detailing some of the many obstacles still standing in its way. To sum up: the estimated cost has doubled to $60 million, meaning the CPD may not approve the plan after all; influential local organizations like Friends of the Park and Openlands are generally opposed to it; the proposal hasn’t gone through any environmental or structural review processes. There’s also, of course, going to be a new mayor, one possibly less inclined to puttering around with vanity projects. If the course falls through, that’s unfortunate for Emanuel, Woods, and Obama, but the rest of Chicago will carry on just as we have with the existing golf courses: perfectly fine.

IN THIS ISSUE a chinatown civics lesson

Building political power in Chinatown Tammy Xu..........................................4 back to school

“It was kind of difficult because some of the candidates didn’t have updated information on their website.” rachel kim........................................6 a starbucks is born

“It's just absolutely the worst thing they could put at that corner.” rebecca stoner.................................8 the numbers game

Previous election data shows how wards 14, 15, 20, and 25 can be won neil miller......................................11 meet the candidates

Short excerpts from interviews with aldermanic candidates weekly contributors.....................16

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Cover art by Seon-Hyung Kim FEBRUARY 20, 2019 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 3

POLITICS

A Chinatown Civics Lesson

MILO BOSH

Building power in a neighborhood without representation

BY TAMMY XU

T

he evening of January 28 was cold and snowing, but around 150 people made their way up four flights of stairs to the grand auditorium in the Pui Tak Center in Chinatown for a 25th Ward aldermanic forum. The center serves as one of the hubs of the community, hosting English and computer classes, services for new immigrants, and a Christian school.

With its terra cotta façade and handsome, finely detailed interiors, the building is listed on the register of Chicago Landmarks and in 2007 placed first among twenty-five sites across Chicagoland to win a $110,000 4 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

preservation grant through wide community support.

The forum was organized by Coalition for a Better Chinese American Community (CBCAC), an association of community organizations across Chinatown and Chicago. The coalition has historically focused on voter registration and has expanded its tactics to encourage political engagement in Chinatown, where the 2018 elections saw about thirty-eight percent turnout compared to the city’s sixty-one percent turnout overall. Before the last census and redistricting process, Chinatown

¬ FEBRUARY 20, 2019

was split into four different wards. After the 2012 remap, all but a tiny sliver of Chinatown was drawn into the 25th Ward. CBCAC Community Development Coordinator Debbie Liu says that since then, “I think people are trying to really understand their place and how it fits into this bigger ward picture and bigger city picture.” The city is gearing up for another redistricting process in 2021, which could determine whether Chinatown remains a minority community in a Latinx ward or becomes a political power base of its own.

But first, Chinatown residents need to vote

for their next alderman, and their options are all Latinx millennials based in another neighborhood, Pilsen, which makes up the voter base of the 25th Ward.

All five candidates were in attendance at the Chinatown forum: former Chicago Public Schools (CPS) principal Aida Flores, IBM data scientist and environmental activist Troy Hernandez, former CPS teacher Hilario Dominguez, nurse Alex Acevedo, and former Pilsen Alliance executive director Byron Sigcho-Lopez.

The candidates answered questions on education, housing, and public safety that

POLITICS

were submitted by committee from the thirteen organizations hosting the forum.

The first question was about the candidates’ plans for K–12 education in Chinatown. Chinatown residents have long advocated for a high school in the neighborhood, and a 2017 community research report found that creating a high school in closer proximity was a high priority for students, adults, and community organizations in Chinatown. Residents nearly got their wish this year, with the controversial plan to convert National Teachers Academy (NTA) into a high school for Chinatown and the South Loop, which some Chinatown leaders, like Liu, supported because it was the only plan put forward by CPS to alleviate Chinatown’s lack of a high school. This plan was stopped in its tracks when a judge found that the decision to close the predominantly Black NTA was discriminatory. Most of the candidates expressed direct support for a high school, with Sigcho-Lopez adding that he would like to fund a high school using “TIF dollars”—money collected from property taxes in particular districts and then used for development projects in “blighted” areas. In recent years, TIFs have come under increasing scrutiny because the city has interpreted the word “blighted” very generously, and used TIF dollars to subsidize corporate developments in already well-resourced areas like the South Loop and Navy Pier.

One issue that revealed division was whether candidates supported the Chinatown Special Service Area, SSA #73, which taxes a commercial strip of Chinatown in order to fund neighborhood beautification and security. Chinatown support for the SSA was divided, with business owners worried about paying an additional tax and upset at what they considered a lack of transparency. Sigcho-Lopez was the only candidate who opposed the SSA, arguing that small businesses shouldn’t have to bear that burden when big businesses do not. “Why is it a big developer gets $700 million [in TIF funding] without benefiting the community, while the small businesses have to pay for all the developments around it?” Sigcho-Lopez asked, referring to the 78, Related Midwest’s proposed sixty-twoacre development just north of Ping Tom Park. The city’s Community Development Commission just voted to create a new TIF district that would encompass the proposed site of The 78, to be used for infrastructure projects supporting the development, like a

new Red Line station.

The candidates agreed on most topics that were raised at the forum. Another question noted that the 78, which is just north of Chinatown’s Ping Tom Park, would block Chinatown’s views of downtown, and asked how candidates would ensure that the development would “support rather than hurt Chinatown.” Candidates all said that the pace of approvals should be slowed down and expressed support for a community-led process. Specifically, Sigcho-Lopez suggested using a community benefits agreement, and Hilario Dominguez suggested a community-driven zoning process. Notably, for the upcoming redistricting, all candidates said they would support a ward remap in 2021 that would give Chinatown its own majority-Chinese ward. Later, in an interview, candidate Aida Flores explained this position, saying it would allow Chinatown the same benefits that Pilsen residents are demanding. “If we want that for ourselves—a community school, pride, preservation, representation that looks like you that has your experiences—why wouldn’t we want that for our neighbors next door?” she said.

This race could have looked very different had it not been for the current alderman Danny Solis’s plan to retire at the end of this term, and the subsequent revelation that Solis was cooperating with the FBI in an investigation into city hall corruption. The FBI scandal shook the city, and Solis’s retirement meant that for the first time in decades, there would be an open race for leadership in the 25th Ward.

Solis has served as alderman of the ward since 1996, after being appointed by Mayor Richard Daley to fill the seat left

by Alderman Ambrosio Medrano, who resigned due to corruption charges. “This is really the first time in a really long time that the community gets to vote for someone,” said CBCAC Community Outreach Coordinator Angela Lin. The ward is one of the most economically and racially diverse in the city, comprising parts of West Loop, South Loop, Pilsen, and Chinatown. Demographically, the ward is twenty percent white, fifty-six percent Latinx, and fourteen percent Asian.

At only a fraction of the population of the ward, Chinese Americans cannot determine the outcome of an election alone but instead need to build cross-ethnic coalitions.

This occurred on the district level in 2016 with the election of state Representative Theresa Mah, who won the 2nd District

Democratic Primary with 51.2 percent of the vote through a coalition of ChineseAmerican and Latinx voters, helped along by prominent endorsements from thenU.S. Representative Luis Gutierrez and his successor Jesús “Chuy” García.

The race was a culmination of years of effort on the part of community organizations in Chinatown to make votes in the neighborhood matter. Starting in 2010, the CBCAC, which was founded as the Coalition for a Better Chinatown with the intention of creating a single city, county, state, and federal legislative district for the Chinese community, started a campaign to bring awareness to the upcoming census, leading to a bump in the response rate among residents. In 2011, armed with results of the census, CBCAC successfully pushed for the passage of the Illinois Voting Act of 2011, which requires districts to be drawn so that minority populations are able to influence the outcome of an election or create cross-ethnic coalitions to elect a preferred candidate. The subsequent redistricting made it possible to elect Mah, the first Asian-American State Representative of Illinois and the first Chinese American to represent Chinatown at any level of government.

It was the most prominent example of the Chinatown community having the political will to fight for what they want, despite the reputation Asian Americans have for being politically inactive. But there are other recent examples of Chinatown flexing its political power. In 2010, 400 people attended a community town hall discussing the need for a Chinatown branch of the Chicago Public Library, which successfully opened in 2015 and is now the busiest branch in the system. More recently, 200 to 300 people flocked to attend a town hall about the need for a high school in Chinatown. It was also a community effort that won the preservation grant for the Pui Tak Center, in which the 25th Ward candidate forum was held.

But there are still many obstacles to achieving widespread political engagement in Chinatown, an important one being language. “The language barrier is the biggest barrier, just for any kind of civic engagement,” said Lin. Even while doing voter mobilization or awareness campaigns, finding volunteers who can discuss politics in Mandarin or Cantonese can be difficult.

“In the past a lot of our high schoolers would [volunteer] with us, but even the high schoolers don’t necessarily know how to talk about politics in the language,” Lin

explained. At the Chinatown aldermanic forum, each question posed to the candidates, as well as each candidate’s response, was translated from English to Cantonese. The service allowed the forum to be accessible to more people, but the translation took up almost half the total time. By contrast, the aldermanic forum in West Loop ran roughly the same amount of time but was able to cover more questions and allowed each candidate to provide more depth in their responses, giving attendees a clearer picture of their distinctions.

In addition, many residents don’t understand the structure of government and get discouraged by the often confusing political system, such as the different layers of government and the seemingly endless rounds of election cycles. “They maybe don’t understand why there’s so many elections, the difference between a primary and a general election, the difference between a state election and a federal election,” Liu said. “They just hear of elections all the time and think, ‘well, this is [another] election, it doesn’t really matter.’”

Another barrier to political engagement is that people have trouble relating politics to their daily lives. In the beginning the CBCAC was mostly centered around voter registration. “Registering people to vote, that was like a ten-year process,” said Lin. “But then it turns out that even if you register people to vote they still won’t vote because they don’t know anything about why they should or who the candidates are.”

It might help that Chinatown now has a popular leader in Theresa Mah, who can bring visibility to other candidates. In the 25th Ward race, she has endorsed Hilario Dominguez for alderman, saying in her endorsement video that Dominguez “has built coalitions, and has proven himself to be someone who cares about making sure everyone has a voice.” This endorsement makes sense considering that Dominguez also has the endorsement of Chuy García, who supported Mah in her first run for state rep.

To meet the need of political education in Chinatown, CBCAC started giving Civics 101 presentations during the last election cycle. In the weeks leading up to the aldermanic elections Lin gave several, walking through slides on the branches and layers of government, and explaining how each of them can impact residents’ lives, as well as providing a primer on how voting works. Turnout at the presentations ranges from forty audience members to just FEBRUARY 20, 2019 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 5

POLITICS

a couple.

In 2015, CBCAC published a vision plan that detailed recommended projects for Chinatown to undertake in order to grow and remain a vibrant community. “Over the years [CBCAC] kind of morphed into more community development,” said Liu. One community development project that came from the vision plan was the walkability report, which had volunteers conduct walkability audits of streets and sidewalks, and surveyed residents about what changes they thought would make walking and cycling better in the community. Residents were encouraged to contact their representatives to push for changes based on the findings, which also illuminated the impact of politics on their daily lives. “That’s something that we’ve been really adamant about, to make sure that whatever topics people have that are a concern, that it is a community-wide effort instead of the pressure being on CBCAC or on a different organization just to do it, which really shouldn’t be the case,” said Liu. At the forum, the five candidates sat on stage between a pair of traditional Chinese red banner poem couplets. Audience members settled down into their seats with heaping plates of fried rice, bok choy, and fried chicken from the buffet, where a representative from the city’s Board of Election Commissioners circulated, recruiting bilingual election judges.

Booths were set up and covered in election materials, with voter registration forms, information on early voting, and voting by mail advertised in both English and Chinese. It was a full room, but Lin noted that many of the attendees were already affiliated with community organizations in the neighborhood. “Even though it was a good turnout and there were a lot of organizational people, I do wish we had more grassroots people,” she said.

ORIGIN, the CBCAC youth-led group consisting mostly of high school students, is trying to address that very problem by connecting more with everyday Chinatown residents. ORIGIN president Derek Lau says that members engage with the community in various ways, from volunteering to help with voter registration and raising awareness about upcoming races, to painting murals, to surveying community members about issues important to them.

“I really want to continue this mission to empower people to be civically engaged,” said Lau. “I really just want to start with the youth, setting them up so that when they 6 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

grow up they can be leaders themselves and encourage others to be active citizens.” Tammy Xu is a contributor to the Weekly. She last wrote for the Weekly in January about the City coding bootcamp program at Chicago City Colleges.

¬ FEBRUARY 20, 2019

Back to School

Kenwood Academy students grill mayoral candidates on education and race

BY RACHEL KIM

O

n February 12, students, teachers, and staff gathered in the auditorium of Kenwood Academy High School to listen to five mayoral candidates discuss their campaign platforms and answer students’ questions. The town hall was planned and organized by students in the school’s Global Issues class, and students were responsible for not only thoroughly researching each candidate’s platform and crafting detailed questions, but also reaching out to candidates and their campaign staff, moderating the forum, and staffing the event. While only five of the fourteen mayoral candidates—La Shawn Ford, Lori Lightfoot, John Kozlar, Neal Sáles-Griffin, and Willie Wilson (who arrived halfway through the event)—attended the town hall, the event drew a sizeable audience of engaged students.

The town hall was moderated by three Kenwood seniors: Taylor Wilson, Zion Cobb, and Christian Ward, who asked candidates questions that largely focused on education reform and South Side neighborhood improvement. The questions themselves were far from easy: students asked candidates to address the racial disparity between Chicago Public Schools (CPS) teachers and students, gentrification and the lack of affordable housing in minority communities, segregation, the school-to-prison pipeline, and the inequitable distribution of Tax Increment Financing (TIF) funds across the city.

“Some issues that I think I’m worried about are definitely the TIF funds, we kind of discussed that in our class a lot—the fact that they aren’t going to the right places,” said Nia Priest, a senior and the president of Kenwood’s National Honor Society chapter, in an interview. “We know that a lot of that has to do with the aldermen, but it definitely starts with the mayor. So I’m definitely kind

of nervous in seeing who’s gonna win and if that’s going to change.”

Students described the process of organizing the forum and contacting candidates as a challenging but rewarding experience.

“It was kind of difficult just because of the fact that some of the candidates didn’t have updated information on their website, some of the emails were not going through... we could not get in contact with a few of the candidates for weeks,” said Taniyah Bates, a senior. “[It put] us in a different position than just an average student at Kenwood. It was really eye-opening because we learned how to communicate better, we learned how to present ourselves better.”

Kelli Bryant, a junior, recalled her difficulties in reaching out to her assigned candidate Bob Fioretti, who was slated to attend the forum but canceled at the last minute.

“It was funny because I emailed him, and then I emailed him again, and I guess he emailed me back like five times but it went to my spam,” Bryant said. “So the last time I emailed him, he emailed me personally off of his account, like, ‘I responded to you five times...we said we were going to be there.’

But he canceled.”

Throughout the moderated portion of the event, the candidates were actively engaged with appealing to the students and their interests, often noting their South Side roots or their experiences with CPS, and attempted to distance themselves from traditional Chicago machine politics. In response to the question regarding racial disparity between CPS teaching staff and students, West Side state Representative Ford mentioned his teaching experience in CPS, highlighting the importance of having Black teachers (particularly Black male teachers) who can reduce incarceration rates

EDUCATION

IAN PREKEZES, JUSTIN O'HARA, ANIA WELLERE, DAIVON GARRISON, NOAH WILSON

among Black male students. Ford mentioned that out of the 22,000 teachers at CPS, only 550 are Black or brown (Ed note: according to CPS data from this month, Ford’s estimate was quite off: out of the 20,915 teachers at CPS, about 8,800 of them identify as Black or Hispanic).Ford said that he would propose that students who wanted to teach in CPS would be able to attend City Colleges for free. Former Police Board head and federal prosecutor Lightfoot suggested a similar policy proposal for a teacher residency program that would provide prospective teachers with stipends so that they could gain classroom experience while still earning a salary.

Candidates also took issue with CPS’ “college-or-bust mentality,” and supported more vocational opportunities for students.

Attorney John Kozlar introduced his “K-10” plan as an alternative to the “K-12” model. In the K-10 model, students would go through traditional classroom schooling until the end of their sophomore year of high school, at which time students would be allowed to choose whether they want to pursue a more academic, college-oriented direction during

their last two years, or pursue a fifty-fifty split curriculum that also offered vocational or job-training programs. Lightfoot noted that her platform would include increased investment in early childhood education, and suggested the institution of a Chief Diversity Officer, whose hypothetical duties she did not expand upon. Medical supplies multimillionaire Wilson discussed providing every school with the latest technology and suggested reopening some of the schools that were closed in 2013. He seemed to imply his support for a curriculum focused more on vocational and trade training, noting, “George Washington got nothing to do with today.”

This town hall was also Neal SálesGriffin’s first event as an official mayoral candidate after an extended period in which he was required to defend and authorize the signatures on his petition for mayor against a challenge from Wilson. SálesGriffin notably emphasized his Kenwood upbringing and his experiences at CPS as a student and later as an adult through his nonprofit CodeNow, which was especially notable for students like Taylor Wilson, a

senior and one of the co-moderators of the forum. “[Sáles-Griffin] went to Ray [Elementary School], his mom taught at Ray, [and] I went to Ray Elementary on 57th...for elementary school, so I knew his mom. She actually came up to me and we had a little interaction, so that was cool,” said Taylor Wilson in an interview after the event. “I had no idea her son was running, so it was really cool to see know how he grew up knowing his mom and seeing how that has made him, and seeing how that has impacted his perspective. It was really cool because coming from the same neighborhoods, the same schools, we have parallel ideas.”

Sáles-Griffin also spoke about his background as a technological entrepreneur as he argued for a familiar “trickle-down” approach in community reinvestment. In explaining his platform for more equitable educational resources across the city, he hoped for more technological education for more students of color so that they would acquire higher-paying jobs, become “millionaires and billionaires,” and then

eventually reinvest in their communities.

Candidates also responded to two student-submitted questions regarding concrete protections for LGBTQ+ students in CPS and their thoughts on the impending $95 million police academy slated to be built on the West Side. While all of the candidates expressed disapproval of the decision to build the police academy (though Lightfoot maintains that a new police academy should be built at some point, just with more community input), students like Bryant and Bates noted afterwards that they especially agreed with Lightfoot and Willie Wilson’s proposals to see that money being redirected towards education and schools on the South Side.

The candidates’ responses to antibullying policies for LGBTQ+ kids varied.

Ford spoke to his experience as a state representative and his voting record of supporting marriage equality and civil unions, though he, like Wilson and Kozlar, did not suggest any clear policy proposals.

Sáles-Griffin suggested more social workers and bias trainings be introduced to CPS, and promised a fuller platform to come.

Lightfoot spoke to the issue of rampant homelessness within young LGBTQ+ communities and expressed the need for more services and support networks for these students, along with stronger antibullying policies. Lightfoot’s status as the first LGBTQ+ candidate for mayor initially piqued Priest’s interest in selecting Lightfoot as the candidate she wanted to research, and Taylor Wilson echoed the same anticipation for Lightfoot’s candidacy.

Taylor Wilson spoke about the process of organizing the event as integral to her own personal development as both a student and a politically conscious Chicago citizen.

“My teacher Mr. Stieber actually asked me to be a moderator. However, what did make me accept it was that I was going to be part of something that Kenwood hasn’t done yet, and I was going to be a part of something that benefitted the student body as a whole,” Wilson said. “Being able to ask [candidates] upfront...these are problems, what are you going to do to fix it? I felt like it was just a good opportunity to have where I can see their raw reactions and their responses and get a better understanding wholeheartedly of where their mind is at.” Rachel Kim is the Weekly's education editor. She last contributed to the Holiday Guide.

FEBRUARY 20, 2019 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 7

DEVELOPMENT

A Starbucks is Born

Bridgeport residents protest the forthcoming coffee chain

BY REBECCA STONER

T

he December meeting of the community group Bridgeport Alliance ended with a standard group picture. Except instead of saying “Cheese,” members said “Fuck Starbucks!”

The Starbucks in question is slated to be built as part of a multi-store development on a vacant lot at the intersection of Bridgeport’s two main commercial arteries, Halsted and 31st Street. That lot has been empty for more than twelve years, after stores were relocated to make space for the new 9th District police station. For seven of those years, Glazier Corporation, a Chicago developer, was working to get approval from City Council to build a drive-through Starbucks and a second retail building, according to testimony before the city Community Development Commission.

Finally, the project was announced publicly in late September, and by December, City Council had already voted to approve the sale. Construction is scheduled to begin this year.

The project has sparked debate between those who welcome the chain’s presence as a prelude to further commercial development, and those with concerns—like Bridgeport Alliance—about the impact a drive-through Starbucks will have on local coffee shops and on public safety, and a perceived lack of transparency around this development.

“One, it's pay to play,” said Rick Bak, a business systems analyst at the University of Chicago after a January meeting of Bridgeport Alliance’s Starbucks working group. “Two, it's city-owned assets that's being given away, more or less. Three, it's building towards a vision of Bridgeport that's antithetical to what I want to see my city become. It's just absolutely the worst thing they could put at that corner.” After the announcement, the group put up signs around the neighborhood encouraging residents to call Alderman Patrick Daley Thompson and express their dissatisfaction with the project.

But by then, the development has already 8 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

cleared a number of hurdles, including the seven-year planning process that spanned two aldermen, the sale of city-owned land to the developers, and approval from the Zoning Board of Appeals to construct a drive-through on a plot that isn’t zoned for one. While even most Bridgeport Alliance members admit the group is unlikely to succeed in derailing the project, they plan to continue to speak out and organize for transparency in local development.

I

n late September, the 11th Ward office posted several legally-required public notice signs around the lot announcing the proposed new development and circulated letters in the neighborhood.

But many Bridgeport residents, including Bridgeport Alliance members, only heard about the project from a late November Block Club article. Shortly after its publication, Bridgeport Alliance formed its anti-Starbucks working group, and began organizing residents to voice their disapproval.

Residents have been divided over what the Starbucks means for the future of the neighborhood, which has struggled with vacancies and business retention in the last ten years. Its supporters include Thompson and Ed Marszewski, the owner of Marz Community Brewing and the director of several media and arts organizations—and unofficial “mayor of Bridgeport.” They argue that the neighborhood’s first Starbucks will encourage further commercial development on Halsted, where vacancy levels are particularly high. As Alderman Leslie Hairston said to the Tribune when the chain first came to her 5th Ward in 2004, “You are officially a neighborhood when you get a Starbucks.”

“A priority for the 11th Ward is the continued improvement along Halsted Street,” Thompson wrote in his letter of support for the project. “The addition of a Starbucks will help to attract other national retailers to this location.” In an interview

¬ FEBRUARY 20, 2019

with the Weekly, he said he hoped the development “will drive a lot of foot traffic” to nearby businesses. Thompson said that a study done in San Francisco demonstrated that the arrival of a Starbucks increased nearby stores’ sales by eight percent.

Marszewski also believes it will bring more business to the neighborhood.

“If a Starbucks opens it means that the neighborhood or location it is in denotes an area that is ready for additional retail commerce,” he wrote in an email. “It brings more persons to the area in which the cluster exists creating more street traffic and multiplying the customer base of other retailers.” (Marszewski, a founder or director of several Bridgeport businesses, including the popular Maria’s Packaged Goods and Community Bar and the arts space CoProsperity Sphere, came out strongly against the project on Twitter when it was first announced, saying it represented “a total lack of vision.” He changed his mind after doing more research into the project, he said in an email.)

According to Mike Parella, a project manager with the Department of Planning and Development, the project is expected to bring in $70,000 a year in property taxes, between twenty-two and twentyseven permanent jobs, and thirty to fifty temporary construction jobs. Developers have yet to contract with a second tenant, though Dan Abdo, a partner of Glazier, says that mobile phone stores and a fast casual sandwich shop have expressed interest in occupying the second of the two one-story buildings planned for the lot.

There are already two independent cafes within two blocks of the site—Jackalope Coffee and Teahouse and Bridgeport Coffee—as well as a Dunkin Donuts.

“It's basically being built across the street from my business,” January Overton, owner of Jackalope Coffee and Teahouse, said in an email to the Weekly. “[It’s] receiving financial assistance from the city which was not something that was offered

to me. I also have ten employees that I need to worry about. So to say ‘I don't care’ or ‘I am not a little worried’ would be lying.”

Both Jackalope and Bridgeport Coffee are beloved local meeting spaces. “We try to foster a sense of community and provide a space where people from the neighborhood can come together and feel welcome,” Overton said. “We built the space in a way that encourages guests to sit and stay.”

One Bridgeport Alliance member, Sarah Gourevitch, tells me that one reason she moved to Bridgeport was for its coffee shops; the neighborhood is home to at least five others besides Bridgeport Coffee and Jackalope.

One independent cafe owner, who would only speak anonymously to avoid casting a negative light on their business, said they didn’t believe that Starbucks, which they described as a fast food chain, serves the same function as their specialty coffee shop. In addition to offering somewhat different products, they “started here. This is our community,” they said.

Rachel Weber, a professor of urban planning and policy at UIC, says that new development can sometimes help attract more development, or at least have a neutral effect on nearby businesses. “If you add new space it doesn’t always take away existing businesses, or the business from those business. It depends on what’s being offered,” she said. “If there was a cafe one block away from the Starbucks I might be concerned.”

But if a newcomer serves the same function as existing retail, Weber says, it may have a “cannibalizing effect.” “There’s a limited number of people who spend their money on coffee in the area, and they can either give their money to Starbucks, or they could give their money to that cute café on 31st,” she said.

That’s what Overton fears may happen.

“I believe that we won't see additional businesses open but we may see one or two local coffee shops ultimately close,” she said.

DEVELOPMENT

She’s especially concerned that customers who currently drive to Jackalope will instead opt for the convenience of the Starbucks drive-through.

Jackalope is on a cul-de-sac, and it’s located on a street without meters. “People park there all day,” Overton says, and those who double-park and run in for a coffee are often ticketed. “Our number-one complaint is that we don’t have parking,” she said.

Ajay Bhatia, president of the firm that owns the Dunkin Donuts across the street from the lot, also expressed concerned about the potential loss of business. “Obviously I’m not happy,” he said. “I’d be lying if I said I thought it wouldn’t impact our business at all.”

The Dunkin Donuts actually once occupied half of the lot sold to Glazier, back in the early 2000s. The property was seized via eminent domain to be used as part of the 9th District police station, which sits immediately to the south. Though the police station ultimately just used the vacant lot for water retention, the Dunkin Donuts was forced to relocate across the street. Bhatia says that he would have been interested in rebuilding the store on the lot, but wasn’t aware that it was up for bid. “It was news to me that Starbucks was coming,” he told me.

W

hen running for alderman in 2014, Thompson campaigned on bringing more business to Bridgeport. In a questionnaire returned to the Chicago Sun-Times, he wrote that he envisioned a neighborhood where people “walk[ed] throughout their community to get errands done, do some shopping in boutiques and have a nice meal all within a well-planned space that serves as a catalyst for local commerce, jobs and economic development.”

Under Thompson’s tenure, new businesses have come to Halsted Street, including Shinya Ramen House and KL Nails. But others, like a mattress store and a dog grooming salon, have closed, and the street still has a high rate of vacant storefronts. A 2017 analysis of a three-block stretch from 34th to 36th Streets by the Red Line Project, a student publication at the University of Illinois at Chicago, found that sixteen of fifty-six storefronts were empty, and eight of those sixteen had been vacant for more than a decade.

Members of Bridgeport Alliance stress that they aren’t anti-development—they just want to have a say in what gets built in the neighborhood. They’re critical of what

they perceive as a lack of transparency and public outreach in the development process.

At meetings and in interviews with the Weekly, the group said the below-marketvalue sale of the vacant lot to a development company that’s donated $2,000 amount to Alderman Thompson within the last three years is a reason to suspect a quid-pro-quo relationship. In that time Glazier has also donated $750 to the 11th Ward Democratic Party Campaign Committee, the ward organization lead by Thompson’s uncle, ward committeeman and Cook County Commissioner John Daley. “I don’t know anything about that,” Thompson said when

moralism around these use restrictions,” since certain businesses are associated with less well-off neighborhoods. Catherine Lowe, a member of Bridgeport Alliance and an assistant professor of urban policy and planning at UIC, pointed out that some of the use restrictions are racially tinged. Salons and massage parlors, which Thompson cited as his reasoning in attempting to downzone stretches of Halsted in 2017, in the area are predominantly owned by Asian-Americans.

Especially given Halsted’s vacancies, “I think the focus needs to be on bringing businesses in, not out,” she says.

Bridgeport Alliance members—as well

They’re critical of what they perceive as a lack of transparency and public outreach in the development process, citing the lot’s belowmarket-value sale to a development company that’s donated $2,000 amount to Alderman Thompson within the last three years as a reason to suspect a quid-pro-quo relationship. asked about the donations. “Typically, my policy is if somebody comes in for a zoning request, we typically aren’t accepting any donations. I have to go back and see when those were coming in, I have no idea.… That has no influence on any of the decisions I make.”

Appraised at $790,000, the lot sold for $625,000, a markdown of just over twenty percent. According to the developers, the discount is meant to account for the use restrictions placed on the second building, which won’t be allowed to house fast food chains, hair or nail salons, massage parlors, spas, or mattress stores. By Glazier’s estimate, a fast food chain would pay between $7–9 more per square foot than other businesses.

The developer says it expects to lose more than $165,000 in rent revenue over seven-and-a-half years by accepting the restrictions.

But Weber said that such use restrictions are “pretty common” and “relatively minor.”

“That alone wouldn’t account for the reduction in value,” she said. “So there is a question of whether or not the developer is getting a really good deal here.”

She notes that there can be “a kind of

as Thompson’s challenger in the aldermanic race, David Mihalyfy—view the write-down as a subsidy tied to Glazier’s donations to Thompson. “Paying for a drive-through Starbucks in a residential neighborhood seems like a misuse of money,” Mihalyfy said.

Josh Glazier, CEO of Glazier Corporation, seemed bemused by the idea that those donations would translate into meaningful influence over the alderman. “I don’t think that we have political influence,” he said. “I think the influence we have is the fact that we can put together this deal.”

“Alderman Thompson––his heart and mind are in the right place, and it’s a pleasure to help support [him],” Glazier said, “not just because we're doing a Starbucks, but because you see government working the way it should work.”

But members of Bridgeport Alliance don’t quite see their alderman working for the community in the way that Glazier does. “Bridgeport Alliance seeks to bring people of the community to the decisionmaking table,” said Quade Gallagher, chair of the group. “We've strived to do that with Alderman Thompson. Unfortunately,

Alderman Thompson seems committed to doing the bare legal minimum.”

Thompson didn’t invite public comment on the Starbucks, as he does when zoning changes are sought from his office; there was no zoning change required for the development, but aldermanic prerogative dictates that aldermen have say-so over sales of city land in their wards.

In theory, the members of the public might have been able to slow down the development process by reaching out to their alderman’s office in response to the signs, letters, or the newspaper notice. But in practice, Bridgeport Alliance members and many Bridgeport residents didn’t find out about the development until shortly before the approval of the sale in December.

Overton also reached out to the alderman to express her concerns. “He doesn't seem to think that a Starbucks being built across the street will affect my business,” she said.

In a seeming contradiction, Thompson told the Weekly that he wasn’t able to dictate which businesses can build on the lot—even though he imposed use requirements on the second building. “I can’t sit here and say we can’t have this compete with this. This is a free market capitalistic society,” he said. \ According to Bridgeport Alliance, the lack of public coordination is emblematic of Thompson’s tenure as alderman. Recently, according to Gallagher, it took almost two months for Thompson’s office to respond to an invitation to an aldermanic forum for the 11th Ward. Thompson’s office told Bridgeport Alliance he was unavailable, and that there was no other time he would be able to attend.

F

SEON-HYUNG KIM

or some residents, the drive-through accompanying the Starbucks is another sticking point. While Thompson has publicly championed a more walkable Bridgeport, members of Bridgeport Alliance see the development serving drivers at the expense of pedestrians

FEBRUARY 20, 2019 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 9

“[It’s] receiving financial assistance from the city which was not something that was offered to me….

So to say ‘I don't care’ or ‘I am not a little worried’ would be lying.” and bikers. They believe the drive-through could be dangerous to them, and especially to students walking to school at nearby Holden Elementary. There’s some research to support their claim: the Minnesota Department of Transportation discovered a positive correlation between urban driveways, like drive-throughs, and higher incidences of crashes. And a 2006 study done by the Virginia Tech Institute of Transportation and the National Highway Safety Administration found that eating and drinking while driving—which often follows a visit to a drive-through—was linked to a higher risk of accidents.

Glazier said that a drive-through was necessary to make the project financially viable for Starbucks. “Unless you’re in a very dense neighborhood, or a very special circumstance, they need a drive-through,” he said. He argued that the drive-through would be “self-contained” and that an urban planner who reviewed the plans said it would not create traffic issues.

Bridgeport Alliance is also concerned the drive-through will increase traffic at a busy intersection that already houses a shopping center and a gas station. Two different bus routes, the 31 and the 8, go through the intersection, as do cars heading to the Dan Ryan expressway. “I’m not opposed to development, because frankly, this area needs a good burger joint,” said Eric Pacheco, who is involved with Bridgeport Alliance. But a drive-through “is going to be a gridlock nightmare,” he said.

And a drive-through can work against the goal of increasing foot traffic to the area, according to Weber. “You want people walking down the sidewalk because then they're more likely to go into a neighboring store,” she says. “If they're just driving in and out, the likelihood of that kind of retail spillover is lessened.”

Bak agrees. “Drive-throughs just get people out of the neighborhood quicker,” he says.“If you don't have the density and the vibrancy of the businesses, you're not going 10 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

to have the people walking around, and it's just going to be another suburb. And I don't want to live in the suburbs.”

A

t one point during an early January meeting of the anti-Starbucks working group, Lowe showed the group a picture of the Starbucks with a drive-through that the Glazier Corporation had built in suburban Elgin. “This is their vision for the neighborhood.”

For some, different visions for Bridgeport’s future are what’s at the heart of the Starbucks debate. Bak, who grew up in Bridgeport and whose mother still lives in the neighborhood, wishes for a return to the days when Halsted was lively and lined with mom-and-pop stores. “Bring back our public transportation, bring back opportunities for people to walk around and mingle, not more cars,” he says. By supporting the Starbucks and certain other developments, Bak believes Thompson is driving Bridgeport towards a car-oriented, suburban future.

“That’s not what Bridgeport was. That’s not sustainable,” Bak says.

Even though members are not optimistic about successfully halting the project, Bridgeport Alliance has a broader goal. Through its opposition, it’s hoping to open the door to expanded neighborhood input in local developments pushed through

by Thompson and others. Our goal should be “normalizing the idea that there needs to be community engagement on such projects,” Lowe said. “I want there to be a sense that the norms have to change.”

“This is city land. Public goods. Where’s the public?” Sam Stecklow contributed reporting.

Rebecca Stoner last wrote about Bernice’s Tavern for the Weekly. She lives close to the vacant lot.

¬ FEBRUARY 20, 2019

POLITICS

The Numbers Game

Previous election data shows how wards 14, 15, 20, and 25 can be won

BY NEIL MILLER

25th Ward

Pilsen, and the Lower West Side community area that includes it, is the spiritual and political center of the 25th ward. All five candidates running to replace incumbent Alderman Danny Solis, who declined to run for re-election several weeks before allegations surfaced that he wore a wire to record conversations with Alderman Ed Burke, count Pilsen as their base. Candidates Byron SigchoLopez (Pilsen Alliance), Troy Hernandez (Pilsen Environmental Rights & Reform Organization), and Alex Acevedo (Pilsen’s Neighborhood Watch Coalition) all founded or lead organizations in the neighborhood.

Hilario Dominguez worked as a community

organizer with the Resurrection Project, a member organization of the Solis-affiliated Pilsen Land Use Committee, and Aida Flores taught history at Benito Juarez High School in Pilsen before serving as a CPS principal.

In the 2015 election, most 25th Ward voters lived in Pilsen or Heart of Chicago, its neighbor to the west. Of 7,500 votes cast in the first round, approximately 4,700, or sixty-three percent, came from the Lower West Side community area. Running against four challengers, Solis won the most votes in every precinct in the ward, but he only surpassed fifty percent and avoided a runoff because of strong performances in the 25th’s other neighborhoods. Parts of

the West Loop and University Village, as well as low-income housing communities at Loomis Courts, Barbara Jean Wright Courts, and the Brooks Homes, are part of the 25th Ward, and home to over a fifth of the ward’s 2015 voters. The three precincts located within Armour Square, comprising much of Chinatown, made up just eight percent of the ward’s electorate, and the South Loop made up five percent, but each gave Solis over seventy percent of the vote last time he ran. Solis also did well in his single McKinley Park precinct, located across the Chicago River from the Lower West Side.

Voting patterns often vary significantly across the 25th’s many neighborhoods,

and became polarized in the 2015 mayoral runoff. García, who has endorsed Hilario Dominguez in this race, received better than seventy percent everywhere in the Lower West Side and McKinley Park. Rahm Emanuel won everywhere else in the ward, usually with the backing of more than twothirds of each precinct’s voters. With all five aldermanic contenders touting their ties to Pilsen, the Lower West Side is likely to be too split to deliver anyone the clear majority García won. The campaigns that advance to a runoff will likely do it by pulling away in one of the ward’s other neighborhoods.

NEIL MILLER

Rahm Emanuel: 2,014 votes, 31.73% Jesús "Chuy" García: 4,333 votes, 68.27%

NEIL MILLER

Daniel “Danny” Solis: 3,811 votes, 51.07% Byron Sigcho: 1,383 votes, 18.53% Jorge Mujica: 907 votes, 12.15% Roberto “Beto” Montano: 748 votes, 10.02% Ed Hershey: 614 votes, 8.23% FEBRUARY 20, 2019 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 11

POLITICS

15th Ward

NEIL MILLER

Photo: Hayim Heron

Rahm Emanuel: 2,014 votes, 31.73% Jesús "Chuy" García: 4,333 votes, 68.27%

The 15th Ward takes in parts of Back of the Yards, Brighton Park, Gage Park, and West Englewood. Analysis of the results from the 2015 municipal election show that candidates looking to carry the 15th Ward will likely need to build a coalition across its several neighborhoods. A slight majority of voters in 2015 lived in the ward’s northern neighborhoods: of the 4,550 votes cast in the first-round aldermanic race from February 2015, roughly thirty-six percent (1,644 votes) came from Brighton Park, with nineteen percent (883 votes) from Back of the Yards, both predominantly Latinx neighborhoods.

More than a third of voters in that election (approximately 1,600 voters, or thirty-five percent of the electorate), however, were from West Englewood, which is predominantly Black. Finally, the two precincts that are part of Gage Park held nine percent of the 2015 electorate, about 420 voters.

Incumbent Alderman Raymond Lopez found a winning strategy in the April 2015 runoff, receiving large margins in West Englewood and taking all but one of the precincts in Brighton Park, where he lives. After forcing him into a runoff, Rafael Yañez fell short of Lopez, despite winning all five precincts in his Back of the Yards neighborhood. In addition to Yañez, two other Back of the Yards residents will be on the ballot for alderman in this election: Otis Davis Jr., who received ten percent of the first-round aldermanic vote in 2015, mostly from West Englewood; and first-time candidate Berto Aguayo. Another first-time candidate, Joseph Williams, will be the only candidate from West Englewood in the race.

The presence of two other candidates from Back of the Yards may cut into Yañez’s numbers there, but Williams’ West Englewood residency could similarly affect the votes Lopez gets in that neighborhood.

It’s possible the $95 million police academy being built in West Garfield Park will be a significant factor in the race. Lopez, who supported the academy’s construction, was commended by the Sun-Times and the Tribune in their endorsements of him for his aggressive language toward gang members. Meanwhile, Yañez, a former Chicago police officer with the greatest likelihood of making this year’s runoff, opposes building the police academy and argues for a violence intervention model focused on economic development.

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NEIL MILLER

Raymond A. Lopez: 3,596 votes, 57.98% Rafael Yanez: 2,606 votes, 42.02%

POLITICS

14th Ward

Asked last April if he would run for re-election to the City Council seat he has held since 1969, Alderman Edward M. Burke shot back at reporters, “Why would you wonder?” Covering parts of Garfield Ridge, Archer Heights, Brighton Park, West Elsdon, and Gage Park, Burke was confident that the ward’s voters would support him in 2019, and pointed to his brother’s success in the ward during the March 2018 Democratic primary in the 1st State House District. A slight majority of 14th Ward Democratic voters, 51.46%, choose then-Representative Dan Burke, even as his challenger, current Representative Aarón Ortíz, carried the Southwest Side and suburban district with 53.12% of the overall votes.

However, a closer look at the carefully gerrymandered boundaries of the 14th Ward and the 1st District casts doubt on the Burke family’s ability to win a wardwide race in 2019. By looping in a few blocks in suburban Stickney, mapmakers were able to include five precincts that make up the 14th Ward’s outstretched western arm in the First District, capturing parts of Garfield Ridge where the electorate is still mostly white. These five precincts were Dan Burke’s strongest base of support in the 14th Ward, and in the district as a whole, driving his 145-vote majority over Ortíz in the 14th. But the district excludes all of three majority-Latinx precincts in the 14th Ward neighborhoods of Gage Park and Brighton Park, and parts of several other similar precincts. Ed and Dan Burke’s districts were drawn early this decade to protect these incumbents from the changes that white flight and immigration would bring to their electorate, but the numbers may no longer be on their side.

Had he taken into account how the missing 14th Ward precincts voted in the 2015 mayoral runoff, Burke might not have been so confident about his chances for re-election. Among voters in three Gage Park precincts that are squarely within the 14th Ward, but not in the 1st district, now-U.S. Representative Jesús "Chuy" García received 356 more votes than Mayor Rahm Emanuel, an amount greater than Dan Burke’s majority over Ortíz in the ward. Ed Burke’s challengers—Tanya Patiño, endorsed by García, and Jaime Guzmán—will be hoping these voters upset the incumbent’s calculation.

NEIL MILLER

Daniel J. Burke: 2,562 votes, 51.46% Aaron M. Ortiz: 2,417 votes, 48.54%

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NEIL MILLER

Rahm Emanuel: 2,962 votes, 35.61% Jesús "Chuy" García: 5,355 votes, 64.39%

Neil Miller is a statistician and social services researcher. He is currently living in Moscow. This is his first piece for the South Side Weekly.

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POLITICS

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¬ FEBRUARY 20, 2019

ACTS V–VI March 17

Nine candidates are on the ballot to be the next alderman of the 20th Ward, which stretches west from Woodlawn and includes parts of Washington Park, Greater Grand Crossing, Englewood, and Back of the Yards. Incumbent alderman Willie Cochran, a Woodlawn resident, is under indictment on corruption charges and is not running for another term.

In the first round of the 2015 aldermanic election, approximately forty-seven percent of votes cast came from Woodlawn, more than any other part of the ward. This time around, five of the nine candidates in the race live in Woodlawn, and each cites their work in the neighborhood while making their case to voters. One candidate, Jeanette Taylor, is an organizer in the campaign for a Community Benefits Agreement (CBA) for the Obama Presidential Center, reflecting concerns that development in Woodlawn will displace residents. Maya Hodari, an administrator at the Chicago Housing Authority, co-founded the Woodlawn Neighbors Association, and police officer Jennifer Maddox founded Future Ties, an afterschool program housed at Parkway Gardens, an apartment complex on Woodlawn’s western border. Quandra Speights and Denard Newell, both attorneys, are the other Woodlawn residents running.

Together, Washington Park (about sixteen percent of February 2015 voters), Back of the Yards (eighteen percent) and Englewood (fourteen percent) just exceed Woodlawn in their share of the ward’s electorate. The two contenders from Washington Park—activist Andre Smith and Kevin Bailey, an engineer and the 20th Ward’s Democratic committeeman— both ran against Cochran in 2015, with Bailey making and losing the runoff. Bailey, who knows Spanish, had his best performances in Back of the Yards, home to many MexicanAmericans, and his native Washington Park.

Completing the ballot, Nicole Johnson, a former teacher, and entrepreneur Anthony Driver, Jr., are both in their mid-twenties, and are both the only candidates from their neighborhoods. Driver is a fourth-generation resident of the 20th Ward, and that his grandparents are pillars of the Back of the Yards community he grew up in. Johnson worked as a manager with community development nonprofit Teamwork Englewood, and now lives in the same Englewood house she was raised in.

With so many candidates running, and most voters having at least one local option, campaigns will try to distinguish themselves from the pack across the ward. Bailey came in to the campaign with an organization in place across the ward, having run before and served as Democratic committeeman. Johnson has fundraised successfully, most major labor unions have endorsed Taylor, and Hodari was recommended by both the Sun-Times and the Tribune.

Geography and the many options before voters make the race hard to predict, but in less than a week, we will get our first indication of who the 20th Ward wants to be their next alderman. ¬

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Kevin Bailey / 3,489 votes / 44.60% Willie B. Cochran / 4,338 votes / 55.40%

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POLITICS

Meet the Candidates

Short excerpts from interviews with aldermanic candidates

BY OLIVIA STOVICEK, SAM STECKLOW, CHRISTIAN BELANGER Over the past month, the Weekly has been sitting down with aldermanic candidates across the South Side, in particular, challengers to incumbents or candidates in open races. Below we’ve assembled excerpts from four of those interviews, with candidates from the 3rd, 6th, 15th, and 20th wards. You can find the full text of these interviews, as well as our prior Meet The Candidates pieces at southsideweekly.com.

A

fter twenty-three years as a Chicago police officer—serving as a beat officer, on a tactical team, and as a CAPS Beat Liaison—Richard Wooten retired from the force in 2015. An advocate for police reform and some form of civilian oversight, he was named to the Civilian Office of Police Accountability’s Community Advisory Council and Police Accountability Task Force. Wooten currently serves as the pastor of his church, Gathering Point Universal Ministries.

In an interview in the office of the Brainerd storefront his church occupies, Wooten, who ran for alderman in the last two elections and for the area’s seat in the state House in 2012, said his campaign slogan is “Endorsed by the People.” “I want to make sure that the people understand that I work with them and I work for them,” he said. He is challenging twoterm Alderman Roderick Sawyer for the Chatham, Park Manor, and Englewood-based 6th Ward. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Part of your platform is small business development; on your website, you write that the business community in the ward is made up of “liquor stores and low-quality fast food restaurants.” What kind of businesses do you want to attract, and how will you attract them?

ELLEN HAO

RICHARD WOOTEN 6TH WARD

16 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

¬ FEBRUARY 20, 2019

We need to actually look at how can we bring businesses in that’s gonna hire people in our community. You bring a major grocery store in, then guess what: that’s going to be jobs. You bring an Amazon warehouse in, that’s going to be jobs.

We have to begin to look for the right businesses.

You know, a restaurant that where families can come into and everybody can sit down—those are jobs. We’re not getting jobs from hair salons.

We’re not getting jobs from liquor licenses. And all these liquor licenses being issued—how many are actually Black-owned? So those are questions that we have to bring to the table here.

Last year’s Englewood high school closure scheme could not have gone forward as it did without Alderman Sawyer’s support—he was critical of the overall plan, but supported the building of the new “mega-high school” at the site of Robeson High, which is in the 6th Ward.

What are your thoughts on the plan?

First of all, I wouldn’t have supported closing those five other schools, because those are neighborhood schools. And when you close those neighborhood schools, you take tax dollars out of those areas, out of those communities. But when you build a mega school where you tear down five other schools, and then you’re gonna put five schools inside of one school, we’re gonna have an issue with safety, because those kids have to travel now from these different communities into the schools. I’m thankful that the school is being built in the 6th Ward, but I’m also concerned about the safety of the kids coming to school and going back home. I think that Englewood is going to have to actually beef up their police presence—not only police presence, but also Safe Passage has to increase.

Community participation has to increase.

Have you received pushback from groups like the Fraternal Order of Police (FOP) for working with the Civilian Office of Police Accountability (COPA), or advocating for police reform or oversight?

White guys booed me at [a Chicago Police Department] Christmas party…and called me a traitor and a snitch, because of my engagement and my opposition. It landed me a spot on 60 Minutes. I laugh about it now, [but] it shows that we have a true issue within the department when it comes down to racism. (Sam Stecklow)

POLITICS

Anthony Driver’s elevator pitch is compelling enough: just twenty-five, he says he grew up academically gifted and “pulled away from the rest of the community,” the sort of exceptional student chosen to give tours to Rahm Emanuel and Arne Duncan when they visited his school.

When it came time to choose a college, he was inundated with acceptances and scholarships.

Driver was all set to go to the University of Michigan when, a month apart, two of his closest friends were shot and killed. “That was a message to me that I need to wake up,” he said.

“Although I have these gifts, talents, and this acclaim, it’s not going to help my community.”

At the last minute, he headed to Howard University instead. He touts his experience, which ranges from nonprofit Congressional Black Caucus Foundation to a fellowship in Emanuel’s mayoral administration. After a year spent working at the Department of Defense, Driver returned to Back of the Yards.

Soon after, he decided to run for alderman in the Woodlawn, Back of the Yards, Englewood, and Washington Park-based 20th Ward.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity..

What’s your perception of how the race is divided up politically?

KATHERINE HILL

ANTHONY DRIVER JR. 20TH WARD

There is a map of all of the candidates— where we live. Everybody’s in Woodlawn.

You got one, Nicole [ Johnson], who’s not.

Just as far as the representation, I started looking at that data, I dug back even before the remap. The last three election cycles, last twelve years, there hasn’t been a candidate who’s made the ballot west of the Dan Ryan.

And if you look at the way the map is set up it’s literally fifty-fifty population-wise.

Turnout is heavy in Woodlawn. That’s also the area that’s been focused on the most.

But if you look at the dynamics of it, it’s literally the same population on both sides.

It’s almost split directly down the middle by the Dan Ryan. There’s something that I’m making it a point to focus on.

think about the psychology of that. You sell a vacant lot to a person who’s already not as well-off. Now that person has to pay property taxes on that lot. That person has to maintain it, or they’ll get fined, and they don’t usually have enough capital to build on it. What we need to do is provide residents with access to capital. Sell them the lot for a dollar, have a 20th Ward credit union where the community is part owner. Now they can go and get a loan from the credit union to build on that lot. Then, try to find a way to stipulate that some of the work done on that property they’re building is from people within the community. That’s the way we keep dollars circulating within the community. That’s the way you slow down not just gentrification—that’s the way you slow down displacement. That’s the way that you build wealth.

What do you think of participatory budgeting?

I will bring participatory budgeting to the 20th Ward and take it a step further. This is what I mean when I say we have to rebuild trust. Other aldermen who don’t have this issue in their wards can say participatory budgeting is enough and is right. I agree with that.

In the 20th, we’ve had people locked up for stealing our money since ’88. That’s 31 years. So what I’m proposing is full transparency. Every quarter, I’ll mail out every dollar that came in and every dollar that went out to residents of the 20th Ward. For younger residents who are more technologically savvy, you can go online and look at it every quarter. You should know exactly where your money’s being spent. It’s going to take that type of transparency, that type of work, to rebuild trust with residents.

(Christian Belanger)

What’s one key part of your platform?

I think we need to go deeper into vacant lots. [Right now], you have to live on the same block and have to be a property owner [to buy a vacant lot under the city’s Large Lot program]. One, we’re denying renters access, someone who wants to actually own.

That’s a problem right there within itself, because a lot of people can’t afford to be homeowners at this moment. But two, these vacant lots are in poor communities. Let’s FEBRUARY 20, 2019 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 17

POLITICS

Tell me about your journey from being excited to be a resident of this area to wanting to run for alderman.

I joined a block club before I signed my papers for the condo association—I said, if I’m gonna live here, I’m gonna be involved. I tried reaching out to the incumbent a few times and didn’t get the best response, as far as what’s the plan for the area, and how can we get involved? Nothing. She couldn’t direct me anywhere, and she wasn’t willing to organize and move any initiatives forward.

In August, when we had those sixty shootings and ten deaths, the Black Caucus’s response, my incumbent’s response, was just lackluster. They were saying oh, maybe housing, maybe workforce development, maybe this maybe that. If you’ve been in the office for twelve years, to not even have a wish list of what you’d like to see done? I just didn’t want that to happen again.

What do you see the role of a Chicago alderman as right now? How would you explain it to someone who doesn’t follow local politics closely? And what would you like it to be?

ALEXANDRIA WILLIS 3RD WARD

LIZZIE SMITH

The 3rd Ward—where Alexandria Willis hopes to be the next alderman—stretches from Washington Park, Fuller Park, and a small corner of Englewood through Bronzeville to the South Loop. Willis grew up in Chicago and moved to the 3rd Ward four years ago, to a spot in Bronzeville not too far from where her father grew up in the Robert Taylor Homes. A policy analyst with a background in public health, nursing, and advocating for nursing home safety, Willis has been excited to contribute to the community’s momentum as a resident and through work like serving on the board of nonprofit developer the Renaissance Collaborative and helping with the Englewood Quality of Life Plan.

It would be a true shake-up if Willis, a first-time candidate, ousted incumbent Pat Dowell; Dowell has held the seat for twelve years, and brings a lot more cash, as well as endorsements from a number of big unions, to the race. But Dowell has been in the middle of a couple contentious issues lately, namely the proposal to close National Teachers Academy (which Dowell was a key supporter of, and which Willis opposes), and Willis’s detailed platform has drawn attention—including the endorsement of local celebrity, sociology professor, writer, and former Weekly contributor Eve Ewing.

This interview excerpt has been edited for clarity.

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You’re the first line of defense for residents. You help assist to provide the constituents’ services, such as trash pickup and maintenance issues for the ward. You also legislate and budget—part of ordinances oftentimes has to do with how money is being spent and collected. And then investigation.

That’s probably the most important one, because when you find there’s something wrong, your job is to investigate why and then how to fix it. I think that’s where [current aldermen] end up dropping the ball a lot. You’re sitting in the committees, you’re getting all the notes firsthand, why aren’t you putting one and two together?

What would you like to do as alderman to connect with your community and get people to participate?

Outreach, outreach, outreach. Social media is great, but a lot of our residents are older or maybe not on social media anymore, so you know what it’s gonna take? Door to door. And it’s like, “Damn, the alderman knocked on my door?” Yes, and invited you to whatever.

One of my biggest frustrations as a working citizen is that things happen during the day that I can’t attend, or I have to take off work to make my presence known. So I would like for things to be streaming, for you to be able to comment as it’s going on, and there’d be a repository of that information, and those questions can be addressed at a later date. I want to have all the questions visible and available, because typically you’re not the only one that has

that same question. And it can just be there in an organized, clean, and transparent way.

What do you think is needed for an alderman to be accountable, and what will you do if you become alderman to be accountable to your ward?

Transparency! Transparency and having a plan and a goal that we come up with together. Creat[ing] a plan for the community, that’s one thing you can hold me accountable to… and from there you’ll have your checkpoints, and you can keep tracking these things. [And I want to have] my online database, my repository of meetings, making sure that we’re streaming things, making sure the questions are visible.

You mentioned participatory budgeting at the forum as one of the ways you want to bring people in. Can you tell me about why that’s part of your platform?

Participatory budgeting goes along with transparency. People hear [$10 million towards infrastructure improvements], but you don’t know where did it go to. Especially if you live on a block where streets still flood, or your sidewalk is still cracked, or your lights are always going out, you have a hard time believing these infrastructure things are happening.

It’s going to be so exciting, because you’re going to see people coming in like, “I got 500 people to say that we need trash cans on this block.”

“Well, I have 250 who say we need dog parks!”

Then once people see that they are being heard, that’s going to encourage more participation.

What are some of the other priorities you’ll have, or issues that voters in the ward have brought to you, that you want to focus on?

Activities for our youth. Violence is a big problem. The first murder of the year happened two blocks from my house. And we have to start talking about the trauma that the community experiences when something like that happens.

We need space for these young men to be, right? We have this inter-communal beef where if I’m on 63rd, I don’t want to go to 51st, or if I’m on 51st, I can’t go to 47th Street, but the park is on 49th or something. They’re being underutilized because people can’t cross these lines that they’ve drawn for themselves. So we definitely need to first have a really good understanding of what are the fractions in the community and how to address them. In public health, we have the community health model where you teach community members how to be health educators. I think we need a community peace model where we teach

POLITICS

community members how to be peace advocates, and you know who the people are who are engaged in these activities, and you can talk with them, and you can direct them to the appropriate resources… We’re going to have to have a very intensive and very purposeful plan to address violence, and it’s not just to add more police. We need restorative justice. (Olivia Stovicek)

The next 3rd Ward candidate forum, co-hosted

by The Triibe and Good Kids Mad City, will be at Hartzell Memorial United Methodist Church, 3330 S. King Dr., on Saturday, February 23, from 12pm–2pm.

Berto Aguayo, a twenty-four-year-old organizer from Back of the Yards, was the first of four challengers to 15th Ward Alderman Raymond Lopez to announce their candidacy, and is by far the youngest. All four candidates work in anti-violence—the group includes a CPD crime prevention specialist, a minister, and a violence interrupter—but Aguayo may have come to his profession the most directly. He is a former gang member who, after becoming involved with the Mikva Challenge youth civic engagement program, went on to graduate from Dominican University, intern for U.S. Senator Dick Durbin and the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, co-found the Resurrection Project’s #IncreaseThePeace initiative, and serve as a national leadership trainer with the Obama Foundation.

In a phone interview, he said that his decision to run for alderman was personal; as the child of a single parent who lost friends at a young age, attended overcrowded CPS schools, joined a gang, and came out of it a success story, he has a perspective not available to other candidates. But he was also motivated by Lopez’s divisiveness in a ward that includes Back of the Yards, Brighton Park, and Englewood. For example, after a fatal alleged gang shooting in 2017, Lopez made a statement that he was thankful “no innocent lives were lost.” To that, Aguayo said, “I could have been one of those not innocent lives lost.” This interview excerpt has been edited for clarity.

Has it been difficult running as one of the youngest people campaigning in the city?

ASIA BABIUK

BERTO AGUAYO 15TH WARD

I think we've had a lot of community support, more community support than any other campaign, especially given the community organizing work that I was already doing. Although I was a fresh face to politics, I am a well known face, right. I often run into moms who have met me at a peace march or you know, when I'm knocking on doors they say, “Oh, you're that guy who Facebook Live'd and defended families from ICE and deportation a year ago.” I think the average voter wants someone who they've seen, who they know, that didn't pop out of nowhere to run for office, but have seen them continuously working in the neighborhood.

The 15th Ward is one of the most gerrymandered in the city, containing parts of four different communities. How would you approach this issue as alderman?

I approach everything that we do in the campaign through a participatory lens. As a community organizer, I have experienced bringing people together and coming up with collective solutions to address a collective problem. I'm the only candidate in the race that has committed to cutting my own salary in order to have young people create a Youth Advisory Council where young people can advise me on things like redistricting and things that they face every day. I am a proponent of participatory budgeting, and in this same way of redistricting, I want to be able to make sure that our first month in office, we have a meeting where we talk about what the community sees [as] our redistricting goals.

Talking to community members, I already know that one of the big goals that we want to have is for the Back of the Yards community to be mostly under one ward, and to be unified. Currently there's about five alderman where Back of the Yards gets cut in and out.

All of the challengers to Alderman Lopez work in anti-violence in some regard. Why do you think that is?

I think it’s telling of the main issue in the neighborhood, which is the issue of youth violence.

We are a community where safety is a main concern, especially among young people fifteen to twentyfour, and there’s no other candidate in this race who has more experience than I do dealing with that population, dealing with that problem. Ultimately, we see the issue of violence as a symptom of the root causes that exist in our neighborhood, and those root causes for us are very simple; when you have a lack of opportunity, when you have generational disinvestment in our community, violence is a symptom. (Sam Stecklow) ¬

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EVENTS

BULLETIN The Black Presence at the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 Newberry Library, 60 W. Walton St. Lecture series, Wednesdays starting February 13 through March 20, 5:45pm–7:45pm. Cost $242. Ten percent discount for members, seniors and students. Visit newberry.org for the required materials list and first week’s reading.

Register online at newberry.org As part of the Newberry Library’s adult education seminar program, Roosevelt University Professor Emeritus of History Christopher Reed seeks to question the narrative created by a Columbian-era pamphlet printed in time for the 1893 World’s Fair titled Why the Colored American is Not in the World’s Columbian Exposition, which fueled the idea that Black people were excluded from the World’s Fair while failing to document their successful participation in it. Reed is a native Chicagoan who has dedicated decades researching the contributions Black people have made to the city’s growth and development. (Nicole Bond)

Public Newsroom 94: What Racial Equity Policies do Chicagoans Want?

Build Coffee, 6100 S. Blackstone Ave. Thursday, February 21, 6pm–8pm. Free.

Register online at bit.ly/PublicNewsroom94 Chicago United for Equity has spent weeks talking with different Chicago communities about what policies they want our future elected leaders to implement to bring about racial equity. Now CUE is compiling a racial equity voter guide from the responses, so you can know where the candidates stand ahead of the election. Our neighbors at City Bureau are holding this public newsroom with CUE Executive Director Niketa Brar to discuss how CUE and their partner organizations got Chicagoans to participate, their findings, and next steps.

(Ellen Mayer)

SSW Workshop Series: Reporting on Public Meetings South Side Weekly, 6100 S. Blackstone Ave. Saturday, March 2, 1pm–3pm.

Part of South Side Weekly’s regular workshop series offering hands-on sessions in journalism basics, this event will break down how and why to report on public meetings. Weekly senior editor Olivia Stovicek will lead this workshop, sharing her experience covering public meetings for local outlets including City Bureau’s Documenters program, from City Council committees on zoning to the City Colleges of Chicago Board of Trustees. You’ll have the opportunity to practice finding and preparing to cover a public meeting, so bring a laptop if you can. And feel free to bring an idea of a public body you’d like to know more about. (Ellen Mayer)

My Midnight Years: Surviving Jon Burge's Torture Ring and Death Row University Church, 5655 S. University Ave. Tuesday, February 28, 5pm–6:30pm. Free.

Register at bit.ly/RonaldKitchenReading Ronald Kitchen survived torture at the hands of Jon Burge and his Midnight Crew, he was wrongfully convicted of murder, and spent over a decade on death row.

He co-founded Death Row 10, a group of Black men who organized from within prison and helped turn the tide against the death penalty in Illinois. He won his freedom in 2009 and has been organizing for reparations for Burge’s victims ever since. Hear Kitchens read from his memoir <i>The Midnight Years</i> at this event sponsored by The Seminary Co-op and the Pozen Family Center For Human Rights.

There will be a book-signing and reception following the reading. (Ellen Mayer)

3RD WARD Candidate Forum: Presented by The TRiiBE & GKMC

Artists Live: Brandon Breaux and Nikko Washington

Hartzell Memorial United Methodist Church, 3330 S King Dr. Saturday, February 23, 2pm–2pm. Free. bit.ly/3rdWardTriibe

Logan Center Performance Penthouse, 915 E. 60th St. Wednesday, February 27, 7:30pm– 9:30pm. Free, RSVP recommended. bit.ly/ArtistLiveFebruary27

Presented by the Triibe and Good Kids Mad City, this forum will uplift youth voices and ask the third ward candidates to address issues that are most significant to Black youth in Chicago. The forum will be moderated by Triibe editor-in-chief Tiffany Walden and will feature 3rd Ward incumbent Alderman Pat Dowell and challenger Alexandria Willis.

There will be time at the end for audience questions. (Ellen Mayer)

The Artists Live series features various artists from Chicago’s diverse art scene and beyond. In conversation this week are two Chicago natives who both first became known for their work with Savemoney rappers: Nikko Washington, whose work is currently being exhibited at the Logan Center for the Arts’s café, and Brandon Breaux, artist-in-residence at the UofC’s Arts and Public Life. (Roderick Sawyer)

The Artist In Me

VISUAL ARTS Platica y Poetry Pilsen Outpost, 1637 W. 18th St. Thursday, February 21, 6pm-8pm. Free. bit.ly/PlaticaPoetry Part of a monthly series, Platica y Poetry features poetry and conversation. You can come and hop on the mic, listen to others as they perform, or engage in critical conversation with other poets. This event is co-hosted by Meli of Between Historias, "Caveman Poet" Emilio Maldonado, and Stephy of Media Luna. (Roderick Sawyer)

Popin' @PilsenOutpost

South Side Community Art Center, 3831 S. Michigan Ave. Every Saturday beginning February 23 through March 16. 3pm – 5pm. $80 for the series. BYOB/W. Call or visit to register. 773) 373-1026. www.sscartcenter.org.

A four-week paint and sip inspired workshop presented by SSCA artist Dionne, where participants will learn how to transform emotion and thought into paintings using basic art principles.

Expect to complete three to five paintings depending on your skill and speed. All levels of artists are welcome. (Nicole Bond)

MUSIC

1637 W. 18th St. Thursday, February 14, 3pm–6pm. (773) 830-4800, pilsenoutpost@ gmail.com. bit.ly/PopinPilsenOutpost

Seun Kuti & Fela’s Egypt 80 Harold Washington Cultural Center, 4701 S. Martin Luther King Dr. Friday, February 22, 8–11pm. $25 early bird tickets, $40 general admission, tickets at bit.ly/kuti-haroldwashington (650) 360-2216. allrqulture.com

Pilsen Outpost opens its doors every Thursday to high school students for open studio hours. Students can come to draw, paint, write, use free Wi-Fi, or just hang out and talk. (Roderick Sawyer)

Chai Tulani Afro Fest DuSable Museum of African American History, 740 E. 56th Pl. Saturday, February 23, 7pm–11pm. $20–$40. bit.ly/TulaniAfroFest Join Chai Tulani at the DuSable Museum for the Chai Tulani Afro Fest. There will be performances by DJ Bonita Apple Blunt, Jasmine Thurmond, Calid B, L.A. VanGogh, and, of course, Chai Tulani and The Bomba. Cop your tickets sooner rather than later—they’ll cost more on the day of the show. (Roderick Sawyer)

Singer-saxophonist Seun Kuti, son of legendary afrobeat musician Fela Kuti, will perform in Grand Boulevard for the Chicago leg of his latest tour. Though he’s inherited his father’s stage presence and political edge, Seun continues to push the Egypt 80 ensemble into innovative arrangements and styles. (Christopher Good)

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EVENTS

STAGE & SCREEN

Chai Tulani Afro Fest DuSable Museum of African American History, 740 E. 56th Pl. Saturday, February 23, 7pm–11pm. $20–$40, tickets at bit.ly/ chai-tulani (773) 947-0600. dusablemuseum.org Join Chicago-raised soul-hop musician Chai Tulani for a nightlong celebration of African music, dance, art, and culture. DJs and performers include gauzy R&B rapper L.A. VanGogh, AMFM’s DJ Bonita Appleblunt, “Afrobang” producer Calid B, neo-gospel singer Jasmine Thurmond, plus a set from Tulani and the Bomba. (Christopher Good)

JC Brooks Band Beverly Arts Center, 2407 W. 111th St. Saturday, February 23, 8pm. $25 in advance, $30 at the door. (773) 445-3838. beverlyartcenter.org The JC Brooks Band recently dropped “the Uptown Sound” from their name—fitting for a gig on the South Side—but they’ve held on to their signature blend of motown, funk, and soul. This Saturday’s gig follows last year’s “Red Black and Blue, Vol. 1” EP, where foot-tapping rhythms met sharp political commentary. (Christopher Good)

Sibling, Ozzuario, Elena Chimaera Digital Arts Demo Space, 2515 S. Archer Ave., Suite #2. Sunday, February 24, 8:30pm–11:30pm. $8 suggested donation.

(312) 451-2962. bit.ly/sibling-dads On Sunday, NYC noise duo Sibling will perform high frequencies at high decibels for their Chicago debut. Support from Ozzuario (bone-crunching power electronics), Elena Chimaera (outré slacker pop), and DJ Shuffle (dubbed a “weirdo Chicago staple” by the Reader).

(Christopher Good)

Reparations Awareness Day 2019 Chicago State University, 9500 S. King Dr. Gwendolyn Brooks Library, 4th Floor.

Saturday, February 23, 2pm–4:30pm, doors open 1pm. Parking $5. bit.ly/Reparations2019 The National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America (N’COBRA), in co-sponsorship with Chicago State University, will host a talk with economist, researcher, and Duke University Professor William Sandy Darity, Jr. “400 Years of Terror: A Debt Still Owed” will debunk myths about closing the racial wealth gap, according to a new study by the Duke University Samuel DuBois Cook Center on Social Equity, and speak to what is necessary to actually do so. (Nicole Bond)

Sunday Silver Screen Outerspace Chicago, 1474 N. Milwaukee Ave. Sunday, February 24, 7:30pm–9:30pm. Free admission but donations are welcome and encouraged. bit.ly/2U32myM The Sunday Silver Screen film series curated by filmmaker Diana Quiñones Rivera, featured in the Weekly’s 2018 Arts Issue, sought out dance/film submissions one to five minutes in length inspired by the Martin Luther King Jr. quote, “If you can’t fly, run. If you can’t run, walk. If you can’t walk, crawl, but by all means, keep moving.” The screening and short Q&A will feature six different films, including Rivera’s docuseries Darling Shear. (Nicole Bond)

Sunday Evening Jazz Series Room 43, 1043 E. 43rd Street. Sunday, February 24, 7:30 and 9:30pm. $10, $5 with student ID. Cash bar and food service. (773) 285-2222. hydeparkjazzsociety.com On every Sunday evening, the Hyde Park Jazz Society hosts a live performance at Room 43. Up next is the Bobbi Wilsyn Group, featuring Chicago’s own jazz vocalist Bobbi Wilsyn. (Nicole Bond) 22 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

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A Slippery Land: Recent Short Films from Haiti

Precious Knowledge with Eve L. Ewing and Ray Salazar

DuSable Museum, 740 E. 56th Pl. Tuesday, February 26, 7pm–8:30pm. Free admission.

(773) 947-0600. Registration for this event is currently closed: bit.ly/2TY7nJ6

The Harper Theater, 5238 S. Harper Ave. Thursday, February 21, 7pm–9:30pm. Free and open to the public. Seating first come first seated, doors at 6:45pm. bit.ly/2BIC260.

Experience Haiti’s present-day and folkloric culture along with select dance and celebration and dance traditions, with the screening of four short films: “Nan Lakou Kanaval,” “Bounda pa Bounda,” “The Crying Conch,” and “Love Me, Haiti.” Presented in collaboration with South Side Projections, DuSable Museum of African American History, and the Haitian American Museum of Chicago.

(Nicole Bond)

Join Eve L. Ewing, assistant professor at the University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration and author of Ghosts in the Schoolyard: Racism and School Closings on Chicago’s South Side and Ray Salazar, board-certified CPS teacher and award-winning educational writer, in examining race and education in American schools, with a screening of the documentary film Precious Knowledge. The film highlights the struggle for meaningful curriculum. A conversation with Ewing and Salazar will follow after. (Roderick Sawyer)

The MLK Project: The Fight for Civil Rights DuSable Museum, 740 E. 56th Pl. Wednesday, February 27. 11am–noon. Tickets $5. (773) 947-0600. Register at bit.ly/2SOV0mk One actress combines poetry, hip-hop, and history to chronicle a student’s journey through learning about key events of the nation’s Civil Rights Movement, featuring the stories of celebrated and unsung Chicago-based activists. (Nicole Bond)

Urban Bush Women/ Hair & Other Stories The Dance Theater, Columbia College 1306 S. Michigan. Thursday–Saturday, February 28– March 2, 7:30pm. Tickets $30, $24 seniors, $10 students. bit.ly/2V68qXA Described by the New York Times as triple-threat performers with a searing sense of truthfulness, Chicago favorites Urban Bush Women present a multidisciplinary work of dance, music, and humor to unpack the narrative around selfimage, race, gender identity, and economic inequities, through the lens of Black women’s hair. (Nicole Bond)

FOOD & LAND Indoor Farmers Markets 61st Street Farmers Market: Experimental Station, 6100 S. Blackstone Ave. The second Saturday of every month, 9am–2pm. experimentalstation.org Pilsen Community Market: Honky Tonk BBQ, 1800 S. Racine Ave. Sundays, 11am– 3:30pm. facebook.com/pilsenmarket Plant Chicago Farmers Market: The Plant, 1400 W. 46th St. The first Saturday of each month, 11am–3pm. plantchicago.org Just because it’s cold doesn’t mean your need for fresh produce, chef demonstrations, and shopping with your neighbors is gone.

This winter, the three above-listed markets are sticking around and moving indoors to make sure your needs are fulfilled. Each market offers slightly different pleasures, and all are worth making a regular habit. (Sam Stecklow)

BLK Bike Panel and Discussion Experimental Station, 6100 S. Blackstone Ave. Saturday, February 23, 2pm–4pm. Free. bit.ly/BLKBikePanel An all-Black panel of Chicagoland bikers is convening this Saturday to talk about impediments to biking in the Black community and how to work together overcome these barriers. The panel, which features Bill Gaston of the Major Taylor Cycling Club, Sam Scipio of Comrade Cycles, Taryn Randle of 2wheelgods, Michael “Tekhen” Strode of Red Bike & Green, and Mulubwa Munkanta of SRAM, a bicycle parts manufacturer, will start with a screening of a film about world champion cyclist Major Taylor. (Emeline Posner)

Illinois Stewardship Alliance Annual Meeting The Plant, 1400 W. 46th St. Tuesday, February 26, 3pm–6pm. Free for Illinois Stewardship Alliance members; $25 for nonmembers. Registration required at bit.ly/ILStewardshipAlliance Join Illinois Stewardship Alliance leaders and members to celebrate a year of successful legislation for local food producers, and to hear about the alliance’s plans for the year to come. The meeting will be followed by drinks and networking at the Plant. (Emeline Posner)

It’s time to register for Spring programs with the Chicago Park District!

STAY CON N E CT E D.

Activities start the week of April 1st for most programs.

Online registration begins: Monday, February 25 at 9AM for parks WEST of California Ave. (2800 W.) Tuesday, February 26 at 9AM for parks EAST of California Ave. (2800 W.) In-Person registration begins: Saturday, March 2 for most parks.

Some parks begin Monday, March 4

Please note: registration dates vary for gymnastics centers as well as Morgan Park Sports Center & McFetridge Sports Center.

MAYOR RAHM EMANUEL Chicago Park District Board of Commissioners Michael P. Kelly, General Superintendent & CEO

For more information visit:

Blackstone Bicycle Works

Weekly Bike Sale Every Saturday at 12pm Wide selection of refurbished bikes! (most bikes are between $120 & $250)

follow us at @blackstonebikes blackstonebikes.org

Blackstone Bicycle Works is a bustling community bike shop that each year empowers over 200 boys and girls from Chicago’s south side—teaching them mechanical skills, job skills, business literacy and how to become responsible community members. In our year-round ‘earn and learn’ youth program, participants earn bicycles and accessories for their work in the shop. In addition, our youths receive after-school tutoring, mentoring, internships and externships, college and career advising, and scholarships.

Hours Tuesday - Friday 1pm - 6pm 12pm - 5pm Saturday

773 241 5458 6100 S. Blackstone Ave. Chicago, IL 60637

A PROGRAM OF

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Nikko Washington CAFÃ&#x2030; LOGAN LOGAN CENTER FOR THE ARTS 915 E. 60th Street JAN 11 MAR 31, 2019 @loganuchicago logancenter. uchicago.edu