March 13, 2019

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 20 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

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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

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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, Elizabeth Winkler, 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 Haley Tweedell Webmaster Operations Manager

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Cover art by Lizzie Smith and Davon Clark

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

Fighting Words Our neighbor to the north, the University of Chicago, has made a racist mess again.

Nincompoop (and law professor) Geoffrey Stone had to be convinced that using a racial slur as a routine part of his lecture on the “fighting words” doctrine is a bad idea.

(Stone, as it happens, is also the person chiefly responsible for the report the university administration uses as its reasoning to rail against trigger warnings and the like—“freedom of expression” run amok.) Defined as a category of speech unprotected by the First Amendment, and legally recognized by the 1942 Supreme Court case Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire, “fighting words” are described in part as words that, by their very utterance inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of peace.

To illustrate the key tenet of the doctrine, for decades Stone would tell his class an anecdote—he claims it's a true story—in which he asked a Black student his thoughts on the doctrine, to which the student replied that he thought the "fighting words" doctrine was no longer relevant. Stone then asked a white student in an adjacent row, what he thought of the Black student’s argument. The white student answered by saying, “That’s the dumbest argument I’ve ever heard, you stupid [n-word].” Immediately, in his story, the Black student lunged forward in an attempt to choke the white student. When Stone, a white man, told the story, he used the slur in full.

In an op-ed published by the Chicago Maroon, a law student accused Stone of furthering aggressive and racist stereotypes, and of fostering a safe space for racism and a hostile environment for education through the use of the anecdote. The student also called for Stone to apologize and to stop using the slur as part of his pedagogy. Initially Stone "stood his ground" and refused to stop using the slur in classroom, but was later finally convinced to cease, following conversations with Black students who shared how hurtful and unnecessary using the word is to teach the merit of a legal doctrine. The Weekly isn’t sure why Stone, with his law degree and all, couldn’t manage to learn and comprehend this earlier, but okay.

IN THIS ISSUE wospital withdrawal

“If you don’t understand addiction, then there’s a tendency for bias.” mari cohen........................................4 meet the candidates: alex acevedo

“If you want to build green development here on Cermak corridor—that's great.

But let me bring my people with me too.” ellen mayer.......................................8 on the corner

“Twelve feet of grill, six burner ranges, six foot steam table, on-site butcher” max budovitch..................................9 between reform and retribution

“I would just say, just keep fighting.

Whether there’s parole, whether it’s sentencing, whether it’s fighting for a different statute.” wendy random................................16

A Changing Neighborhood A recent Sun-Times article documented a demographic shift in West Englewood: as Black residents leave the neighborhood, part of a broader trend of Black Chicagoans leaving the city, more Latinx people are moving in. Between 2010–2017, Englewood lost 19,000 Black residents, ending at just over 50,000. Meanwhile, Englewood’s Latinx population nearly tripled to 2,700. An interviewed Latinx Englewood newcomer cites cheap property as the primary reason to move to the neighborhood. According to the real estate website Trulia, the median home sale price in Englewood is $35,000, and $43,750 in West Englewood—much lower than in majority-Latinx neighborhoods like Pilsen ($305,000), Gage Park ($154,500), and Back of the Yards ($100,000).

Englewood residents and leaders are worried what the demographic shifts will mean for longtime residents of the neighborhood—like whether they will be pushed out. 15th Ward aldermanic candidate Rafael Yañez (who made it to the runoff against incumbent Raymond Lopez) told the Weekly he sees the coexistence of Black and Latinx people in the ward—the base of which is in Brighton Park and Back of the Yards, but contains a large portion of West Englewood—as an opportunity for cross-racial coalition-building, an attitude that could transfer over to a changing Englewood. But given the long history of white politicians pitting people of color against each other in this city, some, like RAGE’s Asiaha Butler, feel that getting there will be difficult: “Unfortunately we’ve been taught to be divided.”

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MARCH 13, 2019 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 3

HEALTH

Hospital Withdrawal

In Chicago, many people with opioid use disorder avoid going to the hospital for fear of becoming dopesick Dan the day after Rhonda died.

LLOYD DEGRANE

BY MARI COHEN Belt Magazine is a digital publication by and for the Rust Belt and greater Midwest founded in 2013. Reprinted with permission.

D

an and Rhonda met in upstate New York. Later, when Dan left and ended up in Chicago, living on the streets, Rhonda moved to be with him. At night, in their tent in Chicago, they entertained themselves by having makebelieve meetings of the “Mean Girls Club,” modeled after the movie; Rhonda would do different voices for the club’s imaginary members. Other times, Rhonda and Dan would read to one another. “I feel like we were soulmates, you know?” Dan said. “You only get one soulmate, you only get one chance at that.”

One day, Rhonda, who, like Dan, was addicted to heroin, developed a small wound in her arm where she’d been shooting. She continued to shoot into it; the wound grew and became infected. Soon the bones of her arm were visible. She and Dan argued—he 4 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

¬ MARCH 13, 2019

wanted her to go to the hospital, but she refused, because she was afraid of going through opioid withdrawal. Finally, Dan and friends managed to convince Rhonda to check into the hospital. Within a few days, they learned the infection had spread to her heart. It was too advanced for recovery; Rhonda died after a week in the hospital.

These days, hospitals in Chicago are seeing a lot of patients like Rhonda—people with opioid use disorder who live on the streets. In 2017, Cook County saw 1,167 opioid-related deaths, the highest rate in the state. Many of those with opioid use disorder are homeless. By day, they “hustle” in the streets downtown, earning money to go to the West Side and buy heroin. At night, many sleep on Lower Wacker Drive, below the streets of Chicago’s business district.

Heroin users like Rhonda are often reluctant to go to the hospital because they fear going through withdrawal. Others will leave early, against medical advice and

with their health problems unresolved, once withdrawal begins to hit. It’s not a small fear: Dan described withdrawal—or “dope sickness”—as “the worst flu you’ve ever had, plus you break a couple of your bones at the same time to the point that you can’t even move them, and the same exact date this happens your whole family gets killed in a car accident.” For those who are severely addicted, getting access to heroin is no longer about looking for a high—it’s a necessity to ward off intense sickness.

Because of the severity of withdrawal symptoms, one of the most promising treatments for opioid use disorder is known as medication-assisted treatment, or MAT. It involves prescribing FDA-approved medications—buprenorphine, methadone, or naltrexone—that safely address a patient’s withdrawal symptoms and help quench the thirst for heroin or other opioids. Hospital doctors are legally authorized to give these drugs to admitted patients going through withdrawal, but the people I interviewed

for this story reported mixed results getting their withdrawal symptoms addressed at Chicago-area hospitals.

“I have a blood clot in my leg as we speak. I’m in no hurry to go,” said a man named Larry. We spoke in a West Loop parking garage, slightly sheltered from the wind. “I know a lot of people who are in bad shape out here. And they don’t go in because they don’t really help you…There’s a girl sleeping with us—down where I sleep there’s about seven of us—she’s got two holes in her legs. You could put your hand inside her legs. She’s been to the hospital; she leaves early because she gets too sick and she’s miserable. She’s willing to basically lose her leg because of it, rather than be dopesick. If you’ve never been dopesick, you can’t explain it, but it’s excruciating.”

“I know so many people who have died because they didn’t go to the hospital,” one man, who goes by Speedy, told me. Speedy, who was also a friend of Rhonda’s, spends his days on a corner in the Loop, selling drawings.

HEALTH

When we met, he had recently finished several months of inpatient treatment for endocarditis, an inflammation of the heart that can be caused by contaminated needles.

Endocarditis nearly killed Speedy, in part because he had initially refused to stay in the hospital. “They wanted to admit me, and I said no. I didn’t have any dope on me,” he explained. Speedy said that when one of his best friends—who has since passed away— was in the hospital, Speedy brought him heroin every day to prevent him from leaving.

“It might’ve been the wrong thing to do,” Speedy said, “but it was for a good intention because he was gonna die.”

Those familiar with the opioid epidemic likely know about the threat of overdose and the importance of access to Narcan to treat overdoses. But intravenous opioid users are at risk of many health problems beyond just overdoses. Shooting up carries a risk of infection and abscession at the injection site, blood clots, the introduction of bacteria into the blood, and more, all of which become more dangerous when left untreated. The severity of the epidemic is forcing doctors to quickly become savvy in addiction medicine, a field many of them have little training in.

The stakes, as Rhonda’s story demonstrates, can be life or death.

I

first learned about many addicted people’s fear of the hospital from Lloyd DeGrane, a local photojournalist who began getting to know homeless people as part of a fellowship three years ago and has since formed relationships across the homeless community. (It was DeGrane and his wife, Laurel Berman, who helped Dan finally get Rhonda into the hospital.) He introduced me to the people interviewed for this story. DeGrane spends many of his days walking around downtown and under Lower Wacker, giving out cigarettes, taking photos, and chatting with people about how they’re doing. Homeless folks often greet him with a smile and an exclamation: “Lloyd!”

DeGrane stays up to date on his friends’ medical needs, but he told me it’s difficult to find a pattern in how Chicago hospitals address patients’ withdrawal symptoms. At times, DeGrane said, he’s seen two people with opioid use disorder admitted to the same hospital at the same time, but only one will be given methadone. The process, in his experience, feels arbitrary. I learned through conversations with DeGrane that Northwestern had a reputation, among addicted people admitted to its hospital, for being strict and refusing to offer methadone

to addicted people seeking care for their injuries,and the University of Illinois Hospital at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) was known for being more lenient.

Other people I talked to gave mixed reports. “Northwestern—they won’t give you anything,” Cliff, a man with opioid use disorder, told me. “A lot of people that need attention have left, because they’re going through withdrawal. Some of them have died.” He reported recently having a positive experience at Cook County’s Stroger Hospital; he went in for treatment for a leg injury, and they gave him methadone. Another of Lloyd’s friends—who had previously walked out of UIC against medical advice—was receiving regular methadone doses at Northwestern and feeling empowered to continue treatment on her serious hand wounds for the long haul.

And a man named Sam said that at Stroger Hospital, where Cliff had a good experience, they “treat you like a jail inmate.”

Karim Khan is a third-year resident at University of Illinois Hospital and cofounder of UIC Street Medicine, a student group that provides medical care to people living on the street. As an undergraduate at the University of Florida, Khan was involved in student activism and worked with homeless people in Gainesville. Later, as a medical student at the University of South Florida, in Tampa, he co-founded a street medicine group to offer medical care, modeling the project on existing programs around the country. When he moved to Chicago for residency, Khan and two other students created UIC Street Medicine. Through this project, Khan began learning more about addiction and injection drug use, and he began to notice a gap in providers’ understanding of addiction, which affected how his street medicine patients got treated in the hospital, especially in the emergency room.

“In Chicago, you run a very high risk of going into the hospital and not having your opioid dependency treated,” Khan said.

I reached out to several major area hospitals to try to learn more about their policies for giving methadone or buprenorphine to patients with opioid use disorder. Patrick Lank, an emergency medicine doctor at Northwestern Memorial Hospital, wrote in an email that “It is standard to continue all patients’ outpatient methadone and buprenorphine (suboxone) regimens while they are admitted to the hospital for any reason. For patients who are not on medication to treat their opioid use disorder, we have inpatient specialists who can evaluate them while they are admitted

Dan and Rhonda the night before she died at UofI hospital.

and screen for their appropriateness and desire to undergo medication assisted therapy for opioid use disorder.”

At UIC, Khan said, providers are supposed to continue a patient’s existing methadone regimen if they are already established at a clinic. If a patient has not already started at a methadone clinic, providers are still allowed to give methadone, but, Khan said, it should “trigger a social work consult, where a social worker works with the provider to prescribe methadone.”

Khan said that only recently has it become commonplace for UIC doctors to prescribe methadone for people who need it to stave off withdrawal. It took sustained work from street-medicine providers, as well as other hospital addiction specialists and advocates, to get to this point.

Representatives for Rush and UChicago Medicine did not respond to requests for comment on their policies.

At Cook County Hospital’s emergency room, doctors have become accustomed to prescribing buprenorphine to people experiencing opioid withdrawal, according to Steven Aks, the head of Cook County Health’s toxicology department and an emergency medicine doctor. The emergency room doesn’t typically give out methadone, Aks said, unless the patient is already on a methadone regime at a clinic, but methadone may be distributed in the hospital to patients who are admitted. The distribution of buphrenophrine in the emergency room is relatively new, but it has already made a big difference, Aks said. “I found that it has really reassured our patients. We’re doing a

LLOYD DEGRANE

better job with this new approach.”

O

ne evening in mid-January, I joined UIC’s Street Medicine team on one of their evening runs. DeGrane went too—he often joins the street medicine teams to help them find people who need care. The weather was more tolerable than it had been the week before, but I wouldn’t have wanted to be out all night in it.

During the visit, DeGrane introduced us to his friend Sam, who was in need of hand warmers. Sam was seated atop two crates on a busy Michigan Avenue corner across the street from Millennium Park, where he often hustles. Thin and pale, with his head shaved, he carries a sign that says he’s going through chemo (he isn’t). Sam used to sit on just one crate, but because of a serious kidney issue, he can no longer get up from sitting that low.

The UIC team—which included a fourth-year medical student, a social worker, a pharmacy resident, and an internal medicine resident—knelt in a semi-circle around Sam, introducing themselves one by one. Sam is usually a “cheerful guy,” he told them, but he’d been having a rough time lately, feeling worried and scared. “I feel like I’m dying slowly,” he said. He no longer took off his boots, even to sleep, because he couldn’t bend down to manage it. And he’d been having trouble keeping on weight. Recently, Sam was admitted to Northwestern Memorial Hospital, but he left early, against medical advice, in order to manage his withdrawal symptoms on the streets.

Sam finds Northwestern a tough MARCH 13, 2019 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 5

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patient who is admitted to a hospital or longterm care facility for the treatment of medical conditions other than opioid use disorder.”

“Those have been foreign drugs to a lot of docs in the emergency room,” said Ralph Ryan, a retired cardiologist who volunteers as a street medic for The Night Ministry. “They’re a little leery of giving too much, they’re a little leery of patients faking symptoms.” Ryan said he believes that most doctors generally have good intentions, but “if you don’t understand addiction, then there’s a tendency for bias.”

I LLOYD DEGRANE

hospital to visit as a homeless and addicted person. Once, he said, when he was waiting for an appointment, a security guard made him wait next door in the Walgreens, instead of in the lobby. When he’s been admitted and asked for methadone, his doctors always tell him “no.” Internal medicine resident Emily Peninger asked Sam some questions about his health. The team urged him to go to his follow-up appointment at Northwestern and, when he said he would prefer to go to UIC, they agreed to help him try to transfer.

The two street medicine teams that operate in Chicago are able to give some care right on the spot. UIC’s volunteers go out once a week, and a team from nonprofit group The Night Ministry goes out five days a week. During expeditions with both teams, I observed volunteer doctors, residents, and medical students evaluating wounds and changing dressings, giving out Advil and other common medications, calling in prescriptions, and answering patients’ questions about health concerns from urinary issues to pregnancy. Khan said street medics can also assess vitals and do basic wound cleanings. In some cases, the UIC team even helps patients manage complex medication regimes, like blood thinners, by following up with them on the street. But more involved procedures and assessments—including blood tests, anything requiring anesthetic, surgeries, and IV antibiotics for serious infection—must be done in a hospital or clinic.

Khan wants patients like Sam to feel more comfortable having serious health complications addressed in the hospital. “I 6 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

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think the biggest sort of barrier to treating these folks well comes down to miseducation,” he said. “That’s both on the provider’s part and on the patient’s part. There’s a lot of misinformation floating around regarding the treatment of opioid use disorder and how to provide opioid replacement therapy. So providers will either not know the rules or regulations or protocols, or patients will think there are regulations and protocols in place to stop them.”

Because there are restrictions on prescribing buphenropherine and methadone in outpatient settings, many doctors don’t know that they’re allowed to prescribe them in inpatient settings, said Nicole Gastala, a family medicine physician expanding the addiction and behavioral programs at Miles Square Health Center, a federallyqualified patient center affiliated with UIC. Gastala herself had little background with medication-assisted treatment until she began working at a clinic in rural Iowa, where she learned on her feet how to prescribe buphenropherine to treat addiction.

In order to prescribe buphenropherine to outpatients, doctors must complete eight hours of training and receive a waiver from the government. They can then prescribe buphenropherine in any setting, from a private office to a community health center.

Methadone, on the other hand, can only be given out at government-certified “opioid treatment programs,” or OTPs. Yet the federal health code includes an exception for hospital stays: “certification as an OTP under this part will not be required for the maintenance or detoxification treatment of a

n the last few years, Khan said, he’s seen significant changes in how the University of Illinois Hospital at UIC treats patients.

Street medicine volunteers like those I met have been able to advocate for their patients and raise awareness about addiction issues in the hospital. UIC is also starting a monthly case conference between providers in emergency medicine, general medicine, family medicine, and addiction, to discuss and evaluate how patients with opioid use disorder have had their cases handled.

Khan said they are also working on additional training and approval to allow as many providers as possible to give buprenorphine to patients who come in but are not admitted to the hospital. He finds the strict regulations on dispensing buprenorphine and methadone in outpatient settings counterproductive for treating addiction, especially because, he said, other drugs that are just as dangerous do not have these regulations. “It’s conservative, traditional morals being legislated,” he said.

People with opioid use disorder who feel confident communicating with doctors might have an advantage in getting the care they need. Cliff said he gets methadone to manage withdrawal when he goes to the hospital because he “knows how to talk to doctors.” If he hadn’t been given the methadone when he recently spent five days at Cook County Health’s Stroger Hospital for a leg injury, he would’ve left, he told me.

“I just tell them the truth. As soon as I get there, I tell them who I am, and what I’m going through. They usually take care of me.”

Peer recovery coach programs are one way to help more patients with addiction advocate for themselves in the hospital. For about a year and a half, Cook County Health has had grant-funded certified peer recovery coaches in the emergency room during the days and evenings. These coaches, who are in recovery from addiction themselves, are trained to support anyone with opioid use

disorder who comes into the hospital and can help patients get linked to treatment programs if desired. Gastala said she and other addiction advocates at UIC have applied for a state grant, which would help pay for peer recovery coaches in their emergency room.

Peer recovery coaches “can also educate providers about the discomfort of the individual,” said Steven Brown, a UIC social worker who also worked on the grant application. “They can negotiate to make sure that the person’s needs are being met too.”

“I can’t say enough great things about having them here,” said Aks, the Cook County Health physician, of the recovery coaches.

It’s also crucial that, in response to the opioid epidemic, medical schools integrate instruction on addiction into the curriculum, Khan said. In fact, he told me, it’s a problem that this hasn’t been done already. “It speaks to our biases as a culture. The opioid epidemic affects everyone, but communities of color, poorer communities, they’re the ones who have been hit the hardest. And they’re historically neglected…If the opioid epidemic were a problem which specifically affected rich white men, we’d have had a very different approach to it.”

Dan told me he’s learned that UIC has come a long way in how it treats addicted patients, but it’s too late for his wife. These days, two and a half years after Rhonda’s death, Dan is keeping on with his daily routine. Outside of his “hustle” time, he visits the Harold Washington Library most days—we met and talked there in a private room—and reads the papers. His favorite columnist is the Tribune’s Rex Huppke.

He’s also built himself a sturdy sleeping structure near the expressway. Made of pallets, plywood, tarp, and other materials, it helps him stay warm and dry in the winter.

“Now that she’s gone that’s why I try to stay as drunk as possible all the time and stay high all the time,” Dan said. “All I’ve got to say is that if the hospital had given Rhonda what she needed so that she wasn’t sick and didn’t have anxiety, she would still be alive, because she would’ve stayed in there, and she would’ve gone a lot sooner.” This project was supported by Rise Local, a project of New America Mari Cohen is a senior editor and the workshop manager of the Weekly, and an associate editor at Belt Magazine.

POLITICS

Meet the Candidates: Alex Acevedo

The Weekly sits down with the nurse and activist in the runoff for alderman in the 25th Ward.

BY ELLEN MAYER establishment in this race. (Sam Stecklow and Quinn Myers) This interview, which was conducted before the February 26 election, has been edited for length and clarity.

What is the coalition that you’re building?

What is the people power behind you?

KATIE HILL

Last month, Alex Acevedo came in second of the five candidates vying to replace disgraced 25th Ward Alderman Danny Solís. Providing a more conservative, homeowner-focused foil to his runoff companion Byron SigchoLopez’s DSA-endorsed platform, Acevedo often reminds voters of his work as a nurse and with a neighborhood watch group.

Acevedo’s homeowner-focused platform is rooted in his family’s political history, which stretches back decades in Pilsen. His father is former state Representative Eddie Acevedo, a one time cop who, after getting slated to run by the corrupt Daley-linked Hispanic Democratic Organization, represented the area in the Illinois House of Representatives for over twenty years until 2016. That year, Eddie unsuccessfully tried to have his son be appointed to replace him in an old Chicago tradition— which another beneficiary of that nepotism, Cook County Commissioner John Daley, vetoed. Alex then ran in the election with Solís’s endorsement, eventually losing to progressive challenger Theresa Mah. That election led to a rift between the Acevedo family and Solís, and in the 2019 aldermanic election Alex has been quick to distance himself from the incumbent and identify himself as a progressive, even doing so on campaign materials. But with his opposition to rent control and support from the Fraternal Order of Police, it remains to be seen whether he can break from his association from the old

It’s not just this campaign. I’ve lived in Pilsen for thirty-three years of my life.…

It was one of those areas where no one wanted to come because gangs and violence plagued our corners, but we stood here. My family stood here. We went to our schools, played at our parks, shopped in our stores, I got my first job here—because we love it.

But we knew there was a lot of hardships to overcome. That’s what pushed me to get involved in my community and build these coalitions.

One of the things that I was able to do, and I'm proud of, is creating the very first neighborhood watch coalition. About three and a half years ago, Pilsen was hit with [six] arsons in a row, week after week after week. We couldn't find the arsonists. An undocumented individual actually ended up dying from smoke inhalation, people lost their homes. [Ed note: The Weekly was unable to independently verify that the person who died in the arsons was undocumented, or that Acevedo’s neighborhood watch coalition was the very first in Pilsen.] No one wants a community where there's a cop on every block, or there's a camera on every house, right? Because there's no sense of privacy anymore, and you wouldn't want to live in a world like that. So veterans, parents came together—there was only seven of us— came to the table and said, “What can we do to provide a better neighborhood, safer neighborhood?” Not one where it's just like, we want to be security guards and walk down the street and say, “You're doing that wrong,” or take a picture. No, but bringing back civic engagement.

We have over 7,000 people who are on

our email list, who are on our phone tree, who are on our social media. We meet once a month. We use some of the information that's given at CAPS meetings, but we're not a police group; we work with them as a coalition, but we take their stats and some of the crimes that are being recorded, and we share the information with the stakeholders, the community at large, because we want people to come to us. There's a lot of people who don't call 311 or 911 or go to the local police, because they're afraid of vengeance, something that's going to come back to them, a retaliation because a gang member knows where they live. So they come to us and we report it anonymously.

On the other side is something I’m very passionate about: the coalition of health care. Our culture is home to [some] of the most silent killers: high blood pressure, high cholesterol, heart attacks, diabetes.…

These things need to be addressed, and there needs to be some type of remedies or support. What were we doing to connect [the health care resources of the 25th Ward] to the people and the alderman’s office?

We weren’t doing much. [So] we provided basic screenings to the people for free, and if we noticed that their readings were off the charts, we followed up with long term care for them. We brought the services to schools, to parks, to small businesses, to churches.

The big picture more is the environmental coalition. Why? I’ve seen as a nurse in the ER rooms where we have kids brought in with lead poisoning.

You’re like, lead poisoning? I didn’t even know that existed. But it does. These are six and seven year olds living in affordable housing or outdated housing eating paint chips, drinking from faucets, and it doesn’t happen overnight. My coalition is focused on making sure that basic health care and environment are the main priorities not just of the ward, but the city of Chicago.

How can we redevelop the Pilsen Industrial Corridor so that tomorrow looks promising,

health-wise? We all want to have great businesses and good education, great jobs and opportunity. But if we don’t have good health care and a good environment, none of that’s going to exist.

So I’ve been talking to a lot of environmental groups, including the Illinois Green Alliance, who’s talking about building green development, smart development.

What I want to be able to do is build a coalition of architects, of environmental folks, policy experts, and residents, where we can talk about how we can clean up the Cermak corridor, because people most people think that you can get a bulldozer there today, knock it down, and build a park tomorrow. That's going to take years of remediation, but there's things that we can do today where we can benefit today and that's taking, you know, good policy, good research.

How would you ensure that you remain accountable to these coalitions, should you be elected?

One of the things I want to make sure [is that] I'm accountable. That's the very first thing that people know that I'm accountable. I like the hashtag that we use, #AlwaysOnCall. Because as a nurse, you know, when you're on your shift, you're always on call, and you have to be there for the residents. But absolutely, when it comes to to business, when it comes to developers, there is going to be a certain process, right from the initial approval stage. If you want to build something, you want to provide a business here, the community is going to know about it to all the way to the end.

How we hold them accountable is measuring certain metrics—the results may be different on a case-to-case basis. But the process is going to be the same. So if you want to build green development here on Cermak corridor, and you come in and you say, “Hey, Alderman Acevedo, I want to build this”—that's great. But let me bring MARCH 13, 2019 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 7

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my people with me too.

If you're going to come in and you're going to build here, why not spend some money and fund some of this public infrastructure? There are ways that we can do that today, because we can’t scale back, right?

We can’t scale back from these high-rises that are already built, we’re not gonna knock it down to build a park. But we can say, hey, look, if you care about this community, and you want to stay here, how about investing in our parks? Invest in some of our schools, or invest in the Neighborhood Opportunity Fund to give to some of these small business owners or working class families that can’t afford to fix their facade, or upstairs or downstairs.

At the candidate forum hosted by the Chicago Housing Initiative, all of the candidates were asked if they support keeping the Pilsen Land Use Committee (PLUC), Danny Solís’s handpicked group that advised him on zoning changes for large developments. You said that you were in favor of keeping it and expanding it. Could you talk more about that?

People go, “What is PLUC?”, right? It’s something that was created by the alderman, and I believe it was created so that he can kind of wash his hands and put the blame or benefit on them, to say, “People don’t like it? Blame PLUC, don’t blame me.” But the people who are in PLUC, a lot of them have done great work for this community. [Pilsen Neighbors Community Council treasurer and longtime activist] Teresa Fraga, you know, we call her the godmother of Pilsen.

She worked to bring Benito Juarez here, the first high school in Pilsen. Esther Corpuz of the Alivio Medical Center, which services not only residents, but undocumented families. Some of these folks are on it for the right reasons. I believe they have a true passion and want to benefit everyone who’s within our community.

But what I mean by expansion is that if we’re going to have PLUC, or some type of mirror group, we want actual residents to be a part of this. Like, hey, look, we can have five members who run these nonprofits, that’s fine. But let’s include actual residents here as well.… The residents are going to have just as much of a vote as the members of PLUC. I believe there’s a lot that we can learn from [the current members]—these folks are not just residents, but they’ve helped build Pilsen [to] what it is today. So we can’t discredit for some of the good work, 8 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

¬ MARCH 13, 2019

but going forward people want transparency.

At the same forum, you said you were opposed to rent control and the Fair Housing Ordinance. What do you think are good solutions for maintaining affordability and stopping displacement?

Rent control is just not the solution for Pilsen and stopping gentrification, and I say that because if you look at the amount of homeowners in Pilsen that actually live here, it’s thirty percent. [Ed. note: as of 2016, it was 26.5 percent.] Seventy percent live in New York, Kentucky, LA—outside of our city, outside of our state. [Ed. note: The Weekly was unable to confirm this statistic.] If we implement rent control today, that thirty percent is only gonna drop, so you’re gonna see less homeowners who actually live here.

People who are renters, most of the time, they’re here for a couple years and they go.

We’re seeing a lot of the younger generation, millennials, who are here for school, or they love Pilsen because it’s hip, it’s an up-andcoming community. Which is great—we love to see diverse ages, races, ethnicities— but this is home to me, I want to raise my daughter here, where the air is clean, she can drink the water, she can go to a great neighborhood school. That’s where families come in. In order to keep working-class families here, we have to provide resources for home ownership. There’s a lot of resources there today most people don’t know about, but how we preserve [affordable housing] today is, what we can do as an alderman is work with the new [Cook County] Assessor.

Let’s provide some property tax freezes for families that have been here for at least ten years, especially on the Paseo trail that we’re building.

There have been a lot of renters who have been displaced in the last few years—not younger people here for school, but longtime residents. Do you have any thoughts on ways to make Pilsen a place for those people in the community to come back to?

Absolutely. What some other wards are doing, and even some other cities, is they’re creating pool preservation through nonprofits. What they used to do back in the day that they don’t do today is, nonprofits would buy property—they would use city funding or state funding to buy property— and they would create affordable units, and they would help tenants with their credit scores with job placements. And over the

course of the years, they would monitor that, and if the tenant is on the right track, [the nonprofit] actually sold the house to them.

These are people who never thought in their lifetime that they would own a home. These are programs I want to bring back to the community—create that pool preservation, where it’s affordable units, but also give people an opportunity to buy to help them with management of funding, give them job placement opportunities, because that’s what everyone wants, right?

One of the biggest things that’s become controversial in this election is Danny Solís, and people’s associations with him.

You’ve been very critical of him recently, but you were also endorsed by him in 2015.

How would you describe that relationship prior to 2015?

When I ran for state rep, he endorsed me, but really, he wasn’t involved in my campaign, didn’t give me a single penny, no resources. Quite frankly, I don’t see what his endorsement included besides his way of saying, “Oh, I supported Alex.” But when I was unsuccessful at winning, the very next day, I hosted a clean-and-green, where we got neighbors together and cleaned the street. And I continued to do that— creating the neighborhood watch coalition and building things—and then I would be approached by people in the community, got calls from some reporters, got calls from some of Solís’s volunteers and precinct captains: “Hey, are you running against him?” I’m like, “Why? The election’s not for another three years.” “But why are you doing these things?” I said, “Look, when I ran for state rep, 5,000 people just in Pilsen came out to vote for me. They believe in me, and I can’t turn my back on them, so at least I can be of service for them.” And it continued to build, build, build, because I saw the neglect that Solís has been doing. All along, from development, to lack of accountability, to being there for people, and that’s when I knew that someone had to do it. You can’t sit on the sidelines.

I’m not my father. My father, he was a state rep, he served his time in public service, but he comes from a different industry: he was a police officer, I’m a nurse. He has a different story on why he ran for office, and I have mine. Growing up, I always told my parents, I didn’t want to get involved in politics and become a police officer, I wanted to get involved in being at the bedside with patients. I became a nurse because my

grandpa was confined to a wheelchair for so many years—he had chronic diabetes— and he would call me and say, “Hey mijo, can you take me to the doctor?” And I’m eighteen years old and was like, “Grandpa, it’s Saturday, I want to hang out with my friends.” But I took him. I had a car, a Dodge Intrepid, and I would take him every other week, and it was the nurses who provided the advocacy for him.

Over the years, I don’t know what my father’s relationship with Solís was. But for me today, I was running before Solís decided he was going to retire. He was boasting: “Oh, more candidates, I’m gonna win.” But I stood strong, and I was listening to residents.

I was out there knocking on doors. I was getting petitions. I was being vocal against Solís, because the people needed change. Ellen Mayer is the former politics editor of the Weekly. She last helped coordinate coverage of the 2019 municipal elections for the Weekly, and covered the 25th Ward race.

On the Corner At the intersection of 63rd and Cottage Grove, developers are shaping Woodlawn’s future by curating its past

DAVON CLARK

BY MAX BUDOVITCH

With the Obama Presidential Center proposed for Jackson Park, the University of Chicago’s continuing development along 61st Street, and a myriad of other projects large and small, residents are asking: what will Woodlawn become? This is the third article in a series investigating the past, present, and future of the neighborhood.

O

n the morning of March 7, the Jewel-Osco at 61st Street and Cottage Grove is packed for its grand opening. A half-dozen greeters welcome each new customer, and another

hands out roses to those leaving. Jewel’s cyclopean, gender-neutral mascot, JoJo, makes an appearance, as does 20th Ward Alderman Willie Cochran who, a few days prior, announced he would plead guilty in his corruption trial and resign from his position on March 17.

But back to the opening: many of the store’s products are on sale through the weekend and, as company president Paul Gossett notes, there are items from over thirty local or minority vendors. “There was a movie that came out a few years ago about dreams, called Field of Dreams,” he

says, adding that, earlier that morning, forty people had waited outside locked doors for the supermarket to open. “And it’s true—‘If you build it, they will come.’”

Delivered on a makeshift stage in front of the baked goods section and a backdrop that says “Welcome to Woodlawn,” Gossett’s short speech comes after a brisk performance from the South Shore Drill Team. He’s followed by others: an eighthgrader at MetroSquash, a local nonprofit; Margaret Brewer, a longtime resident; and Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who touts his administration’s success in bringing

grocery stores to neighborhoods across the South Side. “If you’re gonna call yourself a Chicagoland store, you have to be in every part of Chicago,” he says. “And all of you, you’ve got a grocery store. Shop here, will ya?”

After the event has, by all indications, ended—the dais with the microphone has been removed and Rahm has shuffled off to the next item on his agenda—Cochran steps to the front of the makeshift stage and begins speaking, his voice only a decibel or two louder than the chatter of the dispersing crowd. “Who is that?” one woman mutters.

MARCH 13, 2019 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 9

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“All of you, you’ve got a grocery store. Shop here, will ya?”

—Rahm Emanuel After a minute, someone mercifully hands him a microphone; as it turns out, he’s making a point about who deserves credit.

“This store is here because a plan was put in place and executed. Over thirty years ago, I started working with Bishop Brazier and his son Arthur Brazier to bring more programming and community involvement than ever before. I’m proud to be standing here today and saying we played a major role in bringing this here.”

Two blocks south of the Jewel, at the intersection of 63rd Street and Cottage Grove, things are quiet. People wait for buses and a loose chain of people, separated one from the other at a block’s length, stretches to the north, south, east, and west.

They’re coming to ride downtown on the train, which shakes the elevated tracks over 63rd Street at even intervals.

On one corner stands Cosmo Beauty, its wide interior an array of makeup, wigs, and jewelry.

On another, an abandoned bank building, with one foot of water in its basement and a crumbling façade. Its back door has been propped open by scrappers.

On the third corner, there is a restaurant, Daley’s, that will soon open on one end of the ground floor of a new, colorful building.

The rest of its frontage is vacant.

On the fourth corner, there is a low building with a small crowd standing outside; there’s almost always a man selling loose cigarettes from under his coat.

Inside, there’s a currency exchange, a nowshuttered liquor store, and several other shops, including the old Daley’s. Hardly any of those still there will remain for long— the nonprofit that built the affordable housing development across the street has bought this building, too, and told most of the businesses to leave. Some owners, like the man who runs the currency exchange, wanted to stay. “They’re trying to modernize it,” he said of the intersection. “‘Gentrify’ is a word, but I don’t know if that’s what’s going on. I’d like to be a part of the improvement.”

As it is, he’ll be moving out at the end of April.

The low building, and nearly every 10 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

¬ MARCH 13, 2019

shop in it, will make way for a commercial development that will house new, mainstream businesses in a part of the city that has not, in the past, attracted the retail and amenities many of its residents want. If they succeed, the developers think that they will prove a theory of how investment can transform a neighborhood—a theory that dictates what can stay, what must go, and, importantly, who decides.

O

n a recent afternoon, Jeanne Clark, a community leader from West Woodlawn, drove her car slowly down St. Lawrence Avenue, craning her neck to get a view of the sturdy brick twoflats on either side. She pointed at the homes: one on the left, then on the right, then on the left again. “Airbnb,” she said with each jab. On the weekends, people drive in from Chatham and Beverly to walk the streets that they last lived on as children, before their parents decided to move out to more stable neighborhoods. They are back, looking for open house signs.

Running through this flurry of interest and investment, 63rd Street, Woodlawn’s primary commercial corridor, features several hair salons and beauty stores, a church, a currency exchange, a liquor store, two schools, a café, a sit-down restaurant, several clothing stores, and a public library, among a number of other institutions. While this may sound like a lot, consider that the street runs for a mile and a half through Woodlawn and is flanked by the homes of over 23,000 residents. With people buying up property and visitors lugging bags to Airbnb’s, why isn’t 63rd Street keeping up?

As Natalie Moore described in her book The South Side, the dominant retail options in many Black neighborhoods are fringe operations like liquor stores, gas stations, and fast food joints. In a 2006 study that popularized the term “food desert,” researcher Mari Gallagher showed that Black neighborhoods, no matter residents’ incomes, can have trouble attracting mainstream food retailers. Others have gone further, arguing that food deserts are a misnomer, and that we should instead be

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the UofC’s Office of Civic Engagement joined in a partnership they called the “four corners strategy” to coordinate them. They met regularly to share ideas and tenant lists, and hired the international architecture firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill to study the intersection’s potential. DL3 estimated that, in sum, the offices, eateries, and stores in the new developments could employ up to 500 people. 1Woodlawn email chains started to hum and fliers went up in bus shelters and shop windows announcing a meeting where the developers would explain their work.

At 6pm on August 23 of last year, hundreds of people assembled in the banquet hall in the Apostolic Church of God at the corner of 63rd Street and Dorchester Avenue. As the several dozen ten-tops filled up, the vast room echoed with friendly conversation. One woman who lived nearby said that she was looking to buy property in Woodlawn. Another man identified himself as a landlord.

The conversations ended when Brazier stepped forward, a speck at the front of

In Walker’s experience, it’s easy to think you are talking to the “community” when you’re actually not. talking about “food apartheid”—the entire system of racial and economic inequality that exists around food access and ownership.

Some developers think the solution is to bring amenities to neighborhoods where they see a need. Leon Walker is the head of DL3 Realty, which he describes as dedicated to accelerating “neighborhood revitalization efforts” by bringing “high impact real estate projects” to “rising urban neighborhoods.”

In 2016, DL3 opened Englewood Square, a commercial development that includes a Whole Foods. (The name of his company stands for Data Level Three, the highest level of data review for stock transactions.)

What Moore and Gallagher might call the effect of racism, Walker calls the “additional persistent risk premium” that investors attach to neighborhoods with the “toughest reputations.”

“Being a UofC business school graduate, I understand economic logic,” Walker told me one evening over sliders at a restaurant in the lobby of a downtown office tower. He often begins a thought by recounting the detailed history of a Chicago neighborhood (he remembers taking the B train from Stony Island to the Loop as a child) and then ends it in a flurry of real estate and investment terminology. In Walker’s view, the commercial aversion to some Black neighborhoods is so exaggerated that the return on an investment can never satisfy the perceived risk. Apart from market-rate capital, Walker says, the only other options are what he calls “charity” and public subsidy, which, in his opinion, “are never sustainable.”

But Walker thinks that private capital investment will flow where there’s available land, neighborhood leadership, investment from a large anchor institution, and development projects that change a neighborhood’s “brand,” as he puts it. You can find anchor institutions—in the case of Woodlawn, it’s the University of Chicago— and available land by looking at Google Maps. The neighborhood leadership is trickier: “In some communities it’s a pastor, in some it’s an alderman. Sometimes it’s a fire captain.” In Walker’s experience, it’s easy to think you are talking to the “community” when you’re actually not.

DL3 used private investment to build

the Jewel at Cottage Grove and 61st Street, which he describes as the first full-service grocery store to open in Woodlawn in decades. (A number of smaller grocery stores have cycled through the neighborhood in recent years, and a small Aldi remains open on Cottage Grove near 67th Street.)

Walker’s company also recently bought the 30,000 square foot Cosmo Beauty store on the northwest corner of 63rd and Cottage Grove. It plans to expand the structure to 40,000 square feet, redesign the interior, and lease it to the headquarters of a medical provider along with a retailer—maybe a coffee shop.

Other actors are also trying to change perceptions and attract business to Woodlawn. The Cook County Land Bank Authority, which owns the abandoned, battered, and flooded Washington Park Bank Building on the southwest corner of 63rd and Cottage, is reviewing development proposals for the site. It is the Land Bank’s first large-scale commercial acquisition.

Preservation of Affordable Housing (POAH), a national nonprofit developer, has been planning similar retail spaces for several years. POAH recently demolished a strip mall kitty corner to the bank building in order to build Woodlawn Station, a housing development that contains fiftyfive mixed-income units and 15,000 square feet of retail space. POAH also bought 22,000 square feet of retail space on the intersection’s southeast corner—the building where Daley’s, the liquor store, and the currency exchange are located—where it will construct a commercial development named Woodlawn Crossing.

DL3’s proposed medical facility, CCLBA’s bank building, and POAH’s Woodlawn Station and Crossing will transform the intersection and what Walker calls the “additional persistent risk premium” that hangs over it like the heavy “L” tracks.

But, as Walker pointed out, it is easy to think you are talking to the “community” while planning these developments, when in fact you are only talking to a particular subset. What community is shaping these changes at 63rd and Cottage Grove?

I

f you want to do something in Woodlawn, there’s one group you must speak with: 1Woodlawn, headed by the Reverend Byron Brazier. Brazier, who is also the pastor of the 15,000-member Apostolic Church of God, describes 1Woodlawn as a “designation” of the Network of Woodlawn (which he also leads) that allows residents to gather, discuss, and, ultimately, control what their neighborhood looks like.

As far back as 2005, community leaders and a number of residents drafted a community plan that envisioned new commercial developments at the intersection of 63rd Street and Cottage Grove. By mid-2018, the various projects on each corner of 63rd and Cottage were underway. POAH, the CCLBA, DL3, and

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MARCH 13, 2019 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 11

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Reality Itself Is Always Already The Case. the room to those in the furthest corners.

Brazier’s relaxed fingers held a microphone, which projected his voice over the heads of the audience and through two pyramidal chandeliers. Behind him, a projected slide read “Vision – Self-Determination and Sustainability.” “If we don’t make sure the community is self-determined,” he told the audience, “someone else will make the decisions for us.”

Brazier invited Rob Rose, executive director of the CCLBA, to outline the Land Bank’s participatory development process.

“It’s my third meeting here today, and I’m out of RFPs,” Rose told the audience, referring to the draft of a Request For Proposals that would guide the redevelopment of the bank building on Cottage Grove. “I didn’t know I had to bring 500.” A gentle, rolling laugh rose through the hall.

The Land Bank acquired the decrepit building in 2017, taking it over in a tax sale from Leon Finney, the longtime community organizer who, along with Brazier and Brazier’s father, has steered the direction of much of Woodlawn’s development for the past half century. After the acquisition, Rose wanted to set the tone for the development by involving neighbors in determining its ultimate use. He learned that Kendra Freeman, the director of community engagement at the Metropolitan Planning Council (MPC), had a method to do just that.

The MPC’s Corridor Development Initiative consists of three public meetings, online polling, and a final report that the MPC’s website says allows developers to “understand local opportunities and values” and gives residents a “starting point for discussions with developers.”

1Woodlawn, with its resident base and organized sub-neighborhood leadership, could have been a one-stop-shop for Freeman to invite the community to the process. Instead, she twice convened an advisory council comprised of about fifteen people from several neighborhood groups: the Woodlawn Summit, Blacks in Green, Harris Park Advisory Council, West Woodlawn Coalition, Woodlawn Chamber of Commerce, Woodlawn Neighbors Association, and 1Woodlawn, as well as representatives from the Chicago Public Library, Cook County Land Bank Authority, and the Chicago Park District.

The advisory council’s outreach efforts were supposed to draw a large cross-section of Woodlawn residents to the meetings.

At the first meeting in January of 12 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

¬ MARCH 13, 2019

2018, however, only twenty-six percent of attendees (about 100 people) lived in Woodlawn. (Thirty-one percent said they neither lived nor worked in Woodlawn.)

Fifty-one percent of the respondents were homeowners—contrast that with the more than seventy percent of the community area’s residents that are actually renters.

Afterward, the advisory council took measures to involve more renters and local residents. They made calls, knocked on doors, and left fliers at the POAH property management office, the Strand, Parkway Gardens, local libraries, Park District buildings, and schools, with a special focus on locations west of Cottage Grove, which had a low showing at the first meeting.

At the second meeting, one week later, the proportion of respondents who were homeowners went up to sixty-eight percent.

Freeman said that the advisory council did a good job of reaching out to residents.

She noted, however, that trying to get people to meetings by leaving fliers, or even door knocking, doesn’t always work when people have multiple commitments, multiple jobs, or childcare responsibilities. To revise Walker’s formula, then, the advisory council’s experience suggests that you might know exactly who in the community you need to talk to—and even where they live— but still be unable to reach them.

The Land Bank’s final RFP, based on the input of those meeting participants and online respondents that said they lived in Woodlawn, echoed Walker’s concept of risk premium. “The greatest impediment to sustain growth in the community,” it noted, “is the public perception that the area is not safe.” It calls for a “high-quality” development including “retail, commercial, medical services, and local and national tenants, that reflect the tastes, incomes, and needs of the immediate neighborhood and broader communities.” It states that this will “draw more people to this intersection, improve people’s perception of safety and… disrupt negative activities currently taking place.”

Several developers submitted proposals to an RFP committee created by the Land Bank, which then asked for more information on financing and floor plans from three finalists. DL3’s plan, submitted together with another development company, is to demolish the existing building and erect a commercial structure that might house a major bank—it’s one of the finalists. The Land Bank is expected to pick the winning proposal later this week.

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DEVELOPMENT

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T

he “negative activities” mentioned in the RFP are clustered along the south side of 63rd Street. Getting rid of them has become a target of the organizations that created the “four corners strategy”: Rob Rose, of the Land Bank, thinks that removing or renovating the “blighted” bank building will “discourage stuff happening in front of it,” and POAH plans to turn the low-slung building across from the bank into Woodlawn Crossing, its planned commercial development.

On a cold November day, several men in heavy coats stood on the sidewalk outside the low-slung building. Several feet away, on the corner of Cottage Grove, plush toys and an empty liquor bottle propped

against a small wooden cross formed an impromptu memorial. Outside the currency exchange, one of the men had an open pack of Newports tucked inside his coat, which he produced for passersby with a dollar. He ducked into the exchange between sales to warm up.

He said he knew where the exchange was going to move when POAH demolishes the building. “Over there,” he said, pointing to a vacant storefront next to the new Daley’s location in POAH’s Woodlawn Station.

But it’s not that simple. When it bought the building, POAH coordinated with the UofC, DL3, the Land Bank, the Network of Woodlawn, and 1Woodlawn to decide which of the old tenants—among them the

currency exchange, a liquor store, a food mart, a Boost Mobile store, and Daley’s— would be invited across the street into the newly completed Woodlawn Station, and which would see their leases expire and be told to move on.

Ultimately, of the low-slung building’s old tenants, only Daley’s got the green light to move in. Konrad Schlater, the Chicagoarea vice president at POAH, said that ten years of work redeveloping the affordable housing complex called Grove Parc, of which Woodlawn Station is a part, provided his office with an idea of what kind of things Woodlawn residents wanted to see at the corner of 63rd and Cottage Grove.

At multiple 1Woodlawn meetings and

elsewhere, he recalls residents asking for a dry cleaner, coffee shop, and sit-down restaurant. “Improving the commercial amenities in the neighborhood,” he recalled, was a theme.

So long as tenants have a business plan and can help POAH pay off its loan, Schlater says that POAH is open to startups and local entrepreneurs, and is “really trying to support Black-owned businesses.” POAH’s retail selections, he said, should be viewed as “keeping our promise to the neighborhood.”

Apart from Daley’s, POAH plans to lease space to a yoga studio called Blue Lotus and a Black-owned UPS franchise.

Some, however, think that POAH’s plans are flawed.

MARCH 13, 2019 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 13

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DAVON CLARK

Just like the man selling Newports had said, the owner of the currency exchange wanted to move into Woodlawn Station.

He does not want to reveal his name due to security concerns—he said that he lives within city limits, and is the person with the key to the money box. Once POAH bought the building, the owner of the currency exchange got a meeting with Schlater, at which he presented a booklet outlining plans for a “modern and clean storefront,”including a basic architectural rendering for new teller booths. “I’ll build a nice store,” the owner, who owns two other currency exchanges in nearby neighborhoods, says he told Schlater.

He argued that, with approximately 59,000 14 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

¬ MARCH 13, 2019

individual transactions during 2018, the exchange “could be a cornerstone to the building [Woodlawn Station]” that would fuel economic activity in neighboring shops.

According to the owner, Schlater said, “You don’t fit with our plan.”

A

t an intimate 1Woodlawn breakout meeting in November, a disgruntled resident speculated that POAH was “pushing the currency exchange out” from the site to disperse the crowd that stands at the door. In so doing, he said, the neighborhood would lose a key business that serves people who don’t have bank accounts, sometimes due to their mistrust

in banks. In the four years leading up to the 2008 financial crisis, a mortgage lender steered 15,000 Black and Latinx residents of Illinois into loans on which they paid higher interest than white borrowers. Foreclosures hit Woodlawn particularly hard. Residents left, and so did new investment.

The impact of the 2008 foreclosures made POAH’s work to turn Woodlawn into a mixed-income “community of choice” difficult. To attract investment, amenities, jobs, and housing to the corner of 63rd and Cottage, or anywhere else in Woodlawn, Schlater needed to “be able to tell a story of the neighborhood and how things are improving.” What Schlater saw when he

looked at the low-slung building across the street from Woodlawn Station was not helping. Sometimes that’s showed up in more concrete ways: POAH tried to get Ain’t She Sweet Cafe, a small Black-owned eatery and bakery with locations in Bronzeville and Beverly, to open in Woodlawn Station, but the cafe backed out after the windows of their new store were shot out last year.

While a corner without a currency exchange might help investment, some neighborhood residents say it’s a necessity.

At POAH’s mixed-income housing development just up the street, a longtime tenant sat in a community room with several other residents and community organizers.

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“We need that currency exchange in this community,” she said. Another resident seconded.

Inside the exchange on a recent day, a customer leaned into the teller’s thick glass, trying to get a glimpse of something on the other side. The teller looked at the screen of her phone as the customer craned her neck.

“Happy third birthday!” she finally said, and turned the phone to show the customer her video chat with a toddler. The customer smiled widely and waved.

Stacey, one of the tellers, was happy to chat through the glass about the exchange’s fate. She said that she gathered hundreds of signatures on a petition to keep the currency exchange on the corner, which she submitted to POAH’s Woodlawn Park property management office. She lives in Hyde Park, and worked for fifteen years at an exchange in South Shore before coming to this one five years ago.

From behind the glass, the tellers build personal relationships with people.

Sometimes, Stacey said, elderly customers will bring her their mail, which she reads and explains to them. She said that some people who live to the west on 63rd Street prefer to come to her, fearing that they will be robbed after using the exchange at King Drive. As we spoke, a man doing business at another teller window yelled out “Y'all my peoples!” The tellers smiled. Another man eating fried chicken from a tray of crumpled white paper entered the store. The teller told him to show her what he was eating and asked where he got it from.

The men standing outside—those pursuing “negative activities”—also have connections to the larger Woodlawn community. In the food market around the corner, a man named Warren, who lives in POAH’s mixed-income development up the street and has worked at the liquor store in the low-slung building for years, explained the impromptu memorial. It was for a man named Biggy, he said, who had hung out on the corner since around 1987. Everyone knew Biggy, though few knew his full name. Last year, Biggy walked Woodlawn’s streets collecting signatures for aldermanic candidate Andre Smith. But in the middle of the night in late 2018, Biggy died in a car accident. His father had set up the small memorial on the corner. Standing in the food mart, Warren brought up a picture of a large, smiling man on his phone. “He wasn’t a bad guy,” Warren said.

At the meeting, others expressed the opinion that POAH’s unwillingness to host

the currency exchange is part of a trend in the neighborhood. A community organizer was in the room with the tenants. “Me myself, I think POAH is pushing people out of the community,” she said. “I think so too,” a resident said. “Gentrification,” another summarized. “It’s called gentrifi-push-out,” the organizer responded.

Even though POAH is not hosting the exchange, it worked to find it a new home. In accordance with federal regulations, POAH hired staff to help the exchange and other businesses relocate. They also are providing relocation payments to each business in the range of forty thousand dollars.

Sitting in his office adorned with selections from the rare genre of exchangethemed posters (one reads, “COLD HARD CASH,” with an image of a bill encased in ice), the owner of the currency exchange leaned over to knock on the outer wall of the store, which reverberated like the steel hull of a submarine. This is the “cage,” he explained, which encases every currency exchange in the country and makes them time-consuming and expensive to build.

POAH might have to provide additional relocation money to cover the price.

The exchange’s owner is eyeing Alderman Willie Cochran’s office at 6357 S. Cottage Grove for his new location. POAH agreed to extend the owner’s lease through April to accommodate the move, though the owner says that it still does not leave enough time to build a new store. Schlater says that there is no intention to push the exchange out of the neighborhood, deny residents its services, or gentrify the area. He sees the issue as a limited one, having to do with POAH’s leasing decisions in a single building, and the positive story that he needs to tell on behalf of the neighbors who came out to public meetings, said they wanted new retail, and suggested they wanted the people who stand on the corner gone.

The owner, who will soon need to either move his exchange or close it for good, explained that he can’t stand the people who stand outside his shop. “I’ve called the police—they don’t do anything.” Then again, he continued, “It’s their right to stand where they want to.” If the new owners want to address it, he’d tell them, “Get a foot soldier on the street and shoo them away.”

M

ike Zar is one of the few businesspeople who will outlast the changes that the developers are bringing to the intersection. Zar will soon move into the new Woodlawn Station

across the street along with the rest of the restaurant, but for now he runs the 127-yearold Daley’s from his small, paper-stuffed office in the basement of the low-slung building. You’ll have more luck finding him in the restaurant’s kitchen, where he prefers to spend most of his time. On a rainy day last November, he bunched his food-stained apron in his hand and walked across the street to show off his new space, then under construction.

“Twelve feet of grill, six burner range, six foot steam table, on-site butcher,” he narrated as he paced through the empty rooms that will become the new kitchen.

Since POAH demolished the Grove Parc affordable housing development that stretched from 63rd to 61st Street along Cottage Grove and replaced it with the new, mixed-income community, Zar says that more UofC students are coming from their dorms along 61st Street to eat. To accommodate the additional clients, he has scaled up from 137 seats to 180. There is an annex for large parties as well as an online ordering app.

Few will complain about the expanded and upgraded Daley’s. Woodlawn residents have been waiting and working for decades to recoup the loss of shops, restaurants, grocery stores, and theatres that began in the 1950s. Soon, where Biggy hung out on the corner, where scrappers now mull through the abandoned bank building, and where the few shoppers who haven’t defected to Amazon roam the aisles at Cosmo Beauty, developers will transform the intersection by erecting office buildings that will hold hundreds of workers.

Leon Walker is working on reducing the neighborhood’s additional persistent risk premium. Byron Brazier calls developer after city official after hired consultant before his crowd while he judiciously checks his watch. Eyeing the currency exchange, Rose thinks that “owners need to take responsibility for what’s going on…To work closely with [the Chicago Alternative Policing Strategy, Chicago’s community policing program].” POAH agrees: Konrad Schlater talked about “keeping our promise to the neighborhood” and his colleague, Bill Eager, described what is happening as “a window of opportunity in Woodlawn to do comprehensive community development that could be a national model.”

T

Grove were bright lights, scuffed linoleum tiles, and customers slowly walking the aisles. The manager, working the cash register, wore blue latex gloves over his thin hands and clear, wrap-around woodshop glasses. The gloves were flaccid from overuse and yellowed in the creases. If you asked him why he wore them, he gave a close-lipped smile. Speaking quietly and quickly one day last November, he explained that the store’s lease would soon end. (A few months later the store closed.)

A woman asked him to hand her a bottle of liquor from behind the counter.

She held it gingerly in her hand and stared at the small orange sticker that read 12.99.

After several seconds, the manager said, “I’ll give it to you for 9.99.” She continued to stare. “That’s three dollars off,” he said.

Without looking up, she brought her purse close to her face to carefully check what was inside, and then let the purse fall by her side.

She placed the bottle on the counter, told the manager not to forget the discount, and left the store. Next in line was an older man with alcohol on his breath. He sat several bottles down and asked, “You leaving?” The manager nodded. The man smiled widely.

“We need you!” he boomed. Max Budovitch is a contributor to the Weekly.

hrough the doors of Fair Discount liquor in the low-slung building at the corner of 63rd and Cottage MARCH 13, 2019 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 15

JUSTICE

Between Reform and Retribution Stateville Calling looks at one man’s fight against a failed justice system

BY WENDY RANDOM

T

he artwork and poetry of inmates lined the walls. Mid-afternoon on a Saturday in February, there was an intimate gathering of people at Art on 51st, a gallery in Back of the Yards. They came to hear the story of Bill Ryan, of the people of Illinois, and of a failing justice system.

Stateville Calling directed by Ben Kolak and released by Scrappers Film Group, recounts one man’s mission to bring a chance of parole or clemency to elderly inmates who, due to Illinois’ unique criminal justice system, are currently serving lengthy or life sentences.

Art on 51st is part of religious nonprofit Precious Blood Ministry of Reconciliation, which has advocated for restorative justice and healing since its founding in 2000. The artwork and poetry on display also comes from inmates at Stateville Correctional Center, a notorious maximum-security prison near Joliet. Developed through the Prison + Neighborhood Arts Project, which unites teachers and artists with men at Stateville, offering workshops, guest lectures, and other studies to inmates.

In 1978, the state of Illinois abolished its discretionary parole system. This controversial decision has led to overcrowded prisons as sentencing terms have become 16 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

¬ MARCH 13, 2019

longer to replace the parole system. This issue is only amplified for elderly inmates: according to the film, it costs taxpayers approximately $67,000 a year to incarcerate an elderly inmate, making it cost twice as much than a younger traditional inmate.

Stateville Calling focuses not on an inmate, but on Ryan: an eighty-two-year-old prisoner’s rights activist, and his endeavor to give elderly prisoners facing long-term and life sentences a second chance in life. His primary aim is to fight for their freedom, or at least the possibility of parole, working with men housed in Stateville and women in the Springfield-area Logan Correctional Center. Ryan, a faithful Catholic and former social worker, is originally from Kentucky, and strongly believes in forgiveness and human transformation. Speaking in the film about this transformation, Ryan said, “It doesn’t happen overnight, but it doesn’t take a lifetime.” However, the documentary shows that the state’s criminal justice system has not been open to recognizing inmates’ ability to change.

The documentary demonstrates Ryan’s utmost efforts to defend long term inmates.

In the film, Ryan attends countless meetings with legislators and opens his heart to the

stories of numerous inmates over the phone and in person. Charles Hoffman, an assistant defender in the Office of the Illinois State Appellate Defender, said in the film that Ryan was one of the most influential activists involved in the state’s abolishment of the death penalty in 2011.

At the end of the film screening, a few special guests discussed their personal experiences with incarceration. Among these guests was Eric Blackmon, a former Stateville inmate who was wrongfully accused of a murder he did not commit in 2002 and served roughly seventeen years in prison. He became a paralegal while serving time and represented himself during his court appeals. In January, Cook County prosecutors dropped all charges against him and made him a free man. Blackmon is now a full time paralegal at the Lawndale Christian Legal Center, and offers his unique personal perspective to assist disadvantaged clients, including inmates.

The other speaker was Melissa Gallardo, the wife of longtime inmate and Pilsen native Benny Rios. Rios has already been in prison for seventeen years in Stateville, but his sentence is forty-five years to life. Gallardo explained her point of view as a visitor in

the correctional facility, saying that too many people judge the ones who are incarcerated, not understanding that a lot of inmates change for the better. At one point, the prison previously restricted her from communicating with her husband, and written letters would take up to two months at a time to arrive.

During visits, prison guards would also make negative comments toward to her to hurt her relationship with her husband. She admitted that her daughters now have a hard time visiting Benny in prison because they know the experience will be unpleasant.

Her husband will be attending his clemency hearing next month. Having exhausted all of his appeals, this will be his final chance at a reduced sentence. Gallardo however still has hope the state will recreate its parole system. This hope may be well-founded: the Illinois legislature passed a bill in November which provides parole opportunities to new offenders who commit crimes as minors, which is currently on Governor J.B. Pritzker’s desk. Although the bill does not address the elderly or the currently incarcerated, it is a step in the right direction.

In a call to action, Melissa Gallardo tells the audience, “Just keep fighting. Get involved. Even if you don’t have a loved one incarcerated. My husband has grown so much in there. He is a totally different man and change is possible. We see it every day. If we look at ourselves seventeen years ago, we were not the same person as we are today, so get involved... Pass the word.”

Eric Blackmon echoed Gallardo’s call to action in his concluding remarks. “I would just say, just keep fighting. Whether there’s parole, whether it’s sentencing, whether it’s fighting for a different statute,” he said. “Just speak out. Speak up... You just gotta keep fighting.” Disclosure: Jill Petty, the Prison + Neighborhood Arts Project’s co-director of community building, is a member of the Weekly’s board of directors Stateville Calling will be screened next at the Statehouse Inn, 101 E. Adams St., in Springfield, on Tuesday, March 26, 7pm– 9pm. It will be followed by a discussion with Illinois Innocence Project executive and legal director John Hanlon. Free. bit.ly/ StatevilleCallingSpringfield Wendy “Random” Chavez is a contributor to the Weekly and photographer and writer from Los Angeles who is currently living on the South Side. She last contributed an interview with WHPK DJ K-Max last August.

BULLETIN Long Over Due Discussion Group Hall Branch Library, 4801 S. Michigan Ave. Wednesday, March 13, 4pm–6pm. Free and open to all. For more information email odysseyprojectbookgroup@ilhumanities.org Long Over Due is a series of regular discussions throughout the city sponsored

by Illinois Humanities to share the works of authors who believe in the power of the written word to support ideas of freedom and liberation. Previous discussions have included the works of James Baldwin and Audre Lorde. This discussion will feature guest author (and Weekly contributor) Paris Smith, reading his short story “The Heartbeat of the City,” from his Subterranean Tales collection. Sylvia Taylor will facilitate the discussion. Light refreshments will be served. (Nicole Bond)

Community Conversations: Criminalization Won’t Save Us Sanctuary Cafe, 5655 S. University Ave. Thursday, March 14, 7pm–8:30pm. Free. bit. ly/CriminalizationConversation Community and activist groups, including BYP100, Black Lives Matter Chicago, and other members of the #EraseTheDatabase Campaign, will host this community education and discussion forum for residents to learn about the CPD’s gang database, how it’s used, and what the efforts are to end its use. (Sam Stecklow)

East Side Renovation Plan Community Meeting Vodak-East Side Branch Library, 3710 E. 106th St. Friday, March 15, 3pm–5pm. Free with RSVP. bit.ly/ EastSideRenovationPlanMeeting Following the release of a new Calumet River communities framework plan by UIC’s Great Cities Institute, Far Southeast Side stakeholders will be getting together in a series of community meetings on how to best implement that plan. Free pizza and refreshments will be served. (Sam Stecklow)

10th Annual Woodlawn Community Summit University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration, 969 E. 60th St. Saturday,

March 16, 8am–12:30pm. Free with registration. secc-chicago.org Join neighbors, community leaders, and experts at the tenth annual Woodlawn Community Summit, hosted by the South East Chicago Commission. Events include an information session on homeownership on the South Side, a panel on economic development in Woodlawn, and a meetand-greet with the runoff candidates for the 5th and 20th Ward races. Featuring special guest Jahmal Cole of My Block My Hood My City. (Sam Stecklow)

Book Talk: Elizabeth ToddBreland, A Political Education Woodson Regional Library, 9525 S. Halsted St. Saturday, March 16, 2pm–3:30pm. Free. bit.ly/2SUhD3O Historian and educator Elizabeth ToddBreland discusses her recently-released history of Black politics and teachers organizing, A Political Education. Sponsored by the Chicago Public Library's Women's History Committee. (Sam Stecklow)

Chicago Sun-Times, Chicago Reporter, and AARP Community Forum Arturo Velasquez Institute of the City Colleges of Chicago, 2800 S. Western Ave. Monday, March 18, 7pm–9pm. Free with registration. bit.ly/VelasquezCommunityForum Make your voice be heard and listen to your neighbors at this community forum on the issues that matter most to you in the upcoming mayoral runoff. Panelists include Chicago Reporter editor-in-chief Fernando Diaz, Sun-Times columnist Mark Brown, the AARP’s Rosanna Marquez, and Sun-Times reporter and former Weekly contributor Carlos Ballesteros. Toni Preckwinkle and Lori Lightfoot have both been invited, but only as “active listeners.”

(Sam Stecklow)

Aldermanic Runoff Debates 25th Ward: Benito Juarez Community Academy, 1450 W. Cermak Rd. Wednesday, March 20, 6pm–9pm. Free with registration. bit.ly/25thWardPilsenDebate 25th Ward: Pui Tak Center, 2216 S. Wentworth Ave. Thursday, March 21, 5:30pm–8pm. Free. bit. ly/25thWardChinatownDebate

20th Ward: Akarama Foundation, 6220 S. Ingleside Ave. Sunday, March 24, 2pm– 3:30pm. Free. bit.ly/20thWardRunoffDebate If you’re not deathly sick of election talk by now, and you live in a ward with a runoff election (on the South Side, that’s the 5th, 6th, 15th, 16th, 20th, 21st, 25th, and potentially 12th Wards), there are likely going to be debates and forums you can attend—the ones listed were just the ones we could locate by press time. Even if you don’t attend one of these events—don’t forget to vote! (Sam Stecklow)

VISUAL ARTS Feminism in Your Face: Public Art Resistance Glass Curtain Gallery, 1104 S. Wabash Ave. Thursday, March 14, 5:30pm–7pm. bit.ly/ FeminismInYourFace Presented by Neysa Page-Lieberman—a contemporary art curator, lecturer, writer, and educator—Feminism in Your Face features conversations with various artists and organizations on the creative and influential place women have in the public realm while also highlighting the various obstacles they face, such as harassment and microaggressions. Page-Lieberman will be joined by Sam Kirk of Provoke Culture, Meida McNeal of Honey Pot Performance, and Gloria Talamantes of Mujeres Mutantes. (Roderick Sawyer)

Celebrating Mexica New Year & Spring Equinox 2130 W. 21st St. Sunday, March 17, 12pm– 6pm. bit.ly/2T1edfP Come celebrate the Mexica New Year and spring equinox! There will be a macrame bracelet making workshop ($8–$15), Mexica New Year platica and Ofrenda, Community Acupuncture (by sliding scale), and much more. (Roderick Sawyer)

Synergy Album Release + Exhibition & All Style B-Girl Battle Stage Two, 618 S. Michigan Ave. Friday, March 15, 7pm–10pm. $10 presale, $15 day of, free for college students with ID. bit.ly/ SynergyAlbumRelease.

Come for a night full of festivity and good MARCH 13, 2019 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 17

EVENTS

energy following Synergy’s album release.

In partnership with Columbia College Chicagos Black Student Union, Jovan Landry celebrates the production of an allwomen’s produced and performed hip-hop album. The release event features Chicago Women/Femme MCs, DJs, Producers, B-Girls and Visual Artists. (Roderick Sawyer)

MUSIC Literally Every Possible Way to Eat a Potato and Hear Live Music House of Heavy Petting, ask a punk.

Wednesday, March 13, 7pm–11pm. $5. bit.ly/ potato-music No, the potato thing is not a joke. Come through to the House of Heavy Petting for an assortment of spud-foods (baked potatoes, potatoes au gratin, latkes, etc) and starchy live music from Tenci, Henry Hank, Izzy True, and Camp Counselor.

(Christopher Good)

Winter Blue with J Bambii and Manasseh Experimental Station, 6100 S. Blackstone Ave. Friday, March 15, 6pm–9pm. $5 donation, pay what you can. (773) 241-6044. bit.ly/winter-blue-march The clocks have sprung forward but A Thing Called Joy has one last installation of its community-building music series, “Winter Blue,” in store. With the help of host J Bambii and special guest Manasseh (performing at 9pm), they’ll present the perfect end to the workweek and to the winter. (Christopher Good)

Young Natives Open Jam Session South Shore Cultural Center, Music Library, 7059 S. South Shore Dr. Friday, March 15, 6pm–8pm. urbanaspirations.org If you’ve been itching to play some live music, we have good news for you: the Young Natives open jam session will be held again this Friday, with the Morgan Park Jazz Combo holding it down as the featured performers. (Christopher Good)

Third Sundays TapJam Harold Washington Cultural Center, 4701 S. King Dr. 2nd floor (use 47th St. entrance).

18 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

¬ MARCH 13, 2019

Sunday, March 17, and the third Sunday of each month after that, 2pm. Free and open to the public. bit.ly/third-sunday-tap Whether you’re interested in selfexpression or aerobics, you can grab your dancing shoes and join the M.A.D.D. Rhythms community for their monthly “TapJam”—a welcoming environment for learning and practicing tap dancing.

(Christopher Good)

Brother El: Sonic Abstractions Smart Museum of Art, 5550 S. Greenwood Ave. Saturday, March 16, 2pm. Free. bit.ly/ SonicAbstractions Exploring the relationship between abstraction and blackness, Lionel ‘‘Brother El” Freeman incorporates synthesizers, samplers, sequencers, and FX as part of his work. Come out to the Smart to see various performances by Brother El in each section of the exhibition, and reflect on your own ideas behind his concepts. Additional performances will happen on Saturdays at 2pm on April 27 and May 18. (Roderick Sawyer)

STAGE & SCREEN La Femme Dance Festival Green Line Performing Arts Center, 329 E. Garfield Blvd. Friday and Saturday, March 15 & 16, 7pm. $10. To reserve seats, visit bit. ly/2SFC5Fj This festival curated by Red Clay Dance Company, Flyground, and Catalyst Movmnt celebrates and showcases choreographic works created by women of Black/African Diaspora descent. Friday’s performance will include a post-show discussion with the choreographers.

Saturday will feature a pre-show talk with curators and choreographers at 6pm and a closing night reception. (Nicole Bond)

Auditions: Buddha Swings Augustana Lutheran Church, 5500 S. Woodlawn Ave. Wednesday, March 13, 6pm–9pm; Friday, March 15, 7pm–9pm; Saturday, March 16, 2pm–5pm. Email cromwelljones53@gmail.com for more information.

Hyde Park Community Players are auditioning for Buddha Swings—a Swing-dance musical about the Buddha

Siddhartha Gautama. The show will run May 3–19 with seven performances, at University Church, 5655 S. University Ave. Come to the audition prepared to sing.

(Nicole Bond)

For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When The Rainbow Is Enuff Court Theatre, 5535 S. Ellis Ave. Thursday March 14–Sunday April 14. $20–$74. (773) 753-4472. courttheatre.org Court Theatre welcomes playwright Ntozake Shange’s most well-known work, from which the genre choreopoem was coined. Director Seret Scott, who performed in the original Broadway production from 1976-1978, weaves Shange’s heartfelt, slice-of-real-life poems, with music and choreographed movement to tell vivid stories through the characters of eight women of color navigating womanhood in sometimes painful yet always powerful ways. (Nicole Bond)

Beyond The Rainbow: Court Community Conversations Various South Side locations. March 14 through April 13. All events are free and open to the public with registration. Visit courttheatre.org to register.

In conjunction with the production of For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When The Rainbow Is Enuff, Court Theatre has curated a series of community engagement programming focusing on themes from the show.

March 14, 5:30pm–7pm A laying on of hands: An Opening Ritual is an opening ceremony presented in collaboration with spiritual leaders from McCormick Theological Seminary and the Lutheran School Theological Seminary, at McCormick Theological Seminary, 5460 S. University Ave. March 24, 4:30pm Phases of womanhood: Dramatists Guild Panel moderated

by Tracie Hall of the Joyce Foundation features five female playwrights of color discussing Ntozake Shange’s influence on their work, at Court Theatre, 5535 S. Ellis Ave. April 1, 7pm Sing your song: A Night of Personal Stories, performers Emily Hooper Lansana, Ann Douglas, LaDonna

Tittle, Kristiana Rae Colon and Kemati Porter present original work in the FCG set.

April 5, 9:15pm there wuz no air: A Community Conversation, is a post-show panel with leaders from men’s and boy’s group discussing what it means to be allies to women, at Court Theatre.

April 8, 6:30pm Spotlight Reading Series: A Tribute To Ntozake is a staged reading of Shange’s play Boogie Woogie Landscapes, at the Experimental Station, 6100 S. Blackstone Ave. April 9, 7pm Exelon South Side Youth Performance – FC Girls Project is dedicated to student work and will be followed by a post show reception at the Smart Museum of Art (directly across the courtyard) catered by Piccolo Mondo.

April 13, 11am–4pm Loving her fiercely: A Day of Wellness features a day of meditation, art, and reiki with a vendor fair of female-run businesses, presented in partnership with the national nonprofit A Long Walk Home, whose work is dedicated to end violence against women and girls. The location for this event is to be announced.

Louder Than A Bomb: Finals Auditorium Theatre, 50 E. Ida B. Wells Dr. (formerly Congress Pkwy). Sunday, March 17.

Doors 5pm. finals 6pm. $20 adults, $10 students. (312) 341- 2300 bit.ly/2VPITSG Louder Than A Bomb (LTAB) is the largest annual youth poetry festival in Chicago (and the world!) Come support all of the top four Team and twelve Indy finalists. But just so you know, representing the South Side for the 2019 Team finalists are Gwendolyn Brooks College Prep. And the 2019 Indy finalists representing the South Side are: DaJona Butler (Gwendolyn Brooks College Prep), Janasia Phillips (Butler College Prep), Derrion Kellum (Butler College Prep), Nilah Foster (Lindblom Math & Science Academy), and Adarah Hale (Kenwood Academy).

Congratulations everyone! (Nicole Bond)

Auditions: Stand Up! eta Creative Arts Foundation, 7558 S. South Chicago Ave. Sunday, March 17, 10am–2pm, and Monday, March 18, 6:30pm–9:30pm. etacreativearts.org/currentauditions

EVENTS

Audition for Stand Up!, a Chicago premier original musical book by Phyllis Curtwright and Kamesha Khan, directed

by Jonathan Wilson and Kemati Porter and about the unsung heroes of the Birmingham Children’s Crusade of 1963. The show will run June 8–29 with a possible summer extension. Prepare a ninety-second contemporary monologue comedy or drama and an a cappella song of any genre. Resume and headshots required.

Sign up for a time slot arrive five minutes prior to your scheduled time. Performances are paid. (Nicole Bond)

FOOD & LAND

is limited; please register in advance at bit. ly/2UvxgQV This coming Sunday, a group of Black and brown farmers will host Leah Penniman, food sovereignty activist and co-founder of New York’s Soul Fire Farm, at KAM Isaiah Israel to discuss her new book, Farming While Black, a “comprehensive manual” for reestablishing the agency of Black farmers in the larger food system. (Emeline Posner)

Illinois Food Policy Teach-In The Plant, 1400 W. 46th St. Wednesday, March 20, 6pm–8pm. Free. Register at bit. ly/2HtBd4D

Pilsen Community Market: Honky Tonk BBQ, 1800 S. Racine Ave. Sundays, 11am– 3:30pm. facebook.com/pilsenmarket

Break bread over this year’s upcoming food and farm related legislation at The Plant.

Hosted by the Chicago Food Policy Action Council and other local groups, this event provides a great opportunity for amateur and professional farmers alike to get a sense of the changes—to cannabis and hoophouse regulations, for example—to come. (Emeline Posner)

Plant Chicago Farmers Market: The Plant, 1400 W. 46th St. The first Saturday of each month, 11am–3pm. plantchicago.org

CCGA 7th Annual Conference: Gardening & Adapting to a Changing Climate

Indoor Farmers Markets 61st Street Farmers Market: Experimental Station, 6100 S. Blackstone Ave. The second Saturday of every month, 9am–2pm. experimentalstation.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)

Chicago River Summit Friends of the Chicago River, 411 S. Wells St., Ste. 800. Thursday, March 14, noon– 5pm. $25, lunch included. Register at bit. ly/2SYprS5 How to protect Chicago’s river corridors and the green spaces that surround them?

At the annual Chicago River Summit, hear from regional conservationists and planners about the importance of prioritizing these spaces—and creating more of them—as the climate changes. (Emeline Posner)

Come learn fundamental journalism skills. All workshops are free and open to the public.

RSVP

bit.ly/sswworkshops

Breakthrough FamilyPlex, 3219 W. Carroll Ave. Saturday, March 30, 9am–2:15pm. $25; $15 for students and children under 18. Meals included. bit.ly/2SIJynb Harboring questions about how the impact of climate change on the growing season? On seed viability? Indoor container gardening? At the seventh annual conference of the beloved Chicago Community Gardening Association, expert gardeners and farmers will answer these questions and more. Word to the wise: free soil testing will be available after lunch, so if you’re curious about heavy metal levels in your garden soil, bring a baggie of soil for an on-the-spot analysis by UofI researchers.

(Emeline Posner)

Farming While Black Book Tour with Leah Penniman KAM Isaiah Israel, 1100 E. Hyde Park Blvd.

Sunday, March 17, noon–3pm. Free. Space MARCH 13, 2019 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 19

Join City Bureau for our

March 21, 2019. 6-8pm 6100 S. Blackstone Ave. Help us celebrate 100 free, public workshops with local TV legend Chic-A-Go-Go! Costume attire encouraged.

Come dance and eat cake with us!

RSVP: tinyurl.com/pn100-PARTY #PN100 City Bureau

@City_Bureau

@City_Bureau