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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 27 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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Contributing Editors Mira Chauhan, Joshua Falk, Carly Graf, Ian Hodgson, Maple Joy, Sam Joyce, Ashvini Kartik-Narayan, Rachel Schastok Amy Qin, Jocelyn Vega Staff Writer Kyle Oleksiuk Data Editor Jasmine Mithani Radio Exec. Producer Erisa Apantaku Social Media Editors Bridget Newsham, Sam Stecklow Director of Fact Checking: Sam Joyce Fact Checkers: Abigail Bazin, Susan Chun, Elizabeth Winkler, Tammy Xu Visuals Editor Ellen Hao Deputy Visuals Editors Siena Fite, Mell Montezuma Lizzie Smith Staff Photographers: milo bosh, Jason Schumer Staff Illustrators: Siena Fite, Natalie Gonzalez, Katherine Hill Interim Layout Editor J. Michael Eugenio Deputy Layout Editor Haley Tweedell Webmaster Managing Director
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The Weekly is produced by an all-volunteer editorial staff and seeks contributions from across the city. We distribute each Wednesday in the fall, winter, and spring. Over the summer we publish every other week. Send submissions, story ideas, comments, or questions to editor@southsideweekly.com or mail to: South Side Weekly 6100 S. Blackstone Ave. Chicago, IL 60637 For advertising inquiries, contact: (773) 234-5388 or advertising@southsideweekly.com
Cover photo by Davon Clark
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
Will the Real Lori Lightfoot Please Stand Up?
ISSUE turning up
“Rahm won, and I was like damn, I
Lori Lightfoot’s inaugural address and transition plan were ambitious and far-reaching. should have voted.” Promising to rethink education and public safety, end water shut-offs, and provide free jade yan..............................................4 medical care to the needy, the new mayor’s days leading up to her first in office were full of sky-high thinking and grand, populist promises. money, money, money: It’s a little funny, then, to compare her rhetoric with her choices for City Council thirteen takeaways from chicago’s committee chairs. (Never mind that, under the written rules, City Council is supposed historic election to choose its own committee chairs.) It’s a bit disheartening to see a plan that so nakedly No alderman spent like Ed Burke, period. rewards allies and punishes enemies, even if a few of those choices end up being good matt kiefer, la risa lynch, for the city as a whole. For instance, independent Scott Waguespack is clearly one of the josh mcghee, asraa mustufa...........5 better possible choices to lead the powerful Finance Committee, as he’s spent his entire tenure pushing back against the horrid financial practices of Mayors Daley and Emanuel. a space of his own But at least one of Lightfoot’s stated reasons for choosing him? He supported her before Throughout Richard Wright’s transitions the runoff election, and she’s “not gonna forget that.” from home to home, and job to job, the On the flip side, no transportation expert or advocate could possibly claim that South Side Writers Group and other Anthony Beale did much of anything as Transportation Committee chair, but it’s clear groups provided a sense of stability. that he’s being stripped of his title—and not being offered another chairmanship—solely kristen jere simmons.......................7 because he spoke out against Lightfoot’s agenda in the press in recent weeks. Other aldermen who supported Toni Preckwinkle are keeping their positions, and Beale is the the last days of rezkoville’s purgatory only City Council veteran to be completely demoted. (At least his replacement, Howard In a city teeming with 2.7 million people, Brookins Jr., offers the possibility we might see some more good anti-squirrel legislation.) the population here is zero. Lightfoot’s other choices inspire about the same amount of confidence. For every good ryan smith.........................................9 choice—hell yes, heir to the legacy of union leader Ed Sadlowski and former CPS counselor Susan Sadlowski Garza should lead the Workforce Development Committee—there are three bad ones. Why conservative Nick Sposato for the Cultural Affairs Committee, aside from the fact that he supported her? Why does perennial reform-killer Michelle Harris get to keep the Rules Committee? After the scandal around the asphalt plant being built directly across the street from McKinley Park by a well-connected industrial developer, what makes George Cardenas qualified to run the Environment Committee? It’s difficult to see how Lightfoot would be able to articulate good answers to these questions, but hey: now that she’s mayor, she doesn’t have to. In By a Hair Fifth Ward aldermanic candidate William Calloway attempted to delay the swearing-in of incumbent Alderman Leslie Hairston, and continues to challenge the Board of Elections’ ruling that Hairston won her fifth term by 176 votes. Calloway, a staunch critic of Hairston who managed to force force an April run-off election between the two, maintains he will file suit to challenge the results, despite a Cook County judge rejecting a temporary restraining order as part of Calloway’s lawsuit. The Tribune reports that Calloway hopes to launch a new vote in four precincts of the South Side ward that includes the University of Chicago. According to the same Tribune report, Hairston spokesperson Delmarie Cobb says that at some point, Calloway will start to look like a sore loser. But he may not be the only one: winning by just 176 votes indicates fairly tepid support for Hairston, and will hopefully serve as a wakeup call to Hairston that her constituency may not be as excited about her win as she is. Unjust Justice in the Courtroom Controversial doesn't even seem to be a strong enough word to describe the recent appointment of Nicholas R. Ford as a U.S. Immigration Court judge in San Francisco. Ford, who retired from the Cook County Circuit Court last month, has a bad track record of biased decision-making in the courtroom. The Chicago Council of Lawyers cited various cases that raised “serious concerns about Judge Ford's ability to decide cases in an impartial manner.” In a 2010 criminal case, Ford denied a defendant’s motion to allow a professor of legal psychology to testify as an expert regarding eyewitness error, citing an unprovable theory that psychologists study eyewitness error to “increase their degree of remuneration… That's a way of saying I think they're in it for the money.” He stated this as coming from “my own personal view,” a decision that was eventually reversed by the Illinois Appellate Court. The San Francisco Bay Area chapter of the National Lawyers Guild has already stepped up, stating, “As someone who has dedicated his career to perpetuating racist state violence, Judge Ford has no place in a courtroom.” MAY 22, 2019 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 3
POLITICS
Turning Up Local organizers discuss how to get youth invested in local elections BY JADE YAN
DAVON CLARK
A
lex Boutros believes in the value of voting. As a community organizer for Chicago Votes, she works with young people to get them excited about civic engagement and to show them why voting should matter to them. But when Boutros first arrived in Chicago as an eighteen-year-old, she didn’t vote in the 2015 mayoral election. The 2015 race had Mayor Rahm Emanuel running for re-election, and culminated in a runoff between Emanuel and then-Cook County Commissioner Jesús “Chuy” García, who has since been elected to Congress. García supporters argued the election held the potential for a shift from Chicago’s corporate Democratic “machine” to more progressive grassroots politics. Boutros had come to Chicago from Michigan, and didn’t know anything about García, Emanuel, or how they fit into the bigger picture of Chicago politics. Instead, as a freshman at DePaul University grappling with new people and places, she wasn’t even aware that elections were happening. It was only after the runoff had passed that Boutros had the chance to learn more about Chicago politics. She began to regret not casting a ballot. “Rahm won, and I was like damn, I should have voted,” she said. At the time, she simply blamed her own negligence. But since then, Boutros’ work as a community organizer has shown her that low voter turnout, particularly among young people aged eighteen to twenty-four, can have more institutional origins. As usual, this year’s February mayoral elections saw far fewer voters than November’s statewide election: some say 4 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY
¬ MAY 22, 2019
holding elections in February is partially due to manipulation by the Chicago machine in a move to protect incumbents. Only 35.45 percent of Chicagoans voted in February 2019, compared to 60.67 percent in November 2018. The runoff between Lori Lightfoot and Toni Preckwinkle saw slightly lower voter turnout, at just 33.08 percent. While newspapers and elected officials traced the low turnout to reasons such as poor February weather and too many candidates—or, in the case of Lightfoot and Preckwinkle, candidates who were too similar—much was also made of the sharp decline in the number of young people who voted, in contrast with the November 2018 elections. In comparison to the 57,221 ballots cast by voters aged eighteen to twenty-four in the November, only 19,495 young voters turned out for the February 2019 elections, according to extrapolated numbers provided by the Chicago Board of Elections this week. (However, this was a notable increase from the 13,839 votes cast by eighteen-to-twenty-four-year olds in the 2015 municipal elections.) Referencing youth protests against the shooting of Laquan McDonald, Sun-Times columnist Mary Mitchell speculated that “maybe the millennials mistakenly thought their work was done.” Shawn P. Healy, democracy program director at IllinoisCivics—a website that provides online civic education—argued in a blog post that accusations against young voters are unfair. Healy pointed out that the turnout for voters aged eighteen to twenty-four was one of the largest increases in turnout among the different age groups from the 2015 municipal election. He
outlined how voter turnout in general tends to decrease when elections have a more local focus, and argued that February’s “coverage of turnout [was] incomplete, and analysis of the underlying reasons for poor participation [was] wanting.” In an op-ed for The Triibe, journalist Charles Preston opposed Mitchell’s column by highlighting the fact that political engagement does not just manifest itself in voting. He named a number of grassroots campaigns started by young Chicagoans, such as Good Kids Mad City, a student-led movement against gun violence and unfair decisions made by government officials, to show just how politically engaged young Chicagoans are. According to Trina Reynolds-Tyler and Maira Khwaja—who do youth voter outreach through their group TM Productions—while these movements do show a level of political engagement, they also highlight lack of faith in the current political system by showing that youth are turning to alternative means to try and achieve political change. “For a lot of people, voting is like choosing to play a part in the government system,” said Khwaja. Chicago’s political system has long been designed to protect incumbents. As a result, many young people have grown up seeing the same name on their ward ballot again and again. 28th Ward Alderman Jason Ervin, for example, has held office since he was appointed to the position by Richard M. Daley in 2011, and in 2015 he ran unopposed after knocking all seven challengers off the ballot with petition challenges. (He attempted to do the same this year, but ended up facing three challengers, whom he
easily bested without a runoff.) This leads to a lack of motivation or even awareness of the possibility for political change. Additionally, for new voters, the mechanisms of voting can be daunting. According to Khwaja, many young voters have actively unpleasant associations with the voting process itself, particularly the computerized process, long ballots, and negative associations with polling places located in institutions such as schools and police stations. “A lot of kids said it reminded them of getting booked, or taking the SAT,” said Khwaja. She explained that the mistrust that many young people have of the government and its officials often makes them reluctant to provide more information about themselves, and thus discourages voting. According to Boutros, “[organizations] can’t simply make voter guides and expect people to read them.” The key is instead to guide a new voter through the electoral process, holding their hand at every stage. “We need to find interesting ways to incorporate voting into our everyday lives,” said Reynolds-Tyler. Grassroots campaigns may be more successful in securing youth support because they are directly applicable to lives of the young people driving them: for example, the high youth participation in campaigns like #NoCopAcademy can be attributed partly to personal negative experiences with the police. Reynolds-Tyler and Khwaja are experimenting with using different forms of media as other ways to inform voters on their local politics. “Voter guides are a lot of words,” said Reynolds-Tyler. “Even for me,
POLITICS
and I’m a master’s student.” Aside from biased campaign ads, there are few, if any, comprehensive non-partisan sources using video or audio. This year, Khwaja and Reynolds used grant funding from the Midwest Culture Lab, a project of the Alliance for Youth Organizing, to experiment with mixed-media work to inform voters in different ways, such as making short videos about runoff candidates Lightfoot and Preckwinkle, in order to provide additional information to complement voter guides. Get-out-the-vote organizers also emphasize the importance of making the voting process fun. In the opinion of Jen Dean, co-deputy director of Chicago Votes, the most effective way to encourage voter turnout is to “turn voting into a celebration.” Chicago Votes organizes events such as Parade To The Polls program and Give A Sh*t Happy Hours, events that make voting both fun and an immediate possibility for those who find it difficult to get to the polls. During Parade to the Polls, organizers travel around the South and West Sides and drive people to the polls. Partnerships also help these organizations reach more voters: Chicago Votes has partnered with the Women’s March and CPS high schools. Boutros works with students in CPS schools to educate them on voting. However, she believes that this kind of education needs to be institutionalized as a fundamental part of school programs, in order to have as widereaching an effect as possible. “It needs to be an effort by the City of Chicago and Chicago Public Schools,” she said. “You can’t just dedicate a couple of lessons to this, and expect students to understand democracy.” As a result, Boutros’ experience working as a get-out-the-vote organizer has given her a different kind of disillusionment with the political system. Although she continues to believe in the immense power of voting, “the more work you do around getting people to vote,” she said, “the more you see the lack of effort the city and the country puts into getting people to vote.” ¬ Editor’s note: Maira Khwaja is a former Weekly editor, and Trina Reynolds-Tyler is a former administrative employee of the Weekly. Both contribute to the Weekly. Jade Yan is a writer for the Weekly. She last wrote about an animal rights activist group that holds vigils around Chicago.
Money, Money, Money: Thirteen Takeaways From Chicago’s Historic Election Dollar for dollar, Mayor-elect Lori Lightfoot spent less than half as much as Toni Preckwinkle to clinch her landslide victory BY MATT KIEFER, LA RISA LYNCH, JOSH MCGHEE, ASRAA MUSTUFA
C
onsidering Chicago’s history of overspending, voters can rest assured their new mayor knows how to squeeze a dollar. A Chicago Reporter analysis of quarterly expenditure reports from the Illinois State Board of Elections shows Mayor-elect Lori Lightfoot not only beat Toni Preckwinkle handily in the April 2 runoff, she spent just $13.56 per vote compared to the Democratic heavy-hitter’s $45.85. But they have nothing on Bill Daley.
1. Who spent the most?
Bill Daley. He spent nearly $7 million in the first quarter of 2019 and received just 82,294 votes in the February 26 general election. Counting all the money he spent during the campaign, that translates to one hundred and thirty-two dollars for each vote he won on Feb. 26.
2. Aldermanic panoramic
While the fourteen candidates for
mayor spent more than $38.5 million dating back to 2018, the candidates for alderman were also writing some big checks. The 133 candidates spent $23.6 million, with Alderman Ed Burke leading the way. The longtime alderman, currently facing federal corruption charges, dropped more than $2 million since the beginning of 2018. Total Dollars Spent By 2019 Mayoral Candidates
3. Turning a little water into a little wine
Though it wasn’t anywhere near enough to force a runoff in the 3rd Ward race, challenger Alexandria Willis was able to spin less than $2,000 into more than 4,000 votes. Incumbent Pat Dowell, who has represented the area that includes parts of the South Loop, Bronzeville, and Fuller Park since 2007, took the race with more than 9,000 votes.
4. What is average, anyway?
The average expense in an aldermanic campaign is just over $1000.
5. What isn’t?
The 14th Ward, which includes Archer Heights, Gage Park, and Brighton Park and is home to big spender Burke. A total of $2.3 million was spent in the three-way race.
6. Who did it best?
Over in the 17th Ward, which includes
MAY 22, 2019 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 5
POLITICS
parts of Englewood, Chatham, Auburn Gresham, and Marquette Park, incumbent David Moore spent a little more than $25,000 (including several thousand in “nonitemized expenditures”) on his win, doubling challenger Reynetta Greenleaf ’s vote total on February 26. Moore’s spending helped him grab more than 5,300 votes, while Greenleaf, a patient care facilitator at Rush University Medical Center, won nearly 2,600 votes. Greenleaf showed no expenditures on her campaign committee reports.
7. Donations vs. donors in the mayoral duel
While Preckwinkle raised $7.4 million—nearly $3 million more than Lightfoot’s $4.6 million—it did little to rain on her parade. Lightfoot’s support came through a greater number of smaller donations, receiving 4,323 contributions compared to Preckwinkle’s 2,195 in the last year. Lightfoot’s average donation of $2,142 was also about half of Preckwinkle’s average donation of $4,211.
8. What did they spend it on?
The simple answer: getting your attention. Between January 1 and the February 26 election, candidates for alderman and citywide offices spent $32.8 million—primarily on advertising. Heading into the April 2 runoff, the slimmed-down field spent just $12.4 million. The average expense was just over $3,000. The biggest single expense was Bill Daley’s $1 million on TV advertising. No alderman spent like Burke, period. He wrote the biggest checks, literally, to buy your time. “Buying Time, LLC,” a DCbased media company, received three six-
Lightfoot is the new Rahm Emanuel and she’s not going to get her way for free, or this city ain’t named Chicago. 6 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY
¬ MAY 22, 2019
figure checks from the longtime alderman. He also paid a production company $150,000 to round out the top-four biggest checks in the aldermanic race. Dollar Amounts of Biggest Checks Written During 2019 Aldermanic Race
Top Five Recipients Of Spending, Aldermanic Race 2019
9. When did mayoral candidates spend the most?
February 19. One week before the general election, candidates spent a whopping $2.03 million.
10. The least?
March 9: Consider this the political spending lull: after the general election, but not quite crunch time for the final push to the runoff.
11. Where did Lightfoot’s funds come from?
Chicago’s richest ZIP codes, developing neighborhoods, a couple of big money suburbs and the nation’s capital kicked in the most money for the mayorelect. Lincoln Park and Streeterville topped the list with the West Loop, with Logan Square, Lakeview, and the Gold Coast all making appearances in the top ten. From the suburbs, donors in Willowbrook gave a half-a-million dollars in donations, landing it at number three on the list. Winnetka, home of former Governor Bruce Rauner, just squeezed into the top ten. The furthest money in the top ten donors list came express from Washington, D.C.
12. Who raised the most for a spot on the City Council?
Alderman Brendan Reilly (42nd Ward), despite having no challenger on the ballot, raised the most since 2018: $1.3 million.
JOSHUA FALK, SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY, BASED ON A MAP BY JOSH MCGEE, CHICAGO REPORTER. DATA SOURCED FROM THE ILLINOIS STATE BOARD OF ELECTIONS.
13. Final Takeaway?
looked at expenses and receipts since the mayoral race began in 2018. We excluded receipts and expenditures that were marked as “archived.” The Reporter’s analysis only included committees specifically in support of candidates and not “political action committees” that may also serve to help elect specific candidates. Source data from the Illinois State Board of Election does not include “non-itemized expenditures” or reports filed on paper. ¬
How we ran the numbers
This article was originally published by The Chicago Reporter, an investigative news organization focused on race, poverty, and income inequality. Reprinted with permission.
Lightfoot is the new Rahm Emanuel and she’s not going to get her way for free, or this city ain’t named Chicago. With $397,782 of her campaign funds unspent, she’s got a light war chest but has shown that she can stretch a dollar. Following Rahm Emanuel’s runoff win in 2015, he had a little more than $446,000 on hand. In 2011, when the mayoral election did not go to a runoff, he had nearly $2 million on hand. The Chicago Reporter pulled campaign finance data from the Illinois State Board of Elections via ilcampaigncash, an open-source project by David Eads from ProPublica Illinois that pulls Illinois State Board of Elections campaign disclosure records into a relational database. The Reporter primarily analyzed expenditures from the first quarter of 2019, ending March 31, two days before the runoff election. (Campaigns are not required to report second quarter expenditures until July.) In some cases where indicated, the Reporter
Matt Kiefer is the data editor of the Chicago Reporter. La Risa Lynch and Josh McGhee are reporters for the Chicago Reporter. Asraa Mustufa is the digital editor of the Chicago Reporter.
HOUSING
A Space of His Own
The decade Richard Wright spent in Chicago was packed with life transitions and centered by his initiation into becoming a Chicago writer BY KRISTEN JERE SIMMONS
S
ome of author Richard Wright’s most famous works, such as Native Son, are set in Chicago. He moved here in 1927, at the age of nineteen, but it wasn’t until two years later that Wright was able to afford a home with space for his writing: a four-room apartment in a two-flat at 4831 South Vincennes Avenue. Originally from Natchez, Mississippi, Wright spent his time in Chicago living with his extended family, sometimes squeezing his mother, two aunts, his younger brother, and him into just a few rooms. Wright moved around the city at least five times during his ten years in Chicago; the Vincennes building, designated a Chicago Landmark in 2010, was the first of those places where the Wright family could escape the cramped spaces of poverty that awaited a class of Black people moving to Chicago in the early twentieth century. Wright’s job situation shifted almost as often as his housing. He would work odd jobs, doing anything from ditch digging to mentoring young boys on the South Side. He took a temporary job with the U.S. Postal Service, but was deemed unfit for a permanent position after poor nutrition caused him to fail a fitness exam. In 1929, though, Wright took the fitness test again and passed, and his new steady income allowed the family to move into the relative comfort of the Vincennes apartment—until he was laid off and relegated to seasonal work again.
LILY COZZENS
Working at the post office on and off would be a point of tension for Wright and his family. As the position that allowed Wright and his family to move into the home on Vincennes, the job represented a economic status that many Black folks migrating to Chicago could only dream of, but keeping that dream proved to be a difficult task. But from 1929 to 1932, the two-flat in Bronzeville with a cream-colored exterior and charcoal roof was a place where Wright could practice his craft, the beginning of what would become a storied career. Those three years would be the longest amount of time he spent living in a single residence in Chicago. It was at the Vincennes apartment where Wright wrote his first novel, Cesspool, full of characters that are much like himself at the time—Black folks working at a post office in Chicago during the Great Depression. Retitled Lawd Today! when it was finally published in 1963, Cesspool was written in between Wright’s part-time work and relentless criticism from his aunts over his difficulty in keeping the post office job, which he was laid off from and rehired to over the course of several years. The novel reflects some of his own criticism of life in Chicago: “The only difference between the North and the South is them guys down there’ll kill you, and these up here’ll let you starve to death,” one of his characters famously says.
But Wright found solace in a community of Chicago writers in a multitude of spaces. One space that he frequented was the South Side Writers Group, a collective of writers living on the South Side during the 1930s that met to share their work and critique each other's writing. Writers like Margaret Walker and journalists like Frank Marshall Davis would convene in a wide red-brown brick building on Oakwood Boulevard once known as the Abraham Lincoln Centre. This building, which was one of Frank Lloyd Wright’s first commissioned designs, used to hold streetlevel shops, an auditorium, living spaces, a kitchen, and meeting rooms. (It is now home to Northeastern Illinois University’s Carruthers Center for Inner City Studies.) Wright regularly attended meetings during the period in which he published his first nationally acclaimed short story, “Big Boy Leaves Home.” Throughout Wright’s transitions from home to home and job to job, the South Side Writers Group and other groups gave him a sense of stability in his otherwise everchanging life, providing spaces that he could go to write stories that resonated with him and a larger community of Black people. Another one of those spaces was the John Reed Club, a collective of Marxist writers, artists, and intellectuals affiliated with the Communist Party. Here, as in the South Side Writers Group, Wright could practice his writing while temporarily escaping
the prejudices of Great-Depression-era society. Eventually Wright would become disillusioned with the John Reed Club, due in part to political directives that caused it to shift its focus from purely artistic pursuits to more politically charged subjects like inflation and industrialization. Yet, at the time, Wright did “appreciate their
“For Wright, his found home in Chicago was not limited to his place of residence, but more closely linked to a community of writers and intellectuals in the city.” MAY 22, 2019 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 7
EDUCATION
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8 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY
¬ MAY 22, 2019
opposition to racism,” which allowed him write freely about Black life. Wright also found support through government-sponsored writing programs. Wright worked on the Federal Writers’ Project, part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Works Progress Administration,. Wrighthe once described this as the source that gave him “his first opportunity to put these thoughts to paper” in his writing career. For Wright, his found home in Chicago was not limited to his place of residence, but more closely linked to a community of writers and intellectuals in the city. With those resources, his writing career began to blossom, and he began to publish more prolifically. In 1938, a year after he left Chicago, Wright received a national award for a collection of four novellas titled Uncle Tom’s Children, inspired by Harriet Beecher Stowe’s legendary anti-slavery novel. Two years later, Wright would publish his book Native Son his most well-known work, which was turned into a Broadway drama, co-written by playwright Paul Green, just a year after that. Wright had left Chicago for New York three years prior, but the effects that Chicago had on Wright remained evident in his writing. In Native Son, Wright writes about the struggles of a young black man named Bigger, who is living in poverty on the South Side of Chicago.
“Every time I get to thinking about me being black and they being white, me being here and they being there, I feel like something awful's going to happen to me,” Bigger famously says in the novel, which highlights the effects of Jim Crow segregation and the lack of opportunities for poor, uneducated Black people living in the city. Wright continued to live in a myriad of places: he moved from New York to Mexico, and finally to Paris with his daughter and second wife, where he spent the final years of his life. He died in November 1960, fifteen years after publishing his autobiography, Black Boy. But Chicago, and the writing spaces he had engaged in there, remained important to Wright. In his writing about his time in Chicago, Wright mentions how he was able to find hope through writing and the communities that fostered his growth, when a living in a racist society under a severely damaged economy had proven lackluster: “Whenever my environment had failed to support or nourish me, I had clutched at books...” ¬ Kristen Jere Simmons is a contributor to the Weekly. A Mississippi native, she enjoys writing poetry, finessing yoga studios, and making strangers uncomfortable by talking to their dogs in baby voices. She last reviewed a poetry anthology for the Weekly in May 2018.
DEVELOPMENT
The Last Days of Rezkoville’s Purgatory
A long-empty swath of land south of the Loop is the latest site of a planned mega-development BY RYAN SMITH
MAY 22, 2019 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 9
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Call 773!890!0055 to register!" www.institutochicago.org" 10 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY
¬ MAY 22, 2019
Birds of prey are a rare sight in Chicago. But on a blustery February day, I watch as a hawk perches comfortably on a telephone wire here in this sixty-two-acre expanse of land that lies just south of the Loop like it owns the place. Who’s around to tell it otherwise? Certainly no human being. In a city teeming with 2.7 million people, the population here is zero. For fifty years, this open lot the size of forty-seven football fields has been defined by the things it is not: it’s not a neighborhood, not a park, not a nature preserve, but a phantom version of all of those things—a twilight zone. Try to find it on Google Maps and all you see is a greycolored rectangular blank spot bounded by the Chicago River, Roosevelt Road, and 16th and Clark Streets. There are no buildings, no streets, no people, just crumbling remnants of its former life as a train yard. It doesn’t even have a formal name, just nicknames. The only one that has stuck is Rezkoville, a sarcastic nod to Antoin “Tony” Rezko, the infamous developer and political fixer who owned it for several years. Now, the site is slated for a sprawling, multi-billion-dollar real estate project called “The 78”—a reference to the city’s seventyseven official community areas. The 78, the company’s marketing copy says, aspires to be “Chicago’s next great neighborhood.” One day, several years ago, I stumbled across the area by accident. I was trying to find a shortcut to Chinatown from the Loop on my bike. One minute, I was pedaling on a road past a Target; the next, I rode under a bridge and into an eclectic ecosystem of urban ruin and accidental wilderness— bloated bags of trash, broken glass, cracked concrete, and discarded furniture nearly swallowed up by tall green grasses and a patchy forest. The place was quiet but not lifeless: at that time, fifty or so people planted their tents or lean-tos in the thickets of trees. Walking around, you could find flora and fauna rarely seen in the city—fireflies, wildflowers, coyotes. Urban explorers, myself included, snuck in occasionally to get a taste. That laissez-faire era ended in late 2016, when real estate firm Related Midwest, the Chicago office of New York-based The Related Companies, ordered everything inside Rezkoville’s borders— all the trees, grasses, and improvised dwellings—razed to the ground. They ejected the transient population and erected chain-link fencing to keep interlopers out. An elevated stage appeared with the words “78” in letters large
enough to be seen from an airplane flying overhead.
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or most of the last two centuries, this future neighborhood was literally underwater, part of a mile-long crook in the Chicago River. In the 1920s, city leaders wanted to straighten the river to better connect the booming south and west sides to the street grid of the Loop’s central business district. “It cannot be emphasized too often that a new outlet southward from the Loop is one of Chicago’s most urgent needs,” said Chicago mayor William E. Dever, according to a 1926 Tribune article The city authorized a $9 million project to uncrook the river, and construction began in 1928. It was a complicated process because sewage and pollution still flowed south to empty into the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal, forcing engineers to dig out a channel before the old bend in the river could be filled in. Chicago River 2.0 was completed in fifteen months, in December 1929, and the former mile of river was reborn as a large yard of dirt dug out for the channel. The roads and formal connections to the rest of the city were never built. Instead, rail companies built infrastructure to connect the crammed rail yards in the narrow space between Clark Street and the river to Grand Central Station, a passenger railroad terminal on West Harrison Street. But the dawn of the age of the automobile was an inopportune time for train yards. Americans fell deeply in love with the car during the post-World War II era, and non-commuter rail passenger travel declined by eighty-four percent between 1945 and 1964. By 1969, Grand Central Station served an average of only 210 passengers a day, prompting the city to close it down that year. Without any other kind of urban infrastructure—no roads, telephone lines, water pipes—Rezkoville fell into a fifty-year slumber. Efforts to wake it up have been mired in different circles of bureaucratic hell over the last two decades. In 1997, the city bundled the former rail yard into a 158-acre “Vacated Railway Area” as part of a “River South” Tax Increment Financing district to attract mixed-use development. (Tax Increment Financing districts, also known as TIFs, are a complicated bit of policy through which the city doles out funds from property taxes to pay for infrastructure improvements, in order to attract private investment and redevelop “conservation” or “blighted” areas.)
DEVELOPMENT
RYAN SMITH
Tony Rezko himself purchased the sixtytwo-acre portion in 2002 and attempted to build an IKEA store there. But the deal fell through when the Scandinavian furniture giant opted for the nearby suburbs instead. Three years later, Rezko tried again— asking the city for $140 million in TIF funds to build a new development with 4,600 residential units and 670,000 square feet of retail space he called “Riverside Park.” The city got cold feet, however, allegedly due to Rezko’s involvement in a contracting
scandal related to Panda Expresses he owned at O’Hare Airport. Around that time, the FBI began investigating his connections to Governor Rod Blagojevich. (Eventually, Rezko would be sentenced to ten and a half years of prison on sixteen counts of fraud and attempted bribery.) In 2005, Rezko sold the property to a company owned by British billionaire Nadhmi Auchi, who also has a history of corruption charges. Mayor Rahm Emanuel threatened to seize Rezkoville in 2014, using the powers
of eminent domain, but before he could, Related Midwest acquired part ownership and announced that they intended to make something of the vacant land. Those plans were solidified in 2017 when a group of well-dressed government officials and other big shots convened on the site to announce that The 78 would be coming soon.
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ow that The 78 has been approved by Chicago’s City Council, the property will be fitted for urban
consumption. The plan is to connect it to existing streets, public transit lines, and the downtown grid. Meanwhile, thirteen million square feet of glittering new luxury apartments, office space, storefronts, and a possible public-private research center connected to the University of Illinois will spring up from the dirt over the next two decades. Five acres will be set aside for a paved one-hundred-foot wide portion of the Riverwalk and seven more acres for a crescent-shaped park that follows the path MAY 22, 2019 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 11
DEVELOPMENT
The 78 is poised to become another monument to today’s “winners-takeall urbanism.”
of the old Chicago River, pre-straightening. The project is expected to cost $7 billion. Supersized real estate projects are popping up all over the world. Dubai, for example, is getting an eight-million-squarefoot climate controlled domed city called The Mall of the World. Remarkably, The 78 isn’t even the first collection of impossibly expensive towers, plazas, and shops birthed on top of the bones of a former rail yard by Related. That would be Hudson Yards—a skyscraper-filled mixed-use development in New York City opening this month that New York Magazine described as a “billionaire’s fantasy city.” The 78 also has a mega-development sister closer to home: Lincoln Yards, a $6 billion real estate deal on Chicago’s north side approved this month by the City Council. Lincoln Yards is The 78’s unofficial sister site. There’s a different developer behind Lincoln Yards (Sterling Bay), but nearly everything else is virtually identical, including the architect: Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill LLP. Lincoln Yards is also a brownfield site along a branch of the Chicago River getting an upscale makeover in the form of luxury apartments, offices, shops, entertainment venues, and novel new ways to consume the riverfront. It’s no coincidence that a handful of metropolises like Chicago, New York, London, and Hong Kong are being retrofitted with these mega-developments and cities-within-cities. As all the world comes to be ruled by the same global markets, 12 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY
¬ MAY 22, 2019
capital is increasingly being concentrated by geography. This concentration of capital in the US is part of a trend that urban scholar Richard Florida calls it “winner-take-all urbanism.” It means that some places are winners, some are losers, and everyone is desperate to win the next pageant of investment. In an era where every country and municipality is competing to attract fickle capital, you have to be considered “businessfriendly” to do so. This means offering all sorts of financial incentives, like those that Amazon receives around the country. During his two terms as mayor, Rahm Emanuel intentionally positioned Chicago as such a “global city.” To sweeten the pot for both The 78 and Lincoln Yards, Chicago is expected to promise nearly $2.4 billion to the developers in the form of two TIF districts, including up to $700 million for The 78. For firms like Related, the advantage of building on sites like Rezkoville is that they’re essentially blank slates. There are fewer residents to upset about the loss of their favorite bar or bookstore; no property owners to displace; few preservationists or NIMBY’s to assuage. Up until recently, there’s been almost no political resistance to The 78, except for a small controversy over the location of an additional Red Line train station and murmurs about a scandal involving former Alderman Danny Solís, whose 25th Ward includes The 78. Solís resigned
as zoning chairman earlier this year after news broke that he was a target of an FBI corruption investigation and wore a wire to record conversations with other politicians. The candidates running to succeed Solís immediately began to question approvals for The 78, and Alex Acevedo, who lost the April runoff for the seat to Byron Sigcho-Lopez, called for an independent investigation. (Sigcho-Lopez called for City Council to delay voting on the TIF, which was roundly ignored, even after he won the election.) But few substantially questioned the idea of handing the keys of large swaths of land to big developers in the first place. That changed when Lori Lightfoot and Toni Preckwinkle finished first and second in the February 26 contest to succeed Emanuel. Both candidates, who posed themselves as progressive reformers, criticized the Lincoln Yards and The 78 projects and also called for a delay on City Council’s vote to approve the TIF districts—also ignored. “Why can’t we wait another month, six weeks, to let a new mayor, and a new City Council, really evaluate this project, and make sure there is a level of transparency, so people can take their measure of it?” Lightfoot, who was inaugurated as mayor on Monday, said of Lincoln Yards on a March appearance on a political talk show.
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early two years after Related bulldozed it clean, the Rezkoville land is stubbornly returning to wildness. It’s a brownfield site where brownfield doubles as a literal description. Some shade of brown permeates nearly everything in sight, from the beige and tancolored grasses on the banks of the Chicago River to the dusky dirt paths marred by scattered bits of litter. At the field’s southern border, patches of copper-colored prairie sway in the wind on a gentle ridge. When you stand at just the right vantage point, underneath the defunct bascule bridge on the southern border of the field, the view is startling: waist-high grasses are juxtaposed with the background of Chicago’s iconic cityscape. Squint hard enough, and you can nearly trick yourself into thinking you’ve been thrust into the kind of dystopia portrayed in Veronica Roth’s Divergent, the young-adult book and movie series in which Chicago’s man-made built environment has been slowly reclaimed by nature because of a societal collapse. At first glance, The 78’s plans seem like the utopian opposite of this Divergent scene. The conceptual art depicts crowds of
ever-smiling, ever-diverse people strolling on concrete paths or lounging on carefully manicured lawns amongst squat buildings topped with lush gardens. It looks like a futuristic and verdant blend of city and suburb—or “surban” as real estate developers have begun to call the trend. Surban development, the thinking goes, will attract wealthy white millenials who enjoy the amenities of the city and short commutes, but who also want the bucolic suburban calm that comes with lower-density zoning and private green space. What the drawings don’t illustrate is the the high cost of living in a neighborhood created entirely by a luxury developer. At one of Related’s Hudson Yards buildings, available apartments reportedly cost from $4.3 million for a one-bedroom to $32 million for a duplex penthouse. Related’s description of the project claims that The 78 “is imbued with Chicago’s culture and history, blending seamlessly with the neighborhoods it borders” but what it seems more likely to do is expand the geographies of inequality of a city that urban planner Pete Saunders has described as “one-third San Francisco, two-thirds Detroit.” Those chain link fences now surrounding the boundaries of The 78 will be replaced by barriers of the invisible kind, the ones that increasingly segregate Chicagoans by race and class. Only 500 of the proposed 10,000 housing units are designated as affordable. Related will avoid building another 500 and pay a $91.3 million fee to the city’s Affordable Housing Opportunity Fund. The 78 is poised, then, to become another monument to today’s “winnerstake-all urbanism” and its inherent racism and inequality. Given all that, when Related brags on their website that “city by city, property by property, experience by experience, we transform what it means to live, to connect, to belong” it sounds like a promise. A promise and a threat. I better warn the hawk. ¬ Belt Magazine is a digital publication by and for the Rust Belt and greater Midwest. Reprinted with permission. Ryan Smith is a journalist and essayist in Chicago covering politics, history, transportation, and media. He is a native of Springfield, IL.
EVENTS
BULLETIN Blackstone Bikes Art Show PopUp Shop Opening and Reception Blackstone Bicycle Works, 6100 S. Blackstone Ave. Wednesday, May 22, 5pm–8pm. Free. bit.ly/BlackstonePopUp Our friends and neighbors at Blackstone Bicycle Works are hosting their third annual art show, featuring works created by youth participants of the program, as well as its first pop-up shop, offering youthcreated, bike-themed merchandise, artwork, and accessories. Lead by teaching artists Michele E.L. Merritt, who also worked on the Boxville market in Bronzeville, and Concitta Cavin. (Sam Stecklow)
Dramatic Reading and Panel Discussion of The Garcia Boy Harold Washington Library Center, 400 S. State St. Wednesday, May 22, 6pm–7:30pm. Free. bit.ly/GarciaBoyDramaticReading Actor Carlos Rogelio Diaz will perform a dramatic reading of author Rafael Torch’s posthumously-published memoir The Garcia Boy, which recalls he and his students’ struggles growing up in Pilsen. Followed by a panel discussion on the revival of Torch’s work. (Sam Stecklow)
Urban Thought Interactive Discussion Happy Birthday Malcolm X Whitney M. Young Library, 415 E. 79th St. Saturday, May 25, 1pm–4pm. Free. (312) 747-0039 bit.ly/HappyBirthdayMalcolmXDiscussion In honor of what would have been slain civil rights activist Malcolm X’s ninetyfourth birthday this past Sunday, the Whitney M. Young branch of the Chicago Public Library will host an interactive discussion on one of the nation’s most outspoken advocates for Black pride and human rights. The event will include rare video footage chronicling both well-known and lesser-known historical facts about Malcolm X’s life and legacy. (Nicole Bond)
Party for Justice!
Exhibition tour: *Blowout*
Experimental Station, 6100 S. Blackstone Ave. Saturday, May 25, 6pm–10pm. bit.ly/PartyForJustice Join survivors of police torture, advocates, and community members for a night of music and dancing hosted by the Chicago Torture Justice Center and Chicago Torture Justice Memorials organizations. Featuring a DJ set by Jon Burge torture survivor and exoneree Shawn Whirl. (Sam Stecklow)
The Renaissance Society, 5811 S. Ellis Ave, 4th floor. Saturday, May 25, 3pm–4pm. bit.ly/RSBlowout
BSICS Symposium on Culturally Relevant Pedagogy Chicago State University, 9501 S. King Dr. Thursday, May 30, 4pm–7pm. $20, $10 for seniors, free for students. bsics.org Explore the methods and results of the culturally relevant, Afrocentric teaching style of the Betty Shabazz International Charter School, which has two campuses on the South Side, and other ways of imparting culturally relevant education. Dr. Kim Dulaney will moderate a discussion between University of Washington American Indian Studies professor Dr. Megan Bang, Northwestern University professor of education and social policy Dr. Carol Lee, and José Lopez, director of the Puerto Rican Cultural Center in Humboldt Park. (Sam Stecklow)
VISUAL ARTS MDM Pilsen Collective Art Exhibit LALUZ Gallery, 1545 W. 18th St. Friday, May 24 and Sunday May 26, 4pm–9pm both days. bit.ly/MDMPilsen As part of Festival Mole de Mayo 2019, ESDC & Pilsen Law Center present a collective exhibit featuring several different artists. There will be live painting, a bilingual conversation around mole’s history accompanied by photographs of its varieties (5pm–6pm on Sunday, May 26), and so much more. Swing by in between grabbing mole from the festival! (Roderick Sawyer)
Join the Renaissance Society for a walkthrough of Canadian artist Liz Magor’s solo exhibition, BLOWOUT. Magor’s work focuses on the relationship between different objects, matching together various objects with contrasting elements. Artist and educator Lan Tuazon will be leading an informal tour of Magor’s work. (Roderick Sawyer)
Propeller Fund 2019: Info Session 3 Gallery 400, 400 S. Peoria St. Tuesday, May 28, 6pm–7:30pm. bit.ly/PF2019IS3 The Propeller Fund grants $50,000 annually to public, collaborative, and artist-led projects in Cook County. Join Propeller to learn more about their grant process, writing proposals, creating budgets, and completing the application. (Roderick Sawyer)
MUSIC Digging Our Roots: Chicago Blues Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E. Washington St. Thursday, May 24, 5:30–7pm. Free. (312) 742-1168. bit.ly/2QfOUGN
London (Reel People), and down the street (Chip E, Gant-Man). The program will also include a keynote talk by house historian and DJ Duane Powell (“Anatomy of a Groove: House in Borrowed Spaces”), a youth party (“House Kidz”), and panels on marketing, gender in the industry, and production techniques. (Christopher Good)
Faux. Co, Engine Summer, The Lipschitz, Lollygagger Bohemian Grove (ask a punk). Friday, May 25, doors at 8pm. $5 donation. bit.ly/faux-co Psych-pop four-piece Faux Co. will bring their heart-on-sleeve harmonies to this McKinley Park DIY spot with support from Engine Summer (“tension punk”), The Lipschitz (“art thrash”), and Lollygagger (“patriotica rock”). (Christopher Good)
Jamila Woods, Nitty Scott Thalia Hall, 1807 S. Allport Ave. Sunday, May 26, doors at 7pm, show at 8pm. $26. (312) 526-3851. bit.ly/JamilaThalia Poet and singer-songwriter Jamila Woods—a South Side hometown hero if there ever was one—will celebrate the release of Legacy! Legacy!, her longawaited follow-up to 2016’s Heavn, with a performance at Pilsen’s Thalia Hall. (Christopher Good)
Join harmonica player Billy Branch and WDCB jazz DJ Leslie Keros as they trace the history of the blues, from the delta to the South Side. Their conversation marks the start of a new talk series, co-presented by the Jazz Institute of Chicago and the Jazz Journalists Association. (Christopher Good)
2019 Chicago House Music Conference and Festival Multiple dates and locations, Thursday, May 23–Saturday, May 25. Thursday: Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E. Washington St., 6–9pm. Friday: Jay Pritzker Pavilion, 201 E. Randolph St, 6:30pm. Saturday: Jay Pritzker Pavilion, 2pm. Free. (312) 742-1168. More info at chicagohousemusicfestival.us Over the weekend, Chicago will celebrate the breadth and diversity of house music with acts from Detroit (Moodymann), MAY 22, 2019 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 13
EVENTS
STAGE & SCREEN The Adaptations of Augie March—Performance and Special Collections Exhibition Court Theater, 5535 S. Ellis Avenue. Through June 9. Wednesday through Sunday, 7:30pm; 2pm matinee, Saturday and Sunday. Tickets $50-$74. Call the box office at (773) 7534472 or visit courttheater.org See the brilliant coming-of-age story based on the novel by Saul Bellow, former University of Chicago faculty member and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. Written by David Auburn and directed by Charles Newell, the production stars Patrick Mulvey, making his Court debut in the title role. Then, be sure to visit the free exhibition at the Special Collections Research Center Gallery, 1100 E. 57th Street, Monday through Friday 9am–4:45pm. Curated by Court Theatre Dramaturg Nora Titone, the exhibition showcases treasures like the early handwritten draft of Saul Bellow’s novel and materials from the theater artists’s work on the Court’s current production. (Nicole Bond)
ETHIOPIANAMERICA Victory Gardens, 2433 N. Lincoln Avenue. Through June 6. 8pm, Thursday–Saturday; 2:30pm matinee, Saturday and Sunday. Tickets $20-$25. Call (773) 871-3000 or visit victorygardens.org Definition Theatre Company, a member of Victory Garden Theater's Resident Theater Company program, recently recieved$1.6 million in funding from the City’s Neighborhood Opportunity fund to transform a former Woodlawn church into a new South Side theater. Their current production, written by Sam Kebede and directed by Sophiyaa Nayar, is a tense family drama that examines the American dream from the view of Ethiopian immigrants preparing to send their eldest son to college. (Nicole Bond)
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¬ MAY 22, 2019
Stand Up
Afro Film Series
Too Heavy for Your Pocket
eta Creative Arts Foundation, 7558 S. South Chicago Avenue. June 8 through June 29. Saturday performances 3pm and 7pm, Sunday performance 3pm. General admission tickets $35, $25 seniors, $15 students. Call (773) 752-3955 or visit www.etacreativearts.org
Harper Theater, 5238 S. Harper Ave. Thursdays now through May 23. Doors open 6:30pm, screening 7pm. Free. bit.ly/2UXGPeW
TimeLine Theatre, 615 W. Wellington Ave. April 24–June 29. $25-$54. (773) 281-8463 ext. 6. timelinetheatre.com
As part of their forty-eighth season, eta Creative Arts brings to life the book by Phyllis Curtwright and Kamesha Khan about Birmingham students who braved police brutality, water hoses, vicious dogs, racist taunts, and jail time, as they march to reignite a stalled Civil Rights Movement in the Birmingham Children's Crusade of 1963. Catch a snippet of a rehearsal on eta’s YouTube channel [bit.ly/2VEwqkz]. While you’re there, take a peek at their video photo story [bit.ly/2HrNkPs] produced in celebration of the theater’s forty-eight birthday. Among the youthful faces of founding members, keep an eye out for audience members like Maya Angelou and a very young Barack Obama. (Nicole Bond)
What Use Are Flowers?: A Fable by Lorraine Hansberry makebelieve.fm/flowers Listen online to an audio drama produced by the Make Believe Association of a littleknown one-act play intended for television, written in 1961 by South Side playwright Lorraine Hansberry. The dystopian though timely tale of a hermit returning to a society he had abandoned features: Grammy nominee Billy Branch, director and performer Daniel Kyri, Khloe Janel, Tevion Lanier, Kiayla Ryann, and sound by the Weekly’s Radio Executive Producer Erisa Apantaku and Mikhail Fiksel. (Nicole Bond)
So Live Experiences presents a series of films to showcase the work of African and Caribbean talent. This week–Osuofia in London, directed by Kingsley Ogoro of Nigeria, which tells the story of a man arriving in London from an African village to claim an inheritance left by his late brother. In the coming weeks catch Sometimes in April, by Haitian director Raoul Peck; Black Girl, directed by Ousmane Sembene of Senegal; Lumumba, a political thriller based on a true story, also directed by Peck. Yabba, by Idriss Ouedraogo of the Republic of Upper Volta; and Yeelen, by Souleymane Cissee of Mali. (Nicole Bond)
Hamilton: The Exhibition Northerly Island, 1300 S. Linn White Dr. Opens April 27 through September 8. Mondays and Tuesdays noon–6pm (last entry 4pm); Wednesdays, 10am–6pm (last entry 5pm); Thursdays–Saturdays, 10am–8pm (last entry 6pm); Sundays, 10am-6pm (last entry 4pm). $39.50 adults, $32.50 seniors/ military, $25 ages 4-14. Discounts available for CPS groups or groups of 10 or more. hamiltonexhibition.com Whether you have or haven’t yet seen the theatrical phenomenon that is Hamilton, this exhibition of interactive lighting, sound, multimedia, music, and historical artifacts, featuring an audio tour by Hamilton director Lin-Manuel Miranda, will be an experience beyond the musical to immerse attendees into the world of the now famed founding father. (Nicole Bond)
Court Theatre Resident Artist Ron OJ Parson directs a story by playwright Jiréh Breon Holder, who was recently named one of “Tomorrow’s Marquee Names, Now in the Making” by the New York Times. Holder’s play examines the bonds of love and friendship, and the personal cost of progress when the opportunity to fight racism in the Deep South, as a Freedom Rider, supersedes a college scholarship. Too Heavy For Your Pocket was seen in an extended Off-Broadway run at the Roundabout Theater in 2017. (Nicole Bond)
EVENTS
FOOD & LAND Farmers Markets Sundays: Maxwell Street Market, Desplaines St. & Taylor St. Sundays, 9am–3pm. bit.ly/ MaxwellStMarketChicago 95th Street Farmers Market, 1835 W. 95th St. Sundays, 8am–1pm, through November. 95thstreetba.org/farmers-market Pilsen Community Market, 1820 S. Blue Island Ave. Sundays, 9am–3pm, through October. facebook.com/pilsenmarket Thursdays: City Market at Daley Plaza, 50 W. Washington St. Thursdays, 7am–2pm, through October 24. bit.ly/DaleyPlazaMarket Saturdays: 61st Street Farmers Market, 6100 S. Blackstone Ave. Saturdays, 9am–2pm, through October 27. experimentalstation.org/ market The Plant Farmers Market, 1400 W. 46th St. The first Saturday of each month, 11am–3pm. plantchicago.org/farmers-market Summertime in Chicago means many things; one of those things is the return of farmers markets and with them, fresh produce to our lives. Some troopers toughed it out indoors over the winter, but is it truly a farmers market if you can’t take your winnings, bike to the lake or your nearest park, and eat them quicker than you could’ve imagined in one sitting? If the list above looks sparse to you, it is—it only includes the markets that are currently open. Many more around the South Side will open in the next two months. (Sam Stecklow)
Tips on Identifying Birds McKinley Park Library, 1915 W. 35th St. Wednesday, May 22nd, 6:15pm–7:15pm. Free. bit.ly/ChicagoBirdID Want to learn more about the birds you see every day? Join Chicago Audubon’s Bobbi Asher for a presentation about the easiest ways to identify birds. This event is open to the public; you do not have to be a Chicago Audubon member to attend. (Sam Joyce)
How to Build a Park Advisory Council Marquette Park, 6743 S. Kedzie Ave. Thursday, May 23, 6pm–8pm. Free. chicagoparkdistrict.com Park District community relations manager Maria Stone leads this information session with the Marquette Park Cultural Committee on how residents can create advisory councils—small, volunteer watchdog organizations that have a direct relationship with the Park District—for their neighborhood parks. (Sam Stecklow)
One Eleven’s First Full Week 712 E. 111th St. Hours vary by restaurant. oneelevenfoodhall.com Stop by the newly opened One Eleven food hall in Pullman to sample dishes from three unique restaurants: Laine’s Bake Shop, the vegan-focused Majani Restaurant, and Exquisite Catering. One Eleven had its grand opening last week, making it the first food hall to open south of Chinatown. (Sam Joyce)
10th Annual Mole de Mayo Festival Festival: W. 18th St. and S. Ashland Ave. Friday, May 24–Sunday, May 26, noon– 10pm (9pm Sunday). $5 suggested donation, $10 for families. moledemayo.org After-party: Simone’s, 960 W. 18th St. Saturday, May 25, 9pm–3am. Free before 9pm, $7 after. bit.ly/MoleDeMayoAfterparty This annual celebration of Mexican mole— the thick, rich sauce usually made with peppers, spices, and chocolate—comes back to Pilsen for its tenth year. In addition to over twenty mole vendors, over fifty live acts, from musicians to lucha libre fighters, will be present for family-friendly entertainment. On Saturday night, 18th Street bar Simone’s will host the festival’s official after-party, with two rooms full of music and dancing. It’s the first street festival of many for summer in Pilsen, and always one of the best. (Sam Stecklow)
Indian Ridge Marsh Community Stewardship Day Indian Ridge Marsh, 11740 S. Torrence Ave. Saturday, May 25, 9am–12pm. Free. bit.ly/IRMDays Join Audubon Great Lakes and The Wetlands Initiative for a day of learning and volunteering at Indian Ridge Marsh. This event will include a chance to plant some native plants, as well as a bird walk in celebration of International Migratory Bird Day. Free bus transportation available from the East Side Library, Hegewisch Library, Bridgeport Coffeehouse in Hyde Park, the Pullman Visitor Center, and Big Marsh. (Sam Joyce)
MAY 22, 2019 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 15
Weston Game Lab Dedication Wed, May 29, 2019 / 4–7pm Media Arts, Data, & Design Center John Crerar Library, 1st Floor Featuring an artist talk with Patrick LeMieux and Stephanie Boluk, authors of Metagaming: Playing, Competing, Spectating, Cheating, Trading, Making, and Breaking Videogames
FREE. westongamelab.uchicago.edu