November 16, 2016 by South Side Weekly

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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 4, Issue 8 Editor-in-Chief Jake Bittle Managing Editors Maha Ahmed, Christian Belanger Director of Staff Support Ellie Mejía Director of Writer Development Mari Cohen Deputy Editor Olivia Stovicek Senior Editor Emeline Posner Education Editor Lit Editor Music Editor Stage & Screen Editor Visual Arts Editor

Hafsa Razi Sarah Claypoole Austin Brown Julia Aizuss Corinne Butta

Contributing Editors Joe Andrews, Ariella Carmell, Jonathan Hogeback, Andrew Koski, Carrie Smith, Kylie Zane Video Editor Lucia Ahrensdorf Radio Producer Maira Khwaja Web Editor Camila Cuesta Social Media Editors Sierra Cheatham, Emily Lipstein, Sam Stecklow Visuals Editor Ellen Hao Deputy Visuals Editor Jasmin Liang Layout Editors Baci Weiler, Sofia Wyetzner Staff Writers: Olivia Adams, Maddie Anderson, Sara Cohen, Bridget Gamble, Christopher Good, Michal Kranz, Anne Li, Zoe Makoul, Sonia Schlesinger Staff Photographers: Juliet Eldred, Kiran Misra, Luke Sironski-White Staff Illustrators: Javier Suarez, Addie Barron, Jean Cochrane, Lexi Drexelius, Wei Yi Ow, Amber Sollenberger, Teddy Watler, Julie Wu, Zelda Galewsky, Seonhyung Kim Social Media Intern

Ross Robinson

Webmasters Alex Mueller, Sofia Wyetzner Publisher

Harry Backlund

The paper 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 Kiran Misra

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

Rahm Reaffirms Chicago as Sanctuary City Rahm Emanuel has joined the ranks of many other mayors of large, liberal cities in reaffirming Chicago’s status as a sanctuary for immigrants. As a sanctuary city, it is illegal for police or government officials to ask residents about U.S. citizenship status. This is a stand against President-elect Donald Trump, who has claimed that he will cut federal funding to sanctuary cities. Emanuel’s own recommendations on immigration were once much more similar to Trump’s than he would probably like to admit—as a top advisor in the Clinton administration, he urged the president in a 1996 memo to crack down on immigrants to be able to "claim and achieve record deportations of criminal aliens." Under the Obama administration, which oversaw 2.5 million deportations, Emanuel advised the president to avoid the issue of immigration reform. However, as the mayor of Chicago (who depends on the Hispanic vote), he has supported immigration reform, even joining a 2013 hunger strike to pass federal legislation. That said, Chicago must face its own problems. After an explosion in the number of deportation cases in recent years, there are now over 20,000 pending cases, putting the average wait time for a hearing at three years. In about a fifth of the cases, residents are seeking asylum from dangerous home countries, and these long wait times translate to uncertainty about the future, especially now. Chicago has been a sanctuary city for over thirty years: if Rahm want to show a tangible commitment to Chicago’s more vulnerable residents, he may need more than reaffirming words in the coming months. Election Results This picture makes up the entirety of the Weekly’s (nonpartisan) commentary on the presidential election, but, duty-bound, we’ll happily recap local races. In this year’s two most important statewide elections, for U.S. senator and state comptroller, Democrats prevailed. Tammy Duckworth, the first AsianAmerican senator from Illinois, handily beat incumbent Mark Kirk by fourteen percent. Kirk’s campaign was colored by gaffes: he referred to President Obama as “drug dealer in chief,” and joked about Duckworth’s Thai heritage in their October 27 debate. Meanwhile, Susana Mendoza, who grew up in Little Village, defeated Leslie Munger for the position of state comptroller in a MARK MUNIZ race widely seen as a proxy war for ongoing state budget negotiations. In Cook County, notable victors include Theresa Mah, who will be Illinois’s first AsianAmerican state representative, and Kim Foxx, who defeated the wildly unpopular Anita Alvarez in the March Democratic primary for Cook County State’s Attorney and has been mostly quiet since. Dorothy Brown, the embattled Cook County Clerk whose office was last seen being investigated by the FBI, also won reelection, this despite the Sun-Times’s refusal to endorse any candidate in the race. While the editorial board cited Brown’s “long track record of bad judgment” as a point against her, opponent Diane Shapiro—whose claim that Barack Obama would “nationalize the police” was culled from The John Birch Society, a far-right conspiracist group—apparently also failed to woo the paper’s editorial board.

IN THIS ISSUE red line extension elicits hope and frustration

Residents and community members voiced their visions for transit on the Far South Side. michal kranz....................................4 back to basics

“It’s about putting the right kind of music out there to make them want to change.” austin brown....................................6 life, and a death, in mount greenwood

“We just don’t want to see any trouble around here.” christine schmidt............................8 school librarians, shelved

“Why does CPS continue to remove vital people from needy children's lives?” anne li.............................................12 organic interiors

From the get-go, having the store reflect the Englewood community had been part of the plan. isabelle lim.....................................14 lives of pie

Everyone chose to be involved out of a wholesome love for the dessert. isaac tannenbaum...........................16 Left: A protester in a food truck holds a sign insulting President-elect Donald Trump. The Republican candidate’s victory in last Tuesday’s election resulted in three consecutive days of marches and demonstrations in the Loop, condemning, among other things, Trump’s racism, sexism, xenophobia, and alleged abuse of women.

NOVEMBER 16, 2016 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 3

Tracking the Red Line Extension

KATIE BART

At public hearing in Roseland, residents discuss the project’s impact BY MICHAL KRANZ

n November 1, the St. John Missionary Baptist Church on 115th Street in Roseland became the forum for discussions that could shape the future of the area for years to come—with changes potentially rippling across the entire South Side. Community members, CTA officials, and organizers came together for the only public hearing on the environmental impact statement for the Red Line extension project, the details of which were announced in late September. “The draft environmental impact statement looks closely at the potential benefits and impacts of both the east and west options,” says Jeffery Tolman, a spokesperson for the CTA, referring to two possible routes for the extended Red Line.“The public meeting 4 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

was to seek out the community’s feedback.” The final route and impact statement will be unveiled in 2017, Tolman says. The stakes were high for many people at the hearing, including Roseland residents Shari Henry and her mother Mary Thomas. The home they have lived in for years is among those that might be seized by the city to make way for the 103rd Street stop. “I was told tonight that we would receive a letter in 2017, and the decision is going to be made based on the comments received tonight,” says Henry, who says she cried at a previous meeting on the issue. “You can’t make any plans. We don’t know what’s going to happen.” Including Henry’s home, 175 homes would have to be demolished to make way for the eastern route, says Tolman,

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and 113 for the western route. Forty homes would be affected regardless of which option is chosen. Only a portion of the people present were residents of Roseland, however. Many came from across the South Side, illustrating the broad impact the project could have on residents’ lives in the city. Antonio Reed, an assistant administrator in the main office of Olive-Harvey Middle College, a charter high school on the Far South Side, was among those in attendance. He says he uses a number of buses to make lengthy, daily commutes. “I live all the way in Englewood,” he says. “I come all the way to Roseland for different things like church, events I got to participate in, and the high school. I do everything in the hundreds,” he says,

referring to blocks south of 99th Street. But as it currently exists, the local transit network forces Reed to take two buses in addition to a ride on the Red Line just to get within walking distance of his various commitments. He says things are even worse for residents of the Far South Side. “We have a lot of struggles on the South Side, and when people have to work in the Loop downtown and they live out in the hundreds, it takes them a good minute to get down there.” Complaints about transportation inequity on the Far South Side have been circling for decades, says Andrea Reed, the executive director of the Greater Roseland Chamber of Commerce (no relation to Antonio Reed). “In this part of town we talk about there being a food desert, but there is also a transportation desert,” she says. “When you’re trying to get to work and it takes you two or three hours to get there, that takes a lot of time out of the day, especially for single mothers who are trying to raise children.” However, with the planned extension of the Red Line south from the 95th/Dan Ryan stop all the way to 130th Street, residents are hopeful their transit woes will be alleviated. Residents like Antonio Reed say the plan, which would cost $2.3 billion and affect nearly 128,000 people, would help connect residents in the area to job opportunities further north, cut down on commute times, and prevent overcrowding on buses. “I’m just glad they finally bringing it to the [Far] South Side,” Antonio says. “Ever since I was a young teenager I’ve been keeping up with the CTA—keeping up with new buses they buy, new projects they got—so I’m really looking forward to this project.” In addition to making it easier for residents to get to resources and jobs, community organizers hope the project will also help revitalize commerce and retail in the Roseland area. “The problem is historically, transportation planning has often been to the detriment of poor African-American communities,” says Lou Turner, professor of African-American Studies at UIUC and the former research and policy director at the now-defunct Developing Communities Project (DCP), which was headed by Barack Obama in the late 1980s. “So we thought, why not use transportation planning to actually enhance African American communities?” But Turner says that the Red Line extension project would have happened

TRANSPORTATION

KATIE BART

had it not been for his group’s work. He claims that it was DCP’s innovative policy thinking that got the project off the ground—“We were the origin of using TIF bonds for transportation funding in the city of Chicago, which suddenly the city and the CTA discovered,” he says, referring to tax increment financing, where local funding for transportation projects is matched by state and federal funds. “But we’d been pushing that in 2003, 2004, when nobody listened.” Tolman says that while TIF is one of the possible funding avenues for the project, he says the final funding scheme will remain up in the air until 2017. “We’re seeking up to fifty percent of the project’s cost through federal funds, but it’s too early to say what funds we would use as far as a local match.” Turner says that the City of Chicago had been exploring a southern Red Line extension since 1975, but that each time it concluded, more studies needed to be done

before a plan could be developed. The city was in no hurry to undertake such studies, Turner says, so DCP conducted them on their own. “When we began doing studies, we found out that the city of Chicago and the planning department hadn’t done a neighborhood plan for this area in decades, so the studies that we did were the only ones that focused specifically on this area, the Far South Side.” However, Tolman attributes this to the complexity of the Red Line extension proposal. “This project has been a long time goal for CTA and for Mayor Emanuel, and obviously it would be a transformation project for the South Side,” he says. “A project of this scope takes several years of planning, so it’s a lengthy process.” The four studies DCP conducted were included among the twelve cited in the project’s environmental impact statement. Turner, who was present at the

November 1 hearing, proudly carried the multi-chapter statement under his arm. “In order to measure the impact of the project on the area, you need to understand what the objectives and goals of the community for the area are,” he says. “And so, [in the DCP studies], we have livability objectives, environmental justice objectives, those kinds of things.” Turner says there are plenty of other problems with the CTA’s public information process. “The organization [DCP] doesn’t exist anymore but some of the former members are still active, and we put out this letter to the CTA asking for more than one public meeting on this thing,” Turner recounts. “In fact, for all previous phases of this process, they had more than one meeting. So why is there only one on this one?” Like nearly everyone at the hearing, Turner is looking forward to the extension

project, despite his criticisms. Andrea Reed, whose constituents will be the ones affected most directly by the project, largely agrees. “The Red Line project is just one piece of the puzzle,” she says. “It certainly is going to help, but it’s not going to be the answer to everything.” But Reed says the Far South Side will need much more than new El stations if it is going to truly thrive. “The conversation is coming up about people saying, ‘Wow, these people have been overlooked,’ but it’s intentional. Transit needs to be fair and equitable throughout the city.” The public comment period on the project lasts until November 30, and city officials hope to begin construction by 2022. But even after the Red Line project gets off the ground, Reed says there remains much work to be done. ¬ Katie Bart contributed reporting.

NOVEMBER 16, 2016 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 5

Back to Basics

Hieroglyphic Being’s Jamal Moss on telling stories and making history BY AUSTIN BROWN

he thing I most immediately notice upon meeting Chicago house DJ Jamal Moss is just how casual and unworried he is. He’s an imposing man, for sure, with an all-black fashion style and a stature that has him towering over almost everybody else in whatever room he’s in. But when he opens his mouth, any intimidating undertone evaporates; all that’s noticeable is his grounded perspective on the world of art he’s a part of and his willingness to offer his thoughts on anything concerning dance music, Chicago, and the murky realm of “taste.” By the time the interview begins, he’s already grinning and sharing a story about meeting Kanye West in the mid-2000s. Moss’s demeanor is a surprising contrast with the music that’s made the man a legend in underground dance circles. The most recent Hieroglyphic Being full-length, The Disco’s of Imhotep (the apostrophe is intentional), winds through aged drum patterns and sparkling, distant melodies, with track names like “Sepulchral Offerings,” “Nubian Energy,” and “The Shrine of the Serpent Goddess” that pair with the crystalline synths and lend them a devotional tint. It’s spooky, trance-inspiring stuff, and seeing the man who made it parse out his long-distance relationship or his gripes with the politics of booking shows is simultaneously disorienting and thrilling. Moss is Chicago born and bred, and, hearing his background, it’s not hard to see why he’s been mythologized by the dance music press. In his Resident Advisor documentary, he talks casually about his tumultuous upbringing, which culminated with him leaving his parents and becoming what he called an “urban refugee.” Homeless and without a place to go, he took to spending his nights in all-hours clubs, sometimes even finding a place to stay with those he met there. Slowly but surely, he built up a reputation as both a regular attendee and, eventually, a house music practitioner, most prominently doing music for the “Liquid Love” parties at the all-night Powerplant club in the late eighties. With more than a decade’s worth of 6 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

tracks like “Fingerprints of the Gods” and “Speaking In Tongues,” Moss’s Hieroglyphic Being project (one of the many monikers he’s gone by, but the one that’s ended up sticking) bubbled under for years, as Moss brushed shoulders with and received mentorship from Chicago mainstays like Steve Poindexter and Adonis while beginning to carve out his own musical path, one filled with harsher, more industrial rhythms than his mentors’ music and dotted with esoteric religious and futurist references. By the early 2010s, Moss’s unique take on Chicago’s classic sound and his well-maintained label, Mathematics Recordings (with releases from the aforementioned Adonis and Poindexter), had both blossomed into idiosyncratic mainstays in the city’s dance underground. His music got attention from “in-the-know” publications like The Wire and Resident Advisor, the latter of which did a podcast with him in 2012. He became a known quantity in the underground dance world, if more as a sonic historian and reclusive mentor than a rising star. But in 2015, when he worked with New York label RVNG, Intl. and Sun Ra member Marshall Allen on We Are Not The First, that tone suddenly shifted. We Are Not The First, an album that often veered towards free and astral jazz even as it thickened the Hieroglyphic Being project’s own artistic style, recast Moss as a key innovator in dance music. Moss was suddenly thrust into the muddled, uncertain world of hype. Now, with more eyes on him than ever, he’s released Imhotep, a strangely accessible (but still strange, of course) turn that has Moss receiving accolades from the Tribune, The Guardian, Pitchfork, The Fader, and FACT Magazine. If 2015 was the year Moss broke through into the mainstream, 2016 has become the year he’s entrenched his position, becoming a representative of the dance underground. Moss is hyper-aware of this. When I mention that I’ve seen more articles about him than ever before this year, he shifts the weight away from himself: “I think it’s one of those things that’s not really about me,”

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he says. “It’s about the machine, and the industry, so that they can sell their product.... It’s not like I come with this deep, prophetic harmonious ‘Oh wow, the cosmos,’ and all this other stuff—it’s just who I’m dealing with and them asking the right questions for it to come out. And it just so happens that since RVNG, and the labels I’ve been affiliated with from that point, they have a [better] outlet for reaching certain media outlets than from two years ago.” As the conversation goes on, it becomes increasingly obvious that Moss isn’t just hedging to be modest—he enjoys his newfound power as a lo-fi culture jammer in the world of underground dance, but this influence is something that found him, rather than vice versa. When publications describe him as “healing the world with house music” and take press photos of him emerging from a lake during sunrise with arms outstretched to match his ankh necklace, he doesn’t stop them, but it’s apparent that he finds it amusing more than anything else. He’s more occupied building his own narratives and sonic worlds, seeing how they might play with or against the trends of the day but not letting it concern him. “I’m not saying the music is any better,” he says. “It’s just the fact that they get me more exposure to get it to a broader audience than what I had before.” Because of all of this, though, he stands apart from many of the other house producers that have received attention in the same wave as him. “You know, technology changed, and the culture changed, where all of a sudden people think this is new,” he says, “but I’ve been doing the same stuff forever.” It’s apparent in the music: a sort of “outsider house” movement of similarly lofi dance music artists has been praised by many of the same publications that promote Moss, but their tracks—best noted on labels like L.I.E.S. and 1080p and artists like Huerco S, Lnrdcroy, and Anthony Naples— tend to sound like practiced choices instead of simple stubbornness. Moss’s musical and conceptual touchstones seem devoid of retromania, thoughtfully chosen not for the

way they signify certain periods of dance music history but rather for how they create new, concrete futurist possibilities rooted in ancient Egyptian and Mesopotamian mythology. Moss also doesn’t have much patience, then, for more activism-driven efforts that aim to bring back some imagined “glory days” of dance culture, whether through more representative politics like the “women only” DJ nights now found at some of the more progressive clubs or nostalgia-driven efforts for “reclamation” that attempt to address and “fix” the demographic and aesthetic shifts that have occurred in club music since the 1980s. This includes attempts to counter the dominance of “the drop” or the continuing development of “bro”-ish EDM culture that tends to exclude the queer and racialized listeners who built the culture from the ground up. “It’s separating people right now, instead of bringing them together, and it’s not really healing,” Moss says on the current state of underground DJ culture. “It’s about putting the right kind of frequencies and harmonies in the music and vocals so people can hear it and want to change. If you go to the press trying to change people, that just makes them more divisive, it gets them on the defensive.” “I’m not saying women aren’t being represented,” he says, but in his mind, the focus on identity can become limiting. “There were ladies who would get booked and it wouldn’t say ‘female DJ,’ but now, it’s like [the clubs] go out of their way to say we got an all-female lineup.” But Moss doesn’t believe that dance floors are apolitical—far from it. “There were disco songs, like Carl Bean, ‘I Was Born This Way,’ talking about gay pride,” he says, “and you had straight men, who wasn’t gay, probably didn’t wanna deal with gay people, would get on the floor and start sashaying and twirling the hardest motherfucker.” But it’s more effective, to Moss, if you get someone to feel changed, not think about change. He’s a firm believer in the dance floor’s potential to heal and bridge gaps, or to subtly shift opinions, and

MUSIC

JASMIN LIANG

he thinks the explicit, outspoken politics of the modern underground tend to prevent that from becoming a reality. But though he may break ranks with the politics of representation, Moss sees himself as involved in other ways in the process of broadening and deepening the history of Chicago house. Now that he does have a spotlight on him, he’s careful to be educational with it. Speaking on the “ninety percent of Chicago house history” he says has historically gone ignored, he says: “You get certain people who come along and tell their perspective [when a scene first gets exposure] and people accept it as truth. Then, someone else comes along and says no, that’s not all true, there’s other parts involved, but that person is considered a ‘hater.’ There’s a lot of heroes that came before the people

who was in the spotlight that made things happen that’s not known about." As a result, Moss makes an effort to flesh out the past for those who might be less well-informed, saying, “I try, when I do interviews, to inject their name in there to get people curious and make them reach out to try to get their story. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t.” Indeed, Moss is aware that not all of the people to whom he tries to give the spotlight are interested—indeed, many prefer to keep their role in the development of house and Chicago dance in the background for one reason or another. Moss’s thoughts on the process of making The Disco’s of Imhotep throw much of this pragmatic perspective into relief: he’s most passionate in his desire to get “back to basics,” clarifying that he means “back to ba-

sics when it comes to designing tracks, and keep them to the point and telling a story and evoking something inside.” In an industry Moss sees as often infatuated with gear quality, beat-matching intros and outros, and lighting setups, his success operates as a corrective. “It’s all about the Function One speakers, and this mixer,” he says, “but what about the music that’s being played?” On Imhotep specifically, he admits to retooling his writing approach slightly, operating with an awareness of the broader potential audience and focus of attention on him. Moss admits, “A lot of what I would put out before was just footnotes! Now, I’ve learned to properly construct a full legible sonic conversation for people to pick up on.” “Before, I would call it a sonic diary,” he says, referring to his earlier work, “but this

is a full-fledged novel, one that people can get.” It’s a telling space of compromise for Moss. While the interviewer, the historian, or the DJ-with-an-ego might shift a narrative (intentionally or unintentionally) to exclude people or to over-determine what something “meant,” whether it was house, Hieroglyphic Being, or just music in general, there’s still a power in a story being told, and in being able to tell a story. “I just let people know I came from this point, and excelled and bonded with other people, and it helped me get past that certain thing,” he says. “And I think for any movement, social, economic, sexual, whatever terms, if you want people to understand your story, you’ve got to give them a beginning, a middle, and then the end.” ¬

NOVEMBER 16, 2016 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 7

Mount Greenwood Community Church is one of two large Catholic churches on 111th Street. It stands about half a mile from where Joshua Beal was killed.

Life, and a Death, in Mount Greenwood A police shooting spotlights a neighborhood’s troubled racial history BY CHRISTINE SCHMIDT

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he heart of Mount Greenwood, where I grew up, is 111th Street. The neighborhood’s Irish Catholic pride beams through the shamrocks and Irish flags painted on the front doors of bars on almost every other block. During the day, small storefronts owned by generations of neighbors welcome shoppers looking for comic books, shoes for your first day of school, floral arrangements, hardware, and even sweaters and jewelry imported from Ireland. Two churches provide the street’s most imposing architecture and its most regular gathering places. If you sit in your backyard, you can hear their bells for Sunday Mass echoing across the whole neighborhood. The road draws a straight line between a pair of cemeteries whose business helped bring Mt. Greenwood to economic life in the nineteenth century. As de facto borders, they insulate the neighborhood from the southwestern suburbs to the west and the Morgan Park neighborhood to the east. Mount Greenwood is eighty-nine percent white and eight percent black. More than ninety-five percent of residents at least graduate from high school, and the median

KIRAN MISRA

household income is nearly double the city average, according to 2012 census data. The neighborhood also bleeds Chicago Police Department (CPD) blue and Chicago Fire Department (CFD) red: because Chicago law dictates that city workers must live within city limits, Mt. Greenwood, which is the city’s southwestern-most community area, is full of police officers and firefighters. Their families line its suburb-like streets, and have done so for decades. Many of those families take pride in the “quietness” of the neighborhood; crime in Mt. Greenwood is nearly nonexistent, but the area is also frequently described as unfriendly to racial minorities. It’s also the only community area in Chicago where a majority of voters chose Donald Trump last Tuesday. It was here, two weeks ago, that Joshua Beal, a twenty-five-year-old black man from Indianapolis who was in town for a funeral, was shot and killed by an off-duty CPD officer. Since then, Black Lives Matter protestors have clashed with pro-cop, “anti-crime” Blue Lives Matter supporters three times, in a series of events that has disrupted the usual calm of the neighborhood.

he details of what happened on Saturday, November 5 are hazy. The incident is still under official investigation by the city’s Independent Police Review Authority, but, by all accounts, Beal was part of a group of cars leaving a funeral and passing by a fire station on 111th Street. CPD Superintendent Eddie Johnson, who held a press conference near the scene Saturday evening, called it a “road rage incident.” According to Beal’s family, an off-duty officer in an unmarked car cut off part of the group of cars, leading to the confrontation. Beal’s relatives filmed the encounter and later said that an officer pulled a woman out of one of the cars and pushed her to the ground and put a gun in her face, causing family members to get out of their cars to object. The police report differs, stating that Beal's car was parked in the way of the firehouse and a firefighter asked him to move before the situation escalated. Hearing the commotion, an off-duty CPD officer exited a barbershop near the firehouse to see what was going on. Screenshots from a video recorded during the incident appear to show Beal pointing a gun toward the off-duty cop and a sergeant in uniform who had stopped on his way to work. Beal’s family says Beal, of Indianapolis, had a concealed carry permit, but that claim has not been substantiated. Details later emerged that up to four off-duty officers had stopped to monitor the situation and that Beal had a prior road rage-related conviction in Indiana. Minutes later, Beal was dead after being shot by the off-duty officer. His brother Michael struggled with a cop to gain control of Beal’s gun, allegedly putting him in a headlock. 111th Street was closed for CPD to process the scene. One way or another, the street had blood on its hands. “Chicago police gunned my baby down like a vicious animal,” Tiffaney Boxley, Beal’s mother, told reporters through tears. “It’s unfortunate this incident happened,” said Alderman Matt O’Shea of the 19th Ward, which includes Mt. Greenwood, a few days later. “I believe everyone has seen the photographs. People have seen the video out there. People’s lives were in danger, and unfortunately the officer felt deadly force was needed.” Organizers with Black Lives Matter Chicago came to Mt. Greenwood Saturday evening, saying they wanted to meet with Beal’s family at the 110th Street & Kedzie Avenue Burger King down the street from the shooting. But Mt. Greenwood residents turned out in droves, largely organized through the community Facebook group “Mt. Greenwood Watch.”

POLITICS The Black Lives Matter group stayed at the Burger King until police officers asked the manager to close early. Mt. Greenwood residents stood in the parking lot across the street holding American flags. Some passersby heckled the organizers. This was the first time Black Lives Matter, which has protested police brutality and other racial injustices across the country since 2014, had ever come to Mt. Greenwood. But to residents’ dismay, it wouldn’t be the last.

n Sunday, the conflict continued. Chicago activist Ja’Mal Green held a press conference in front of the Burger King at 110th and Kedzie with Beal’s relatives and approximately twenty-five members of Black Lives Matter Chicago. In response, about 300 Mt. Greenwood community members filled up Mt. Greenwood Plaza at 111th and Kedzie, milling about the stone “Welcome to Mount Greenwood” sign. This time they held black-and-white American flags with a single blue stripe, the symbol of the Blue Lives Matter police supporter movement, which was formed in New York City in 2014 after two cops were fatally shot. They cheered motorcyclists who drowned out the press conference with their engines. A handful of pit bulls and German shepherds paced in the crowd alongside their owners. One person with a Donald Trump mask carried a baseball bat down the street by the neighborhood’s public library branch. Some Mt. Greenwood residents nonchalantly stood in the back and talked to each other, as casually as if they were at an early November block party. Why did they come? “To make sure they don’t loot our stores,” a community member named Laura told me. She only let me record our interview after I mentioned that I was from the neighborhood. “That’s what usually happens when they have their protests. To protect our neighborhood, that’s why. Our businesses, okay? That’s why.” Several residents I talked to expressed concern over what they’ve seen or heard Black Lives Matter supporters do during their protests, as depicted by many media outlets. While several admitted they’ve never talked to a Black Lives Matter protester, they said they didn’t want any violence or vandalism to happen on their streets, or threats of what they call “CPDK,” or “CPD Killers.” And they thought it was hypocritical of Black Lives Matter to only respond to incidents of whites shooting blacks rather than black-on-black crime. But overwhelmingly, over the next three hours, that protecting turned into harassing. As police officers and Chicago Alternative Policing Strategy (CAPS) representa-

A monument near Mt. Greenwood Plaza stands “in honor of all veterans” of the military. The neighborhood, which was the only one in Chicago to vote for Donald Trump in the presidential election, is home to many police officers and firefighters.

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tives spoke to Beal’s family members across the street, the crowd shouted out insults and slurs while chanting in support of the police. “We got some bus money for you here,” a man with the Blue Lives Matter crowd bellowed across the street. “Get on 111th and go east.” “C-P-D! C-P-D!” “Over three thousand shot in the city of Chicago! Thank you for your service!” another white man with a red megaphone hollered at a protester carrying a laminated poster with pictures of people killed by Chicago police. “C’mon, we gotta get home! NASCAR is on!” “Why don’t you stay out of Mt. Greenwood?” “Take it to the fucking ghetto!” Yet another man with a Toys for Tots shirt leaned into a wall of police officers escorting the protesters toward the intersection and sarcastically shouted, “Have a good day, son! You take it easy! Watch your ass!” Though the crowd was mostly grown white men, I could hear a boy somewhere in the crowd excitedly echoing the residents’ heckling calls of “Goodbye!” to the protesters. Beal’s relatives shouted at police officers and the Mt. Greenwood residents as tensions escalated precipitously between the groups.

One of the relatives, a female teenager, yelled over and over, “Justice for Joshua!” In response, a white woman leaning on the wrought-iron fence between the two groups replied, “We got justice! He’s fucking dead!” Michael Tyler, a twenty-nine-year-old student at the University of Illinois at Chicago and a frequent participant in Black Lives Matter protests, said that the group had prepared for the emotional intensity of their visit. “I never knew it harbored so much hate, so many people who were against diversity, who were with police brutality,” he said as a motorcycle roared beside him on the street. “They say ‘all lives matter’ but I don’t see any black people over there.” A few feet away, one of Beal’s relatives yelled out, “No one is intimidating me. No. One. So get your motherfucking ass back to where you came from.” “This is my neighborhood. You go back to where you came from,” Laura, the community member I had spoken to earlier, called back. Some Mt. Greenwood residents came to 111th and Kedzie just to observe and reflect. “There’s a lot of hate out here,” said Cervante Nicks, who lives down 111th in the suburb of

NOVEMBER 16, 2016 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 9

A street near Mt. Greenwood Park was renamed in honor of John C. Knight, a police officer from Mount Greenwood who was killed in the line of duty in 1999.

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Oak Lawn. “I’m just soaking it in. We’re all people.” Nicks, who is black, said he came out to make sure the protests went peacefully. He didn’t know Beal. A white woman from the crowd approached him. “I’m sorry that that man got shot,” she said. The two talked about how the woman’s relatives are recently retired CPD officers and how Nicks’s best friends are cops. “Thank god it’s America and we can all protest peacefully,” the woman said. “We wanted to show an example as Chicagoans supporting our Chicago police. I feel bad for the guy that got shot and killed, too. I talked to his sister.” Nicks sighed. “It goes too far,” he said. “This is my neighborhood too.” Now, many neighbors and protestors are wondering what happens next. “It’ll get worse,” said Tyler, the UIC student. “Activists are gathering. They’re planning rallies. They’ll be here. Once the word gets out what they’re dealing with, they’ll address it accordingly.” “This feels like shit. It’s going to tear the neighborhood apart,” said Brandon, a thirtyfour-year-old white man who’s lived in Mt. Greenwood for his entire life. He was on his front porch listening to the yells and shouts from a few blocks away. “Racist comments ain’t gonna solve shit…. It seemed like Mt. Greenwood was the last safe place to raise a kid.” In an attempt to diffuse tensions, Alderman O’Shea sent an email to constituents the following day, on November 7. “I urge all 19th Ward residents not to further burden law enforcement by spreading rumors, 10 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

engaging in speculation, or using divisive rhetoric,” he wrote. “Engaging in any type of dispute with protesters will only fuel conflict and make it more difficult for the police to maintain peace.”

efore the protests, Mt. Greenwood prided itself in being a quiet—some would even say boring—place. “There’s an old Chinese curse where a person wishes that you live in interesting times,” said Tim Davis, who has owned the comic book store Alternate Reality on the corner of 111th and Kedzie for over 20 years. “Interesting times usually aren’t good times. Boring times usually end up being good times.” The only other controversy in Mt. Greenwood’s recent history took place a few weeks ago, when O’Shea introduced a plan to reorganize the public schools in the ward. Amid backlash from parents, he quickly dropped the idea. “People in Mt. Greenwood get upset when they think their kids are going to get threatened, whether it’s someone waving a gun in the middle of the street on a Saturday afternoon…or wanting to bus their kids to another school,” Davis explained. For Mt. Greenwood residents, boring means stable. Many neighborhood residents are Chicago police officers or firefighters and see plenty of action while they’re on the job. At home, boring can be good. This version of Mt. Greenwood is the one I grew up in. Over half of the people on my block were city workers, and almost everyone went to the Catholic elementary

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school, and then graduated from one of the local Catholic high schools. Some of my own relatives are CPD officers. The street next to Mt. Greenwood Park was renamed in honor of a police officer who was shot and killed in the line of duty in 1999 (Honorary Office John C. Knight Way). Colored ribbons frequently decorate street poles in support of local children battling cancer, a symbol of how tightly bound together the community is. For almost all who live there, Mt. Greenwood is family. “I’ve lived on the same three blocks my whole life,” said Pat, a thirty-two-year-old Chicago police officer whom I spoke with while he was waiting for his kids to get out of school. “Everybody gets along and knows each other’s names…. I found a good home and that’s why I stayed. I still know my neighbors from when I grew up.” “Mt. Greenwood is just a lot of hardworking people trying to mind their own business and get along,” said Peggy Hederman, who will soon celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of her Lindy’s Chili & Gertie’s Ice Cream shop on 110th and Kedzie. “We just don’t want to see any trouble around here,” she added. “I’m sorry that guy died, but I don’t know if it was at his own hands or not.”

ut my upbringing in this Mt. Greenwood was just one version of childhood in a neighborhood where racism has persevered over the years. In high school, I met a girl who grew up on the other side of the cemetery, in Morgan Park. We became close friends but I

was surprised I’d never seen her around the neighborhood before. Eventually she told me that her parents had chosen to homeschool her because of the hostility she might find as a black person in Mt. Greenwood schools. Unlike me, she did not go to Mt. Greenwood Park: the last time she had gone, she had been called a “n——”, and the white people she was with had been called “n—— lovers.” Although this was news to me, it wasn’t new to the neighborhood. A New York Times piece by Isabel Wilkerson from 1992 showcases the contrast between Mt. Greenwood and Roseland, a majority-black neighborhood two miles east on 111th Street. “I don’t mind them, but I don’t want them living next to me,” said Peggy O’Connor, a waitress and wife of a police officer. “I don’t want to be too close to them. I think they’ve been whining too long, and I’m sick of it.” Like other Mount Greenwood residents, Mrs. O’Connor is rarely around black people to hear the “whining” personally or to see what the trouble might be. It infuriates her that “blacks buy porterhouse steaks with food stamps, while we eat hamburgers,” she said. She said she had never actually seen any blacks do this. But she has heard and read stories, and that is enough. But not all Mt. Greenwood residents felt that way about black people: Wilkerson also interviewed William Knepper Sr., who taught eighth grade at my elementary school. Mr. Knepper…said he never had a bad experience with blacks, and feels sympathetic toward them. “From my experience with them, they’re like us,” the elder Mr. Knepper said. “They have the same goals, the same aspirations, the same fears. When they blame something on racism, I tend to agree with them.” When Mr. Knepper suddenly passed away, just weeks before our graduation, the community rallied around his family and us, his students. We mourned, but we also soon moved on to high school. Many people ended up at Marist High School, the local co-educational Catholic school. Now, in the aftermath of Beal’s death, students from that same high school are immersed in their own controversy. After a screenshot of racist text messages sent between senior girls at Marist was posted on a Black Lives Matter activist’s Twitter, BLM Youth organizers planned a demonstration in front of Marist for last Friday afternoon. CPD and Marist security planned to meet them there. (BLM Youth is a different organization than Black Lives Matter Chicago, which staged the original protests the day after Beal’s death.) Archbishop Blase Cupich, who leads the Archdiocese of Chicago that includes Marist and the city’s other Catholic schools,

POLITICS responded in a statement that, “racism is a sin and has no place in the Church, including the Archdiocese of Chicago.” Marist officials said they were “devastated” by the behavior of the students and disciplinary action would be taken. They also announced that the school would have comprehensive discussions and trainings in response to the situation. “This is an education-able moment for the whole community,” Marist principal Larry Tucker told the Tribune. “I think that becomes a reaffirmation of what it means to be Marist, what it means to be a Catholic school.” More than 5,500 signatures have been collected on an online petition asking for the repeal of five students’ expulsion related to the incident, arguing that the girls regretted their messages and that the school should forgive them in the Catholic spirit. Marist officials haven’t said what sort of disciplinary action was taken. The demonstration didn’t happen, though: Marist administrators cancelled Friday classes and the BLM Youth group called off the event, both citing safety concerns. Instead O’Shea, CPD Superintendent Eddie Johnson, Tucker, and leaders of the BLM Youth group met on Friday to discuss the issues. “Today, we came one step closer to achieving our goals to confront the injustice seen at Marist High School, but more importantly, the Mt. Greenwood community as a whole,” the BLM Youth organizers said in a statement. “We demanded monthly, transparent meetings for youth so that youth would have a forum for holding police accountable for the promises they make.” But the organizers of the larger and separate Black Lives Matter Chicago group denounced BLM Youth’s plans. “History has made it perfectly clear that police are designed to enforce Black subjugation,” they said in a statement. On Twitter, the organization said it had “respectfully requested that @BLMYouth cease using the BLM name.”

lection Day marked the start of an era of uncertainty for the nation, but also for Mt. Greenwood. On the evening of Tuesday, November 8, Blue Lives Matter and Black Lives Matter protesters gathered yet again at the corner of 111th Street and Kedzie Avenue. Activist Jedidiah Brown led a Black Lives Matter demonstration and streamed it on Facebook Live, while Blue Lives Matter supporters turned out by the hundreds and shared the video on their own Facebook pages. They clashed in the intersection, with police officers dividing the hostile groups down the middle.

Storefronts along 111th Street, a few blocks from the site of Beal’s death, advertise Mount Greenwood’s many shops and small businesses, as well as its strong union membership.

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Earlier that morning, I stopped by the polling place at Mt. Greenwood Park to talk to voters. The 19th Ward is known for being home to stalwart down-ballot Democratic voters, but Mt. Greenwood has voted for the Republican presidential nominee in the past few elections. They delivered this year as well: nineteen out of the twenty voting precincts in Mt. Greenwood went for Donald Trump. A longtime Mt. Greenwood white resident who wished to remain anonymous explained why she voted for Trump. “I think of my pocketbook,” she said. “I don’t trust Clinton, I don’t like her. I’m less ‘Government take care of you,’ more about ‘Take care of yourself.’” Both the national leadership and Chicago chapter of the Fraternal Order of Police, the police union, had endorsed Trump, who called himself the “law and order candidate.” As CPD officers, many Mt. Greenwood residents belong to the FOP. “When I was knocking on doors, I didn’t get into any higher-office politics,” said Fran Hurley, the incumbent state representative for the 35th District who handily won re-election on Tuesday. She’s white, a Democrat, and has lived in the area her entire life. When I talked to the business owners whose stores I grew up shopping in and the parents waiting outside the school where I spent my childhood learning, I asked them what they thought Mt. Greenwood’s strengths and weaknesses were. The strengths were overwhelmingly family-oriented: at least three people told me that it’s a great place to raise your kids, with quality schools and affordable housing. Only one person cited the lack of diversity as a potential problem.

“Because of where we live, kids aren’t exposed to diversity as much as they should be,” said Mary Pat Magliano, who’s lived in Mt. Greenwood for the past twenty years. She was the only resident who brought up diversity to me then, but for the first time the conversation seems to be growing. After meeting with BLM Youth on Friday, Alderman O’Shea pledged to hold community meetings, prayer vigils, and workshops in Mt. Greenwood to improve “race relations.” Two area churches have already held prayer services to reflect on the situation as a community. But it’s not a clear path: “Something has to break the spell,” Rev. Tom Conde, the pastor of St. Christina Church on 111th Street, said at a service on Saturday night. “To a certain extent, nobody really knows what to do.” Marist officials said they have hired professionals to help the school community process the incident and provide training on diversity awareness. Johnson said he would meet regularly with the youth leaders as well as facilitate a Black Lives Matter workshop for the CPD if BLM Youth planned the curriculum. But for the activists who aided Beal’s family, successfully raised money for his brother’s bond after his arrest for allegedly putting the officer in a headlock, and organized the first protests in Mt. Greenwood, these promises do not represent real change. Black Lives Matter Chicago said in its statement that “freedom cannot be gained by working with our oppressors,” and called BLM Youth’s monthly meetings with Superintendent Johnson “dangerous for the move-

ment.” It’s hard to say that change will indeed come as a result of some of the aforementioned organizational efforts, let alone for the neighborhood as a whole. As someone who still calls Mt. Greenwood home, I see how comfortable residents are with the neighborhood’s status quo. But as someone shocked by how some of the community responded in the aftermath of Beal’s killing, I have also seen that a movement toward changing the racism that permeates Mt. Greenwood might need to start on the individual level. Jedidiah Brown, who led the Black Lives Matter protest on Election Day, shared a post on his Facebook the next day: "I met a family while in Mt. Greenwood last night who expressed support for CPD and for PEACE. They are joining me for dinner tonight." The heart of Mt. Greenwood is still 111th Street. This Sunday, activist and Catholic priest Michael Pfleger and Beal’s cousin will gather with representatives from churches across Chicago at 111th and Kedzie in a protest to “oppose white supremacy [and] stand up against racist mob threats in Mt. Greenwood.” Community members have already made plans to show up in response, with the Mt. Greenwood Watch Facebook page sharing the event and commenting, “Delusional: Maintaining fixed false beliefs even when confronted with facts, usually as a result of mental illness.” It’s up to residents to decide whether and how they want to move forward, or on, from here. ¬

NOVEMBER 16, 2016 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 11

School Librarians, Shelved CPS cuts further drain library resources for students BY ANNE LI

hicago Public Schools budget cuts are nothing new, and it was hard to be surprised at the announcement in August that funding for more than 900 positions had been cut this year. What’s easy to miss in these continuing cuts is just how quickly important school resources can vanish. The presence of school librarians has been shown to improve everything from standardized test scores and childhood literacy rates to graduation rates and professional development, yet librarians have been disappearing from CPS. Only 157 librarian positions are budgeted for this school year, to serve a total of 652 elementary and high schools. That number is down from 217 last year, and 454 in 2012. The South and West Sides are being hit particularly hard: according to the Chicago Teacher’s Union (CTU), in 2015 only two high schools with a ninety percent or higher African-American student population had a school librarian, down from nineteen in 2012. There are several factors at play in the decrease in librarians. CPS’s already-cramped budget has been cut by $104 million since this time last year. That comes out to a seven percent decrease in the money given for each student. Since 2013, funds have been allocated to schools based on enrollment, putting pressure on any school that loses students. In addition, principals are often forced to cut programs to make up for the lost funding, while making sure their school maintains a positive image to avoid any further drops in enrollment. This can lead to subtle changes in hiring and staffing decisions that hide the cuts that have been made. Marie Szyman, a longtime school librarian at Nathanael Greene Elementary in McKinley Park, explained that this is part of why it can be so difficult to find out which schools actually have librarians. “When I talk to people and I tell them how many librarians are left in the city, they’re shocked,” she said. “These parents don’t realize that these libraries have closed down. And they [CPS] did it very quietly, 12 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

very sneakily.” The only national attention this trend has received is from a protest staged by students at Bronzeville’s DuSable High School last December, in response to the news that their school librarian, Sara Sayigh, was going to be laid off at the end of that month. The students organized a “read-in,” in which they walked out of classes, checked books out of the school library, and read in the hallways for hours. In response, an anonymous alumni donation helped to fund Sayigh’s position through the end of last school year, and is now completely funding a parttime position for her after CPS removed her position again in the latest round of cuts. “My students showed that the stereotypes about African-American teenagers are not true,” said Sayigh. “Something that is obvious to those of us who work with them: that they care passionately about their education and they do understand that the system treats them inequitably.” Regarding the overall cuts that have plagued school libraries and programming for many years, Sayigh recalled how cuts affected the citywide high school book club that had flourished through the early 2000s, and which was previously supported by the district. Annual conferences were held with authors, students, and teachers. “Just sitting in the auditorium with so many high school readers affirmed the value of what we were doing with our students, and affirmed the value of reading to all those students,” she said. The district, however, cancelled the program after Mayor Rahm Emanuel took office. Only a few schools were able to continue their chapters by scraping together grants and donations. A related problem is the trend of moving librarians out of the library and into a classroom in an attempt to mitigate increasing class sizes without hiring additional staff. Illinois, like most states, requires school librarians to also be certified teachers. CTU reported that in 2013 fifty-eight librarians were shifted into full-time teaching positions. Though certified as teachers, school

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librarians are special, explained Audrey Church, President of the American Association of School Librarians (AASL). “Librarians are master-teachers—most spend time as a teacher before going on to earn master’s degrees,” she said. “Librarians are very effective as classroom teachers, but that position only allows them to impact those students in their class. They aren’t serving that school or those students as effectively as they could as a librarian.” Marge Fashing, a retired CPS librarian, added that rumors about layoffs were used

placement for a fully staffed school library. The prescribed reading levels implemented in classroom libraries are particularly worrying: Charles Gunn, President of the Chicago Teacher-Librarian Association (CTLA), explained that principals don’t always understand how having a set of ten books for each level isn’t enough, and can close students off from exploring books. “These levels are indicators, but it’s a scary world to me where everyone’s got to read a certain book level,” he said. Gunn estimated that a classroom library would

“I didn’t check out a single book last year. I mean, I was secretly checking out books, and parents were coming to me after school and I was checking out books to the parents under the students’ names, but I was doing it on my own.” —CPS Librarian to scare many librarians into taking classroom positions. One librarian we spoke with was offered a supplemental teaching position. Her principal originally told her that she could continue to serve as the librarian as well, but none of the plans she proposed for keeping her library active were accepted by the principal. “I didn’t check out a single book last year,” she said. “I mean, I was secretly checking out books, and parents were coming to me after school and I was checking out books to the parents under the students’ names, but I was doing it on my own.” Again and again, librarians have emphasized that classroom libraries are no re-

be lucky to have 500 titles, whereas a good school library will have around 10,000. Classroom libraries are built around the curriculum’s reading list, while school libraries allow students to browse. Szyman sums up this benefit by describing the moment of a student “walking in and grabbing a book that a teacher would never have handed [them], and going ‘Whoa!’ ” Gunn said that teachers and librarians work best together as partners. Teachers bring their classes into the library, where the librarian serves as a resource person and a technical advisor while the teachers guide the lesson. Gunn called it “a beautiful model.”

EDUCATION

DATA VISUALIZATION BY JASMINE MITHANI

Numerous studies back this up, emphasizing the importance of the presence of a school librarian and the amount of programming the librarian can offer. Researchers have focused in on things like the priority given to librarian–teacher collaboration, the hours the library is open, and what technical skills are taught in the library. A 2003 study in Illinois found that providing more flexible library hours increased reading scores by ten percent and writing scores by eleven percent on the ISAT. Moreover, programs such as reading workshops were more effective at increasing student performance when led by a librarian instead of a classroom teacher.

This makes sense to Church, who explains how the role of a school librarian has changed over the years. The increasing importance of computer skills and online research databases has made librarians more relevant, not less. School librarians teach their students research skills and digital literacy that may not be achievable at home, especially for students who may not have regular access to a computer. “I think in today’s world, students need a certified school librarian more than ever, because they need to navigate those resources,” said Church. “The information is out there, but students don’t know how to find it efficiently, evaluate what they find, synthesize what they

find, and use it ethically and responsibly.” Gunn speaks of his experiences using teaching technology, with schools buying Chromebooks to help students use Seeking Online Access to Resources (SOAR), CPS’s research portal. Since CPS has Google accounts for everyone, “it’s really just a natural fit. But it’s just a question of if teachers are going to be able to do all that, and really be up to speed and focused. So that’s where in the library we can be a partner.” The same is true for e-books, which can serve to increase students’ access to reading material, but as a resource alone can’t serve as a substitute for individualized book recommendations from a librarian based on their knowledge in find-

ing just the right book for a child. Disparities in which CPS schools have librarians are all the more alarming in light of these findings. CTU reported that in 2015, seventy-five percent of majority-African-American schools didn’t have a librarian, compared to sixteen percent of schools with a less than fifty percent African-American population. CPS’s own demographic analyses, conducted each year to determine quotas for selective enrollment schools, and defined using census data on socioeconomic status and other factors affecting student achievement, can be used to highlight the systemic disadvantages in library access. Overlaying a map of Tier 1 areas—those that are ranked lowest by CPS in terms of income, average education level, and other factors—and a map of which districts lack librarians, shows that schools in Tier 1 areas are far more likely to lack librarians. This is a problem Sayigh has seen time and time again. “We work with students who are bearing the brunt of society's ills, but they also are expected to just get on with it, take the tests, behave, et cetera,” she said. As Sayigh explained it, the cuts reach beyond just the librarians: “In our schools we no longer have sufficient counselors, social workers, nurses, arts programs, librarians—all of these people, including us, are safety nets for some students. Why does CPS continue to remove vital people from needy children's lives?” The impact librarians have on students goes deeper than test scores. Szyman told the story of how a sixth grader came back to her and exclaimed, “Ms. Szyman, I’m reading now! I never read before, until you started reading stories to us, and then I started reading!” All Szyman could say to that was, “Wow.” In the 1940s, Chicago was the national leader in school library programs. Considering how far the city’s schools have fallen since then, Fashing said, “If you look at all of history, we’re always bemoaning the fact that civilizations have lost libraries and librarians. Who knows how much we have lost?” ¬

NOVEMBER 16, 2016 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 13

Organic Interiors

Geier’s interior design for Whole Foods nods to Englewood’s past and present BY ISABELLE LIM

t first glance, the Whole Foods Market on the corner of 63rd Street and Halsted Street looks like any other. Look a little closer, though, and surprising details begin to surface. The new grocery store, which opened in late September, showcases subtle design elements, courtesy of the interior design firm 555 International and its mastermind, James Geier. From the train track motifs on aisle signs that reference Englewood’s history as a railroad hub, to the geometric patterns that mark the checkout counter numbers, the store is strung together by visual threads interwoven by Geier and his team. The Englewood Whole Foods Market, now the center of attention in the Englewood Square retail complex, has perhaps been one of the most discussed developments on the South Side in recent years. When its arrival was announced in September 2013, the news sparked vigorous conversation within the neighborhood: some were concerned about how the development would take into account the existing community, but there was also healthy optimism that the opening of the store—which was joined simultaneously by a Starbucks and a Chipotle—would spark a commercial renaissance in the area. The location’s past identity as the Englewood Shopping Center, one of the busiest shopping districts in Chicago during the late 1800s into the mid-1900s, anchored by department stores like Sears and Kresge’s, set a precedent for a hope of returned glory: that the introduction of national retailers and chains will introduce a healthy sprouting of local businesses in response to the increased foot traffic. As far back as 2013, Whole Foods was already making strides to consult community organizations and urban farming communities in Englewood to address concerns about community collabora14 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

tion. At the opening ceremony on September 28, while Mayor Rahm Emanuel and the then co-CEO of Whole Foods, Walter Robb, were present, so too were community organizers who had been involved in this consultation process. Though the store’s architecture has been criticized for disrupting the flow of commerce in the area and positioning the store as a bastion apart from the community (Daniel Kay Hertz, “Food For Thought,” November 2), it nevertheless carries products from local suppliers and maintains a locally focused recruitment program—evidence that community engagement was indeed factored into the development process. A focus on the local is not unfamiliar to Geier, whose company, 555 International, has been based in Back of the Yards for the last thirty years. Geier speaks of 555’s long-standing presence on the South Side with pride; it’s part of the reason he chose to take on the Englewood Whole Foods project in the first place. “When you go deep into…what should be important about this store, whether it’s in Streeterville, or Schaumburg, or Englewood, [it] really comes down to them wanting to make sure that there’s some hook or connection to the ‘why?,’” Geier says. “So when people walk in, it’s not something completely foreign, but it’s also not one typical-looking Albertsons or Jewel [Osco]...That’s the excitement that comes with the community … Local is something that Whole Foods puts a lot of importance on…Being an employer of local people here for many, many years, it’s not easy to be a manufacturer and employ people in the city, but we’re very proud of being local and city-based, South Side-based, so that was also really important to want to take on that challenge.” Yet, for a firm that is known more for

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DENISE NAIM

its extensive work for brands on the luxury end of the scale—555 has been responsible for the interior design of restaurants like The Girl and The Goat, and retails stores like Gucci—a venture like the Englewood Whole Foods seems out of place. A grocery store was something entirely new for Geier and his team, much more quotidian in function and somewhat incongruent with the design firm’s portfolio. Geier, however, insists otherwise. “I think the fallacy in our world is that we [555] only work for premium brands and premium projects,” he says. “And I say that’s the fallacy because a lot of the names are names that are recognizable because they’re good at their business. But not all of our projects are very high-end with huge budgets.” “We focused on the fact that prior to there being anything there, there was a big oak forest. A big huge forest, and ultimately because Chicago is in the Midwest and all the railroads kind of started to come and go from here and the stockyards and all that,” he explains. “That area then turned into a very important transportation hub for railroads, both for people working and for freight.” These two moments in Englewood’s history

ultimately became the anchoring visual inspirations for the store, with key motifs like the silhouettes of trees and branches, and recurring railroad elements found throughout signage, logos, and materials used. Overall, the design elements of the store are meant to be an understated blend of the Whole Foods brand identity and touches of locality that situate the store in Englewood. The most obvious visual feature is a series of black and white photographs of historical Englewood, accompanied by two panels of text that explain the area’s past as a vast expanse of oak forest, then as a transportation hub in the 1800s, beginning with the naming of Junction Grove from where a confluence of railroads had been. Behind these pictures, two large white silhouettes of oak trees rise toward the ceiling, and next to it, a tableau of intersecting lines mimicking the crossings of railway tracks. Apart from this statement piece, the railroad and forest motifs appear throughout the store in a decidedly more muted tone. According to Geier, the entire process of designing the store, from sketches to when the final bolts were screwed in place, took about a year. The layout of the plan, preset by Whole Foods and familiar in many su-

FOOD

permarkets, guides shoppers through a loose but pre-established route. In this case, that route is complemented by a chronological progression through Englewood’s history. “If you were to go back to the store …you’ll notice, starting from the facades when you walk into the different departments, go all the way around the perimeter and then to the cash register, and you’ll start to see how so many of these periods have changed,” Geier said. “And those facades are just kind of emulating and harking back to some interesting times and kind of trying to set that tone.” Throughout the store, clues to Englewood’s past are located in the details. The signage for the bakery section—red and white capitalized letters—is mounted on a pale green background. It takes a while to notice that the sign is made from the same material as shipping containers—the same containers that presumably were found on the backs of trains that passed through Englewood in its days as a freight center, and the same containers that can still be seen on 63rd Street between Calumet Avenue and State Street. The various labels above the refrigerated sections all bear the same railway markings that are present on the large visual tableau, and walking into the ready-meal section of the store, a marquee with “Englewood” bolted onto its side is reminiscent of those seen around the area in the early to mid-1900s, when the 63rd and Halsted commercial corridor was a thriving shopping district Yet, while weaving this past into the visual design of the store does help localize the Whole Foods Market, it locates it in a distant history that seems almost too far removed from the Englewood of today. The Englewood that was a bustling railway hub in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was a predominantly white neighborhood of industrial laborers, one that predates the white flight and deindustrialization of the twentieth century. In this sense, the historical design on display doesn’t tell the stories of current residents. Geier explains the chronological focus of the design by saying, “We don’t necessarily want to look at what Englewood was and what it is now and what it could be. What we decided to do was look at what Englewood was at the beginning…and the history of the settling of that area, that community…and kind of jump from the beginning to now, and not worry so much about the in between.” While this explains the relative histori-

DENISE NAIM

cal distance of the overall design of the store, it doesn’t fully justify it. What saves the design from complete disconnection to current-day Englewood are the decidedly contemporary community touches that Geier’s team also incorporated in the final design. Artwork by Jerrold Anderson, known popularly as Just Flo, a hip-hop and visual artist whose mural work can be found throughout the South Side, now decorates a wall near the checkout area. Anderson’s large mural of a young boy biting into a green apple was part of an open call for local artists’ work. The incorporated artwork also includes drawings by Chicago Public School students of their favorite fruits and vegetables, which Geier and his team turned into wallpaper that papers the community room. Considering the scrutiny levelled on its process of development, these community touches to the internal design are reassuring. Coupled with the active initiatives that Whole Foods has introduced to this location—such as hiring locally, stocking local products, and establishing a community

room—they’re a welcome step in the direction of community involvement and assuaging some doubt regarding the introduction of an establishment like Whole Foods in the neighborhood. For Geier, the notion that design reaches beyond simply the visual and affects function and purpose has always been present. When he talked about the CPS student wallpaper in the community room, he said that it was “an important thing that they could feel comfortable coming to and feeling a good part of.” Bringing contemporary community elements into the space, then, was also meant to more pointedly assert a communal feel about the place, a level of comfort that somewhat alleviates the distanced external position of the Whole Foods building from the street and the community.” For skeptics, the interior design of the store may perhaps matter less than any of the current active measures that Whole Foods enacts to engage the community. After all, how much can a couple of metal pan-

els and well-cut logos do to impact the way Whole Foods interacts with the Englewood community? To that end, it’s worth noting that no one is claiming the interior design of the store is the sole vehicle to community engagement or change, but Geier does take an optimistic view about the abilities of good design. “It’s been proven that good design wins, and I don’t mean just wins awards,” said Geier. “I mean does a lot of good important things.” Customers of the Whole Foods in Englewood seem to be taking positively to the store as well. Shopping there on a Saturday morning, fifty-nine-year-old Brenda Blair, a resident of 114th Street, commented, “Oh, I think it’s awesome. It’s my third time coming here and I live in the hundreds.” While there is no way yet to know how the presence of this Whole Foods will affect the Englewood community in the long term, for now, walking through the store is an exercise in subtle reminders of Englewood’s past and present. ¬

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FOOD

Lives of Pie

At the South Side Pie Challenge, community comes baked in BY ISAAC TANNENBAUM

ISAAC TANNENBAUM

he weather outside was unseasonably warm, a balmy sixtyfour degrees in early November, and the pies inside the Hyde Park Neighborhood Club were even warmer in spirit. Pie has the longstanding reputation of bringing Americans together, perhaps better than any other food. The New York Times, as noted in an op-ed from 1902, even went so far as to attribute the success of the American people to their love of pie. The annual South Side Pie Challenge is a prime example of just how special this food is. Founded in 2012, the South Side Pie Challenge is a baking competition with the goal of celebrating and encouraging the rich diversity of Chicago’s South Side. Close friends, Julie Vassilatos and Kate Agarwal, cofounded the event after Kate participated in the Bucktown Apple Pie Contest. Disappointed by the homogenous nature of the attendees and participants, the pair took it upon themselves to celebrate the rich community that they’re proud to call home. The rules are simple. Each contestant may enter one pie into one of four categories: fruit, nut, sweet potato/pumpkin, and crème. You must drop off two pies the day of the event, one to be tasted by the judges, and the other to be sliced up and sold to the public at three dollars per slice. With a whopping fifty-four pies entered this year, the competition was fierce. The 16 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

judging period, which took place a few hours before the event, was open to the public and consisted of an evaluation of the pies on four criteria: visual appeal, crust, filling, and overall taste. Aesthetics were considered, and crust flakiness examined. After some deliberations between different groups of judges, scores were tallied, and winners were declared. Natalie Wright won the fruit category with “Pomme Pomme Pie”; Kate Baldwin claimed the title for Nut Pies thanks to her “Fancy Mixed Nut Pie”; Katie Maher-Lipinski’s “The Great Leslie” won her the ribbon for sweet potato and pumpkin pies; and Lisa Samra was crème pie champion, her “#imwithher” defeating the competition. Maya-Camille Broussard, Ben Rogers, Kirsten Esterly, and the other judges of this year’s Pie Challenge showcased some of the unique parts of Chicago’s South Side the event celebrates. Other panelists included local bakers, restauranteurs, culinary school instructors, and even a Food Network chef. The participants and attendees of the event also showcased the mosaic that is Hyde Park. The neighborhood, as well as Chicago as a whole, has a reputation for being segregated, and increasing tension between the University of Chicago and the local community has done little to mitigate that. However, all boundaries and differentiations seemed to crumble at the South Side Pie

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Challenge. A year before the organization’s first event, Vassilatos blogged about her experience attending the pie competition on the North Side. “The crowd skewed white, young and […] male,” she wrote. She and Agarwal sought to make an event that was the opposite of that, something that was more “South Side-y,” as she put it. And the two women accomplished just that. Looking at the crowd in attendance on the day of the event, it was clear that this was not the North Side. The South Side Pie Challenge is much like a great pie. “[The crust] has to balance out the pie,” explained Broussard, who won two ribbons last year and is the founder of Justice of the Pies, a local bakery specializing in sweet and savory pies, tarts, and quiches. If you have a tart pie, you need a savory crust, and a quiche benefits from a crust with just a little hint of sweetness–– there shouldn’t be too much of one flavor in a pie. Everyone who came or baked for this year’s challenge, much like the ingredients of these desserts, complemented one another, creating a cohesive whole greater than the sum of its parts. A mix of local South Siders, people from other parts of the city or state, and students at the UofC just a few blocks south were in harmony with one another, coming together for the beauty that is a delicious, homemade pie.

Cohesion is not the only way the South Side Pie Challenge benefits the local community. Agarwal and Vassilatos, when they created the competition, made it a point to donate almost all of the proceeds to benefit South Siders. It was only natural that they chose to donate to the Hyde Park and Kenwood Hunger Programs. In 2015, they managed to raise over $4,000 for the organizations at the event. The purpose of the contest is not to have a cutthroat competition to see who can bake the best pecan or pumpkin pie, though that aspect of it did not go unappreciated. Agarwal and Vassilatos set out to unite the South Side and Hyde Park community around a common love of warm, delicious, not-so-nutritious (not that it matters) pie, and to bring even more positivity to this area of Chicago. There was no hierarchy or best type of pie, nor was there any prescribed type of pie to make, such as apple or holidaythemed pumpkin. Everyone chose to be involved with the Pie Challenge out of a wholesome love for the dessert. Beyond the awards for best pies, the real celebration of the event was of the community: the people whom the wide range of pies represented, the people who came to the challenge, those who participated, and the unity of the South Side that pervades the South Side Pie Challenge. ¬

EVENTS

BULLETIN Using Data Wisely Community Programs Accelerator, 5225 S. Cottage Grove Ave. Wednesday, November 16, 12:30pm–2pm. Free. Register at bit.ly/usingdatawisely. (773) 702-8803. communityprograms.uchicago.edu In this day and age, information is everywhere—from the government tracking phone calls, to Facebook feeding consumer data to advertisers. But can Big Data be channeled toward social good? The UofCs Community Programs Accelerator explores how to use data in philanthropy and public service. (Hafsa Razi)

Screening of Precious Loss 7th District Police Station, 1438 W. 63rd St., Community Room. Wednesday, November 16, 11:00am–2:00pm. Free. RSVP required. Email btreeceosting@everthriveil.org or call 312-491-8161, ext. 24. The documentary Precious Loss looks at racial disparities in infant mortality and how they arise from systemic racism. After the film, participants will discuss the issue and hear an expert panel speak on how the documentary relates to their work. (Scott K. Olehnik)

Couponing 4 Beginners South Shore Public Library, 2505 E. 73rd St., Conference Room. Saturday, November 19, 9am–11:30am. $15.50–$20. Bring at least one copy of the Sunday Tribune. Ticket price includes raffle entry. (773) 891-7246. bit.ly/couponing4beginners Learn new ways to save money on household necessities from “Natasha The Fugal Coupon Lady,” at this Saturday workshop. Natasha—who “[eats], [sleeps], and [breathes] coupons!!”—will teach you how to get the best bang for your buck by being smart about weekly deals, sales, and coupon offers. (Emily Lipstein)

A Pie In The Sky: A VIP Bake Sale Absolutely Anything Essential Gift Shop, 3521 S. King Dr. Saturday, November 26, 9am–3pm. VIP breakfast 9am–10am, four hour-long unlimited tasting sessions starting 10am. $20 for VIP breakfast and one tasting session, $15 for one tasting session. (773) 4067663. bit.ly/pie-in-the-sky How many desserts can you eat in an hour? Taste cakes, pies, doughnuts, and more from local dessert masters at this exclusive bake sale event. Find your new favorite treat and place your holiday orders while benefitting the FAM Entertainment Theater Company, which empowers young women and girls through the creative arts. (Emily Lipstein)

VISUAL ARTS ArtWorks: Makers on 8 Harold Washington Library, 400 S. State St., 8th floor. Through December 19. Mondays, 4:30pm–7:30pm. Free. (312) 747-4300. chipublib.org Express your creativity at this weekly creative arts studio at the downtown branch of Chicago Public Libraries. Materials like paper, yarn, and ceramic shards are provided. School of the Art Institute of Chicago representatives provide guidance in a cultural exchange that aims to bring diverse people together for greater understanding. ( Joseph S. Pete)

Day Job / Night Job / Art Job Elastic Arts, 3429 W. Diversey Ave. #208. Wednesday, November 16, 6pm–9pm. $5 suggested donation. (773) 772-3616. elasticarts.org Art doesn’t always pay the bills—but it’s made anyway. Join Chicago Artists Resource and a number of local artists to discuss methods of maintaining financial stability and artistic activity. Following

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EVENTS

the discussion is a networking event for meeting other (hopefully not) starving artists. ( Jonathan Hogeback)

You Can Go With This Or You Can Go With That MANA Contemporary, 2233 S. Throop St., 6th floor. Saturday, November 19. Gallery hours noon–4pm, reception 4pm–7pm. Free. (312) 850-0555. manacontemporarychicago.com MANA Contemporary dropped an old Black Sheep lyric in naming its one-nightonly show for Cranbrook Academy of Art and SAIC MFA students at the forefront of the ceramics discipline. Cranbrook is a graduate school known for its design and architecture, located in the leafy Detroit suburbs. ( Joseph S. Pete)

Sadie Benning: Shared Eye The Renaissance Society, Cobb Hall, 5811 S. Ellis Ave., 4th floor. Opening reception November 19, 5pm–8pm; 6pm conversation with artist. Through January 22. Free. (773) 702-8670. renaissancesociety.org Le Tigre founder and internationally exhibited Brooklyn artist Sadie Benning installed forty cut-up and reassembled panels of photos, found pictures and other mixed media paying homage to Blinky Palermo’s “To the People of New York City.” Benning’s installation explores how vision is a shared act, surveillance is internalized, and meaning is constructed through association. ( Joseph S. Pete)

Exploring Symbolism Through Portraiture

his artwork. (Troy Ordonez)

Inspired by Social Issues: Male Artists of Color Reflect on Today’s Urban Experience Bridgeport Art Center, 1200 W. 35th St. Opening reception Friday, November 18, 7pm–10pm. Through January 6, 2017, Monday–Saturday, 8am–6pm; Sundays 8am– noon. Free. (773) 843-9000. bridgeportart.com This exhibition features artwork from a collective of male artists of color, addressing and detailing the problems facing our society today. Topics like homelessness, unemployment, and youth incarceration will be covered in this expansive gallery filled with artworks including works on paper, oil portraits, watercolor, mixed media, and views of the urban landscape. (Troy Ordonez)

MUSIC Ron Perrillo Logan Center for the Arts, 915 E. 60th St. Tuesday, November 15, 7:30pm. Free. (773) 702-2787. arts.uchicago.edu Celebrated Chicago-based pianist Ron Perrillo will perform at this month’s Third Tuesday Jazz event. Described by his peers as a “monster” for his inventive and unorthodox creative style, Perrillo playing solo should be a treat for all to hear. (Emily Lipstein)

Thee Oh Sees

Project Onward Studio, 1200 W. 35th St., 4th floor. Opening reception Friday, November 18, 6pm–9:30pm. Free. (773) 940-2992. projectonward.org

Thalia Hall, 1807 S. Allport St. Saturday, November 19, doors 7:30, show 8:30pm. $20. 17+. (312) 526-3851. thaliahallchicago.com

Artist Julius DC Bautista is a Chicagobased Filipino-American whose artwork for this exhibition, including new pieces, highlights the tension between balance and disharmony through wonderfully colorful portraits that pay homage to abstract expressionism and contemporary illustration. Bautista will be on hand to discuss the complexities and messages of

Hailing from San Francisco, the indiepsychedelic outfit Thee Oh Sees will take the Thalia Hall stage with labelmates Running to make some intensely weird noise. For extra fun, enjoy local opener Grün Wasser, whose industrial synth pop is as murky and rippling as their name, which translates to Green Water, suggests. (Neal Jochmann)

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The Corner Presents: Mother Nature, Participatory Music Coalition The Promontory, 5311 S. Lake Park Ave. Monday, November 21, 7pm–11pm. $5. 21+. (312) 801-2100. promontorychicago.com Emcees T.R.U.T.H. and Klevah of the “Hip Hop Force” Mother Nature named their project after a nonprofit that provides children of neglected communities with safe spaces. Their inclusive message complements that of The Participatory Music Coalition, a ten-member jazz juggernaut with reverence for all Great Black Music traditions. (Neal Jochmann)

Bongzilla Reggies Music Joint, 2105 S. State St. Thursday, November 17, 8pm. $17 online, $20 day of show. 21+. (312) 949-0120. reggieslive.com Stoner metal gods Bongzilla rip through Reggies this Thursday, bringing their smoky riffs and Wisconsin vibes to the Windy City. Roll up for a show guaranteed to melt your brain and light your joint, if that’s your kind of thing. (Austin Brown)

Sarah Davachi Stony Island Arts Bank, 6760 S. Stony Island Ave. Saturday, November 19, 8pm–10pm. Free. Register at sarahdavachi.eventbrite.com. (312) 857-5561. rebuild-foundation.org Canadian experimentalist Sarah Davachi brings her synth-blended electroacoustic music to the Stony Island Arts Bank this weekend. Davachi is most interested in “the experience of enveloped sonic dwelling,” so be sure to make it out if you’re looking for a home away from home. (Austin Brown)

STAGE & SCREEN Chicago Podcast Festival The Promontory, 5311 S. Lake Park Ave. Thursday, November 17, 7pm & 9pm. Friday, November 18, 7pm & 9pm. Saturday, November 19, 11pm. Doors for all shows are an hour before scheduled start time. Ticket

price varies by show, $10-25. 21+. (773) 9359810. chicagopodcastfestival.org Sarah Koenig’s award-winning podcast Serial isn’t the only game in town. Join local podcasters this Thursday through Saturday for live tapings of podcasts, including The Room Where It’s Happening—a Hamilton podcast—and Black Girl in Om—a podcast about self-care and self-love, from women of color, for women of color. (Emily Lipstein)

Connect Hyde Park: Harper Theater Programming Harper Theater, 5238 S. Harper Ave. Friday, November 18, 5pm–10pm; Saturday, November 19, noon–10pm; Sunday, November 20, noon–5pm. Free. connecthydepark.com Although film programming for Eric Williams’s inaugural three-day art festival Connect Hyde Park has not yet been announced, this is an event it would be fair to have blind faith in: the inimitable Jacqueline Stewart, of Black Cinema House, and the UofC are responsible for the curation. ( Julia Aizuss)

Day of Absence Staged Reading South Shore Cultural Center, 7059 S. South Shore Dr. Saturday, November 19, 3pm. Free. (773) 753-4472. courttheatre.org Day of Absence , the final play in Court Theatre’s 2016 Spotlight Reading Series imagines the disappearance of every black resident in a Southern town and the bewildered reactions of the town’s white residents (who may just feel differently than their prejudice would imply). ( Jonathan Hogeback)

African American Film Pioneers: Dirty Gertie from Harlem U.S.A. Logan Center for the Arts, 915 E. 60th St. Saturday, November 19, 7pm. Free. (773) 702-8596. filmstudiescenter.uchicago.edu Follow the tragic story of nightclub entertainer Gertie La Rue in all of its 35mm glory. This screening is a part of the African American Film Pioneers series at the UofC Film Studies Center and will be

introduced by UofC film professor Allyson Nadia Field. ( Jonathan Hogeback)

Third Cinema? IV filmfront, 1740 W. 18th St. Saturday, November 19, 8pm–10pm. Free. filmfront.org Join filmfront for the final screening in the “Third Cinema?” series, following the Tercer Cine movement in Latin America. Viewers will explore the lives of brick makers in Marta Rodríguez’s Chircales, and feelings of misery in Carlos Mayolo’s mockumentary, Agarrando Pueblo. ( Jonathan Hogeback)

The November Phoenix High Concept Labs, 2233 S. Throop St. Saturday, November 19, 7pm–11pm. $10 suggested donation. (312) 850-0555. highconceptlaboratories.org

the aftermath of intimate partner violence. All proceeds from the event will support Sarah’s Inn, a nonprofit that helps those affected by domestic violence. ( Jonathan Hogeback)

RE/NIGHT/LIVE/MARE: Parts 3&4 ACRE TV. Part 3: Tuesday, November 15–Monday, November 21; Part 4: Tuesday, November 22–Monday, November 28. acretv.org ACRE TV’s latest project might now be a little too timely: this diverse four-part multitude of twice-airing video art first and foremost “re-considers your nightmares.” This week, you can catch the daydreams, fantasies, and horrors reworked in the tail end of Part 3 (LIVE) and the beginning of Part 4 (MARE). ( Julia Aizuss)

The November Phoenix is performance with the power to heal: a group of vignettes that tell stories of growth and strength in

WHAT’S MISSING IN YOUR ’HOOD? TEXT “SSW” TO

312-697-1791 Then tell us what you want to see in your community. This is a public engagement project from City Bureau, Chicago’s civic journalism lab based in Woodlawn.

THE PUBLIC NEWSROOM UPCOMING EVENTS Thursday, November 17 2pm–8pm: Public Newsroom is open 6pm: Workshop on Freedom of Information Act led by Chaclyn Hunt of the Invisible Institute Thursday, November 24 Closed for Thanksiving Thursday, December 1 2pm–8pm: Public Newsroom is open 6pm: Workshop on Music Journalism led by Leor Galil of the Chicago Reader CITYBUREAU.ORG/PUBLICNEWSROOM THE EXPERIMENTAL STATION 6100 S. BLACKSTONE AVE

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