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census spotlight
Census Spotlight POLITICS
Coalition for a Better Chinese American Community
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BY TAMMY XU
In preparation for the 2020 Census, the Weekly is featuring an organization doing work around the census and ways to get involved in each issue. Th is is the fi rst in the series. T he 2020 Census kicks off for most Chicagoans on April 1, but state, county, and city groups have been raising awareness about the importance of participation for some time, anxious to avoid an undercount that could result in a projected loss of $1.2 billion in federal funding over the next decade. Areas with large populations of foreign-born residents, multi-family households, and “linguistically isolated” households are among those particularly at risk of being undercounted. “Traditionally Asian Americans have been undercounted because of these reasons,” said Grace Chan McKibben, executive director of the Coalition for a Better Chinese American Community (CBCAC), an advocacy organization based in Chinatown. Within the greater Chinatown area— which includes not just Chinatown, but Bridgeport, McKinley Park, and sections of nearby Bronzeville and Pilsen—CBCAC has focused its canvassing eff orts on fourteen census tracts that are at risk of being undercounted, with plans to knock on every single door within those tracts between now and April 30, in the hope of reaching an estimated 56,000 people.
So far, a team of ten core volunteers have chipped in, working in pairs to go door-to-door and take residents through the basics: the importance of the census, that it’s for everyone regardless of citizenship or legal status, that all information collected is kept confi dential, and help is available to fi ll out forms. Volunteers are given training beforehand, so prior experience is not necessary, although fl uency in one of the Cantonese, Mandarin, Fu Zhou, or Taishanese dialects spoken around Chinatown is highly sought after. CBCAC off ers other ways to volunteer with census outreach as well, such as phone banking, making fl yers, data entry, and writing translations. “Door knocking is not everyone’s cup of tea,” said Chan McKibben,
CHICAGO DEPARTMENT OF AVIATION
referring to the time commitment (it can take two canvassers two hours to cover a city block). “If people are interested, they can help at every level.”
To volunteer, email info@cbcacchicago.org.
Th e Weekly’s coverage of the 2020 Census is supported by a reporting grant from the McCormick Foundation, administered by the Chicago Independent Media Alliance.
Tammy Xu is a contributing editor to the Weekly. She last coordinated coverage of Chinatown and Roseland & Pullman for the 2019 Best of the South Side issue. ¬
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Experts at Play
Nature playspaces allow kids to build, and rebuild, their worlds every day
BY EMELINE POSNER NATURE
The kids in Ms. Pender-Bey’s eighth grade class at Mount Vernon Elementary will soon be preparing to depart for high school. But before they go, they’re leaving their mark on the neighborhood.
The class is designing their own nature playspace to be built in Jackie Robinson Park, directly adjacent to the Washington Heights school.
On a snowy January morning, Pender-Bey’s students eagerly gathered in the science lab, where Chicago Park District employees Sean Shaffer and Isaiah Ballinger had laid out paper, crayons, and special toolboxes loaded up with necessary supplies: sticks, rocks, putty, string, and, to the excitement of one of the tables at the front of the classroom, what looked like a kind of hickory nut.
The kids hardly needed instructions; after a brief introduction, they jumped to it. Zachary and Nazir built a swing from sticks and rope and a seating circle made from branch rounds, while a couple tables down Ronaisha and Mikah worked on designing hopscotch and life-size tic-tac-toe courts and a maze made from sticks. Around the room all sorts of model structures started to rise: tree houses, sand boxes, slides, peace circles, bridges, and islands.
Helping kids design their own playspaces is a big part of the job for Shaffer. A longtime educator and park district employee, a year and a half ago he became the district’s nature education specialist—a position created for him—after realizing how important it was for kids to have access to natural spaces where they can engage in unstructured play.
Nature playspaces and play gardens have been popping up across the city over the last several years, thanks to the park district and to organizations like NeighborSpace and Openlands. Pocket parks that are often filled with hills of mulch, tree stumps, and hollowed out log tunnels—and lots of sticks—these playspaces aren’t quite blank canvases, but unlike traditional playgrounds full of fixed structures they are designed to be built and rebuilt again, and again, and again. “If you give them planks and stumps, kids can create a seesaw and then the next day, [say] ‘We want it to be a ramp, a castle,’ or whatever they see,” Shaffer said.
Sticks and logs break down over time. That’s part of the fun, Shaffer said: “It’s all loose parts, logs and sticks, that are meant to break down and become more interesting until they’re nothing.”
Once the sticks and logs are nothing— once they’ve disintegrated or otherwise become too small to be played with—the park district needs to restock the playspace. Park district staff have addressed this potential supply problem by learning themselves to look at natural debris as play material: a fallen tree as a potential clambering structure, a large branch as a beam in a fort. Shaffer says he gets texts throughout the course of the week from crew members asking if a tree or other object could work in a playspace.
So far, Shaffer has helped oversee the design and construction of eight park district playspaces including in Hyde Park, Northerly Island, and the North Park Village Nature Center where he is based. By his count there are another eleven in some stage of the planning process, which will include Marquette Park, Douglas Park, and Rogers Park.
Shaffer and the park district are in good company with NeighborSpace and Openlands, both nonprofit organizations that have helped communities develop
NAZIR AND ZACHARY BUILD A BENCH WITH WOOD AND PUTTY AS PART OF THEIR PLAYSPACE MODEL. BRIDGET VAUGHN
similar spaces throughout the city.
Openlands helps lead an initiative called “Space to Grow,” which transforms Chicago Public Schools land into green playspaces and gardens, which also helps to reduce flooding by relieving pressure on the stormwater system.
NeighborSpace, which until recently focused on buying land for and maintaining community gardens, first started working with nature play spaces in 2013 after being approached by community organizations and residents in Little Village who wanted a community playspace, Robin Cline, NeighborSpace’s assistant director, said. The garden was completed in 2015, after two years of in-depth community planning, and more followed, in McKinley Park, North Lawndale, and Humboldt Park. And more are planned, on the Far Southeast Side, Austin, and Garfield Park—the latter two as part of the West Side Nature Play Network. “More and more communities are coming to us with requests and desires to figure out how to meet the needs of their communities that are not necessarily met by [playgrounds or] traditional community gardens,” Cline said. “One of the [important aspects] of community managed nature play is the need for intergenerational space that allow for community building… and for kids to play in nature and in their own neighborhoods.”
Though one of the biggest proponents of the nature play movement is based in North Carolina, Cline said, the movement is really international, with roots in Scandinavia. “More and more we’re recognizing the importance… [of ] providing opportunities for early childhood play and decisionmaking.” And not just for kids, but for parents too. “The community stewardship that happens in these play gardens,” she said, referring to plantings and other community work days that occur in play gardens, ”reflects adult play.” W hen Shaffer and Ballinger, who manages the park district’s natural areas, work with kids
designing playspaces, they encourage the kids especially in the community to play an active role. “We let the kids be the play experts,” Ballinger said. This was their first time working with a group of kids directly through the Chicago Public Schools, so they were particularly excited.
In class, Shaffer and Ballinger joked that Pender-Bey’s class of eighth graders had done most of their work for them.
Her students, who are fondly referred to as “the entrepreneurs” of the school, have been researching and planning for this playspace since the sixth grade—way before they met Shaffer. They’ve conducted a community survey to see what community members wanted to see in a playspace, done research on sensory activities for autistic students, and led nature play sessions with the school’s prekindergarten kids on Friday afternoons.
Most students said that playing with the pre-k students had been their favorite part of the process. “I like working with them because they really like to make noise,” Nazir said. “And I’m a musician, so I can teach them beats.”
But for Jayveon and Winston, the best part was “building it all.” In their survivalthemed playspace, they were connecting a boat to an island with a rope. When I came back to their table a few minutes later, they were connecting the island to a peace circle—where kids can go to “chill out”— with a narrow bridge.
A visiting teacher warmly cautioned them to think about safety for the younger kids. “How high is that bridge gonna be?” she asked. “I don’t want any babies falling off there.”
Without missing a beat, Jayveon held up two slivers of wood to the sides of their bridge. “What if we put up railings?”
Although graduation is nearing, the kids will likely get to see a version of their playspace before they leave. As soon as it’s warm enough, Shaffer and Ballinger will return with real materials and some larger equipment for a “pop-up” playspace design session at Jackie Robinson. The kids will play around with different designs and, later this year, the park district will landscape and assemble the permanent version.
One of the things Jayveon and his classmates heard back from the community survey his class conducted was that “every kid wanted a little park,” he said. “We’re gonna build it for them before we go.”
Who Built House
ERIK M. KOMMER
ERIK M. KOMMER
A day and night celebrating Frankie Knuckles reminds us that house music was built in Black queer sanctuaries
BY JEREMY PAUL SAXON MALDONADO
On a frigid Sunday afternoon, our congregation completes its pilgrimage to the Stony Island Arts Bank in South Shore, sitting in chairs arrayed like pews throughout its cathedrallike hall. We have come to hear the gospel of Frankie Knuckles, the godfather of house music, just one day after what would have been his sixty-fifth birthday. In the five years since his passing, Frankie may have already been canonized as house’s patron saint; in 2004 the City of Chicago named the street where house was born after him to honor his contribution to the city’s musical legacy, even declaring August 25 to be Frankie Knuckles Day. The event is titled “Frankie Knuckles and the Power of Liberatory Space,” and DJ Duane Powell is our preacher and sound-selector today. Dressed in all black, complete with a dandy hat, he begins his sermon with a humble introduction. Powell is a tastemaker, a music historian, and the custodian of Frankie Knuckles’s vinyl record collection, housed and digitized on-site at the Arts Bank. A projector shares images of these records—many of their sleeves covered with handwritten notes addressed to Frankie—along with photos of Frankie himself. This rotation of loving and timeless images served as our stained glass windows to adorn the experience. Powell begins his sermon by telling us that house was formed in “Black queer sanctuaries,” an assertion that is met with clear praises from the crowd. These snaps, cheers and affirmations only escalate throughout the program. The palpable energy of the audience peaks when Powell plays his musical selections between anecdotes. The Church of House is present, and they are itching to worship during the “Sunday Service” dance marathon that would immediately follow.
This day-into-night event carried into yet another dance party, this one a benefit for the Frankie Knuckles Foundation. The fundraiser, "For Frankie!", is presented
annually by Queen!, the weekly queer dance series at Metro/Smartbar where Frankie was a resident DJ until his passing. Undoubtedly followed by unofficial after-hours functions; the tradition of dancing until dawn has yet to be broken, carried on by the next generation of the devout, all seeking salvation through the collective effervescence that house provides.
And today, the devout are present: when Powell asks who had danced at the original Warehouse (active from 1977-82), about forty percent of the crowd raise their hands. The Warehouse, a juice bar formerly located at 206 South Jefferson Street, was the holy site of house music’s genesis. Author Stuart Cosgrove describes house, in the style of mixing that Frankie pioneered, as a religion: the DJ is a ‘high priest’ at their pulpit, with the dancers constituting a ‘fanatical congregation.’
After those first few glorious years, the devoted followed Frankie when he opened his own club, The Power Plant. Soon after, the Warehouse changed venues, becoming The Muzik Box, an underground sanctum beneath downtown Michigan Avenue. It was here where Ron Hardy—one of house music’s most influential progenitors— would take up the mantle and advance the evolution of house in his own image.
Powell tells us that these sites were where people came to find “paradise in the darkest spaces,” where these disciples would dance 'til dawn to decadent beats comprised of a harmonious marriage between disco, soul, and gospel music. Near the program’s end, some of the veterans even stand up to share heartfelt anecdotes from the scene in its beginnings, many acknowledging one another. Moments like this are how house music's history is re-remembered through collective myth-making.
Among these myths is the narrative that house “rose like a phoenix from the ashes” of 1979’s Disco Demolition, which Powell contests. The infamous event, which was spearheaded by a local radio personality, promised ninety-nine cent admission to a White Sox double header at Comiskey Park in exchange for a disco record that would be destroyed with explosives between games.
Comiskey Park overflowed with 60,000 patrons, many of whom just brought records by Black artists—not even disco tracks—to add to the pyre. Jeering “disco sucks,” fans stormed the field, forming a riot and forcing the Sox to forfeit their second game. A marketing gimmick had become the cultural assassination of disco, a placeholder for the Black, brown, and LGBTQ people that built that musical movement. This act of war would mark a turning point of disco’s impact on popular culture— but elsewhere in Chicago, Frankie Knuckles had already begun spinning his signature tracks. Quoting Frankie, Powell tells us “house music is disco's revenge,” and that house’s cultural dominance today proves not only that disco never died, but that its culture of joyful liberation lives on through its sonic successor.
Powell contextualizes the Demolition with the refrain: “The Black body in motion is never without consequence.” Solemnly relaying the story or Tamir Rice—an unarmed Black boy shot and killed at age twelve by a Cleveland police officer—he tells us that the gazebo, where Tamir was playing when he was gunned down, is preserved in the lawn outside the Arts Bank. It stands as a grim monument reminding us that too often, the consequence for a Black boy to play—to exist—is death.
“One is many, two is a mob, three is a threat,” Powell repeats while discussing assemblies of Black bodies. This was the sentiment at many of the dance clubs in Chicago in the seventies. Even the gay, majority-white discotheques had strict quotas on how many Black or brown people could enter at once, Powell states. Limited by your race, your sexual orientation, or both, there was hardly a place you could go dance. The alienation caused by this racist discrimination and ignorant fear created a need for a space that the most marginalized people could call their own.
In spite of these segregated spaces, house and apartment parties on the South Side of Chicago filled this void. Powell relays that despite being membership-only, they grew bigger and bigger, expanding to borrowed spaces not up to fire code; one venue even burned down. Undeterred, The Warehouse would open in 1975 as a private gay club; you didn't have to be gay to go—everyone was welcome to dance with anyone. A former factory building, 2,000 people could fill its floors in a single night, all seeking the openness of a space that was built for and by Black and gay people.
These underground dancefloors provided a sanctuary where you could be free from judgement, from the hostility of a cold, cold world. House was built, miraculously, in defiance of the darkness of the neoliberal Reagan years, providing shelter to a population plagued by the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Imagine the power that house had to liberate the body, free the mind, and heal the spirit amidst that political landscape.
Powell puts on a disco record and we hear “I’m happy, I’m carefree, and I’m gay” ringing from Carl Bean’s 1977 track “I Was Born This Way.” We are told that this is a strong message because it was from “before it was a time to be proud,” as Powell puts it. This most recent Pride month, June 2019, marked the fiftieth anniversary of the Stonewall Riots, a series of violent demonstrations against the New York City police who raided a bar attempting to arrest patrons, many Black and brown, who were not in compliance with the anti-gay laws of the time. The 1969 riots in New York would change the trajectory of the gay liberation movement in the U.S. forever. A decade later, house’s cultural revolution would be considered Chicago’s “Musical Stonewall,” to quote legendary DJ Craig Cannon.
Powell repeats, “The Black body in motion is never without consequence.” What is the consequence of hundreds of these bodies dancing together? Political revolution (and an inevitable backlash). House culture broke down barriers between marginalized groups, cultivating space where people could create community across intersections of race, class and sexuality. You could believe that utopia is possible because house set that example for a brief, golden hour—until City Hall forced after-hours juice bar venues to close at 2am, effectively shutting them down, in 1987.
“House will never die,” I’m told by Mary, a fellow dancer. She’s been dancing to house since she was a teenager. She tells me it takes her on a spiritual journey; I nod my head. “Its power is innate in the body, the beat is tribal, releasing your soul onto a spiritual journey.” Her words are as moving as they are sincere. The music just “lifts you up immediately.” I know exactly what she means, because not two tracks into the dance party, my spirits are high.
Although Frankie is in Chicago’s LGBT Hall of Fame, some house heads, like Mary, didn’t even know he was gay. This phenomenon is mirrored in presentday consumption of house as a genre of music detached from its queer roots. This retroactive erasure can be explained by the commercialization house experienced during its success in the late eighties, but one cannot deny the music has a queer soul. “Bad Boy,” one of many collaborations between producer Frankie Knuckles and vocalist Jamie Principle, begins thumping in the middle of Duane’s DJ set. The song’s lascivious pleas hypnotize the now ecstatic throng of dancers, filling the room with steam heat. This is the first original track of Frankie’s played today—his own copy of it, even—and it’s seducing the room with its libidinal innuendo. “Yes we are sexual, too/ Bad boys make life satisfying/because we know just what to do,” Jaime sings, amid solicitations, “Well you might call me a queer/Well you might call me a freak.” Lyrics immortalized in wax: a testament to the hostile reality for queer people of the eighties, but a flagrant rebuke of those prejudices nonetheless.
Punctuated with moans, Jaime continues, “I know you're looking for pleasure/your reasons are understood/You want to find the real party/you want to really let go/For the right price I will take you/to the place you want to go.” These words aren’t just meant to scandalize, they are anthemic and empowering with their lewdness. Explicitly homoerotic, this track was an unabashedly sex positive staple of the dancefloor at the same time that fear dominated the gay community as it weathered the HIV/AIDS crisis. The chants command: feel free to be intimate, to be fearless, to love.
“Oh, I’m just a bad boy,” I sing along— it’s one of my favorites. I must confess: I’m one of the devout. Covered in sweat and beaming, I am relishing the opportunity to dance to Frankie’s vinyl once more. A delinquent, I found this church at age twenty-one on a Sunday night at Queen!, Frankie’s last pulpit, not knowing I was dancing in the audience of a living legend. For years, I would take the midnight train across the city to worship with the Chicago’s house community, many of whom worked in the service industry and had Mondays off. Years later, this party would win the honor of being named the Best Dance Party in the city by the Reader, prompting hours-long waits on busy weekends.
People line up for a reason: the euphoric experience of togetherness is incomparable. As much as I have tried to convey the beauty of house with words, you simply have to experience it for yourself. Find it in a record store, in a nightclub, or in some wayward tabernacle, but you will not be able to deny the clarion call of its beat. Until you come home, we will keep the flame burning bright.
Jeremy is a Bolivian-American artist, writer, and performer. Born in Panama, raised amid the cornfields of Illinois, and reared in Chicago’s queer underground, they are currently working on a TV series that dramatizes the rise of house music in Chicago. They are looking for collaborators who are passionate about building a story that centers house culture's architects. This is their first contribution to the Weekly. ¬
