February 1, 2017 | The Housing Issue

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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 17 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 Editors Emeline Posner, Julia Aizuss Education Editor Music Editor Stage & Screen Editor Visual Arts Editor

Hafsa Razi Austin Brown Nicole Bond Corinne Butta

Contributing Editors Maddie Anderson, Joe Andrews, Ariella Carmell, Jonathan Hogeback, Andrew Koski, Adia Robinson, Carrie Smith, Margaret Tazioli, Yunhan Wen, Kylie Zane Video Editor Lucia Ahrensdorf Radio Producer Maira Khwaja Web Editor Camila Cuesta Social Media Editors Emily Lipstein, Sam Stecklow Visuals Editor Ellen Hao Deputy Visuals Editor Jasmin Liang Layout Editors Baci Weiler, Sofia Wyetzner Staff Writers: Sara Cohen, Christopher Good, Rachel Kim, Michal Kranz, Anne Li, Zoe Makoul Fact Checkers: Eleanore Catolico, Sam Joyce, Rachel Kim, Adam Przybyl, Hafsa Razi, Carrie Smith, Tiffany Wang 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:

THE HOUSING ISSUE More than its facade or its floor plan, what defines a home is one’s relation to it—a home can be something lived in, but it can also be something desired or something imagined, something remembered or something mourned.

At the Weekly, we use our annual Housing Issue as an occasion to explore not only the built landscape of the neighborhoods around us, but also our sense of what it is to be grounded, to be “from” a place, to “find” one. Year after year, these questions lead us to stories as diverse as the row houses and two-flats that line a Chicago block.

In this issue, as we investigate the Chicago Housing Authority’s redevelopment of public housing in Bronzeville and chart two eras of gentrification in Pilsen, we also zoom in on individual homes with extraordinary histories, unique buildings on the brink of demolition, and explore what it means to find a home in history. Just as the cityscape around us always changes over time, the questions we ask are certain to change as well, but the stories in the Housing Issue always touch in some way on those things that—whether we have lost them or found them, whether they are new or old—help us understand who we are.

all in the family

“I think we were the last wave of artists there. I really do.” christian belanger...4 defend at all costs

“We’re always gonna fight for our people.” carlos ballesteros...7 redeveloping the state street corridor: a comic

luc boyce...10 redeveloping the state street corridor

“After a while you start to say, ‘this is just the reality, they’re not going to rebuild.’ ” jake bittle, srishti kapur, & jasmine mithani...13

Cover photo collage

by Robert Harris.

mari cohen on Elam Home...9 bridget gamble on Lorraine Hansberry’s Home...31 christian belanger on the Strand...33 kylie zane on Mahalia Jackson’s Home...34 eco house in englewood

“We love it, we feel alive here.” suzi colpa...20

Standout South Side structures eric l. kirkes & amy qin...23 isolated building studies

On thoughtfully engaging the landscape david schalliol...28 home at the hotel

The fire was a beautiful spectacle. samantha clark...30 chiasmus

I think about how it’s impossible for a nation to have a conscience if it doesn't have a memory. rayshauna gray...32

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All in the Family

A battle over a Pilsen real estate empire highlights the neighborhood’s uncertain future

BY CHRISTIAN BELANGER

T

his past fall, perceptive Chicago art lovers may have noticed the absence of one long-standing tradition: after forty-five years, the Pilsen East Artists’ Open House wasn’t happening.

Many of the neighborhood’s residents thought that the lack of an Open House— which has traditionally been a chance for the public to enter and explore the galleries, studios, and workspaces of the artists living in Pilsen’s Arts District, most of it centered around 18th Street and Halsted Street— might have had something to do with a recent change in management for many properties in the area: from Podmajersky Inc., run by John Podmajersky III, to PMI Properties, run by his sister Lisa Podmajersky. In a letter to her tenants on October 5 explaining the management change, Lisa wrote: “As most of you know, our management transition has involved a lot of work and person-power to complete. Hopefully most of you understand that because of this transition, we will not be holding the Open House on the properties

we manage this year.”

The letter is an indirect acknowledgment of a strange lawsuit affecting East Pilsen over the last few years. At its core is a vitriolic set of court cases between John Podmajersky III and Lisa Podmajersky, the two members of the third generation of Pilsen’s Podmajersky dynasty that has done much, over the past several decades, to give East Pilsen its current reputation as an artists’ enclave. (Both Lisa Podmajersky and John Podmajersky III, through representatives, declined to comment for this story.) The spat follows a host of other factors that have changed the face of Pilsen over the last few decades.

Development by UIC has encroached from the north; rising rents have threatened to drive out artists, galleries, and many longtime Latinx residents; and several stalled, failed, and vacant development projects have appeared in an area that has been described for twenty years as some variant of “up and coming.” East Pilsen has seen a lack of consistent visitors to the neighborhood

outside the flagship Second Friday events (monthly receptions by galleries and studios along South Halsted). The dwindling traffic, in combination with higher rents, mean that there are fewer artists and galleries in the neighborhood than twenty, ten, or even five years ago. Pilsen’s artist class—until recently a gentrifying force that helped push out many of the neighborhood’s blue collar, Mexican residents—now faces an ousting of its own.

The Podmajersky lawsuit is both personal and inscrutable compared with these larger economic and political currents, but it’s another reminder of the uncertainty that animates an ever-changing neighborhood. It’s also a reminder that this uncertainty cuts both ways: the ownership change has fueled fears of creative decay, but also engendered hope that Chicago’s unofficial arts district can still come to flourish.

In 1914, John and Elizabeth Podmajersky, Slovakian immigrants, moved

to Pilsen and started a dairy. When business declined, they moved into real estate, buying up some property in the neighborhood.

The Podmajerskys’ son, John Jr., along with his wife Annelies, increased the family’s holdings. He acquired a number of lofts with the aim of advertising them to artists in order to create an artists’ colony, replete with charming alleyways and cozy communal gardens. “John Jr. thought of it as a new Prague, a new Bohemia,” said Daniel Barber, a painter who lived in the area from the early 1980s until the 2000s.

Former residents’ accounts of John Jr. give the sense that he was gruff, brisk, and businesslike, though not without some charm; Barber described him as having a “typical cantankerous way.” Gary Justis, a sculptor who lived in the area from the late 1970s until the early 1990s, said that certain residents sensed that he was hostile: “They assumed he was rich, which he never was,” he said. “He was connected, with good credit. And committed to improving the

JULIE XU

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neighborhood.”

This commitment to improving the neighborhood manifested itself in different ways. In the mornings and on weekends, John Jr. would walk around picking trash off the streets, said Barber. But both he and Justis remember that there was a slow creep toward gentrification even when they lived there, one subtly abetted by the Podmajerskys. “Retail was just starting, and a cafe had come in,” said Barber. “There were a lot of local Mexican-American shops. But I think John did not want them there.” Of course, some attempts at beautification were less successful than others: Barber recalls that when the second Mayor Daley attempted to plant rows of trees along the streets, one neighborhood teenager biked along a row of them with a machete, slicing off their branches.

Alicia Gonzalez, daughter of MexicanAmerican artist-activist and longtime Pilsen resident Jose Gonzalez, remembers John Jr. raising the rent on the building her father rented until he had to move out: “We lived at 567 West 18th Street,” she said. “That was my first memory of living in Pilsen. That was my dad’s first place...And that was a pretty big artists’ loft. A big, huge studio.”

“My dad didn’t make very much money at all, he was busy promoting other artists,” said Gonzalez. “[Podmajersky] was catering to certain artists, not necessarily my dad.

The studio we did have, there was a moment when I was a little girl, where the roof caved in where I slept. The maintenance of the building wasn’t always great.”

Gonzalez says that she and her dad were quick-moving tenants after leaving the Podmajersky building, slowly making their way further west into the less-developed and cheaper West Pilsen. But she remembers walking by her first home a few years later on her way to church and noticing that the windows had been redone.

“It’s funny that it was the window, but it was powerful. It was one of these icy cool windows,” she said. “It had beautiful glass

“As business owners we don’t know, are we going to be moving? Are they going to shut it down? Are they selling to some bigwig? We were all a little scared.”

—Delilah Martinez, owner of VIP Paints

windows. As a kid, I was just very cognizant of that [they] were never there when we lived there. Clearly there was much more investment in catering to a specific kind of artist.”

While they worked on the business, John Jr. and Annelies also had two children, John III and Lisa. Lisa left Chicago in 1980 to attend college at the University of Vermont. While there, she and Annelies were interviewed for a New York Times article about students reluctant to head home to their families during school holidays. “Vacations can be tense,” Lisa said in the article. “Parents try to do a lot of parenting that they don't do the rest of the year, and they are frightened by the loss of control.” After finishing school in Vermont, she moved to Colorado, where she would live for the next twenty-plus years.

Meanwhile, John III went to school at the University of Chicago and began to work for his family’s real estate business in the eighties. According to public deed records, he also began his own company, Podmajersky Inc., in the mid-nineties to manage the holdings he had been acquiring since the previous decade. His control over the management aspect of his parents’ real

estate holdings increased until 2003, when he completely took over the company’s dayto-day operations. A 2004 conceptual plan for John Jr. and Annelies, put together by their estate planning attorney and included in court documents, suggests that the family’s goal at the time was that John III would own the properties upon his parents’ death; the plan also warned that if the pair did not act quickly, “your legacy that you have spent a lifetime building (the artist colony in Pilsen) will be dissipated and Johnny will not have his opportunity.”

Lisa returned to Chicago just as her parents’ health was declining. This is where the story gets murkier, or at least contentious: in July of 2012, Annelies and John Jr. filed a lawsuit against their son alleging that he had misinformed his parents about the nature and extent of his financial control over their properties through Podmajersky, Inc. For instance, the lawsuit claimed that John and Annelies initially believed John’s annual salary was only $100,000, but an additional management fee earned him “considerably more.” The pair sought to remove their son as property manager for the Podmajersky properties in Pilsen.

During the course of the litigation,

both Annelies and John died—Annelies in late September of 2013, John in October of 2014. John had modified his will to make Lisa the owner, both directly and through various limited partnerships and corporations, of all of the couple’s properties in Pilsen. After Annelies’s death, John III filed a counter-claim to his parents’ initial lawsuit, alleging that Lisa came back in order to manipulate her ill parents to cut him out of their wills and to wrest the management of the Podmajersky properties out of his hands. Among other things, the lawsuit claims that Lisa changed the locks to their parents’ condo after learning John III had keys to the building, and that she denied John the opportunity to visit Annelies at her hospital bed.

But despite John III’s attempts to nullify the revised will, a court order in February of 2016, enforced that summer, required him to turn over management of the properties to PMI, a new company owned and operated by Lisa. This meant that the more than one hundred properties owned by the Podmajersky family, many of them along the neighborhood’s traditional arts corridor centered around Halsted and 18th Street, would come under new management.

Because of his own earlier acquisitions, John III still owns around thirty-five properties in the area; at least some of these properties, such as Fountainhead Lofts, are managed through his Podmajersky, Inc. When PMI announced that it was taking over management of most of the properties around the neighborhood’s established art corridor, the reaction from residents was uneasy. “In the beginning it was a little scary, just because as business owners we don’t know, are we going to be moving?” said Delilah Martinez, owner of VIP Paints, which hosts arts classes. “Are they going to shut it down? Are they selling to some bigwig? We were all a little scared.

It did bring us all a little closer too, because we didn’t know what their next move was.”

Martinez, however, says she’s been FEBRUARY 1, 2017 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 5

happy with life under PMI. “I’ve had the pleasure of meeting Lisa, and she’s amazing,” she said. “She definitely is about keeping the artists and businesses going, making sure all the stores get filled, and meeting our needs, because there’s a lot of things that we need to upgrade.

Sometimes a lot of owners don’t want to do that for us, but I get the sense she definitely wants to.”

Other residents, though, are less satisfied.

“It took about a month before they started really communicating with us,” said Allen Vandever, an artist who lives just off Halsted on 18th Street. “One of the nice things about when it was just Pod, everything was always kept very clean. The yard work was always done very timely.”

Pointing out to his front gate, he added, “There’s a lot of garbage lying around. Never would have happened under Podmajersky.

In the beginning I was trying to give them time to catch up...I’m hoping they have it all straightened up by next year.” Vandever said he was also disappointed by the lack of an Open House, as well as by the disappearance of art installations from vacant storefronts, but noted that PMI had pledged to improve outcomes for artists. “They sent us one email from the daughter saying she wanted to bring it back to how her father had it, and I’d heard a lot of people complaining about what the son had done with it, definitely made it more corporate,” he said.

The switch in management also caused at least one business in the area to leave.

Katrell Mendenhall-Hall, who owns a modeling agency now headquartered at 14th Street and Michigan Avenue, noted that she felt uncertain about the future of the area after the management transition.

“Honestly, the way the transition was done, everyone was caught off-guard, so it made me feel uneasy,” she said.

“Even though I’ve had nothing but great experiences with PMI. Everyone’s been as helpful as they can be, but you can tell there was some disorganization. It doesn’t make us as business owners, people that live there, comfortable within the first four to six months. The transition could have been more comfortable for us.”

But there are bigger issues for artists in Pilsen, beyond the problems of daily property management. Most notable is the high turnover rate of artists and galleries, which has left behind a string of vacant storefronts along Halsted. One cause of this turnover seems to be rising rent: according to 6 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

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City Notes, 2014 rents on the Lower West Side had increased by sixty percent since 2000, though much of that increase appears to have taken place before 2010. Vandever says that in four years under Podmajersky Inc., his own rent rose from $900 to $1200 a month. Given that he and his wife, a singer, had what they called a “down year” in 2016, he’s worried about his ability to sustain himself.

The neighborhood has also failed to attract the kind of audience some artists have hoped for. Bridget Bolger used to own the South Halsted Gallery, located on 18th and Halsted. In a skeptical article titled “Pilsen’s Ailing Arts District,” she told the Reader that when she and her husband, Scott Multer, moved into the area in 2009, she thought visits to the neighborhood would begin to pick up. A couple of years later, she moved. “There weren’t that many artists on my side of the street,” she said in an interview with the Weekly. “Slowly but surely they started moving out, because the exposure wasn’t happening in the area anymore. Of course, we had Second Fridays, but after a while it’s just kind of a party crowd.” Apart from the lack of visitors—she noted there was no foot traffic during the day, and hardly any on a night that wasn’t a Second Friday—Bolger also remarked, like Vandever, that rent had gone up for her and the residents she knew. “I think we were the last wave of artists there. I really do,” she added.

It’s not apparent, either, that the empty storefronts left behind by relocated artists will necessarily be filled with new galleries.

Most of the vacant windows along Halsted are emblazoned with a sign from the Kudan Group, a real estate consultant, which, on its website, lists ten East Pilsen properties available to rent for “loft storefronts, creative offices and production uses.” The future East Pilsen, then, may look less like a group of free-spirited bohemians making art and more like a group of creative businesses such as Martinez’s arts classes or Mashallah Ghouleh’s jewelry store.

Filling up its empty space is not the only impediment PMI faces if it hopes to re-emphasize arts programming in the neighborhood. The Chicago Arts District, which organizes both Second Fridays and the annual Open House, is run by Cynthia West, who is John III’s wife. The organization is funded by John III’s Podmajersky, Inc., and the latest Second Friday featured the company as a prominent sponsor. During the course of the lawsuit, one document filed in

2012 by John III and his lawyers claimed that “the use of Chicago Arts District, a valuable marketing tool where plaintiffs’ properties are located cannot be used by plaintiffs if Podmajersky, Inc. management is cancelled.”

Though management of the properties has been transferred already, it’s not clear what will happen to arts programming in the neighborhood if the case is ultimately settled in Lisa’s favor—whether the Chicago Arts District will continue to operate, and if so, how closely they’ll work with PMI. Cynthia West and the Chicago Arts District did not respond to repeated requests for comments on this story.

If artists truly are on their way out of East Pilsen, their enduring legacy won’t just consist of abandoned galleries and quaint gardens, but also of the part they played in the gentrification of the area.

As a 2016 report from UIC notes, Pilsen’s “redevelopment was spearheaded by a White artist enclave and consolidated progressively into a predominately White version of gentrification.” The steady departure of Latinx people like Alicia and Jose Gonzalez operated in tandem with a steep rise in the price of property: from 1990 to 2000, the census tract that holds part of the artist colony saw a 548 percent increase in owneroccupied housing values. And Pilsen’s appeal has undeniably been augmented by the aura of artsiness that hangs over it now. “When I was growing up, I went to private school in Lincoln Park. None of my friends would ever have gone to Pilsen. But now a lot of people live there,” said Alicia Gonzalez. “We have friends now that are like, ‘We’re going to Pilsen to hang out!’”

The offices of PMI and Podmajersky, Inc. now sit about a half block apart from each other on opposite sides of Halsted, a visual metaphor that’s perhaps a bit too perfect. The case itself drags on: the next court date is set for the middle of May. In light of the larger changes taking place in the area, a familial spat between Pilsen real estate royalty is relatively unimportant, but it is an indication of how precarious the neighborhood’s position seems to be at the moment. Pilsen is balanced between remaining an artists’ enclave and going the way of the North Side’s Wicker Park and Manhattan’s SoHo, where a process of gentrification started by artists—pushing out industrial workers and ethnic minorities— ends with the artists’ own displacement, and the transformation of the entire area into something more vaguely upscale and expensive. ¬

Defend At All Costs

Pilsen Alliance takes up the fight against another round of gentrification in Pilsen

BY CARLOS BALLESTEROS

O

n January 10, as then-president Barack Obama prepared to deliver his farewell address at McCormick Place, Rosa Esquivel was setting up chairs and tables at a Chicago Public Library named after another prominent community organizer, Rudy Lozano. Esquivel, a Guatemalan immigrant who has lived in the area since 2003, volunteers as a community board member for Pilsen Alliance, a grassroots social justice organization headquartered two blocks west of the Rudy Lozano library. The day’s community meeting marked the latest chapter in the organization’s nearly two-decade history of working to protect its neighborhood.

Pilsen Alliance convened the meeting after residents told the group about The Gentry, a new loft office and retail development on the corner of 18th Street and Sangamon Street owned by John Pagone of Villa Capital Properties. Many took the name of the development, a reference to the British genteel society of the eighteenth century, as a “slap in the face” for the thousands of Pilsen residents who have been displaced by the recent influx of mostly white professionals in the area and subsequent higher rents and mortgages.

About three weeks before, Pilsen Alliance had sent letters to Pagone, Alderman Danny Solis of the 25th Ward, and the building’s listing agents, Zach Pruitt and Michael Nelson of NelsonHill, a real estate agency, inviting them to attend the meeting. None of them came. Pagone, who originally said he’d attend, pulled out at the last second, claiming that since NelsonHill wasn’t attending, there was no point in him being there, either. Solis was later confirmed to have been at McCormick Place watching President Obama’s farewell address instead.

Esquivel was flustered. Dozens of people had already congregated at the library, expecting to air their concerns to the community’s major stakeholders. She

COURTESY OF PILSEN ALLIANCE

apologized to the crowd for their invited guests not showing up, but informed them that the meeting would go on anyway. “Let’s use this time to talk about how we feel about this building and what we can do about it,” she said. The meeting then became an organizing effort, with members of Pilsen Alliance guiding the conversation as to how best combat The Gentry and all that it represents.

A couple of days later, Pagone nixed the name after getting “one bit of negative feedback from a perspective tenant,” as he

told DNAinfo. When asked about the issue, Solis also commented to DNAinfo that the name was “kind of silly...but it’s not a killthe-deal issue, either.”

The fight against The Gentry encapsulates the political landscape Pilsen Alliance finds itself in: Solis, who, as the group pointed out at the January 10 meeting, received campaign donations from Pagone and NelsonHill, defers from engaging with Pilsen Alliance directly, and real estate developers refuse to receive community input. This is nothing new for

the organization, which has been fighting the same battle for nearly twenty years. But president of Pilsen Alliance’s community board and lifelong organizer Magda Ramirez-Castaneda describes the current stakes as particularly high. “We’re being hit from all sides, from the president of the United States on down,” she said. “But the bigger they are, the harder they fall.”

Ramirez-Castaneda’s optimism is ubiquitous among the members of Pilsen Alliance. She is the first to admit that when it comes to working for affordable housing

FEBRUARY 1, 2017 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 7

and other issues important to Pilsen, “it’s as hard as it’s ever been.” But for an organization used to waging battles against millionaire developers, coal power plants, and an uncaring City Hall, the present-day struggles don’t just represent one of Pilsen Alliance’s biggest challenges; they’re also the Alliance’s time to shine, and another opportunity to establish the community its members wish to see.

P

ilsen’s history is defined in large part by displacement and resistance. In the 1950s, thousands of Mexican residents living in the Near West Side were displaced to make way for the Eisenhower Expressway. Residents held their ground until the last possible moment, but many were dislocated and moved into Pilsen.

More Latinos were pushed into Pilsen by a southward campus expansion of the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) in the early 1960s. Again, residents did not go quietly: on March 19, 1961, hundreds of Mexican protesters took to the street, deriding Mayor Richard J. Daley for selling them out. Once again, however, their voices were ignored. One month later, City Council designated 106 acres for UIC. Today, Pilsen’s longtime residents are suffering through another round of displacement. According to a study by John Betancur and Youngjun Kim of UIC, more than ten thousand Hispanic individuals left Pilsen between 2000 and 2013, representing a quarter of the neighborhood’s total residents, while the number of white residents grew by twenty-two percent.

The roots of this new round of gentrification stretch back to 1997, when UIC expanded southward yet again and when City Hall created the Pilsen Industrial Tax Increment Financing (TIF) District aimed at jumpstarting industry in the area.

Activists and community leaders expected these twin developments to drive up the price of living in the area and lead to the displacement of families living on the east end of the neighborhood. As a response, they organized a Community Congress for Pilsen in 1998 in order to develop a

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strategic plan for community preservation.

Out of that plan came Pilsen Alliance.

Since then, the organization has fought and won numerous battles in the name of protecting its community from wealthy outside forces and idle politicians. Pilsen Alliance’s philosophy is simple: Defend the community at all costs.

That mission, however, has become increasingly difficult. The pressures driving displacement across the neighborhood are in full force, and with Solis hurting more

was introduced to Pilsen Alliance by an internship after high school aimed at helping “at-risk” youth—at the time, he was on probation. “I was always aware as a young age that our society is fundamentally flawed,” he said. “But Pilsen Alliance introduced me to the world of organizing. Before I thought organizing was just marching and protesting and whatnot, but there’s a whole science behind it—gathering contacts, following back, you know, organizing.”

Another up-and-comer is Barbara

“A quote that was painted on a mural in the office during my first summer with Pilsen Alliance reads, ‘Nothing About Us Without Us.’ Pilsen Alliance fully embodies that in every sense.”

—Barbara Cruz, student organizer at Pilsen Alliance

than helping their cause, Pilsen Alliance has found itself with few allies in high places. Ramirez-Castenada, however, finds hope in the one place it is most needed: the community.

“I am a believer that if people unite we can have a better place for all of us to live,” Ramirez-Castanada said. One major source of hope is the young people who are taking a lead in the organization. “The youth that are coming in and becoming organizers are strong and knowledgeable. When you have that, you don’t fail.”

One of those up-and-coming youth organizers is Javier Ruiz, a twenty-oneyear-old lifelong Pilsen resident studying journalism at Malcolm X College. Ruiz

Cruz, who is studying government at Cornell University in upstate New York.

Part of Pilsen Alliance since her junior year in high school, Cruz credits Pilsen Alliance for developing her critical understanding of the personal being political. “Pilsen Alliance has made it so evident to me that unless you are working directly with the community and involving them in the process, then it’s so difficult to achieve meaningful change for the people,” she said. “A quote that was painted on a mural in the office during my first summer with Pilsen Alliance reads, ‘Nothing About Us Without Us.’ Pilsen Alliance fully embodies that in every sense.”

Lorena Vargas, a single mother of two, first came in contact with the group when

her mother was losing her home last year.

While unfortunately her mother wasn’t able to keep the house, Vargas became more involved with Pilsen Alliance, and is now part of the group’s community board.

“We’re always gonna fight for our people,” she said. “One thing I have learned from my people is resistance. At Pilsen Alliance we have fought, and it’s been tough sometimes, but the hope from the people that come in, las ganas de luchar and not give up is what fuels us as an organization to keep us fighting for justice.”

Pilsen Alliance made its name through its work on affordable housing and educational equity, issues that, according to Ramirez-Castenada, are still the group’s main focus. However, since its inception, Pilsen Alliance has also dedicated itself to creating alliances and coalitions with other social justice groups that work to make Chicago a better place for its people.

Most recently, members of Pilsen Alliance traveled to Standing Rock in protest against the Dakota Access Pipeline, disrupted Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s Martin Luther King Day breakfast, and helped organize the massive demonstrations across the city the day of President Donald Trump’s inauguration.

“In the same way you cannot talk about class without talking about gender without talking about race, you cannot talk about food access without mentioning affordable housing,” Cruz said. “You can’t talk about violence in the neighborhood without talking about police brutality. We can’t have a conversation about immigration rights without talking about increased policing of communities of color. All of these systems and issues work off of one another in order to perpetuate oppression.”

Chicago’s most prominent adopted son centered his farewell address on the fractured state of our democracy and called on all of us to do something about it: “If something needs fixing, then lace up your shoes and do some organizing,” he said. It’s a philosophy that’s driven Pilsen Alliance’s work for two decades. ¬

HOME HISTORIES

Elam Home

BY MARI COHEN

T

he wide boulevard where the Elam Home sits in Bronzeville has had many names, and the mansion, in place since 1903, has known all of them. The ornately carved windows—these days shuttered by gray boards—have peered out at over a century of history in an ever-changing city, watching as Grand Boulevard become South Park Way in 1923 and then Martin Luther King Jr. Drive in 1968. As the neighborhood became majority Jewish and then quickly became majority black; as the surrounding area earned a new moniker, Bronzeville, and a new reputation as a thriving black cultural center.

As the Elam Home’s outsides at 47th Street and King Drive changed, so did its insides: the house was originally owned by a wealthy tailor, then became a rooming house for single black women under its namesake, Melissia Ann Elam. After Elam’s death, the mansion became property of the Center for New Horizons, until a devastating fire in the nineties left its insides empty, its windows boarded, and its future uncertain.

The Commission on Chicago Historical and Architectural Landmark’s 1978 report on the property described it as “Chateauesque” style, reminiscent of sixteenth-century France under Francis I. The gray limestone exterior’s most prominent features are two symmetrical turrets, aptly known as “candle snuffer roofs.” According to the report, the interior at the time had twenty rooms, with wood paneling. Many of the ceilings were still decorated with the original stenciled canvas, “hand painted by a German craftsman.” The house featured

NATALIE GONZALEZ

such luxuries as abundant stained glass, a music room with four crystal chandeliers, and a second-floor bathroom “of solid marble.” The third floor had a ballroom, and near the stair hall was a “breakfast nook that looks out on the yard and at one time contained a goldfish pool.”

Simon L. Marks, the president of a wholesale clothing firm, built the house in 1903, just fourteen years after Grand Boulevard was annexed to the city of Chicago with the rest of the Village of Hyde Park.

Henry L. Newhouse was the house’s architect. (Marks has no relation to the Marx Brothers, despite rumors to the contrary; Groucho and his brothers actually lived nearby at 4512 South King Drive.)

As for Elam, she was born in Missouri in 1853 and moved to Chicago in 1876.

Around 1912, she moved into a home at 4555 South Champlain Avenue with her husband. After her husband’s death, she converted the residence into the Melissia Ann Elam Home for Working Women and Girls. To accommodate increased demand for housing for single black women, brought on by the Great Migration, she bought Marks’s mansion from him in 1926 and moved her rooming house there. The Elam Home is the only one of the three Bronzeville homes for working black girls that still stands today.

In the twenties and thirties, the Elam Home usually hosted about thirty-five young women and often served as the location for various receptions, concerts, and events. In January 1938, the Chicago Defender reported that “the spacious and truly

beautiful triple parlors of the Elam Home” hosted an open house for the tenth anniversary of the National DuSable Memorial Society. In July of that year, Elam celebrated her eighty-fifth birthday and in reporting on the birthday celebration, the Defender wrote, “Mrs. Elam emphasizes the fact that she wants the girls to feel and believe that they are at home.”

After Elam’s death in 1941, the trusteeship was passed down to her female descendants. Demand to live in the house began to dwindle, though, and its upkeep faltered.

In 1978, the time of the Commission’s report, six women lived there. The house faced threats of demolition until artist Margaret Burroughs, the co-founder of the DuSable Museum, founded the Friends of the Elam Home Foundation and succeeded in having the home recognized as a Chicago landmark in 1970 —the Chicago Metro News, a black weekly newspaper, called it “the first Chicago area landmark which is associated with the Black experience” in a 1979 article.

Yet in that same article, called “Landmark Home Ripped Off by Greedy Self-Appointed Board Members,” the Metro News reported that a board of trustees had taken over without the approval of the courts and was selling items of historical value and allowing men to live there. “I feel that a lot of work and effort that I put into making it a landmark is going down the drain,” Burroughs told the Metro News.

In 1982, the International Women’s Economic Development Corp. became the trustee and began a $1.5 million renovation of the home. Centers for New Horizons, a

social services organization, obtained the home soon after. But in 1992, a fire severely damaged the house, causing the roof to collapse and halting the Centers’ plans to use the home as a service site. “It makes me sick.

I don’t want to see it,” Burroughs told the Tribune.

In 2001, the Centers received a $65,000 grant from the state to renovate the home and use it as a women’s health center, but it is unclear what has happened to the house since then. An employee at the Centers confirmed on the phone that that property is in trust with Centers and that they are not able to sell it or do anything with it at this time, but could not give any more information about future plans for the home.

Despite the fire, the Elam Home, protected by landmark status, still stands. The home has outlasted many famous former neighbors like the Regal and Metropolitan Theatres, the Savoy Ballroom, and Gerri’s Palm Tavern. These days, the Harold Washington Cultural Center sits across the street and Peach’s on 47th serves up fresh omelets a stone’s throw away. It’s hard to know what’s left of the interior beyond the boarded windows and the padlocked double doors, but the turrets’ roofs still point to the sky, the sleek limestone is still bright and imposing, and intricate carvings of grapevines and gargoyles still frame the windows and flank the front steps. A plaque near the front door, with writing too small to make out from beyond the gate, still announces the Elam Home’s landmark status to the world. ¬

FEBRUARY 1, 2017 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 9

Redeveloping the State Street Corridor: A Comic

WORDS BY JAKE BITTLE ART BY LUC BOYCE

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FEBRUARY 1, 2017 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 11

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Redeveloping the State Street Corridor After the high-rises came down, CHA pledged to rebuild thousands of units of public housing in Bronzeville. But more than a decade later, construction is behind schedule and below expectations.

BY JAKE BITTLE, SRISHTI KAPUR, & JASMINE MITHANI This investigation is the first in a series of projects that will document and explore public housing on the South Side. If you have tips or suggestions about coverage, email editor@southsideweekly.com

H U.S. NATIONAL ARCHIVES

ow is it that in the center of one of the nation’s largest cities there are empty fields that stretch for miles, isolated houses surrounded by vacant lots that have gone untouched for a decade or more? Why would a government agency whose mission is to provide housing for vulnerable citizens retain all this vacant land when it has plenty of surplus funding with which to build homes? Moreover, why would it do so at a time when the demand for housing among the city’s poor people is so great?

The undeveloped tracts along the State Street Corridor in Bronzeville are the silent legacy of the twenty-first-century Chicago Housing Authority. In this investigation, the Weekly attempts to tell the story of public housing in Chicago through the six housing projects that made up this corridor, a nearly continuous stretch of

public housing that at one time ran from 20th Street in the South Loop to 54th Street in Washington Park. The CHA’s effort to redevelop these projects has been characterized by extensive delays and minimal construction, ultimately yielding a combination of unfinished mixed-income communities and vast stretches of neglected land. This redevelopment effort has been only one part of the CHA’s activity over the past twenty years, but its execution is telling of the agency’s priorities. Over the past decade, the CHA has redefined its approach to providing housing; along the way, some of its promises have been left behind.

HOW WE GOT HERE The Early Years The story of redevelopment on the State Street Corridor is not merely one of bricks and mortar: the whole saga is wrapped up in the political history of an agency that has long been criticized for an alleged lack of commitment to providing housing

FEBRUARY 1, 2017 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 13

GLOSSARY Housing Choice Vouchers (HCVs) Program that allows low-income families to rent a house or apartment in the private market in Chicago; the CHA uses federal funding from HUD to pay landlords the cost of a family’s rent. Families are selected for this program via a lottery that picks from the CHA’s voucher waiting list at random; the waiting list is currently closed to new applicants and has been since 2008.

Project-Based Vouchers (PBVs) Housing vouchers that are tied to a specific building or development; the CHA enters an agreement (these can last anywhere from five to thirty years) with a development owner and refers interested families from its HCV waitlist to that specific development. If the families leave the development, they lose their housing assistance. Notably, PBV units do not cover as much rent as the CHA’s typical public housing units do.

Mixed-income development A development that contains some market-rate units, some affordable housing units (units for lower-income families, subsidized for developers by the national Low Income Housing Tax Credit program), and some public housing units (units for low-income families whose rent is subsidized by the CHA).

Public housing Housing assistance provided by the CHA to families who make under thirty percent of the median annual income in Chicago.

Affordable housing Housing assistance provided through federal government programs to families who make anywhere between thirty and eighty percent of the median annual income in Chicago.

Market-rate Housing with rent that is dictated by the real estate market; people who live in these units do not necessarily receive government assistance to pay their rent.

“Moving to Work” An agreement made between the CHA and HUD that gave the CHA upward of a billion dollars in block grants to spend on completing the goals of the Plan for Transformation. This agreement has been extended twice, first to 2018 and then to 2028.

HOPE VI A national program established by HUD in the 1990s that awarded housing agencies grants to demolish high-rises and replace them with mixed-income housing.

High-rise housing Many of CHA’s largest properties were high-rise towers that housed hundreds of large families in close quarters. These properties were widely considered the most impoverished and dangerous of the city’s public housing projects.

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for Chicagoans—that is, to fulfilling its own mission. So in order to understand the current landscape of public housing in Bronzeville, one must start before the towers came down, when the CHA owned thousands of massive, dilapidated properties in Bronzeville and across the city. These projects were originally built during the fifties and sixties, when housing segregation was still more or less legal, and created isolated neighborhoods of poor African-American residents.

In May 1995, after decades of neglect, mismanagement, and corruption in the CHA, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) took control of the city agency with the intention of setting it back on course. Just four years later, then-Mayor Richard M. Daley brokered a deal with HUD to return the CHA to city control in exchange for a vow that Chicago would radically change its approach to public housing. The resulting Plan for Transformation (signed while Rahm Emanuel was vice chair of the CHA’s board of directors) called for the demolition of nearly 18,000 units of neglected public housing and the construction or renovation of 25,000 units, all over the course of the following five to seven years. Accordingly, HUD and the CHA entered into a ten-year “Moving to Work” agreement that gave the CHA freedom to spend federal funding however it wanted in order to reach the goals of the Plan.

In the 1990s, the city had already begun to demolish some of its high-rise public housing as part of a HUD initiative called HOPE VI. The Plan for Transformation promised to expand and ramp up this initiative in Chicago. The CHA would knock down its clustered high-rise developments, increase its distribution of housing choice vouchers (HCVs), and undertake the construction of “mixedincome communities”—developments encompassing public housing units, “affordable” units for residents on federal housing assistance, and marketrate units. At the time, mixed-income developments were touted as a cure-all for the longstanding challenges of segregation and extreme poverty that dogged public housing in American cities.

The CHA demolished Chicago’s largest and most notorious projects— Cabrini-Green on the North Side, Henry Horner on the West Side, and on the South Side an extensive ecosystem of public housing that included the Harold Ickes

Homes, Stateway Gardens, the Ida B. Wells projects, and the Robert Taylor Homes— in order to replace them with new mixedincome developments. At the time of their demolition, these projects combined provided homes for at least 30,000 residents on government assistance.

From the beginning, the demolitions were sold to residents as a necessary first step in the ongoing revitalization of their communities. Residents were promised that the overcrowded and crime-plagued highrises would be replaced swiftly not just with new homes, but with vibrant communities.

The creation of “community” has been at the center of CHA’s professed ambitions for its mixed-income developments; the reigning attitude toward housing in Chicago and across the country at the turn of the century was that with a diversity of economic backgrounds in a community came a better quality of life—and more upward mobility—for those on public assistance.

As the CHA notes in a report to HUD from 2000, the Plan calls for “more than the renovation of public housing; it calls for broad community planning to revitalize entire neighborhoods.” Or as Mayor Daley put it in 2006, when the CHA had already missed its initial 2004 deadline for the plan's completion: “We’re not just building homes. We’re building lives and building communities. And…we’re rebuilding souls.”

Demolition Without Redevelopment At Henry Horner on the West Side, where redevelopment had begun in 1995 as part of the federal HOPE VI program, the CHA scheduled redevelopment construction to happen alongside demolition. This allowed residents to move out of their old homes and immediately into their new ones. No such timeline ever materialized for projects on the State Street Corridor, including Ida B. Wells, Robert Taylor, and Stateway Gardens. The CHA did not start redevelopment construction on the Corridor until most of the highrises in each project had already been razed.

Demolition, too, proceeded on a delayed and less orderly schedule than had been set out in the original Plan: at Ida B. Wells, for instance, hundreds more units were closed and demolished in 2007 and 2008 than the agency had anticipated each year.

As demolition continued through the early 2000s, real estate prices in Bronzeville rose sharply, based purely on speculation about what would happen once the high-

rises were gone. Given the booming real estate market, the Daley administration would have expected that after knocking down the projects, the fast-paced private development already happening in the South Loop would naturally extend into Bronzeville. By replacing public housing high-rises with new, attractive marketrate housing, the CHA would spur private investment and increase income levels in the neighborhood, jumpstarting a process of gentrification. But the housing market crash dashed Daley’s (and developers’) hopes for large-scale revitalization—the recession stopped both the speculation and private investment in their tracks, and the CHA was left with the task of carrying out redevelopment in an area that was no longer up-and-coming. The agency’s construction activity sharply declined in the years following the housing market crash.

After The Recession To this day, the CHA uses the housing market crash and the recession as the primary justification for the slowdown in construction, even though the agency had fallen behind the original Plan’s timeline for redevelopment well before 2008. The CHA claims that since its mixed-income developments are partially financed by banks and private equity firms, it became harder to fund them during a recession.

But even this explanation, when examined more closely, does not hold water: despite what the CHA says, private investment has provided little to none of the funding for existing mixed-income developments.

“The selling point that private financiers will help finance these mixed-income redevelopments is a flat-out lie,” says Leah Levinger, executive director of the Chicago Housing Initiative (CHI), a community organizing coalition that aims to empower public housing residents. “There are fortythree such redevelopments, and in no case is there significant investment of private resources.” Three-quarters of existing redevelopments received no private funds.

In cases such as Savoy Square in the Robert Taylor redevelopment, private investment accounted for only two percent of the overall financing.

In the aftermath of the housing market crash, then, the agency still had the resources necessary to continue mixedincome redevelopment in Bronzeville. But even as the market recovered, the CHA continued to build far fewer units each year

JASMINE MITHANI

than it had before the recession. Critics like Levinger see in this trend not only evidence that the CHA is not committed to providing housing to Chicago’s vulnerable citizens, but also that the recession is not as big a cause of the slow construction rates as the agency claims it is. The Weekly sent the CHA a series of questions that included questions about the recession and the construction slowdown, but the statement it issued in response did not address these questions.

Housing By Other Means Trends in the CHA’s activity in recent years seem to indicate that the agency is no longer as interested in pursuing new construction in the State Street Corridor— or anywhere else. In 2008, after the CHA was already a few years past its original deadline for completing the Plan for Transformation, HUD granted the agency an extension on its Moving to Work agreement. This extension promised to continue giving the agency broad spending freedom until 2018 so it could finish work

on the Plan. But a key amendment made to this extended agreement in 2010 permitted the CHA to count project-based vouchers (PBVs) toward its overall goal of building or repairing 25,000 units of public housing.

PBVs are vouchers that are restricted to one development—the CHA enters into contracts with private building owners and refers families from its wait list to fill vacancies in the building. PBVs are more restrictive than normal housing choice vouchers, because if a family leaves the specific PBV development they lose access to their housing voucher.

Since the amendment was added, these PBVs have accounted for more and more of CHA’s yearly unit delivery toward the Plan for Transformation, while actual construction on former public housing sites has accounted for less and less. Because of this qualification, the agency can now say that it has nearly reached its initial goal of 25,000 units (albeit almost a decade behind schedule) without even coming close to fully redeveloping the State Street Corridor.

While the CHA’s yearly construction activity has decreased, it has also sold or

swapped portions of former public housing land that were originally included in plans for mixed-income redevelopment. In three high-profile cases, the agency has let go of undeveloped tracts that were originally slated for redeveloped housing, each time arousing the anger of activists who say the agency is reneging on the promises of the Plan for Transformation. In 2014, before any formal plans had been released for the redevelopment of the Harold Ickes Homes, the CHA swapped almost one-quarter of the Ickes parcel with the City in exchange for the construction of a new athletic field for Jones College Prep, which is located in the Loop. Also in that year, the CHA’s board approved the sale of a parcel of Ida B. Wells land along King Drive for the tax increment financing (TIF)-subsidized construction of a new Mariano’s grocery store; as part of the deal, the development reserved around one-third of jobs in the grocery store for former Ida B. Wells residents. Also in 2014, the CHA sold the southernmost portion of the Robert Taylor Homes site to XS Tennis for the construction of a massive tennis facility and athletic center; the purchase was

FEBRUARY 1, 2017 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 15

Hilliard Homes The Hilliard Homes, designed by the renowned architect Bertrand Goldberg (most famous for the “corncob” Marina City towers in the Loop), are one of two State Street Corridor developments that were not razed as part of the Plan for Transformation. Originally built as public housing in 1966, the high-rise development contains two towers for seniors and two towers for families. By the 1990s, it had fallen victim to the same problems as the rest of the city’s public housing, but its status as an architectural landmark saved it from demolition. Instead, the building was placed on the National Register of Historic Places and became eligible for funding from a variety of public and private sources. The redevelopment effort, initiated in 1999 by real estate developer Peter Holsten (called an “anti-gentrifier” by Crain’s for his commitment to building affordable housing), cost $98 million and finished in 2006.

In a story published in the Chicago Reader last October (“The Goldberg variation: High-rise public housing that works”), Maya Dukmasova undertook an in-depth exploration of the history of Hilliard and its redevelopment. The new mixed-income Hilliard, she concludes, has largely been a success, thanks in no small part to Holsten’s belief that attentive, charitable management—something missing from the old CHA—is key to a housing community’s success. But the article also questions whether Hilliard’s strict set of resident guidelines—9pm curfews in the park, required cash deposits for using the community room—is necessary for the maintenance of a mixed-income development.

Dearborn Homes The Dearborn Homes are the only State Street Corridor project that was neither razed nor remade as a mixed-income development as part of the Plan for Transformation. It is still operated solely by the CHA and consists entirely of public housing residents; according to a Chicago Reporter investigation, the project’s census tract had the highest concentration of “deep poverty” in the city, at nearly fifty percent. The project avoided demolition because it passed a test mandated by a 1996 HUD funding bill: according to the bill, CHA was required to demolish all public housing units that could not be renovated for less than the cost of a typical housing voucher. More than forty percent of the agency’s housing stock failed this test, but the low-rise Dearborn Homes did not.

CHA renovated the project in five phases from 2007 to 2011, performing a gut rehab on each of its sixteen towers and installing new water, heating, and electrical systems. The exterior of the towers also got a makeover, with classical decorations added to the once-bare walls and roofs. Vacant units and storage rooms were combined with existing apartments to bring the project’s original 800 units down to 660. The five construction phases of the renovation effort cost a total of $136,627,018, according to contracts from a Freedom of Information Act request.

Two longtime Dearborn Homes residents who spoke with the Weekly about the renovation said it had been, in large part, a success, and that the water and heating had become functional again—before the renovation, they said, there had been routine flooding in some of the buildings on the western side of the project. But one of these residents, Etta Davis, noted that quality of life in the projects had been most improved by the added presence of closed-circuit cameras and security guards who now monitor the building’s entrance.

Of the four building contractors employed by the CHA for the job, at least two have previously come under fire for their work with public housing. The CEO of Burling Builders, Elzie Higginbottom, was exposed by the Sun-Times for essentially giving his own construction company a contract while he sat on the board of the Housing Authority of Cook County. Walsh Construction, responsible for two of the five Dearborn renovation phases, was sued for discriminatory hiring practices by residents of the Altgeld Gardens housing project during the company’s renovation of that project.

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again subsidized by the city through $2.9 million in TIF funding. And no type of redevelopment construction has occurred at all on the Robert Taylor site south of 45th Street.

“After a while you start to say, ‘This is just the reality, they’re not going to rebuild,’ or that if they do rebuild, it’s not going to be for us,” says Rod Wilson, executive director of the Lugenia Burns Hope Center, which, along with organizations including CHI, has agitated for the CHA to fulfill its redevelopment promises in the face of these land swaps and sales.

These changes in the CHA’s actions represent an overall shift away from the construction promised in the Plan for Transformation and toward a new understanding of what it means to provide “housing” to a city in need. The CHA now provides housing vouchers to an overstuffed wait list and maintains an existing stock of senior housing and small family developments; at the same time, it has retained a large funding reserve and gradually divested itself of its larger properties, getting rid of land it could use to build new housing. In a phone interview with the Weekly, Molly Sullivan, director of communications for the CHA, expressed almost exactly these sentiments, stating that while the CHA remains committed to fulfilling the reconstruction promised in the original Plan, building housing is no longer the agency’s top priority.

“Housing is important, but just putting a new roof over people’s heads will not help public housing families become part of Chicago’s economic and social mainstream,” the agency said in a statement to the Weekly. “CHA’s commitment to building sustainable communities and ensuring residents have access to jobs, educations, training and other opportunities is at the forefront of our work as we move toward meeting the goals of the Plan for Transformation.”

WHERE WE STAND The Real Need Our analysis of redevelopment on the State Street Corridor—which includes Harold Ickes, Robert Taylor, Stateway Gardens, Hilliard, and Dearborn—as well as on Ida B. Wells, found that construction is behind schedule by more than a decade, and that many of the completed redevelopment phases have fallen below expectations and

failed to meet promises made at the outset of the Plan for Transformation. Reading through the agency’s many annual plans and reports reveals that over time the CHA has gradually lowered expectations while routinely missing yearly deadlines and benchmarks set both internally and

by HUD. The vacant lots that still sit where high-rises once stood are merely the most visible and dramatic indication of the agency’s failure to follow through on its promises to reinvigorate Chicago’s public housing at the turn of the century.

The significance of the long delay in the State Street Corridor redevelopment is only fully clear when seen in the context of the agency’s overall failure to be proactive in providing housing. Comparing the proposed redevelopment timeline to how events unfolded in reality and the proposed construction to the actual construction is an attempt to show how far the CHA has fallen short of meeting its own goals, but in order to see how far it has fallen short of providing sufficient housing services for Chicagoans, you have to look beyond the agency’s numbers.

Before Jamie Kalven founded the Invisible Institute, a journalism nonprofit advocating for police transparency, he reported on life in Stateway Gardens for decades. He believes the numbers the CHA used at the outset of the Plan for Transformation are “essentially false,” little more than a “shell game”—they vastly underestimate the need created by the Plan for Transformation demolitions.

When the agency estimates the number of families who were displaced from the torndown projects, they work from occupancy numbers as of October 1999. By this point, Kalven says, the agency had already driven down occupancy for years by vacating derelict units without rehabilitating them and moving in new residents.

The original 25,000-unit goal of the Plan for Transformation only includes the construction of about 8,000 new units of public housing—the bulk of the 25,000 is made up of senior housing and rehabilitation of existing housing projects that were still being used at the time. The agency’s estimate of the number of families who were displaced from high-rises and therefore have a right to either return to a CHA property or receive a housing voucher is similar, at around 8,000. And yet 18,000 hard units of public housing were demolished as part of the Plan for Transformation. In the 10,000-unit

WHAT IS YET TO COME Mapping CHA's proposed mixed-income redevelopments

JASMINE MITHANI

FEBRUARY 1, 2017 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 17

Mixed-Income Communities So Far Even if the CHA defends widespread voucher usage as a better and more humane way to provide housing, it promised displaced residents of the demolished high-rises not just a home somewhere in the city, but a community. In some places, like Horner, that community was at least partially preserved, but the mixed-income redevelopments of Oakwood Shores (formerly Ida B. Wells) and Legends South (formerly Robert Taylor Homes) are far from complete “communities.” Kalven called them “prospective ghost towns”: the units may be new, but residents who live in them are surrounded by still-undeveloped fields, and private developers have invested little in retail or social services around the CHA’s new residential construction, perhaps in part because Bronzeville’s housing market has been slow to recover since the recession.

This contrast might be most visible at the Park Boulevard development (formerly Stateway Gardens), where across from a mixed-income apartment block at the corner of Pershing Road and State Street sits the boarded-up back of Crispus Attucks Elementary, closed in 2008.

these developments themselves have all but destroyed the tight-knit communities that once occupied these areas, even if some residents have had or may someday have the chance to return. By now, says Wilson, many former residents of these projects have given up hope of ever moving back, or of being able to convince the CHA to be more proactive about construction.

CONCLUSION In a statement to the Weekly, the CHA said it remains committed to redeveloping what remains of the vacant land: “CHA’s commitment to the communities along the State Street corridor remains the same today as it did in 2000: To create strong, vibrant mixedincome neighborhoods where residents are connected to the larger communities around them and have access to amenities, jobs and education that they need and deserve.”

But skeptics may only have the agency’s word to go on in evaluating this claim, as the agency will soon have even fewer regulations on how it spends than it has ever had before. After the publication of a report by the Center for Tax and Budget Accountability (CTBA) exposing the agency’s failure to spend federal voucher money, the CHA upped its voucher usage to meet the ninety percent usage rate suggested by HUD. Without explaining the significant reserve buildup also charted in the CTBA report (the agency’s liquid reserves peaked at $471 million in 2011), the CHA said in a statement to the Weekly that it had spent down its reserves to $154 million by the start of 2016. It

COMPLETE BY FY2002

2008

2003

2002

Demolition Construction/Renovation Simultaneous Demolition and Construction 2006

Hilliard Ida B. Wells

2005

Stateway Gardens

2004

Dearborn

2001

LEGEND D

COMPLETE BY FY2003 COMPLETE BY FY2003 COMPLETE BY FY2003 COMPLETE BY FY2003 COMPLETE BY FY2003

2007

Robert Taylor

2000

THE REALIT REALIT Y

THE PLAN PLAN

Harold Ickes

Wilson, of the Lugenia Burns Hope Center, notes that after the housing market crash, many market-rate residents in the CHA’s new mixed-income developments were angry that the value of their homes had plummeted, essentially freezing them in place in a neighborhood where private investment had halted.

“I think if they really wanted to develop these communities, they’d put more resources into the schools and reduce the crime,” says Wilson. “[Those are] the biggest dictators of where people want to live, by far. If you fixed those, you would see a more organic version of ‘mixed-income.’ ” The failure of these developments to become the gardens of Eden envisioned at the outset of the Plan has been well documented, including in a recent book from the University of Chicago Press, Integrating the Inner City, whose authors Robert Chaskin and Robert Kuster called mixed-income housing a “relatively narrow policy intervention” and noted that “the enthusiasm for it ought to be tempered by the experience we’re having” with finished developments in practice—which is less than to promising, to say the least.

“Chicago has a warped sense that development is about replacing populations, taking out the low-income and replacing it with more affluent people. And then you put up all these shops and say, ‘Look what we’ve done,’” says Wilson. “Well, you didn’t improve the quality of life of the people that were there, you just kicked them out.”

The recession may have prevented continued private investment in areas around the State Street redevelopments, but the long delays on the completion of

Harold Ickes Robert Taylor Dearborn Stateway Gardens

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Hilliard Ida B. Wells ¬ FEBRUARY 1, 2017

COMPLETED IN FY2007

2010

in 2008, for the first time in several years, more than 232,000 families applied for a spot. The list, which has not opened since, now stands at more than 116,000 families.

And while the wait list expanded, the CHA bulked up its liquid reserves to almost $400 million and paid off its pension fund using federal money that was supposed to be spent on housing vouchers for people on that very list.

2009

discrepancy, says Kalven, is an invisible population, off the CHA’s books. The agency had forced down occupancy of the high-rises and Wells for years, and when they took stock of the displacement caused by the demolitions, they did not account for the considerable number of transient individuals and families who used vacant units as last-resort housing.

The CHA told the Weekly in a statement that as of the end of 2016, only 2.9 percent of relocated residents with a right of return have not yet satisfied that right. But the other ninety-seven percent includes a few key populations: not only those who have chosen not to return to the CHA’s system (meaning either to live in a CHA unit or receive a voucher), but also deceased and evicted residents and the nineteen percent of residents who have lost their right of return by not responding to the CHA’s attempts to reach them.The CHA’s own 2011 update on relocation found that thirteen percent of families who lived in family housing in 1999, some 2,200 families, “had not responded to outreach”— in other words, their whereabouts could not be confirmed.

It is dangerous, then, to accept the CHA’s Plan for Transformation promises as indicative of the need created by the high-rise demolitions, or to believe that completion of these goals will address some meaningful portion of the overall demand for housing in the city. This need, to the extent that it is measurable based on the CHA’s numbers, seems to be higher than ever, and is far from being met by the CHA’s current services. When the agency opened 40,000 new spots on its voucher waiting list

planned to spend another $100 million in 2017 as it completed its original Plan for Transformation goals.

But a federal law signed in 2015 required HUD to extend the “Moving to Work” agreement again to 2028 without actually incorporating requirements about how much federal money the CHA must spend. In an updated report released earlier this year, CTBA cited this fact as cause for concern that the CHA will not continue to spend federal money as proactively as it has in the past two years. Moreover, HUD under the Trump administration will likely govern with far less regulatory rigor than the Obama administration did, meaning there will be far less federal oversight of the CHA’s spending.

It seems doubtful, given the CHA’s present priorities, that the trickle of mixedincome construction along the State Street Corridor will ever result in fully redeveloped communities. The agency’s plans for this year do indicate that it will pursue more mixed-income construction soon—there are provisions for development at Harold Ickes, Stateway, and Legends South There is no telling, however, when exactly these plans will result in the construction of new homes.

Until they do, the fields along the State Street Corridor are not only testaments to the displacement and erasure caused by the Plan for Transformation, but also reminders of its promise—a promise that is still, after almost twenty years, somewhere between unfulfilled and broken. ¬

No construction or demolition work has taken place at the Ickes site since 2010.

COMPLETED IN FY2011

THE REALIT REALIT Y

2017

2016

2015

2014

2013

2012

2011

THE PLAN PLAN

U.S. NATIONAL ARCHIVES

JASMINE MITHANI

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Eco House WORDS & ART BY SUZI COLPA

THE ECO HOUSE

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n 2015, Hannah and Quilen Blackwell bought and renovated a house on 6439 S. Peoria Street, in Englewood. They are now running community sustainability programs from this house—they call it the Eco House.

Quilen, who has a background in community development and environmental sustainability, volunteered at a high school in Englewood before moving to the neighborhood. Hannah, who has a bachelor’s degree in justice studies, previously worked with communities on the West Side, where she lived at the time. When they met in 2014, both wanted to live somewhere where they could put their professional experience to use and work from the ground up to make an impact.

They began an afterschool program at the Eco House and, several blocks away, started the Stewart Street Urban Farm, where they have thirty-two paid positions for high school students. Ultimately, they want to develop more Eco Houses with residents on different blocks, create jobs through sustainable education and manufacturing in Englewood, and support childhood development.

“If we really want to make an impact we have to be on the block, because that is where the community life occurs,” Quilen and Hannah say.

In the backyard, the Eco House has a vegetable garden and a chicken coop where they teach kids about growing their own food, composting, and sustainability.

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“We love it, we feel alive here. For us, it brought about the best in who we are. In more affluent neighborhoods, from a material standpoint, things look better, but from a human relationship standpoint, most people don’t know their neighbors. We’ve only lived here for a year but we already know our entire block.”

ECO WORLD

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or two days a week, the Eco House is all about Eco World, an environment where kids learn practical life skills through a game. The program is supported by the organization After School Matters. Everyone gets assigned a job, and they get paid in Monopoly money, which they can spend in the Eco House.

“They have to pay for their snacks, they have to put money in savings, and they each have job, so they do the job all month and at the end of the month they get paid,” Hannah explains. “We also have a little store.”

Activities include cooking, gardening, piano lessons, reading, budgeting, carpentry, constructing a solar panel, and 3D printing.

“The Eco World is really designed to be this real-world simulator,” Quilen adds.

“It is all captured in the context of a game, where kids can have fun and prepare themselves for things that they have to do in the real world.”

“It is education, it is fun, we get to do different activities, we get to give stuff away to new kids who come here, we get snacks, we do everything, it is fun.

It makes me feel happy, sometimes sad, mad, all kinds of things. I love coming here because new people come here.

It is a new family here.”

“Being here makes me feel happy, because they got fun activities and it helps me for school. It helps me with my reading because I used to not know how to read.”

The vegetable garden and the chicken coop in the backyard of the Eco House as seen from above.

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STEWART STREET URBAN FARM

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n partnership with the office of 20th Ward Alderman Willie Cochran, Urban Prep Academy, TEAM Englewood High School, After School Matters, and the Gardeneers, the Eco House embraced the opportunity to turn several vacant lots into an urban farm in order to teach students about urban agriculture while also contributing fresh produce to the local community. The garden grows kale, lettuce, tomatoes, basil, peppers, green beans, dill, flowers, and more while providing paid positions for students. The food is donated to church food pantries and brought home to the students’ families. The flowers are sold to Flowers For Dreams.

THE FUTURE

“What we think could really help the community is kickstarting the local economy. Starting projects that are income-generating, that really create local jobs and also have the benefit [of helping] the environment. It is about community strength with a sound economic engine. If we can dream, we are thinking about implementing 3D manufacturing, producing biofuel, solar panels, and wind turbine manufacturing and installation in Englewood [in addition] to establishing more farms and Eco Houses throughout Chicago.”

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“I am looking forward to seeing the impact over time. Seeing kids whose parents have been on state assistance get a job and be able to function outside of that. That would be a wonderful success because their kids are seeing other options. Creating career opportunities for them and combining that with what we are doing now, providing a foundation.”

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The South Side’s Most Endangered A close-up look at buildings that face potential demolition

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very year, nonprofit advocacy group Preservation Chicago releases its list of the city’s most endangered buildings. The 2016 version featured three buildings on the South Side: the Lakeside Center, the Washington Park National Bank, and St. Adalbert’s Church in Pilsen. The Weekly photographed each building, and wrote a short history of the former two buildings. Stay tuned in the coming weeks for a longer feature on St. Adalbert’s.

PHOTOGRAPH BY ROBERT HARRIS 24 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

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St. Adalbert’s Church

PHOTOGRAPH BY ERIC L. KIRKES

Lakeside Center

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Lakeside Center

BY ERIC L. KIRKES

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utting out onto the Lakefront Trail, the Lakeside Center has been an integral part of the McCormick Place Convention Center since 1971. Designed by Gene Summers and Helmut Jahn, it replaced the previous convention building that was lost to a fire in 1967. Summers and Jahn were both students of the architect Ludwig Mies Van der Rohe, whose concepts of open design and transparency are present in the Center’s architectural design: large glass windows surrounding the entirety of the building, large steel support structures that give the building a sense of openness and a sleek, all-black aesthetic. Currently the oldest section in McCormick Place, the building is a mid-size exhibition space featuring the Arie Crown Theater, a 4,249-seat theater space.

The building was an important architectural contribution to the city of Chicago in the sixties and seventies, next to other famous structures like the Willis Tower and the John Hancock Building. But nowadays the Center doesn’t see the same amount of traffic it once did, due to the westward expansion of McCormick Place. Furthermore, the once expansive inside space has been partitioned into smaller venue space by the insertion of a permanent physical divider. The changes have left some city officials and investors questioning the importance of keeping the Center around. For instance, the original plan for the now-relocated Lucas Museum of Narrative Art involved the removal of the Lakeside Center, but received opposition from advocacy group Friends of the Park, which claimed that the creation of the museum violated a public trust doctrine. A source close to Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s administration claimed the museum would “expand green space on the lakefront, remove a larger building and allow a valuable addition to the museum campus.”

Other opponents of the Lakeside Center, like Tribune architecture critic Blair Kamin, see it as a symbol dividing the northern and southern parts of the city. Inaccessibility by public transportation is also a problem; in attempting to visit and photograph the Center, the easiest way was via the Lakefront Trail.

Preservation Chicago’s solution to these problems is to adapt the space for new purposes, particularly since it’s used less now than before. Of its expansive exhibition halls, the group writes: “These could be repurposed for a variety of functions including Chicago’s most expansive and comprehensive field house, recreational center and cultural center—with the large glass rooms housing indoor tennis courts and basketball courts in natural daylight, along with a running track and other amenities.”

Another potential solution to the problem of inaccessibility—though probably not one that would be endorsed by Preservation Chicago—is the proposed Burnham Sanctuary, suggested by urban design group Skidmore, Owings, & Merrill, which would involve the demolishing the building and replacing it with a nineteen-acre parkland full of meadows, wetlands, and running paths. This design would also benefit the migratory bird population that has suffered from the construction of the building. The glass design confuses the birds, who then fly into the windows at full speed, leading to injury and death. A bird sanctuary was created directly south of the center in the hopes of reducing the number of injuries and deaths.

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Washington Park National Bank

BY AMY QIN

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ocated right at the intersection of 63rd Street and Cottage Grove Avenue, hidden behind the shadows of a stairwell up to the Green Line CTA Station, sits what remains of a once-magnificent bank.

In 1922, plans were drawn for a new Washington Park National Bank building to replace an older and smaller bank located a few blocks west at 63rd Street and South Evans Avenue. The original plans featured a classically designed building finished with white stone, fluted columns on the Cottage Grove side, and an elegant Bedford limestone elevation. There would be a forty-foot-tall banking floor and five floors of office space above, with the interior of the banking quarters ventilated by a flushed air system to keep bank patrons cool during Chicago’s hot summer days.

However, by 1923, plans for the bank’s design had completely changed. Instead of occupying the entirety of the first floor, the bank would share it with a large corner store and a row of four small shops, and the office space above would be limited to two stories instead of five. The building was finally completed in 1924 under the purview of architect Albert A. Schwartz with a budget of roughly one million dollars. Five other buildings at the intersection were also built within a few years of the bank.

The bank encountered financial difficulties in the summer of 1931, but W. H. Vanderploeg, the bank president at the time who went on to become the president of the W.K. Kellogg company, quickly formed a reorganization committee and reopened the bank as Park National Bank and Trust Company a few months later.

The bank changed ownership several times in the course of fifty years, but as the composition of the neighborhood changed, the bank was abandoned and gradually fell into disrepair. Alongside neighborhood changes, broader shifts within consumer banking habits have left large, intricately designed corner banks like Washington Park National Bank behind. “Banks have transitioned from these grand celebratory halls to a box building in a strip mall with a drive-in teller,” says Ward Miller, executive director of Preservation Chicago. “It’s really not a celebrated experience to walk into a bank and be impressed by the architecture or the space anymore.”

“It’s a remarkable building that has fallen off of everyone’s radar in an area that’s seen a lot of disinvestment over time,” Miller reflects. Along with the recently redeveloped Strand Hotel (also at 63rd and Cottage Grove), Washington Park Bank was not listed on the National Register of Historic Places, the federal government’s official list of sites that are deemed worthy of preservation and could potentially qualify for reinvestment tax credits. Lisa DiChiera at Landmarks Illinois says that there are also no local protections, as it has not been coded with an orange or red building designation by the Chicago Historic Resources Survey, a city-wide inventory of buildings constructed before 1940.

Despite these roadblocks, the bank has been a part of community development dialogues among organizations like 1Woodlawn, Blacks In Green, and the Bronzeville Community Development Partnership, among others.

“Right now, 63rd and Cottage Grove is a major stop because this is as far east as you can go on the Green Line,” says Paula Robinson, president of the Bronzeville Community Development Partnership. The bank’s location near the CTA station would give developers access to traffic counts at the intersection, which could make the case for stores like Walgreens or PNC Bank to move their business into the corridor and could give community organizations access to Transit Oriented Development funds.

“This is the only original corner building that remains at the intersection of 63rd and Cottage,” remarks DiChiera. “The other three corners, well, one is vacant, one is a liquor store that looks like it was built in the seventies, and the other is part of a strip mall. I’d hate to see the bank building go.” ¬

PHOTOGRAPH BY FINN JUBAK

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Isolated Building Studies PHOTOGRAPHY BY DAVID SCHALLIOL

David Schalliol's series of Isolated Building Studies, which he started in 2006, hopes to “draw attention to new ways of seeing the common impact of divergent investment processes on urban communities.”

“When their neighboring buildings are missing,” Schalliol says in his introduction to the series, “a tension emerges: the urban form clashes with the seemingly suburban, even rural setting. Thoughtfully engaging the landscape requires further investigation to resolve this tension: Why is this building isolated?” It is “from this friction” that he says the series, which now comprises hundreds of individual studies, launches. More of David's work is available at davidschalliol.com 28 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

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Home at the Hotel

Excerpts from the Tribune’s writing on hotels during and after the 1893 World’s Fair

BY SAMANTHA CLARK

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he following are excerpts of articles from the Tribune that cover the city’s hotels during and after the 1893 World’s Fair. The news reflects changing opinions about living in hotels and how hotel buildings should be used, or not used, as public spaces.

Hotels were once considered respectable places to live as a home. They were the hub of their communities. As society began to emphasize the importance of single families living alone in homes and apartments, communal living fell into disfavor. Community leaders targeted multi-family buildings for removal, particularly hotels. Single-family home ownership is now viewed as the ideal, and hotel occupants are labeled transients.

JUNE 1893: HOTEL METROPOLE Two suicides were reported on the same day at the Metropole on June 3, 1893. Other suicides of this hotel’s residents would be reported throughout the summer during the financial crisis of 1893.

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Board of Trade speculator committed suicide at his room by strangling himself with the silk cord of his smoking jacket. Two hours before he took his life he was at dinner with his wife in the hotel dining room...He seemed cheerful, and beforehand had gone to the barbershop and was shaved...

After dinner, [he] was a little morose. As he left the table [with his wife] he bid his friends “goodbye” in a sort of careless manner. [His wife] left her husband at 8 o’clock and went to the parlor below. He had some friends with him and finally left them, saying he would return, but he did not...

[Later] when his locked door was broken open [h]e was lying on the floor lifeless...On top of the bed was the smoking jacket itself carefully folded...[His] wife became hysterical when she saw what had happened and was taken away by friends.

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[Businessman] committed suicide...by cutting his own throat with a razor...He and his family occupied one of the most elegant suites of rooms in the hotel in different periods for the last two years and were surrounded by every imaginable comfort....

The discovery was made a moment later by the head porter, who vainly attempted to stop the flow of blood. Excitement at the hotel was intense…[His wife] was prostrated by shock. [He] was popular among those living at the Metropole. When the news spread much sorrow was expressed.

NOVEMBER 1889: SOUTH PARK FLATS

Home items of interest to residents in the outskirts.

The opening of the social season marked by numerous pleasant events, including balls, receptions, amateur theatrics, and musical entertainments.

Hyde Park—There is talk of converting the new South Park flats into a hotel and adding two stories to the building...The G. T. Tennis Club has engaged Rosalie Hall at South Park for New Year’s eve. Extensive preparations are being made for holding a grand ball that evening.”

MARCH 1893: GREAT EASTERN HOTEL

A 1,100 room World’s Fair hotel nearing completion.

“It is claimed that the Great Eastern Hotel, on the block bounded by Sixtieth and Sixty-first streets, St. Lawrence and Champlain avenues, has the largest number of rooms of any hotel in the world. It has 1,100 rooms, and work has so far advanced that insurance has been placed.

Although the building is but three stories high it was thought best to make it practically fireproof by covering it with staff and using mackolite for the partitions, each one of which thus becomes to some extent a firestop wall.

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COURTESY OF THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE

APRIL 1898: GREAT EASTERN HOTEL [AFTER WORLD’S FAIR ENDS]

Big hotel in ashes. Great Eastern structure burns like so much tinder. Is consumed in an hour.

Except for the owner and his family, the Great Eastern Hotel had been unoccupied for years and was given over to decay. [The owner carried no insurance.] Tramps from the neighborhood are supposed to have slept there and to them the fire is attributed by police. [The owner], however, said he thought some of his neighbors had fired the structure, as it was regarded by the residents as an eyesore...

The structure was of flimsy character. It was built entirely of wood and the partition walls were quickly consumed. In fifteen minutes the entire building was burning...

The fire was a beautiful spectacle. The sky was tinted ruby with the reflection of the blazing pile and the entire neighborhood was lighted up...[Crowds of people] stopped to watch one of the greatest pyrotechnic displays the city has seen since the destruction of the World’s Fair buildings themselves...It was opened in late spring of 1893, but its remote location compared with other hotels and light attendance during the Fair proved disastrous and the building was closed. It never opened again to the public.

SEPTEMBER 1970: CHICAGO BEACH HOTEL

HOME HISTORIES

Apartments to replace former Army building.

COURTESY OF THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE

MARCH 1937: MURDER CASTLE Henry Holmes, the World's Fair serial killer, ran the World’s Fair Hotel from 1893 to 1894.

Record of H. H. Holmes’ sensational crimes.

Chicago had been Holmes’ stamping ground from 1888 to early 1894...Holmes had built a house.

O, what a queer house it was! In all America there was none like it. Its chimneys stuck out where chimneys should never stick out. Its stairways ended nowhere in particular. Winding passages brought the uninitiated with a frightful jerk back to where they had started from...This house of his—it was more a strange castle—he furnished well.

The now leveled [site]...was originally the Chicago Beach Hotel, a symbol of the Gay Nineties and the Roaring Twenties affluence since 1893, which barely survived the financial troubles of the Depression.

The building joined the war effort in 1942 when the United States Army established the Gardiner General Hospital there...During the war the hospital was in the news frequently as its combat-wounded patients made model airplanes, assembled small components for war machines, and set up their own radio station.

After 1946 it became just another office building, even though its executives wore military uniforms. The building stood vacant from 1963, when the Fifth Army Headquarters moved to Fort Sheridan, until early this year when it was demolished.

OCTOBER 1972: BRYSON HOTEL Two years ago, 250 elderly residents of Hyde Park’s Bryson Hotel were stuck with the fear that they would be removed from the hotel, because it had been cited for demolition by the Department of Urban Renewal.

Most of the tenants, whose average age was 70 and many of whom were semi-invalids, had lived in the Bryson for more than 20 years. They had grown attached to their home.

Forty of the residents, who refused to move, were finally given temporary residence in a nearby building. The other 210 residents received no assistance moving.

Lorraine Hansberry Home

BY BRIDGET NEWSHAM

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he Lorraine Hansberry House in northwest Woodlawn is unremarkable in appearance. Its brown brick walls and minimal adornments mimic thousands of other brick threeflats built in Chicago throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Its outward appearance is transformed, however, when one learns that many of Hansberry’s experiences growing up in this house served as the inspiration behind her canonical play A Raisin in the Sun—a fictionalized reflection of her parent’s fight against housing discrimination in this very home.

In 1937, when Carl Hansberry (father of Lorraine) made the decision to purchase the home at 6140 South Rhodes Avenue, legally enforced segregation was in full swing. The majority of black residents and families were forced to live in the overpriced and undermaintained area known as the “Black Belt,” largely located on the South Side. In an effort to relocate his family out of these poor conditions, Hansberry made the knowingly dangerous move to Woodlawn—then a primarily white neighborhood. He purchased the home despite the existence of a restrictive covenant blocking any real estate from being “sold, leased to, or permitted to be occupied by any person of the colored race.”

When white residents learned of the purchase, they took the Hansberry family

to court, accusing them of being in violation of the covenant and demanding their immediate exit from the neighborhood. The Hansberrys refused to leave, citing they were not involved in the creation of the covenant, and therefore were not liable to abide by it.

Their refusal to exit began a drawn out legal battle eventually manifesting in the United States Supreme Court Case, Hansberry v Lee. During this unending three-year period, the Hansberrys were subject to several attacks on their home and property, including several bricks thrown through their windows. It is said Mrs. Hansberry would patrol the house at night, armed with a loaded German Luger, to protect her family from unwanted guests.

After nearly three years of fighting, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Hansberrys and overturned Woodlawn’s restrictive covenant. However, the decision did not address the overall unconstitutionality of racially restrictive covenants, but only the fact that Woodlawn’s covenant did not have the required ninety-five percent of homeowners’ signatures required to approve a covenant. Nonetheless, the victory marked a turning point in the fight against housing discrimination, and demonstrated to many that through courage and perseverance, enforced segregation could and would come to an end in the United States. ¬

COURTESY OF THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE

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Chiasmus A Narrative of Ascent

BY RAYSHAUNA GRAY

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ayshauna Gray is a Roseland native, and now a historical researcher at Tufts Uniersity in Massachusetts, among other ventures. "Chiasmus" originated as a series o tweets, and was published on Gray's blog, The Ideologues, in October 2016.

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t’s 1986 and I’m born on the South Side of Chicago. My mother Sharon’s a Chicagoan too—born in 1964...six years into her parents' northern life. My grandma Pearlie Mae is born in 1942 in a Mississippi Delta town founded by formerly enslaved people. My great-grandmother Wyona’s the first of us to be born in the twentieth century and would be eleen when white women got the vote, forty-five when segregation fell on paper, and fifty-nine when Dr. King was shot.

Her mother Trudy was born in 1887 just up the road in the town where WC Handy first heard the Blues. Her mother Lucinda was born in 1862, one year into a war that’d color the conscience and collective memory of a nation. Her mother Martha was born in 1820, part of the generation begging for that slouch toward justice and would be fortyone years old when it began.

It's been said that Black Americans are wedded to narratives of ascent—"up from slavery", "up from the American South in the Great Migration", up from, up from, up from— ...but sitting with history forces me to dig in deep—deep into language too constrained to hold our humanity, deep into philosophies and theologies that sanction terror written into law...and deep into the stories of how that became our cultural inheritance.

Well, It’s 2016 and I live in Cambridge now, with a great chunk of country between where I am and where I'm from. I'm in a part of the country where (let them tell the story) History was invented, where the lore of revolutionaries looms large, and the hooves of Paul Revere's horse are louder in national memory than Crispus Attucks' death rattle.

What's Black memory in comparison?

What's there to say about the tin-like ping of Blues theology in the ear of a heaven that gave the pen to the other side? Who am I, 32 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

more than some modern person, more than just a descendant, than some grandchild of a Great Migration with Chicago in my step and Mississippi pooled in the corners of my mouth like warm milk?

(Sometimes, I feel so ungrateful.)

Sometimes I think that my ancestors were tricked, that weighing time had come and though they'd picked and ached, they were found wanting. Sometimes, I think that they were insufficient in their push, lackluster in their grasp at some kind of justice, that they were naive to assert to an unjust nation that justice wasn't only its moral mandate but our human birthright. ...and I feel ashamed...of myself.

I run my hands along brick buildings and peer down at folks walking down Brattle Street. I pull back walls in historic buildings on Tory Row and see symbols from the Stamp Act era. I occupy space in what’s known as the cradle of American history now and I’m reeling.

“Whose story is this? Whose books are these?

Are these mine? Can’t be—I’m one of forty-two million. I’m from that nation within a nation.

A people isn’t borders, it’s shared circumstance."

Every day, I’m surrounded by the specter of New England’s primacy reminding (always reminding) that they were first. I hear 1630 all the time in Harvard Square and I wonder where my people were, how we lived, how we felt. I wonder about the first of us here in States—about what they desperately needed to hear and would pass away before knowing.

I think about my dad’s mother, the one like Lena Horne and think about the men from other countries—the ones with eyes from France and last names from England. I think about overseers and their families in Ireland and their descendants navigating the same Boston streets. And I think to myself: “How did I ever think I could inherit the gift of (historical) grace without the terrible burden of context?" // ‘How’d I ever think I could document our family history without being undone by it or highly sensitive to it?' // “How’d I ever think I could have unbridled language for Black humanity in a world so dedicated to binding us up?"

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TURTEL ONLI

So, I remind myself of the little things... like being able to walk on the sidewalk. I silence the part in me who forgot she can drink out of any water fountain she chooses, the one that forgot she chose the high school she went to. You know, the one who forgot that people just like her fled the South - first in a trickle and then in droves, six million over sixty years, spurred by world wars and a yearning for the warmth of another sun. I think about my relatives and the ones who came before - the ones desperate for that space from Mister Charlie only to have them be met with race riots and immigrants finding their own America in Detroit and Chicago. I think about people that crammed their culture into hatboxes, ones who fingered the frayed edges of the promise of a kinder mistress as they traveled north (with Jazz, Blues, and Gospel in tow). I think about that six million, the six they left behind, and the grandchildren of both waves of that Great Migration wherever we all may be. ...and I think about living in a place that’s chock full of History and devoid of memory. I think about how it's impossible for a nation to have a conscience if it doesn't have a memory.

As family historian, I go to my elders to collect their stories now and I ask ’em, I say: “What made you leave Mississippi? Did you find what you were looking for? Are you disappointed in us? Does it matter that the Chicago you stepped into is the one eatin’ us alive? Are you proud of us for fighting?"

And then I think: “What if what got us here was never meant to keep us?” I wonder if all that Southern sorrow and woe followed us up here. I wonder if we’ll never be rid of

it. If we’ll be canaries in coal mines forever.

But the story can’t end with despair, so I try to go with what I know and that’s language. I plant my feet and I dig in deep and I say out loud, I say: “The lie of our inhumane treatment is old, but the truth of our humanity and right to walk the earth and flourish is much older." // I say to my elders: "It was hard, forging a grave freedom in a nation that suckled at your breast and grew strong on sociopathy—but you were right" // I say to us: "Thank you for holding a vicious nation to a standard of virtue inconceivable to anyone but us" // "Thank you for creating and passing down language for our humanity so we could stand living in a country whose tongue is decidedly stuck in a vise grip of hateful words."

I’ll honor it because when the nation needs a reminder (and of course, it always will), we’ll need people with cultural memory to tell the stories.

One of the most heinous lies Black America was ever told was that we were a people without history, that we don't come from anything, that coming to the States was our saving grace (how sweet but discordant that Transatlantic sound). That's the lie people use to claim our cultural memory is the stuff of madmen’s imaginations. But Black suffering is matched and surpassed

by Black joy and the sight-beyond-sight that makes us relentless in our reach for something better...and our ability to render it into dance, reverie, and language. The spark that gets us from glory to glory is what got us from the hollows of ships to where we are today...and it hasn't dimmed because we're on the other side of the Migration.

We still have some ascending to do. ¬

HOME HISTORIES

The Strand

BY CHRISTIAN BELANGER

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ast November, when William and Jacqueline Lynch moved their art gallery into the recently reopened Strand Apartments on 63rd Street and Cottage Grove Avenue, they were unaware of their new building’s historical import. “I did know about the Grand Ballroom down the street,” said William. “I didn’t know anything about this building.”

And it really is easy to walk by the building and see nothing but another redbrick apartment building with a little bit of retail on the ground floor. But in fact, the Strand was built more than a century ago: it stands as one of the oldest buildings in Woodlawn, a neighborhood long marred by demolition and failed promises of urban renewal.

The architecture firm Davis and Davis erected the Strand Hotel between 1914 and 1915. Its Classical Revival style hearkened back to antiquity as a way of lending dignity to the structure. “Designers at the time were looking to Europe to distinguish ourselves as a refined city,” said Bonnie McDonald, President of Landmarks Illinois, a preservation nonprofit. McDonald added that this impulse to build distinguished, lasting buildings was also an attempt to counteract the city’s reputation as a gangster’s haven. “At the time, in Chicago,

NATALIE GONAZALEZ

we had kind of a reputation for gangster activity, so oftentimes we were looking back at architecture we considered to be distinguished or have a lasting permanence,” she said.

In the middle of the twentieth century, the building became famous less for its hotel and architecture, and more for its first-floor jazz club, the McKie’s Disk Jockey Show Lounge, which opened in 1956. In 1964 Jet Magazine described the club as “the only spa on the Windy City’s vast South Side where a patron can go these days and dig first-rate jazz.” Started by longtime WVON DJ McKie Fitzhugh, the club saw performances by musical virtuosos ranging from Sonny Rollins to BB King. It also featured one appearance from John Coltrane that led David Crosby (who may not have been entirely sober) to the point where, in his own words to Mojo magazine, “my mind ran out of my nose in a puddle on the floor.”

The economic decline that hit the South Side during the sixties and seventies took McKie’s with it: the club closed in the late sixties, and Fitzhugh died a few years later, in 1970. The lounge’s legacy lives on, though, in an effort put together by Woodlawn resident Mike Medina to restore the club’s original sign, which had been hanging on the building since McKie’s closed in the late

sixties. Medina is currently fundraising on Indiegogo, though he’s raised only a small fraction of the $8,500 he’s asking for.

After McKie’s closed, the building gradually fell into disrepair. Now-indicted 20th Ward alderman Willie Cochran worked there as a police officer in the seventies; he told DNAinfo that the building was then a hub for gang activity. But unlike other historic buildings nearby, such as the Pershing Hotel and Tivoli Theatre, the Strand escaped demolition. In 2014, Holsten Real Estate acquired the property and began a $23 million renovation project with the aim of turning it into affordable housing.

The refurbishment was finished this past fall, with forty-four studio and one-bedroom apartments for low-income residents. It also received Landmark Illinois’s Project of the Year award. “We recognize the building is a beacon for the neighborhood. There is an interested marketplace for creating vibrant housing and retail for other vacant property,” said McDonald. “The history of this property only contributes to the importance of it in the neighborhood.”

Apart from apartments, the building also contains a Subway, a Metro PCS, and the Lynches art gallery, Ariel Joseph Art Gallery and Salon. They originally owned a

smaller, more anonymous location on 64th Street, and moved into the Strand because of its possibility for more foot traffic.

The Strand’s resurgence comes just as renewed attention is being paid to Woodlawn from municipal and private developers. Not only did Woodlawn win Curbed Chicago's 2016 Neighborhood Cup competition, but the website also reported that the neighborhood is one of the real estate website Redfin’s two “hottest neighborhoods” for 2017, based on recent growth. Curbed Chicago named Woodlawn its hottest neighborhood for 2017; while it’s unclear how much new development will end up benefiting Woodlawn’s current residents, the selection of Jackson Park as the Obama Library site means change is inevitable, and a number of community groups are trying to get out in front of it. For their part, the Lynches are happy to see the change. “There’s all the development that’s going on, with the squash court and the elementary school around the corner, and then we found out the presidential library was going to be right down the street,” said William Lynch. “It was like, ‘Wow, we can’t ask for a better place for the future.’ ” ¬

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For Rent

BY DIANE O'NEILL

Furniture gone, my linoleum scarred Where their kitchen table sat.

Morning odors, bacon and coffee, bitter Evaporate.

Oatmeal and fresh-squeezed juice Baby's high chair, vanished.

Now workmen come, labor backbreaking To make this place Beautiful for yuppies demanding Polished floors, sparkling dishwashers.

But my walls remember

The little girl who danced and scuffed my floors,

The boy who joyfully dented my wall

With mis-bounced ball,

The colicky baby's cries

When they brought her home Together,

And the mattress squealed rhythmically Until

Fights began, high volume sometimes.

Once, an anguished plea: "I'm not "…Happy!"

Is happy the feel of paint being lavished on you By someone

gasping joy at the color?

Not the swearing workman's brush smack

But languorous strokes…

Is unhappy the ache

Nails yanked from you Suddenly, Pictures gone One ripped smack In half,

Pieces dropped like garbage

Together with poetry scraps

Now swept up by wide broom

Dumped with anonymous waste,

Crashing pain of drawers and doors slammed?

My carpet remembers pudgy fingers crawling Recalls after-rain mud that never disappeared Now fierce machines scrub, scrub, they blot past footprints.

Varnish overpowers air And I choke.

My window eyes, uncurtained— Glaring sunlight invades.

The screech of an outside truck, halting— New things, new people, new footsteps Meet the lingering echoes and shadows.

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HOME HISTORIES NATALIE GONZALEZ

Mahalia Jackson’s Home

BY KYLIE ZANE

M

ahalia Jackson, the New Orleans-born gospel singer and civil rights activist, spent the later part of her life living in Chatham, in a spacious 1950s brick ranch house complete with seven rooms, a garage, a large chimney, and green lawns, located at 8358 South Indiana Avenue. When she moved to Chicago in 1927 at just sixteen, she lived with family and in various flats while she sang in churches up and down the South and West Sides of Chicago. After her 1947 hit, “Move On Up a Little Higher,” she gained international fame. With profits from her recordings and tours, she began investing in real estate on the South Side and looking for a home of her own. But when she began inquiring at homes with “For Sale” signs in Chatham, which was a majority-white suburb at the time, she was turned away by many homeowners—that is, until she stumbled across a white surgeon who had heard Jackson sing and was glad to sell his house to her. She bought the house in 1956 for $40,000 and was the second African-American homeowner on the block, after her neighbors, the Grants, who had moved in two years earlier.

After racial tensions subsided (tensions that included white neighbors shooting up her front windows and threatening to bomb her house) and the whites moved out, the neighborhood became the home of many of Chicago’s successful African-American business owners and bankers. All the while, Jackson worked to make her new house feel like a home. She purchased the Louis XIV furniture common in wealthy Louisiana homes and built an addition to the back of

her house, complete with a white wrought iron veranda in true New Orleans style, which remains to this day. She opened her doors to many: civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr.; reporters like Edward Murrow and Studs Terkel; fellow artists, including Louis Armstrong; and her dozens of nieces and nephews.

In 1970, Jackson moved to Hyde Park.

Her house stood empty for two years until she was approached by a banker by the name of Roland Burris, who was helping her finance the purchase of the Neoclassical Jewish synagogue on 50th Street and Drexel Avenue that is now the home of the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition. He offered to buy the house, and the sale was made in 1972. A few days later, on January 27, 1972, Jackson passed away. In March of that year, Burris, who would go on to become Illinois Comptroller and Attorney General before filling Obama’s senate seat after the 2008 election, moved into the house with his wife Berlean.

In their forty-five years in the house at 84th and Indiana, much of the interior has been remodeled, though the tile in the back of the house is from Jackson’s own renovation.

However, as the interior changes, the exterior has remained largely the same—even the porch lights on the upper veranda are still original. Burris, whose air is practical (and who is perhaps understandably more than a little suspicious of reporters in his home), seems to stand a little taller as he relays this information. “When we lived in a different part of the neighborhood, and we would have people over, we would always drive by and say ‘That’s Mahalia Jackson’s house, right there,’” he adds. ¬

EVENTS

BULLETIN Black History Live at the DuSable DuSable Museum of African American History, 740 E. 56th Pl. February 1–February 28. Tuesdays–Fridays, 11am–noon. Events vary daily; see detailed calendar online. $10 regular admission; $6 for groups (must book ahead). Buy tickets online at bit.ly/ DuSableBlackHistoryLive. (877) 387-2251. dusablemuseum.org The DuSable Museum has Black History Month packed with youth-targeted events nearly every weekday—from a showcase of five female African-American poets and revolutionaries, to an exploration of hip-hop’s roots in African music, there’s something for everyone. (Hafsa Razi)

4th Ward Aldermanic Forum Kenwood Academy (Little Theater), 5015 S. Blackstone Ave. Saturday, February 4, 10:30am. Enter from parking lot on Lake Park Ave. Free. (773) 288-8343. hydepark.org Hyde Park-Kenwood Community Conference is hosting a candidate forum in advance of the February 28 special election for 4th Ward alderman. Come hear all five candidates (Marcellus Moore, Ebony Lucas, Gregory Seal Livingston, Gerald Scott McCarthy, and interim alderman Sophia King) give statements and answer questions. ( Joshua Falk)

Africa Night: Black History Celebration K.L.E.O. Community Family Life Center, 119 E. Garfield Blvd. Saturday, February 4, 6pm–11pm. $5 suggested donation. RSVP at bit.ly/KLEO-africa-night. (773) 363-6941. thekleocenter.org Bring along the family to the festivities at the K.L.E.O. Center, with food, live music, dancing, spoken word, and of course, “positive vibez.” The event will also pay tribute to the victims of Hurricane Matthew in Haiti. (Hafsa Razi)

Call for Volunteers: Birdwatching for Kids Openlands, 25 E. Washington St., Suite 1650.

Wednesday, February 8, 9:30am–11:30am.

Free. Contact John Cawood at (312) 8636276. More information at bit.ly/BIMN2017 It can be a challenge for kids growing up in the city to recognize that nature is all around them. Birds in my Neighborhood—a joint outreach program between the conservation groups Openlands and Audubon Great Lakes—is calling for volunteers to lead second- to fifth-grade CPS classes on birdwatching treks. No prior birding experience needed; just attend the training sessions. (Michael Wasney)

Wild Things Conference UIC Forum, 725 W. Roosevelt Rd. Saturday, February 18, 9am–6pm. General admission $40, student registration $20; optional lunch fee $12. Online RSVP required. wildthingscommunity.org The biennial Wild Things Conference is, for the seventh time, here to unite nature enthusiasts of every kind: the volunteer, the researcher, the layperson, and the curious. Hosting nearly fifty exhibits and seven breakout sessions, the Wild Things Conference promises education and interaction with apiary experts, Shedd specialists, professional gardeners, and much more from the natural world of Illinois and the Midwest. (Drew Holt)

VISUAL ARTS Rhonda Wheatley: A Modern Day Shaman Hyde Park Art Center, 5020 S. Cornell Ave. February 12– May 12, Monday–Thursday, 9am–8pm; Friday–Saturday, 9am–5pm; Sunday, 12pm–5pm. Free. (773) 324-5520. hydeparkart.org More living artifacts than art objects, the sculptures in this exhibition are tools of transformation as well as a look into the artist's mind. Using found materials including TV antennae and cicada

wings, Wheatley takes on the role of contemporary shaman, channeling energies and consciousness in a gallery of healing.

(Isabelle Lim)

Precariat Hyde Park Art Center, 5020 S. Cornell Ave..

February 5–March 12; Monday–Thursday, 9am–8pm; Friday–Saturday, 9am–5pm; Sunday, noon–5pm.Free. (773) 324-5520. hydeparkart.org Inspired by the work of theorist Judith Butler, this exhibition challenges the typical categories and boundaries of identity.

Nine artists thus confront various socially constructed ideas by reorienting their approach to their content and craft. A series of programs accompanying the exhibit will give the audience a chance to join the dialogue surrounding these notions in our social world. (Hallie Parten)

Odes to Transience I Create: Encounters with Jamie Diamond & Matthew Weinstein MANA Contemporary, lobby, 4th floor and 5th floor cafe. 2233 S. Throop St. Through May 31. Monday–Friday, 11am–5pm; Saturday, noon–4pm. Free. (312) 850-0555. manacontemporarychicago.com Diamond and Weinstein reveal their interpretation of social interactions and the human condition through an exhibition of videos displaying animated moments, as well as reels of couples sharing brief, seemingly mundane exchanges. The exhibition is spread through the hallways of three different floors, challenging viewers’ sense of how place affects emotion and interpretation of personal interactions. (Rachel Henry)

Alex Becerra: Sueños Eróticos Shane Campbell Gallery, 2021 S. Wabash Ave. Opening reception Saturday, February 4, 1pm–3pm. Through Saturday, March 18. Free.

(312) 226-2223. shanecampbellgallery.com L.A.-based painter Alex Becerra puts up a collection of his vivid work, picturing distorted, sexualized figures rendered in flurries of thick paint and brash strokes, dreamscapes of horror and fantasy.

Imposing, provocative, and rude have all been critiques levied on Becerra since his 2014 debut, but here the artist labeled "The Outlaw" by Modern Painter has more up his sleeve. (Isabelle Lim)

White Seam Zhou B Art Gallery, 1029 W. 35th St. Through Friday, February 10. Free. (773) 523-0200. zhoubartcenter.com Polish designer Agnieszka Kulon brings a multimedia exhibition to the Zhou B Art Center, focusing on her “fascination with the color white.” The exhibit is conveyed through fashion design, video montage, and a set of collaborative projects with fellow Chicago artists in the fields of sculptural painting, video, and sound design. (Austin Brown)

Hecho en CaSa National Museum of Mexican Art, 1852 W. 19th St. Through May 7. Tuesday– Sunday, 10am–5pm. (312) 738-1503. nationalmuseumofmexicanart.org Francisco Toledo has spent much of his life founding and developing artistic and cultural institutions in his native Oaxaca. This retrospective of his work not only celebrates his legacy as a champion of literacy and expression but also showcases his symbolic, politically conscious paintings. ( Jake Bittle)

Riot Grrrls Museum of Contemporary Art, 220 E. Chicago Ave. Through Sunday, June 18. Tuesday, 10am–8pm; Wednesday–Sunday, 10am–5pm. $12 adults, $7 students; free Tuesdays. (312) 280-2660. mcachicago.org As one would expect judging by the name “Riot Grrrls,” this exhibit is a refreshingly direct challenge to the sexism that has long permeated the art world. This stunning collection features a series of abstract works by eight prolific, pioneering female painters including Mary Heilmann and Charline von Heyl, as well as works from the generation of female artists that followed. (Bridget Newsham)

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Spencer Rogers: Modern Abstractions S. Rog Gallery, 739 S. Clark St., 2nd floor.

Through March 10. Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday, 10am–5pm, and by appointment.

Free. (312) 884-1457. sroggallery.com It takes a painter’s imagination to curate an exhibition as dazzling as “Modern Abstractions,” comprised of mind-blowing macro photographs selected for interesting detail and exploded in vibrant, dripping acrylic paint. Over a hundred copies will be made of each of these images, which will be on sale to all attendees. Snacks also provided.

(Neal Jochmann)

Onward! Movements, Activists, Politics, and Politicians Uri-Eichen Gallery, 2101 S. Halsted St. Through Friday, February 3, by appointment only. Free. (312) 852-7717. uri-eichen.com Photographer Michael Gaylord James’s exhibit spans fifty-four years of politics, from the Berkeley Free Speech Movement to Black Lives Matter, from JFK in Mexico to Obama at Chicago State. He hopes to show that there’s reason for hope in the long march toward progress. ( Joseph S. Pete)

MUSIC AMFM Presents: The Jazz Series Stony Island Arts Bank, 6760 S. Stony Island Ave. Saturday, February 4, 7pm–10:30pm. $5. rebuild-foundation.org AMFM's Jazz Series visits the Stony Island Arts Bank, where an exhibition of Glenn Ligon's neon rendition of the words of Daniel Hamm, who was part of the “Harlem Six” wrongly convicted of murder in the 1960s, sets the space. Drop on in and catch the bars and melodies of Freddie Old Soul, Selah Says, Krystal Metcalfe, and Rich Jones. ( Joshua Falk)

Jugrnaut and Boi Jeanius Present: Sweatshop Dance Party Reggies, 2105 South State St. Thursday, February 2, 9pm–2am. $7 before 11pm, $10 after. RSVP for discounted entry from 9-9:30pm. 18+. (312) 949-0120.

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reggieslive.com At only twenty-three years old, 2010 winner of the Latin Mixx’s annual Best Midwest DJ contest Boi Jeanius has quickly risen to live up to his stage name. His unrelenting work to improve his craft—he has been performing live every weekend on 103.5 KISS FM for the past four years—is reflected in both his work and his following.

Sweatshop is Boi Jeanius and Jugrnaut’s triumphant return to Reggies after a year since their last 18+ party, and it will feature a performance by BigBodyFiji. (Andrew Holt)

Thaddeus Tukes’ Valentine Vibes Room 43, 1043 E. 43rd St. Sunday, February 12, first set 7:30pm, second set 9:30pm. $10; $5 for children and students. hydeparkjazzsociety.com A frequent collaborator with the SAVEMONEY crew, the sometime student and all-around jazz pro Thaddeus Tukes will be bringing his vibes (and vibraphone) to Room 43 on the twelfth. It’s anyone’s guess what the musical polymath will bring to this classic jazz club, but it’s bound to be exciting.

(Austin Brown)

“Scratch Mania” Chicago Record Release Party 606 Records, 1808 S. Allport St. Sunday, February 5, 1pm–5pm. Free. All ages. facebook.com/606records Turntable enthusiasts will be gathering for gear and tunes this Sunday at 606 Records, where DJs Are Not Jukeboxes will be debuting their Scratch Mania production tool and Teklife member DJ Gant-man will be performing. (Austin Brown)

STAGE & SCREEN Apply: Teen Talk Theater South Side Art Center, 3831 S. Michigan Ave. Now through February 2. Contact: Natalie Battles. (773) 373-1026. sscartcenter.org The application is now open for a free ten-week after school program, where ages fourteen to eighteen learn activistbased theater arts curriculum. It covers all theater components from playwriting to performance, while fine-tuning written and

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THE PUBLIC NEWSROOM THE HOUSING ISSUE Thursday, February 2 4pm–8pm: Public Newsroom is open 6pm–8pm: Covering Chicago’s public housing Led by Maya Dukmasova of the Chicago Reader For more information, visit facebook.com/southsideweekly CITYBUREAU.ORG/PUBLICNEWSROOM THE EXPERIMENTAL STATION 6100 S. BLACKSTONE AVE

S

FEBRUARY 1, 2017 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 37

EVENTS

oral communication skills. Program begins on February 22. (Nicole Bond)

1:30pm. Free. (312) 747-1425. chipublibrary.com

Group 312 Films – Old Black Magic

After their son falls ill with a foodborne superbug, filmmakers Jeff and Jennifer Spitz change their eating habits forever by raising backyard chickens, growing their own food, and setting out on a journey to change the way Americans think about food. (Drew Holt)

Chicago Art Department, 1932 S. Halsted St., suite 100. Through February 10. Free. Contact Ciera McKissick at amfmmag@gmail.com for appointments. chicagoartdepartment.org This powerful interdisciplinary exhibit weaves film, photography, poetry, performance art, visual art, music and dance, to cast a new spell on the perceptions of Blackness. Featured artists include Amir George, Krista Franklin, Joshua Ishmon, Lonnie Edwards and Reginald Eldridge.

(Nicole Bond)

Chicago Film Archives - Sales and Rentals 329 W. 18th St. (312) 243-1808. chicagofilmarchives.org CFA is a non-profit institution dedicated to preserving films reflecting Chicago and Midwest historical culture, with initiatives like their Annual Home Movie Day and their ongoing acquisition of professional films by local filmmakers. CFA offers rentals of short and feature-length films from $100-$250 to skilled projectionist, and parts of their collection are available for purchase.

(Nicole Bond)

Blues for an Alabama Sky Court Theatre, 5535 S. Ellis Ave. Through February 12. $38–$68. (773)753-4472. courttheatre.org Pearl Cleage’s 1999 play explores the effects of the Great Depression on a set of characters living in the wake of New York’s Harlem Renaissance, the interwar cultural movement among the Black community in the famous New York neighborhood. The play is part of a larger celebration of the Harlem Renaissance around the South Side, including jazz concerts with poetry readings and an exhibition at the Beverly Arts Center. (Christian Belanger)

Film Screening of Food Patriots West Pullman Chicago Public Library, 830 W. 119th St. Thursday, February 2, 12pm—

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K Love the Poet presents Black Love Promontory, 5311 S. Lake Park Ave. Wednesday, February 8. 7pm. $15 Advance/$20 Door. (312) 801-2100. promontorychicago.com National spoken word artist K Love brings her annual birthday concert to the Promontory. Black Love is the theme. It will no doubt reign supreme, with a soulful tapestry of spoken word, hip-hop, and theater. And if K Love is not enough to set the scene, also coming to the stage are PHENOM and Harold Green. (Nicole Bond)

Barron Trump(-Themed Show) at the Revival The Revival, 1160 E. 55th St. Saturday, February 4, 8pm. $10, $5 for students. (866) 811-4111. the-revival.com This week's show at Hyde Park's Revival comedy venue will attempt to make light of the subject on everyone's lips—the absurdities of the Trump family (including his creepy, oft-ridiculed son) and the horrors unleashed by Trump and his cronies in the first week of the presidency alone. ( Jake Bittle)

A Women's History of HIV/AIDS Hyde Park Art Center, 5020 S. Cornell Avenue. Monday, February 6, 9am–5pm. Free.

(773) 324-5520. hydeparkart.org A traveling exhibition originally created by students at the University of Cincinnati will make a temporary stop in Hyde Park to give an alternate history of the AIDS epidemic and of how the women who experienced it have become “survivors and history makers.” ( Jake Bittle)

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