May 17, 2017 by South Side Weekly

2 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

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SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY The South Side Weekly is an independent nonprofit newsprint magazine written for and about neighborhoods on the South Side of Chicago. We publish in-depth coverage of the arts and issues of public interest alongside oral histories, poetry, fiction, interviews, and artwork from local photographers and illustrators. The South Side Weekly is dedicated to supporting cultural and civic engagement on the South Side and to providing educational opportunities for developing journalists, writers, and artists. Volume 4, Issue 30 Editor-in-Chief Hafsa Razi Managing Editors Julia Aizuss, Andrew Koski Director of Staff Support Baci Weiler Deputy Editor Olivia Stovicek Senior Editor Emeline Posner Politics Editor Adia Robinson Music Editor Austin Brown Stage & Screen Editor Nicole Bond Visual Arts Editor Rod Sawyer Editors-at-Large Maha Ahmed, Christian Belanger, Jake Bittle, Mari Cohen, Jonathan Hogeback, Ellie Mejía Contributing Editors Maddie Anderson, Maria Babich, Mira Chauhan, Bridget Newsham, Adam Przybyl, Carrie Smith, Sam Stecklow, Margaret Tazioli, Yunhan Wen Video Editor Lucia Ahrensdorf Radio Producers Andrew Koski, Lewis Page Social Media Editors Emily Lipstein, Bridget Newsham, Sam Stecklow Visuals Editor Ellen Hao Deputy Visuals Editor Jasmin Liang Photography Editor Jason Schumer Layout Editor Baci Weiler Staff Writers: Sara Cohen, Christopher Good, Rachel Kim, Ashvini Kartik-Narayan, Michal Kranz, Anne Li, Michael Wasney Fact Checkers: Eleanore Catolico, Sam Joyce, Rachel Kim, Adam Przybyl, Hafsa Razi, Carrie Smith, Tiffany Wang, Baci Weiler Staff Photographers: Denise Naim, Jason Schumer, Luke Sironski-White Staff Illustrators: Zelda Galewsky, Natalie Gonzalez, Courtney Kendrick, Turtel Onli, Raziel Puma, Lizzie Smith Data Visualization: Jasmine Mithani Webmaster

Sofia Wyetzner

Publisher

Harry Backlund

The paper is produced by an all-volunteer editorial staff and seeks contributions from across the city. We distribute each Wednesday in the fall, winter, and spring. Over the summer we publish every other week. Send submissions, story ideas, comments, or questions to editor@southsideweekly.com or mail to: South Side Weekly 6100 S. Blackstone Ave. Chicago, IL 60637 For advertising inquiries, contact: (773) 234-5388 or advertising@southsideweekly.com

Cover photo by Jason Schumer

IN CHICAGO

A week’s worth of developing stories, odd events, and signs of the times, culled from the desks, inboxes, and wandering eyes of the editors

IN THIS ISSUE

Is it a Mirage? The proof will be in the pudding...and the eggs and bacon, fresh fruits and vegetables, and diapers and detergent as word around town is South Shore’s three-year food desert will get a much needed oasis from Shop ‘n Save. The grocery chain signed a fifteen-year lease on a portion of the 40,000 square foot vacancy left by the former Dominick’s. Meanwhile, the owner of Jeffery Plaza listed the entire mall property for sale, asking $19 million, bypassing chatter of eminent do-main and holding out just long enough for front row seating at the gentrification show, as Ald. Leslie Hairston (5th) quietly works to rezone 71st Street and tamp down the tone of new business-es that will surely come in the shadow of the upcoming Tiger Woods-designed golf course and Obama Library in Jackson Park.

all things unequal

Troubled Water While investigating Paul Hansen, a clouted former district superintendent in the Department of Water Management who allegedly sold guns through his city hall email, Inspector General Joe Ferguson stumbled upon yet another email-related scandal: the circulation of racist and sexist emails in the water department featuring a racist reference to Barack Obama, perverse comments on women and LGBTQ communities, and a gorilla face photoshopped onto a picture of an African-American deputy commissioner in the department. Ferguson’s findings soon started a chain reaction in personnel changes: Hansen resigned; Barrett Murphy, the head of the department and an Emanuel family friend, was fired; and the man-aging deputy handed in his resignation letter (it was accepted). He moved quickly on this scandal, but, well, Rahm—keep your head above water.

repurposing shedd

Tribune & Sun-Times: K-I-S-S-I-N-G? As if the major news operations in this city were not hampered enough as it is—see last week’s cover story for more details—the entity known as Tronc, which owns the Tribune, has de-cided to widen its news funnel and attempt to acquire Wrapports, the parent company of Sun-Times. The connective tissue here is Michael Ferro, the bumbling tech “mogul” who’s stumbled his way through every deal he’s made. Lower-level people nearly always lose jobs in the process, but Ferro pockets millions for himself. Ferro bought the Sun-Times with a group of rich busi-nessmen in 2011 and proceeded to do his utmost to turn a profitable business into a limping news-room supplementing badly-run content factories. Then, two years ago, he dumped Wrapports, took over Tribune Publishing, and renamed it the parody that it is now. We can only imagine how Sun-Times and Reader employees feel now that Ferro and his deputy Tim Knight might control them again. A former longtime Sun-Times editor, who called Ferro a “fuckwad,” speculated to Weekly contributing editor Sam Stecklow in 2015 that Knight “doesn’t really understand how a media business works.” Perhaps not surprisingly, some staffers at the Wrapports-owned Reader, which coincidentally voted to authorize a strike in the face of dismally low wages, are now calling to be purchased by a third party so they can be removed from the equation altogether. We don’t envy anyone involved. King Me As our cover story this week on the past and future of chess-playing in Chicago notes, chess coach Joseph Ocol, a teacher at Earle STEM Academy in Englewood, was able to snag do-nated tickets to the U.S. Chess Federation’s Super Nationals Tournament this weekend. The effort was worthwhile: to match the achievements of Earle STEM student Tamya Fultz, whom Ocol dubbed “Chess Queen of the South,” Earle now has a “Blitz Chess King” in the form of eight-year-old Taahir Levi. Levi won first place in the Blitz Chess category for the K–3 under 600 section, DNAinfo reported. Fultz won twentieth place in her category and Earle STEM came in twenty-first place overall. Earle STEM was the only CPS school (and the only Illinois school) to even qualify in its category, K–8 under 750; but if recent programming reported on in this issue fulfills its promise, the next Super Nationals Tournament four years from now may crown more Chicago royalty.

Students in CPS may be more segregated in their schools than in their own neighborhoods. rachel kim & christian belanger...4 across the board

“That’s the nice thing about chess. Anyone can play chess.” natalie friedberg.............................6 “We want to make sure we get the right fit.” deysi cuevas.......................................9

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MAY 17, 2017 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 3

All Things Unequal

Fifty years of racial inequality from the UIC’s State of Racial Justice Report BY RACHEL KIM & CHRISTIAN BELANGER

n Monday, the University of Illinois at Chicago’s Institute for Research on Race & Public Policy (IRRPP) released “A Tale of Three Cities: The State of Racial Justice in Chicago Report,” a study that analyzes disparities in housing, economics, education, justice, and health between Black, Latinx, and white communities in Chicago. Using robust quantitative evidence from a variety of sources, each section delves deep into the history, causes, and consequences of these racial and ethnic inequities that “remain pervasive, persistent, and consequential” in Chicago’s institutions and neighborhoods.” According to Kasey Henricks, one of the authors and a postdoctoral associate at the IRRPP, the report is unique in how it addresses the intersections of inequalities in different areas of life. “If you’re talking about race, it doesn’t operate in a silo or a vacuum,” said Henricks. “It’s systemic. You can’t talk about race in one area. You have to include institutions and dimensions because they’re overlapping and you need to talk about them all at once.” Here, we highlight conclusions from three of the sections in the report—the economy, housing, and education. ECONOMY As part of the section on economics in the “State of Racial Justice,” the report’s authors trace the effects of “economic restructuring” on Black, Latinx, and white populations in the city. They note that Latinx workers have been most drastically affected by the shift away from manufacturing: in 1960, fifty-six percent of Latinxs workers were in manufacturing; by 2015, that number was down to just over sixteen percent. And while jobs for white workers have tended to move toward professional occupations and highend service jobs—think doctors, lawyers, or tech workers—Black and Latinx people have increasingly been shunted toward retail and low-end service employment. One corresponding effect is that 4 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

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Chicago’s white families have seen a generous rise in their median incomes since 1960, from $59,000 to $82,000, while the median income for Black families has effectively remained the same: about $37,000. (The median income for Latinx families has also gone up, though not nearly as dramatically as for white families.) But the report emphasizes that income inequality isn’t simply due to differences in location or educational levels: instead, there is an underlying inequality that can be attributed to race. For example, black men make twenty-two percent less than white men after all other factors are accounted for. In other words, people of different races experience different economic outcomes. The report traces this racial inequality across different measures and sectors. While higher levels of education tend to help alleviate unemployment and increase income among Black and Latinx Chicagoans, both groups still lag behind whites with the same degree, and sometimes behind whites with fewer years spent in school. The report also shows that most Black and Latinx wealth is in the homes they own, as opposed to more “liquid” assets more, like stocks and bonds— which can be converted more quickly to cash. One tragic effect of this difference was that the real estate crash, which kicked off the Great Recession, further exacerbated racebased disparities in wealth; around 2009, “the typical white household had just about $20 of net worth for every $1 held by the typical black or Latinx household.” In a commentary on the section, Teresa Córdova, Director of the Great Cities Institute and a professor of urban planning and policy at UIC, gives some context to the bleak picture painted by the report, noting that deindustrialization in Chicago went hand-in-hand with social service cuts, disinvestment in minority neighborhoods, and an increasingly harsh criminal justice system. Alongside these worrying trends is a tougher one: as economic output has grown over the past several decades, profits tend to end up with an already-rich, mostly white

upper class. But Córdova also sees some cause for optimism, arguing that there are plenty of jobs available in advanced manufacturing— the parts of manufacturing that are high-skill, and aren’t immediately at risk of automation or outsourcing. “Manufacturing in the region has changed, but it is not dead and can provide a viable avenue for rewarding and lucrative employment for blacks and Latinxs seeking opportunities in this sector,” she writes. “Education, though it does not erase disparities based on race...does improve the possibilities and opportunities for advancement and is worthy of public commitment and investment.” HOUSING According to Kasey Henricks, Chicago’s history of segregation has long been the foundation for the multitude of issues facing Chicagoans today. The housing section of the report argues that segregation not only disproportionately affects communities of color but also “costs lives, income, and potential” all across the city. Chicagoans have long been subject to decades of legally defensible racist housing policies and practices. After the Great Depression, homeownership became more affordable through New Deal programs, but many of these programs severely underserved Black residents, which systematically prevented them from buying homes. Combined with the practice of “redlining,” in which racist criteria marked property in majority-Black neighborhoods as “undesirable,” the narrative that Black residents lower property values continues to fester. Although the 1968 Fair Housing Act technically prohibited racial discrimination in any housing-related transactions, a slew of loopholes and newer, more insidious tactics of segregation have made equitable homeownership nearly impossible for Black and Latinx Chicagoans. The report argues that housing discrimination now takes the form of a two-tier subprime lending

market, in which “minority borrowers in predominantly minority communities [are subjected] to unconventional loans” that come with predatory fees, interest rates, and penalties. Because of these subprime mortgages, the majority of Black and Latinx homeowners are cost-burdened, compared to only 35.7 percent of white homeowners, and spend thirty percent or more of their household income on owner costs. This devaluation of Black-owned property set the stage for Chicago’s twenty-point gap in homeownership between Black and white Chicagoans and the rapid depreciation of homes in majority-Black communities. After the housing market crisis nearly a decade ago, the report’s authors observe that most of the foreclosures occurred in several minority communities in the South and West Sides such as Austin, Belmont Cragin, and West Lawn. The concentration of these foreclosures leaves “large portions of neighborhoods being left abandoned,” which the authors argue leads to “community deterioration,” the decline in values of surrounding homes, and the increase of “zombie properties,” which are foreclosure claims that have not been resolved in three years. One of the most prominent conclusions about housing segregation in Chicago is that according to the 2010 Census data, Chicago has remained for decades one of the most segregated cities in the United States. The authors note that “while some black Chicagoans reside in predominantly white neighborhoods, virtually no white Chicagoans live in black neighborhoods.” Using a tool called the dissimilarity index, which measures how evenly Black and white populations are spread across a city (0 indicates total integration, 100 indicates complete segregation), Chicago scored an 82.5 between Black and white communities. While this number dramatically decreased from 1980, when the score was 90.6, social scientists still posit that any score over 60 is indicative of very high levels of segregation. Furthermore, the report pushes back

POLITICS

DATA VISUALIZATION BY ELLEN HAO

against the idea that segregation in Chicago was an inevitable consequence of market forces – what the authors call the “‘it’s really economics’ idea.” Proponents of this idea claim that if people of color had the same access to resources as white people, they would occupy the same neighborhoods that whites do, and “segregation levels would decline as income levels rise.” While the authors found that this holds somewhat true for Latinx households, segregation persists within Black communities despite increases in income. Essentially, “affluent Black households are almost as likely as poor ones to be segregated from whites.” The authors also point out the contradiction in white Chicagoans’ desiring a residence in diverse neighborhoods yet consistently ending up living in a neighborhood that is majority-white. According to a study cited in the report, on average, white homeseekers said that they wanted a neighborhood that is forty-six percent white, but ultimately moved into neighborhoods that were seventyfour percent white. Black and Latinx residents, on the other hand, wanted a neighborhood

that is thirty-seven percent Black and thirtytwo percent Latinx respectively, but ended up living in neighborhoods that are sixty-six percent Black or fifty-one percent Latinx. Ultimately, the authors of the housing section in the State of Racial Justice Report note that even though housing discrimination in Chicago is technically illegal, discrimination—and its consequences—have yet to disappear. EDUCATION With a long-suffering budget and tumultuous overturns in leadership, Chicago Public Schools (CPS) has been embroiled in decades of political and economic conflict. Now, even though CPS is a “majority minority” school district that serves mostly students of color, the State of Racial Justice Report shows that students in CPS may be more segregated in their schools than in their own neighborhoods. And despite the changing demographics of CPS, minority students are now more unlikely to be taught by a teacher of the same race. Compared to a

decade ago, “when one out of every three CPS teachers was Black,” now Black teachers only make up one out of every five teachers. The authors argue that this decrease in Black CPS teachers can be attributed to disproportionate layoffs; Black teachers were forty percent of all layoffs in 2011, fifty-one percent of all layoffs in 2012, and twenty nine percent of all layoffs in 2015. Perhaps this disparity in teacher representation is connected to how Black and Latinx students are more likely to receive harsh disciplinary punishment than white students. According to the 2015-2016 school report, “Black students were suspended at double the district rate...nearly four times the rate of Latinxs, and ten times the rate of whites.” Black students were also 76.9 percent of all expulsions, which is four times the rate of Latinx students and twenty-three times the rate of white students. When Black and Latinx youth are already “disproportionately processed through the state’s juvenile justice system,” these inequalities in punishment in CPS is evidence of the racial presumptions behind notions of innocence and guilt, and who deserves rehabilitation and who deserves punishment. The report extends the definition of segregation to not only racial divisions but also the educational consequences of class inequalities. High-poverty schools are often in majority Black and Latinx neighborhoods and often employ less experienced and less qualified teachers, experience high levels of teacher turnover, and lack effective peer groups, facilities, and learning materials. These schools are also unable to offer robust programming such as gifted and advanced academic programs and arts programs so that “Black students are nearly seven times more likely than other groups to attend a school that offers neither arts nor music.” Furthermore, the report shows that CPS has long been plagued with school closings, as more than 250 public schools have closed from 1980 to 2015. Most of this

closure activity has transpired in recent years. Many of the closed schools were ones in the South and West Sides, and in 2013, thirtyfive of the forty-three schools closed were in neighborhoods with majority-Black or Latinx residents. These shuttered schools mostly have not been repurposed for other public services but instead reopened as charter schools, or left barren. Ultimately, the authors argue that the medley of educational disparities across CPS has led to “persistent racial disparities,” such as wide achievement gaps in between Black, Latinx, and white students in standardized test performance. While the authors note that CPS’ graduation rates have nearly doubled over two decades, there are still significant gaps in graduation rates between racial groups. Only six percent of Black men, eleven percent of Latinos, and thirteen percent of Black women from CPS receive a college degree ten years after entering high school. Compared to the twenty-seven percent of white male CPS graduates and thirty-six percent of white female CPS graduates that accomplish the same feat, Black and Latinx students in CPS are now less likely to receive the employment and income benefits that a college degree often brings. At the endnote, Pauline Lipman, a professor of Educational Policy Studies and Director of the Collaborative for Equity and Justice in Education at UIC, writes that systemic inequality in CPS has long been challenged by activists, families, and students. From the boycotts, walkouts, and grassroots protests against school segregation, racist curricula, and the notorious Daley-era Willis Wagons, Chicago’s communities of color have been continuously fighting for equity for their students. Now, the battle involves resisting the closing of schools that acted as multigenerational community institutions, the redirection of public funds from neighborhood schools to selective enrollment and privatelyrun charter schools, and a historically mayorappointed school board. “But the racial injustice of these policies cannot be fully conveyed by [quantitative] measures,” Lipman concludes. “Numbers can only hint at the human costs of diminished education and life opportunities, loss of committed teachers (particularly Black teachers), trauma of criminalization, and the culture of punishment and shaming visited on primarily Black schools, teachers, students, and their communities. Nor do they capture the social costs and collective trauma to families and communities of shuttering public schools that were community anchors.” ¬ MAY 17, 2017 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 5

Across the Board Making moves to carry on Chicago’s rich chess legacy BY NATALIE FRIEDBERG

wo months ago, Englewood thirteen-year-old Tamya Fultz sparked a media flurry when she won first place in the Chicago Public Schools’ (CPS) Academic Chess South Conference Playoffs, earning the epithet “Chess Queen of the South” from her math teacher and chess coach, Joseph Ocol. Three weeks before that, Tamya placed third in the 2017 Illinois Elementary School Association (IESA) State Chess Finals held in Peoria, where she was the only African American and the only CPS student among the medal winners. Over the past few years, CPS has made more of an effort to bring chess to its elementary and high school students. Sylvia Nelson Jordan, the coordinator of Academic Teams at CPS, rattled off a laundry list of skills that students learn from chess: analytical skills, strategy, increasing math skills, critical thinking, team building, sportsmanship, problem solving, time management, concentration. And the list goes on. CPS provides funding for chess programs in schools across the city, giving stipends to chess coaches and organizing free tournaments in association with a nonprofit partner, Renaissance Knights. But for many chess aficionados in Chicago, there is much more work to be done. Over the past few years there has been a resurgence in efforts to provide access to chess for underserved communities across the city. These efforts, spearheaded by individual teachers, librarians, and coaches, have formed a network of small communities revolving around intense gameplay, encouraged by new programs initiated by the city and by nonprofits. Joseph Ocol’s chess team is one of those efforts. He started out as a math teacher in CPS at Marshall Metropolitan High School in 2005, and he started a chess program there a year later in order to keep his students safer in the hours right after school when there is less parental supervision, after one of his students was tragically shot and killed. As 6 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

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Ocol sees it, he’s saving lives. Ocol started another chess program two years ago at Earle STEM after transferring there. The team used to meet Monday through Friday from four to six, but recently cut back to four days a week due to budget cuts. “My purpose was to save lives, to keep them in school after school. Chess was the least expensive but also the most effective way to develop the critical thinking skills of the kids,” Ocol said. “I really did not expect them to win, but they won again and again.” Since he started the program, Earle STEM has racked up wins, nationally and across the city. Last year, Earle STEM’s all-girls chess team took home a national championship trophy, and State Representative Danny Davis successfully campaigned to arrange a meeting between some of the chess students and Barack Obama. At tournaments, Earle STEM’s team is often the only one predominantly composed of Black students. Ocol recalled one tournament in which his team attracted stares for being the only Black team in a mostly white tournament. Chess is notoriously a boys club—currently the world’s top 100 players are all men—and boys outnumber girls on the main Earle STEM team. But despite these disparities, Ocol still holds faith in the egalitarian nature of chess. “Chess does not identify gender. That’s the nice thing about chess. Anyone can play chess, regardless of physical disability, regardless of race, regardless of age,” he said. Ocol is constantly scrambling to work his way around limited funding. Ocol’s school can’t afford to hire any additional coaches or mentors, so Ocol has his students mentor each other, pairing them up and having students master skills by teaching them to others. Earle STEM often has difficulty paying registration fees to enter its students into tournaments, in addition to transportation and food expenses for lunch. So Ocol comes up with prizes and tournaments of his own within the club, in

addition to searching for outside sponsors to help defray tournament costs. Just last week, Southwest Airlines agreed to donate ten round-trip tickets to send team members to the SuperNationals Tournament. But these kinds of special opportunities are not often available to the average CPS team. However, even if free airfare isn’t usually in the cards, CPS and other nonprofit organizations are trying to expand the kind of support available to student clubs across the city. The Current State of Youth Chess The Department of Academic Competitions at CPS holds two playoff tournaments a year, one for the North Side and one for the South Side. Sixteen schools participate in each tournament, and around 400 kids play in the tournaments overall. Hundreds of other students make use of chess programs in schools, but don’t participate in tournaments. Perhaps given in a system in which under one percent of schools participate in district-sponsored tournaments, CPS’s total chess participation numbers remain far below those in other big-city public school systems. New York, for example, has a far more robust chess program. According to the Illinois Chess Association, the city of Chicago has a total of 1,500 chess players from kindergarten up through high school— less than half a percent of the total student population of just under 400,000. New York, on the other hand, has an estimated 23,000 players from Kindergarten to twelfth grade, accounting for around two percent of the student population. Less than ten percent of schools in Chicago have chess programs. In other major cities, that percentage can be over seventy percent. Jerry Neugarten, a longtime chess coach and founding member of the Chicago Chess Foundation (CCF), a nonprofit chess support organization formed in 2014, attributes the city’s lagging chess performance chiefly to a hundred-year-old CPS policy decision.

In the 1920s, chess was put in the Sports Department. “[Chess] languished there,” Neugarten said. In 2014, CPS transferred the chess program to the Academic Competitions Department but, according to Neugarten, did not have funds available to significantly expand and restructure the program. The numbers have improved slightly over the past few years. Interest has gone up as more students participate in tournaments. In 2008, 200 students participated in the North Side playoff tournament and 173 in the South Side playoff tournament. This year, 211 students played in the North Side tournament and 202 in the South Side tournament. These numbers don’t include students who attend club meetings and trainings but do not attend tournaments. Filling the Gap CPS introduced a new program in 2013, called First Move, that introduces second and third grade students to chess at an early age. The program is designed so that even teachers who don’t know chess well can still provide instruction through teaching videos. Coaches from the First Move program visit schools occasionally, including the “chess lady” who appears in the videos. According to Darcy Linde, the president of the University of Chicago Chess Team who coaches part time at Cook Elementary in Auburn Gresham, when the chess lady visits, kids “freak out.” The First Move program is in one hundred CPS schools currently and is expected to expand, according to Nelson, the CPS Academic Teams coordinator. The program is run by a national nonprofit at no cost to either the school or to CPS, Nelson said, and continues to expand its funding and operations in Chicago. But while successful, First Move is limited. It serves a narrow age range of students and can provide basic instruction, but not build competitive teams.

CHESS

Chess players gather at McDonald’s on 95th St. and Halsted Ave., where they’ve been meeting for the past two years. Some have been playing together since meeting at the Harper Court benches in the eighties.

JASON SCHUMER

The CCF is trying to fill the void left by decades of lackluster programming by supporting chess teams across the city, especially in low-income schools, through funding, coaches, and teaching resources. There are currently approximately ten small private chess providers in the city of Chicago and one other nonprofit partnered with the city, Renaissance Knights Chess Foundation (RKCF). RKCF provides some free tournaments to students, but charges about $10 per class. Jerry Neugarten, the CCF board of directors member and the primary author of the CCF curriculum, believes that the current options for Chicago students are far from adequate. He started coaching and playing chess when his son discovered the game at seven years old and demonstrated talent. Neugarten was impressed by research demonstrating the benefits of chess for children; he referred to an avalanche of studies suggesting the positive effects of chess on everything from concentration to Wall Street employment rates. Neugarten coached his son’s chess team in upstate New York and then Highland Park, eventually

running the district-wide program. A Hyde Park native himself, Neugarten got involved in the ICA Youth Committee after moving back to Chicago about ten years ago. “The game is for many kids irresistible to play. But in order to improve, you have to slow down and think about your choices,” Neugarten said. The CCF currently operates in nineteen schools, distributed roughly evenly across the North, South and West Sides, but recently launched a fundraising effort and hopes to expand to a few hundred more in the next couple of years. Thirteen of those school programs were started by the CCF from scratch as part of their Rook, Rattle, and Roll program, which provides stipends, equipment, and mentoring. CCF’s other major program, Pawns to Queens, takes schools with preexisting strong chess programs and provides advanced instruction. In just the last week, the CCF was able to announce two more programs: an online competitive coach marketplace that aims to bring costs down and bring in more independent coaches, and a “CCF Fellows” program for high-schoolers who

can assistant-coach at elementary schools for community service credit. Chicago Chess Legacies In the late 1970s, Jules Stein started the original Chicago Chess Center (CCC), which ran in Lincoln Park until he passed away in 1989. During this period, Stein’s center was the focal point of chess in Chicago, situated firmly on the North Side. Bill Brock is a board member of a fiveyear-old project to bring back the CCC. The new CCC project is not officially affiliated with the CCF, but according to Brock, the two organizations see each other as working toward complementary goals. The organizers come from the same circles: Brock and Neugarten served together on the ICA before moving on to their current projects. Brock is also a former president of the ICA and lived in Hyde Park while attending the University of Chicago. He remembers a club on 55th Street and the famous Harper Court chess tables, which were removed in 2002. But other than that, institutionalized chess on the South Side was sparse.

“There were chess players on the South Side. But the South Side was kind of dead,” Brock said. The most famous coterie of players came from one program in a South Shore public school, Chicago Vocational High School (CVS). Tom Fineberg had been a member of the South Shore Jewish Community. While most of that community moved out as part of larger South Side-wide white flight movements in the face of growing AfricanAmerican presence in the neighborhood, Fineberg stayed behind and worked as a math teacher at CVS, turning it into a chess powerhouse. “The efforts of one guy really kept chess on the South Side–serious chess-going,” Brock said. When Harper Court removed its four concrete chess tables without warning in 2002, complaining that the players disrupted business and made crude comments, Fineberg, at that point nearly eighty years old, led a campaign and gathered over 500 signatures on a petition to bring them back. The tables had been a core social gathering point for South Side players since the seventies. Eventually, the two sides reached a compromise. Chess could be played, but on weekends only. Fineberg taught thousands of students; at any given year his chess team would include as many as one hundred members. One pupil, Emory Tate (who has since passed away), was a five-time Armed Forces chess champion and International Master. Another star alumnus was Marvin “Uncle Marv” Dandridge, who can still be seen playing at the legendary chess nomads meet-up every Saturday afternoon in a McDonald’s on 95th and Halsted, where they’ve been for the past two years or so. Dandridge is known for prolific smack talk during games, cracking up opponents and spectators alike. Yet another pupil, Daaim Shabazz, now dedicates himself to preserving African diasporic chess history and recently published a book on Tate. On his website, Shabazz claims that highlighting Black chess history will emphasize the universal nature of the game. MAY 17, 2017 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 7

CHESS

Young members of the Knight Moves Chess Club during their weekly gathering at Rudy Lozano Library in Pilsen.

NATALIE FRIEDBERG

Fineberg’s students still dominate the South Side chess scene, but only in the older generation. After Fineberg passed away, no one at his school could pick up the torch. Islands of Community Today, as it has been in Chicago for decades now, chess communities are dispersed in small islands all over the city. In the nineties, a lot of the formal chess clubs on the North Side even closed up shop, and the locus of Chicago chess moved out to the suburbs. “What are the two meccas for chess right now when it’s not the summer time? On the North Side there’s a Starbucks and on the South Side it’s the McDonald’s,” Brock said. “These are the linchpins of the community. That’s how far chess in Chicago has fallen.” Brock and the new CCC are trying to bring back a sense of centralized community by reinstituting a center in the downtown area, which could serve both South Side and 8 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

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North Side players. But the money to rent a space hasn’t been raised yet. In the meantime, the CCC holds workshops and affordable tournaments all over the city, including two tournaments a month at University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) on the Near West Side. The UIC tournaments attract a diverse array of people, geographically and socioeconomically. The CCF is getting on board as well, and held its first high school tournament in partnership with the CCC in January, also at UIC. Linde, the UofC Chess Team president, agrees that it’s strange that Chicago chess has no comprehensive organization—as the CCC’s website notes, most large cities in the country have a metropolitan chess organization, but Chicago doesn’t. But the city is so big, Linde argues, that there is little incentive to return to a centralized model when everyone lives so far apart. Neugarten and the CCF run into this problem as well. For their programs on the far South Side, finding coaches can be difficult when most volunteers live in the northern suburbs.

The Knight Moves Chess Club at the Rudy Lozano Branch Library in Pilsen embodies the contradiction of Chicago’s decentralized chess hubs. It remains an island of a community. Héctor Hernández, the coach and branch manager, has been teaching chess in Chicago for over thirty years. He says that sometimes his former students come with their families, bringing the next generation to learn from the same master. Hernández himself was once only thirty-three points away from rating as a Grand Master, but decided to devote himself to teaching instead. Every Thursday from 6pm to 8pm, a crew of kids, usually in elementary or middle school, file in for a quick free lesson and then an hour and a half of game play. During the lesson, Hernández reviews a match, asking an audience of unusually quiet seven-year-old boys what the best moves are, the definition of a gambit, and how to open up your queen and bishop lines. After each question, lots of eager hands shoot up in the air. “Oh oh oh, Queen to A4?” “Checkmate?”

“No, no, no!” According to Hernández, a fair number of students come from the surrounding neighborhood, but some trek all the way from distant parts of the city. One father, David Cedeño, brings his son every week from Belmont Gardens on the Northwest Side. Since coming to Knight Moves, Cedeño and his son have started their own chess team at James Monroe Public Elementary School. The team receives funding support through the CCF’s Rook, Rattle, and Roll program. Cedeño is officially the coach of the team, but his son is de facto in charge. As Cedeño spoke about the new team at Monroe, his son looked up from a game a few tables away, proudly boasting of his teaching role in the team and chastising his father for always opening with the Sicilian Defense. He was referring to a classic set of opening moves where black responds to a white pawn being put forward by putting forward a pawn of its own, out of reach of the enemy. Cedeño’s son started out playing very chess early on, but recently switched to another school that didn’t have a chess club. After looking around for a new program, they heard about Knight Moves, went to a meeting, and were hooked. “We were able to get him back in the chess community. This is like his chess community now,” Cedeño said. “It’s like a family,” another parent chimed in. “All the kids know each other since they see each other and play together every week.” The Lozano Library branch is not simply a space for people to play chess. It’s a community where students can find mentors, learn skills that help them in school, and make friends from all over the city. Chess communities like the one at Lozano are spread out all over the city. South Side chess, in particular, has a strong legacy that city organizations are now trying to maintain with a reliable infrastructure. With new energy and programs in the last few years especially, change is on the horizon. “You’ve got a lot of heroes on the South Side,” Neugarten said. “A lot of people lean over backwards to get their kids involved in chess.” ¬

EDUCATION

Repurposing Shedd

Four years after its closing, a former elementary school sits empty BY DEYSI CUEVAS

estled in a quiet part of Roseland, at the corner of 99th Street and Indiana Avenue, sits what was once John G. Shedd Elementary School. Shedd Elementary served as a satellite school to nearby Bennett Elementary until 2013. After Chicago Public Schools (CPS) closed fifty schools in 2013, the district made an effort to provide information about the status and sale of the vacated school buildings. CPS maintains a list of these schools, along with a schedule of upcoming meetings (none of them current), and a map colorcoding schools as “Undergoing community engagement process” or “Repurposed.” So far, only fourteen of the forty-three vacated buildings have been repurposed or sold, according to the Reporter. As little as can be gleaned from district-provided information on schools closed in 2013, it’s even harder to know what’s going on with closed school buildings outside of that list, like Shedd. But that hasn’t stopped some Roseland residents from bringing up the status of Shedd Elementary at recent ward meetings and advocating for the school’s repurposing. Marilyn Keeter, principal of the Rescue Missionary Christian School, had hoped to move her school into the vacant building and turn it into something that could benefit the community. In 2014, she and Pastor Estelle Keeter (her mother and the school’s founder) went to inquire about the school’s condition. “As you know, many other public schools are massive; we’re a small Christian school so we weren’t looking for anything that was huge,” said Keeter. “We wanted something that we knew would give us more room to grow but at the same time be something that we could handle.” After the initial viewing of the school, Keeter said they immediately began what she described as a strenuous bidding process.

“We first had to meet with the real estate broker that was handling the property for CPS. After meeting with her, she arranged a time for us to go formally see the property. After we did that, myself, the pastor, and the board met with her and she emailed me all of the documents that needed to be sent in. Fifty-two pages were sent to us. There was a deadline for the bidding documents to be turned in and they were filled out extensively,” she said. Keeter said that a lot of the questions were in regards to the repairs that needed to be done on the property. They were new to the process so they asked to be let into the property a second time, where they took their own licensed inspector to point out the things that had to be repaired. “After checking out the boiler, the roof, siding and all those different things, there were an astronomical amount of repairs that we knew needed to be done in order to bring that building up to code. One of CPS’s stipulations was, ‘If you buy this property, you buy it as is. If you find out that it’s sitting on hazardous waste, it’s not our concern,’” Keeter said. “It was more than just, ‘Oh this is nice, we want it.’ No—we had to really go in there and say, ‘This needs to be changed, this needs to be brought up to code.’ It was a situation like that.” CPS also wanted to know how the Rescue Missionary Christian School would engage with the Roseland Heights community. According to Clevan Tucker, president of the Roseland Heights Community Association, Keeter and the Rescue Missionary School had to be vetted by community members and explain how purchasing Shedd Elementary would benefit everyone in the community. “They presented us with a packet and they went over the benefits; they’d leave the

JONATHAN JARDIN

space open and they would improve it and allow us to use the building for community association meetings and events so it would have been a partnership between the new owners and the community,” said Tucker. Because the property sits on a large amount of land, Keeter said that they wanted to revitalize it. “There would be a little walking path or a gardening type thing for the seniors. [In] the back of the school, we wanted to start a community garden. So there were many aspects of the bidding itself

that [the community] wanted to know. That’s another reason we went to the Roseland Heights Community [Association], because we wanted to know how they would feel if a Christian school were to purchase this property.” The Rescue Missionary Christian School then presented their information to the district and 9th Ward Alderman Anthony Beale, along with another bidder (“We never got a name. All we knew was that it was a [housing] developer,” Tucker

MAY 17, 2017 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 9

EDUCATION

BULLETIN said). Both bids were rejected. “The highest bidder did not get community approval so my thought was, ‘Shouldn’t it go to the second highest bidder since you only had two?’ But no, he rejected both bids and put it back up for sale. At least that’s the story we got,” said Tucker. In fact, because Shedd was not officially considered one of the schools closed in 2013, there was no district requirement for community input or public meetings at the time (now, that requirement has been lifted for many schools closed in 2013 as well). According to Beale, the bid by the Rescue Missionary Christian School was denied because he felt they did not have “the resources to accomplish what the community is looking to have done,” he said. “If the building needs redoing, they really don’t have the capital to rehab the building, keep up with the maintenance of the building, keep up with the landscaping, all those types of things.” According to a Freedom of Information Act request, Shedd Elementary accumulated approximately $5,430 in gas and electricity costs from July 2015 to June 2016, which has residents wondering why taxpayers are still paying to keep the lights on in a closed building. Beale explained that some buildings are secured by alarm systems. “You don’t want a school just sitting there open. You might want to make sure the heat stays at a certain temperature so the pipes don’t freeze. There’s a lot of things going on, just because a building is vacant doesn’t mean that there’s no activity in the building. There’s still a light amount of maintenance being done,” he said. The building is still in good condition and has yet to become an eyesore in the neighborhood. But residents still want to see the building repurposed. “The appearance is fine,” said Marvin

Bonds, a nearby resident. “It’s not shattered with broken windows or hanging gutters. I like it the way it is here. I hope they don’t turn it into a development of some kind.” “I’d like to see them do something with the property,” added his wife, Fran Bonds. “I think a community center or a school would be good.” Bonds added that while a school may be a good idea, there might not be enough kids in the community for a school. “I don’t see a lot of little kids around here. We’re in our sixties and there are a few kids that come and play here in this playground, but I don’t think there’s enough here for a community center or school,” said Marvin. There’s some evidence that opening new schools (specifically charters) in areas with declining child population drains students, and student-based funds, from nearby neighborhood schools. That’s a problem any new school, including Rescue Missionary Christian School, would have to confront. However, according to a report by Chapin Hall Center for Children at the University of Chicago, in contrast to some other community areas on the South and West Sides with declining school-age populations, Roseland’s child population has remained relatively stable between 1990 and 2010. Beale said that some members of the community want to see some type of youth education incubator in the building. “It’s a very good building. It’s a very good location, a quiet community. So we want to make sure that we educate kids and still have the community quiet like they’re accustomed to,” he said. “There are a couple of users out there that are able to do that but again, we’re just not going to accept anything and put it in there just to have somebody in the building. We want to make sure we get the right fit. That’s all we’re trying to do.” ¬

Exclusively Us Seniors’ Day Celebration 63rd St. from Union Ave. to Sangamon St. Saturday, May 20, 10am–3pm. (773) 6094863. bit.ly/SeniorCelebration Celebrate Englewood’s Seniors with this health fair, which will be accompanied by games, prizes, and performances from the Ada Niles Senior Line Dancers, Chicago Dancing Divas and Dudes and more. Transportation from twenty senior centers in the area will be provided. (Adia Robinson)

Young, Fabulous & Female Chicago Panel and Mixer Zhou B Art Center, 1029 W. 35th St. Tuesday, May 16, 7pm–10pm. 21+. RSVP at therootevents.com/yff Join the online magazine The Root for Young, Fabulous & Female, a women-only event, which will feature a panel discussion and Q&A, bringing together influential women to discuss this year’s theme, redefining success in personal and professional life. There will be a pre-panel reception and a post-event mixer with the men from the manCode event. (Andrew Koski)

Invest in Chess Tournament Gordon Center of Interrogative Science, 929 57th St. Thursday, May 18, 10am–12pm. investinchess.org Students from Carnegie Elementary and Pershing Elementary will go head to head in this chess tournament, sponsored by Invest in Chess—the only one of its kind between two Chicago Public Schools. Invest in Chess is a chess advocacy initiative that has been coaching students and instilling in them a love of the game. (Adia Robinson)

VISUAL ARTS Third Friday at Zhou B Art Center Zhou B Art Center, 1029 W. 35th St. Friday, May 19, 7pm–10pm. Free. zhoubartcenter.com The acclaimed Zhou Brothers invite the public to check out the exhibition spaces and resident artist studios at their towering, 10 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

¬ MAY 17, 2017

catacomb-like art complex in Bridgeport on the third Friday of every month. This Friday, attendees can talk to the artists featured in the show “Geometric Complexions,” which includes abstract work from the United States, Mexico, Iran, and Italy. ( Joseph S. Pete)

Hip Hop in the Park at Piotrowski Piotrowski Park, 4247 W. 31st St. Friday, May 19, 5pm–8pm. Free. teensinthepark.com Teens can learn all about the basics of hiphop at this free event in Little Village. They can take part in workshops in breakdancing, beat boxing, DJing; as example and inspiration, they can watch professional dancers perform. ( Joseph S. Pete)

Opening Reception: The Petty Biennial The Arts Incubator, 301 E. Garfield Blvd. Opening reception Friday, May 19, 6pm–8pm. Through Friday, June 23. Free. (773) 702-9724. bit.ly/PettyBiennial Arts + Public Life hosts the opening reception for “The Petty Biennial,” curated by Keisha Leek and Sadie Woods and with live sets from Trqpiteca DJs. All work focuses on the centralized goal of breaking down stereotypes and norms around communities of color. Those exhibiting in the collection use a variety of media, from video to painting, to represent a range of regional and national perspectives. (Bridget Newsham)

Spring Super Sunday Hyde Park Art Center, 5020 S. Cornell Ave. Sunday, May 21, 1pm–5pm. (773) 324-5520. Free. hydeparkart.org Spring Super Sunday will feature all things Art Center. The all-day event will showcase a variety of activities including a performance by Louder Than a Bomb, zine-making, art sales, and an artist talk given by Corinna Button. Stop by to see what your local artists and performers have been working on! (Bridget Newsham)

Making a Place of Purpose, A Collection of Small Actions Smart Museum of Art, 5550 S. Greenwood Ave. Saturday, May 20, 12pm–6pm. (773) 7020200. smartmuseum.uchicago.edu Experience interactive performances and

EVENTS activities that consider how space can function as spaces of belonging. Organized by the Smart’s 2016/17 “Interpreters in Residence,” the Belonging Collective, this event will feature a variety of intimate actions including performative readings, workshops, meals, and more. This event is being presented in collaboration with Arts + Public Life’s Teen Arts Council, Sojourner Scholars, Red Line Service, the Stockyard Institute, and more. (Roderick Sawyer)

MUSIC WHPK 88.5 presents Summer Breeze 2017! UofC Bartlett Quad, 5640 S. University Ave. Friday, May 19, 5pm–9pm. Free. (773) 7028424. facebook.com/whpk885 Join WHPK 88.5 FM for the Summer Breeze 2017 concert featuring Palm, Fee Lion, Clearance, and Blackerface! Don’t get it confused with the UofC’s event of the same name the next day—WHPK’s concert is free and open to the public. (Roderick Sawyer)

Justin Townes Earle Thalia Hall, 1807 S. Allport St. Saturday, May 20. Doors 7pm, show 7:30pm. $25–$35. (312) 526-3851. thaliahallchicago.com Catch singer-songwriter Justin Townes Earle, recently signed with New West Records, for a night of old favorites and some new songs off of his upcoming album Kids In The Street, which will debut May 26. He will be joined by longtime guitarist Paul Niehaus and The Sadies as his backing band. (Andrew Koski)

Samothrace Reggies. 2105 S. State St. Sunday, May 21. Doors 7pm. $12–$15. 21+. (312) 949-0120. reggieslive.com Reggies will host a night of “heavy music for heavy times,” featuring headliner Samothrace and their blues-based doom metal sound. They will be joined by He Whose Ox Is Gored—a “unique synthesis of doom, progressive elements and shoegaze”; the funeral-paced, death metal–infused doom of Disrotted; and Atonement Theory, Jay Jancetic’s solo project, which he describes as “heavy, dark and brooding, yet melodic.” (Andrew Koski)

Drea the Vibe Dealer and Brother El The Promontory, 5311 S. Lake Park Ave. Monday, May 22, 7pm. $5. 21+. (312) 8012100. promontorychicago.com

The Black Line: Part Three DuSable Museum, 740 E. 56th Pl. Sunday, May 21, 2pm–5pm. $15, members $10. (773) 947-0600. dusablemuseum.org

Every Monday the Promontory hosts The Corner, “an intimate musical experience featuring a variety of Chicago’s most innovative emerging artists.” This week will feature singer-songwriter, Drea the Vibe Dealer—a teaching artist, member of the Medicine Woman collective, and older cousin and mentor to Smino—and legendary DJ, producer, and emcee Brother El, the original founder of the long-running radio show “The Hip Hop Project” on WLUW (88.7 FM). All proceeds will go to the artists. (Andrew Koski)

Film producer D. Channisn Berry’s (Dark Girls and The Church House) documentary profiles the history and future of Black women in America. Candid in-depth interviews explore marriage, mothering, racism, career, education, religion and sex as related to identity and culture. (Nicole Bond)

STAGE & SCREEN

Chicago based arts collective Mozawa, brings twelve interdisciplinary artists together to re-create their version of August Strindberg’s classic A Dream Play where expressionism and surrealism combine to take a critical look at the human condition. (Nicole Bond)

Education Emancipation: A Benefit Concert Stony Island Arts Bank, 6760 S. Stony Island Ave. May 20, 6pm-10pm. $25, $15 students with ID. itstheiproject.com Members of the I Project and Bouchet Elementary School are teaming up to raise funds for kids at Bouchet, a predominantly Black, low-income, elementary school in South Shore. The benefit aims to raise $25,000 to provide each student with a Chromebook. All funds raised in excess of the goal will go toward after-school programs, school supplies, and uniforms. Performers featured will include Ric Wilson, Daryn Alexus, Kopano, Christian JaLon, Ausar, and more. (Roderick Sawyer)

Auditions for Hyde Park Community Players Augustana Lutheran Church, 5500 S. Woodlawn. Tuesday, May 16, 6:30pm–9pm; Saturday, May 20, 3pm-6pm. hydeparkcommunityplayers.org Hyde Park Community Players will hold auditions for their summer production of William Shakespeare’s comedy Twelfth Night. No prepared monologue necessary, sides will be given for reading. For questions or more information, email director Leslie Halverson at lesliemhalverson@gmail.com (Nicole Bond)

The Dream Play High Concept Laboratories, 2233 S. Throop St. Monday, May 22, 7:30pm-10pm. $10 suggested donation. highconceptlaboratories.com

Chicago Home Theater Festival Locations and times vary. Sunday, May 14– Monday, May 29. Bronzeville: Sunday, May 14; Kenwood: Thursday, May 18; Hyde Park: Sunday, May 21; Englewood: Monday, May 22; Pilsen: Tuesday, May 23; Wednesday May 24 Little Village; South Shore: Saturday, May 27. Free–$65. chicagohtf.org The Chicago Home Theater Festival has merged art and culture with community since 2012, with over five hundred artists and 5,000 neighbors convening in dozens of neighborhoods to share meals and experiences in each other’s homes. Against the backdrop of a hyper-segregated city, the gatherings center on connection and inclusion. This year’s festival offerings span a wide range of interests from the poetry of Frankiem Mitchell and Orin Frazier to tarot reading from healer Rhonda Wheatley, along with many other performances to suit practically every palate. Hosts include Northwestern professor E. Patrick Johnson, WBEZ reporter Natalie Moore, artist and DIY impresario Mykele Deville, and TRACE artists Marcus Davis and Alexandria Eregbu. (Nicole Bond)

Among All This You Stand Like A Fine Brownstone eta Creative Arts Foundation, 7558 S. South Chicago Ave. Through Thursday, June 8. Fridays,

Saturdays, 8pm; Sundays, 3pm. $40, discounts available for seniors, students, and groups. (773) 752-3955. etacreativearts.org Enjoy this revival tribute that celebrates the life of Vantile L. Whitfield as well as, of course, the Gwendolyn Brooks centennial. First performed to acclaim at eta back in the nineties, you now have a second chance to watch sketchbook vignettes of Black life come to together through Whitfield’s adaptations of poetry by Gwendolyn Brooks—don’t miss out. (Roderick Sawyer)

Harvey Court Theatre, 5535 S. Ellis Ave. opened May 11–June 11. $15-$68. (773) 753-4472. courttheatre.org Long before there was Donnie Darko or Wilfred, there was Mary Chase’s 1944 Pulitzer Prize-winning play Harvey. The titular character is an invisible rabbit that stands six feet and three inches tall and may end up imprisoning the “carefree and kind” protagonist Elwood P. Dowd in a sanitarium. ( Joseph S. Pete)

Never the Milk & Honey The Greenhouse Theater, 2257 N. Lincoln Ave. Through Sunday, May 28. Thursdays, Fridays, Saturdays, 8pm; Sundays, 3pm. $28-$37. (773) 609-4714. mpaact.org It is written that there is a land of milk and honey, promised as respite for the faithful when the world ends. Explore what happens as covenants and faith are broken, when the world doesn’t end as expected, in Joseph Jefferson Award winner Shepsu Aakhu’s newest play, directed by South Shore native Carla Stillwell. (Nicole Bond)

Clybourne Park University Church, 5655 S. University Ave. Friday, May 19–Sunday, May 21. Fridays and Saturdays, 8pm, Sundays, 2pm. $12, discounts available for seniors and students. hydeparkcommunityplayers.org The Hyde Park Community Players present Bruce Norris’s Pulitzer- and Tony Award– winning play Clybourne Park. Norris’s tale picks up where Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun left off, using biting satire to unpack white flight and gentrification over two generations in a fifty-year timespan. (Nicole Bond) MAY 17, 2017 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 11

SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY OPEN HOUSE SUNDAY, MAY 21 2PMâ&#x20AC;&#x201C;4PM HOSTED AT BUILD COFFEE IN THE EXPERIMENTAL STATION 6100 S. BLACKSTONE AVE. CHICAGO, IL 60637

The Weekly is produced by an all-volunteer editorial staff. We want to hear your ideas for our coverage of the South Side. To find out how to get involved, join us at our open house this Sunday, or email us any time at editor@southsideweekly.com. southsideweekly.com | @southsideweekly

SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY