(Ethan Tate)

As you enter the apartment at 55th and Hyde Park, the projector is on your left. Straight ahead, a canvas covered with what looks like multi-colored sponges hangs on a wall. When I ask about it, Julian Antos urges me to take it off their hands: “I just hate feeling like my home is an art project.”

Sponges aside, the apartment that Julian shares with Rebecca Hall feels like an extension of their own project—the Northwest Chicago Film Society (NWCFS), a nonprofit they and a third partner, Kyle Westphal, started in January 2011. According to its mission statement, the Society “exists to promote the preservation of film in context.” Its founders believe that film’s “ability to capture the past uniquely” is more “intelligible when it’s grounded in unsimulated experience: seeing a film in a theater, with an audience, and projected from film stock.” To achieve this goal, the NWCFS runs a classic film series on Wednesday nights for five-dollar admission at the Portage Theater on North Milwaukee.

In addition to the series up north, Becca and Julian host occasional screenings in their apartment, drawing films from their vast personal collection. Though they emphasize the difference between their living room screenings and the society’s public series at the Portage, Becca points out the new NWCFS logo she designed and spray-painted onto her bedroom door. Julian offers a cookie from the open packet of Chips Ahoy sitting on the kitchen table, brought to the previous day’s screening by one of their “favorite patrons.”

The weekly series at the Portage draws a crowd of regulars, many of whom first got to know Becca and Julian when the screenings were held on Saturdays in the now-empty Bank of America Cinema. That program, the Classic Film Series, began in 1972, and persisted in that space around the corner from the Portage as the building’s owners and the programmers changed over the years.

Becca discovered the Bank of America Cinema as a University of Chicago student through her involvement with Doc Films, the university’s student-run film society. “It was legendary among the [Doc] board in 2007,” Becca says. “Once I got to know them, I got to tag along.” She describes it as having “a really weird set up.” According to Becca, “You had to walk around to the back of the building, and there was this quaint little movie theater lobby.”

Becca soon began working at the cinema, and that is where she and Julian first met. “Julian, in my head, was that happy kid who would come with his parents and buy popcorn from me,” she says. Michael Phillips, who now runs South Side Projections and programmed at the cinema for its last few years, eventually brought Julian on to help out. According to Becca, he thought having a high-school kid around would annoy her, but the two quickly became friends. “He was like, ‘I’m going to screen this print of “The Black Cat” in my basement,’” Becca remembers, before asking Julian: “There was a live performance aspect, right? Your parents’ weird friends’ children?”

Both the programmers and patrons were conscious of the cinema’s uncertain fate. “People kept saying that every season for the last year and a half of the Bank was the last one,” Becca says. They began exploring options for continuing the series at a new location. “We were holding out on incorporating [as a nonprofit] until we found a space,” she says. They were introduced to Dennis Wolkowicz, the owner of the Portage Theater, who runs the Silent Film Society in that location. The last screening at the Bank took place on December 18th, 2010, and the NWCFS officially incorporated as a nonprofit on January 21st.

“It was clear that Dennis wanted to see us doing things at the theater,” says Becca. “His love is old films. I think he likes seeing cultural history-oriented programming happening.” In one post on the Society’s blog, Kyle describes the “archaeological aims” of programming a calendar.

“Maybe that’s what we should have called it, the Archaeological Film Society—everyone would think we show dinosaur movies,” says Julian. Neither Becca nor Julian remembers exactly what made them settle on the moniker “Northwest Chicago.” “We didn’t have much time when we were getting started,” Becca says. “I thought it was because we kept fighting and wanted to stop fighting,” Julian responds.

Julian has been collecting film since he was sixteen. The apartment he and Becca share was inherited from a former Doc Films Programming Chair, and the collection is stored in his old bedroom. The room is small and narrow, making the humidity level and 60-degree temperature easier to maintain. It barely fits two desks, a shelf that’s “half-organized,” and a closet holding canisters upon canisters.

“Julian’s just temperamentally a projectionist, he yearns to be in a small dark room with machines,” says Becca. Her interest in film preservation began when she began projecting at Doc Films. “As I was learning, I started hearing little things, sometimes from Kyle, about how because of digital technology’s rise, film stock might not be around for so long. So I was thinking about this the whole time I was learning about it, and these came together to make it seem quite important,” she said in an interview with Michael Phillips for the Chicago Tribune. “We’re still waiting to see if 35 mm, especially, continues to be available from conventional sources, so we’re looking at a lot of ways to make sure that we can keep doing that, including amassing our own film collection.”

****

Kyle, who works at the George Eastman House, the museum of photography and film in Rochester, New York, writes regularly for the Society’s blog. He has devoted a series of posts to the importance of 35mm as it relates to their mission. In a blog post titled “Programming: How To Do Things With Films”, Kyle writes that “the industry-wide switch from 35mm to DCP exhibition is expected to be completed in the next two years.” The Digital Cinema Package, according to a February article in The Atlantic, is “a collection of media files with specifications set by the Digital Cinema Initiatives, a joint venture between Disney, Fox, Paramount, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Universal, and Warner Bros.”

The cost of the equipment used to project these files amounts to over $75,000—a bill impossible for many small theaters to foot. “These exhibitors are clinging to 35mm because it allows them to use existing projection equipment with minimal and rather predictable maintenance costs. It’s an incidental objective,” Kyle writes. “Showing films in 35mm is a mission on a different level of magnitude for repertory venues.”

In the interview with Phillips, he explains that the “film history that we’re often interested in, this very material physical sense of film history, is where you’re learning something not just by seeing it on screen but by actually holding it in your hand, winding through it, and making, in many ways, artistic decisions about how to present it.”

These decisions are evident in the Society’s choice of venue—“We talk about different series that’d be good for the Portage, or good for Cinema Borealis,” says Becca. The Borealis is a small independent screening room in Wicker Park. They talk about a recent five-hour program they screened there called “TV on Film,” explaining how 16 mm prints were used in television broadcasts. Julian recalls a screening of “The Incident,” a 1967 movie, featuring a young Martin Sheen, about young punks taking over a subway car. Because of the Borealis’ proximity to the Damen “El” station, “you could hear the train going by.”

“At an older theater it becomes a different kind of experience,” Becca says of the Portage and Bank of America. She describes the films in that series, a series which continues “in spirit” at the Portage, as “classic but obscure.” Former Bank of America Cinema programmer Mike King wrote in a goodbye tribute posted on Cinephile, a website devoted to Chicago independent cinema, that the series was a testament to the fact that “in order to fully grasp American film history, you have to venture well beyond the canon.”

He goes on to write that though the Bank showed “mostly old movies to mostly old people, the Bank [was] no nostalgia house.” What’s special about the movie-watching experience at the bank or Portage does not only have to do with the choice of film, or even just the fact that it’s on 35mm: “Take a film like ‘The Lady From Shanghai,’” King wrote. “When it plays at Doc Films at the University of Chicago, the undergrads laugh straight through it, to prove how smart they are. Go see it at Gene Siskel Film Center, and nobody laughs at all, as if they are humbled by how smart the film is. At the Bank, people would laugh along with the jokes. But also chuckle at first hearing Orson Welles’ wretched fake Irish accent. Because it’s funny.”

The NWCFS’s mission statement speaks lovingly of “the creak of the seats, the smile of the concession stand girl, the ripped edges of a ticket.” It continues, “going to the movies should mean more than watching a consumer product violently cajoled into filling a theater screen….We believe that it is an experience—aesthetic, material, social, and moral—worth preserving.”

Now, however, the Portage is threatened. CBS 2 reports that a North Side church, the Christian Tabernacle, has offered $2 million for the building, which contains the theater and a few storefronts. The Commission on Chicago Landmarks gave the theater “preliminary landmark status” in early April, and the Zoning Board of Appeals met on April 20 to address the issue. According to the Portage’s website, the church proposes “to convert the theater into their worship space, remove the marquee, alter the auditorium, and eliminate the storefronts and half the apartments.”

Community members and 45th Ward Alderman John Arena are rallying around the historic theater, writing letters to the Zoning Board of Appeals protesting the church’s request for a special use permit to allow for religious services in the theater. The Portage’s website urges community members to attend the Board’s June 15 meeting where the proposal is to be considered.

****

But for now, Julian has just found his “intermission reel”—a collection of old advertisements for concessions he’s spliced together—and he wants to watch it. The apartment’s screening area is currently doubling as a bedroom for one of their roommates; a button-down hangs next to the screen and a desk is in the corner. The couches sit on a stage left by the apartment’s previous occupants. There’s a crash as Julian loads the film. “You scared the cats!” Becca yells from the couch.

“I feel like it still hasn’t sunk in for the general public yet, that there’s a person literally making the show happen,” she says. On the website, they’ve collected pictures of projectors drawn by projectionists. Their answer to the anticipated question —“Why this project?” reads: “Because the future of the medium is particularly uncertain these days, we’d like to record a sense of the skill and affection involved in every level of the trade.”

Becca talks seriously about her “fantasy,” that someday “repertory screenings will get their due;” that listings, the general public, and film critics will acknowledge the difficulty of obtaining certain prints, the particular choices programmers make, the combination of visceral experience and cultural history that lend these films a unique value beyond the stories they tell. “But we still believe in concessions,” Julian jokes. “Popcorn is economically important.” Becca adds that the Portage serves beer, wine, and hot dogs. “People don’t know that!”

Rachel Wiseman

When I meet Arel Brown, he is in his hairnet and apron, sporting the neon green T-shirt that is the uniform of Eternity Juice Bar & Deli. He is in the middle of preparing food, and shows me the pieces of raw kale stuck to his hand when I reach out to shake it. “My hands are a bit dirty right now,” he apologizes.

Brown is the owner and manager of Greater Grand Crossing’s Soul Vegetarian East restaurant and its juice bar and deli extension. He takes off his apron and leads me to the main dining area, where, even at 4pm, most of the tables are full. An older man, lean and well-dressed in a tightly tailored black suit and tie, greets Brown and walks with us into the next room, an unoccupied, more formal dining area. He sits down and introduces himself. “My name is Prince Asiel Ben Israel,” he says, each of his names a carefully enunciated burst of sound punctuated by a short pause.

I am surprised and delighted to hear this, because I know who Prince Asiel Ben Israel is, though I have been unable to find out much about him. Ben Israel and his wife, Yohanna Brown, started Soul Vegetarian East in 1982; the birth of their son Arel and the addition of the Eternity Juice Bar and Deli followed soon after.

Ben Israel is a charismatic figure, and he speaks in an even, amiable tone—except, as when he introduced himself, when he wants to make sure he is heard clearly. Given the recent controversy to hit Soul Vegetarian, this instinct to guard against potential misunderstandings makes sense: a November interview in the A.V. Club Chicago quoted Yohanna Brown as saying, “Women don’t wear men’s clothing, and men don’t wear women’s. If you look at present culture, you can see how breaking these guidelines has led to things like homosexuality.”

Brown and Ben Israel are both Hebrew Israelites, and this identity is the basis of their vegan offerings. Based on an interpretation of Old Testament dietary prescriptions, they support a vegan diet as the source of both spiritual and physical health and believe that being mindful of one’s diet is the first step to living a healthy lifestyle. While this belief is in and of itself unproblematic for most, some have voiced concern that the source of these beliefs is also the source of Brown’s homophobic remarks.

(Ethan Tate)

Off the Brown Line, past a Starbucks and a lighting store, near the Moody Bible Institute, around the corner from a restaurant that used to be cool, down the street from Le Cordon Bleu Culinary School, surrounded by churches on one side, expensive realty on the other, you’ll find the most dangerous place in Chicago. Or what used to be, at least.

In 2000, there were 1,424 arrests in this tiny six by two-block area. Now the gangs and the drug dealers and all the impoverished families that used to scare residents of the Gold Coast are gone. There’s just empty fields, cracked pavement, some dust: the last remaining remnants of the high rise-towers of Cabrini-Green.

Cabrini is the most striking example of a pattern that can be seen across Chicago. Projects that used to inspire fear and disgust are coming down and nothing is replacing them. When the Plan for Transformation began in 1999, there were approximately 38,000 units of public housing in Chicago. Now, there are fewer than 22,000.

On the South Side, the State Street Corridor, once home to 7,938 units, and the Wells Group, an expansive complex that used to contain 3,239 units, are now mostly empty fields or half-finished mixed-income properties. Combined, there are fewer than 1,500 units at both sites. The goal is to rebuild or renovate 25,000 units before the Plan ends. But it’s an open secret that the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) has been boosting its numbers, tallying units that were excluded from the original count and letting over 3,500 units sit vacant.

Meanwhile, the demand for affordable housing remains enormous. During the 2010-2011 school year, the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless reported that 93,780 Chicagoans were at some point without homes. And when the CHA’s Family Property Waitlist opened for 26 days in the summer of 2010, 203,000 families applied for 40,000 spots. It was the first time the waitlist had been opened in over ten years.

Why aren’t there more units to meet this overwhelming demand? Part of the reason is that neighborhoods across Chicago are afraid. They don’t want the next Cabrini or Robert Taylor or Stateway Gardens in their community. And who can blame them? The high-rises were dangerous.

But, it’s a mistake to simply equate the residents of public housing with the physical spaces they lived in. Throughout Chicago, extreme poverty and total institutional neglect plagued the projects. In 1995, CHA developments made up 11 of the 15 poorest census tracts in the country.  The CHA was so mismanaged during this period that the federal government took away local control and put the Authority into federal receivership. Still, detailing structural problems has done little to assuage the fear of many Chicagoans.

****

In April, the Urban Institute released a report that established a tenuous, but nonetheless significant link between relocated public housing residents and crime. But, if you really want to know about public housing’s relationship to crime, you should ask someone who’s lived in a development. They’ll tell you a more complex story than this new report and a more nuanced one than I ever could.

Ms. Deborah Taylor, a longtime tenant activist who grew up in the now demolished Ida B. Wells project, explains, “It ain’t easy to make it through the projects… it always seems like it has a negative connotation, but it actually shouldn’t. It’s about survival. It’s tough. We don’t fall down easy, we aren’t soft, we’re very resilient and very educated…I think we’re demonized.”

The Urban Institute’s report is important to examine because of just how limited its conclusions are. The study examined crime rates in Atlanta and Chicago over an eight-year period, attempting to determine whether residents who relocated from demolished public housing projects to subsidized private market units contributed to any increase in crime in their new neighborhoods. In Chicago, the  CHA issued more 16,000 vouchers to families moving away from projects slated for destruction.

“Overall,” researchers summarized, “our findings show that a substantial majority of neighborhoods in both cities were able to absorb public housing relocation voucher households without any adverse effect on neighborhood conditions.”

Perhaps the least surprising finding of the study was that neighborhoods that used to be home to high-rise projects experienced the most dramatic drops in crime. The report found that areas where the projects stood saw violent crime decrease by 60 percent and gun crime fall off 70 percent. When empty lots replace poorly managed and poorly constructed towers, it turns out that places get safer.

The neighborhoods where residents moved couldn’t boast similarly high drops in crime. Many of the neighborhoods with a high density of relocated residents (more than 14 per 1,000 residents) did experience higher than expected crime rates. But even these areas experienced an overall decrease in crime from the beginning to the end of the study period. This finding coincided with another that confirmed what many feared at the beginning of the relocation process—residents were moving from poor, black public housing projects to poor, black neighborhoods.

But this shouldn’t come as a shock. Faced with the destruction of their homes and the breaking-up of their communities, residents moved to neighborhoods where their friends and relatives in similar circumstances lived. Taken as a whole, then, the Urban Institute’s findings are relatively innocuous.

****

When the report was released, the response was so swift, you’d think every Chicagoan was in immanent danger. The Sun-Times published a piece that began: “crime was worse in neighborhoods where former Chicago Housing Authority Residents used vouchers to move into private apartments,” a finding that the Report explicitly rejects. The Atlantic linked the report to a story published in the magazine in 2008 called “American Murder Mystery” that implicated relocated public housing residents for rising crime rates in Memphis. This connection was highlighted in spite of the fact that the Urban Institute’s findings’ contrast with the claim of that article. And, on websites like EveryBlock, residents of ‘destination neighborhoods,’ where former public housing residents have moved en masse, expressed their outrage at the CHA and city government and their fear of their new neighbors, even as others tried to look at the issue in a more expansive way.

Political figures reacted too. 4th Ward Alderman Will Burns issued a statement, downplaying crime problems in his ward and emphasizing the success of mixed-income developments. Charles Woodyard, the Chicago Housing Authority’s CEO, defended the Plan for Transformation and pointed out a number of shortcomings of the study. For example, the Report only detailed crime statistics from 2000-2008, so any conclusions about the present would be mere extrapolations. Woodyard also made another point that went unrecognized in the rush of articles to appear after the release of the Report: the researchers never specify whether CHA relocatees were the victims or perpetrators of crimes.

What were relocated residents saying? Looking at the media accounts, it’s hard to know. For just about everyone who’s looking, residents are harder to find than they used to be. In 2009, the Authority took out ads in local papers to find unaccounted for tenants, but, for the most part, the search came to nothing. In 2010, the CHA reported that they couldn’t find 2,202 former residents of their demolished projects that they were supposed to be tracking. Residents who were supposed to be relocated with the utmost attention to their well being had disappeared.

For public housing residents, stigma and silence are nothing new. Ms. Taylor once told me, “the public does have a certain perception of people…It’s one they’ve promoted and developed themselves. This is how they want you to see the people in subsidized housing because they don’t want to keep paying for it.”

The towers that stayed up in spite of so many problems have come down. Public housing communities that stood strong in the face of mismanagement and violence and drugs are demolished. But, even without the projects, one thing hasn’t changed: public housing residents are still feared.

(Rachel Wiseman)

On April 10, in the mezzanine of the South Shore Cultural Center, an unusual partnership was formed between Ed Borstein and Noah Emmanuel. Ed is a lanky 25-year-old University of Iowa graduate and drummer for the Chicago punk band T’Bone. Noah is a sixteen-year-old South Shore resident and avid Drake fan. The pair spent over two hours locked in a room with an Akai MPD Midi drum pad controller and a computer equipped with Ableton Live, a music-editing program—they were trying to make a hip-hop song.

“You see the trick to making beats, I think, is finding an isolated instrument and just chopping it up into little pieces,” Ed lectured Noah. “So what we need here is just one little trumpet sound. You ever heard of Arturo Sandoval?”

“I may have heard the name,” Noah replied in a low, slow voice—a stark contrast to his double-timed rap delivery, which has earned him the title of the “new Twista” among his friends.

Ed nodded and pulled up a YouTube clip of Sandoval playing the National Anthem. Slowly, he began to chop up the song into individual notes until it became something entirely new, a blaring four bar trumpet loop.

Noah nodded his head and muttered verses inaudibly under his breath. After a few minutes he pulled out his cellphone and began reading out rhymes he had saved: “I feel/my body is steel/I’m ill/I verbally kill/so tell the cops to stop/ the popped shots/and the crack rocks.”

****

This musical duo is just one result of a series of recording projects and initiatives currently funded by the Chicago Parks District. The idea of a software-based music composition program, particularly one focused on making rap music, might seem outside the jurisdiction of the public parks. However the program’s organizer, Jayvi, sees no conflict.

“You know I just don’t really make those sorts of distinctions, like, between technology and nature, or musicians and non-musicians,” he says. “Age doesn’t really matter that much either. As long as you’re a sentient being, I’m going to talk to you like I talk to anyone else.”

This last statement is particularly important for Jayvi’s Chicago Mobile Recording Studio project, which seeks to record not only the voices of teenagers, like Noah, but also those of younger children. In the summer, Jayvi loads his recording equipment into the back of his van, drives out to the parks, and records songs made by the kids who happen to be hanging around. His main goal, though, is not to record just any song, but those which are sincere and recount real life experiences.

“Because of all the ‘crap’”—Jayvi’s favored moniker for commercial rap—“you get all these kids talking about crazy stuff. Like, if you find a nine year old boy and give him a mic and ask him to sing a song, the first thing he’ll start singing about is having birthday sex and going to the club.”

Shaking his head, Jayvi says, “I’m just like, man, you’re nine. You’ve never been to a club. Tell me about something you actually know about. And once, you do that, you’d be surprised what they’ll tell you.”

****

At the studio, Ed plays some of the recordings he and Jayvi made this past season of kids in various parks around the city.

“Every day we would just go out and do these four hour sessions, you know,” he recounts. “And we’d get the kids to do everything: they made the beat, they rapped and they sang. They made whatever music they wanted to make.”

The recordings are enough to make one believe in Jayvi’s principled opposition to age-based distinctions. Despite being planned out by pre-teen children, the music sounds completely professional. The rhymes vary from the playfully mischievous (“this park is cool/I like this park better than school”) to sincerely concerned (“stop, please listen, you’re wasting your time drinking forties with the homies/you could be learning/instead of burning”).

Jayvi himself did not grow up in a musical family and found few opportunities to play when growing up. “I played clarinet for maybe about a year before I got a marble stuck in it and, well, that was the end of that,” he explains. “But later on I bought a toy trumpet and started collecting other small instruments.”

Jayvi went on to study sound at the School of the Art Institute, but later dropped his studies and began working for the Chicago Parks Department. It was around this time six years ago that he also met a group of teenagers who recorded under the name of “the Inferno Mobile Recording Studio.”

“Those guys though, they just wanted to make ‘hot tracks,’ get it, that’s why it was the Inferno,” Jayvi says. “But I wanted to do more than that. I wanted do something that isn’t just about making music, it’s about documenting something. And that’s what just totally made Ed’s wig flip, that you could actually do something like that with music.”

“The project honestly did change my life. It’s the greatest job ever,”  Ed says. While he has been drumming since he was very young, he had never used computer software to create music until Jayvi trained him.

“These kids make me feel kind of out-dated sometimes,” he admits. “I’m used to just making music with drum, bass, guitar, but through this project I realized how much you can make with just a computer.”

****

Back in the booth, Noah’s rap, for instance, documents a time and a place—“it’s about this neighborhood. It isn’t so bad now, but it used to be real, real bad. I was just rapping about what I remembered from growing up.” But this isn’t his main goal. In fact, Noah wants to be an entertainer, not a  storyteller.

“My guy out in Atlanta,” Noah said, referring to a friend and amateur rapper who goes by the name of Rosco Perrelli, “he’s getting to be real big time. He’s got like, 2,000 followers on Twitter. And he said like maybe I could come down and do a show with him. So I’ve just been telling him like lets stay off the streets for now and in a couple years we’ll just be kickin’ our feet back, on top of this, you know.”

Ed, who has been performing in live shows for over a decade, seemed skeptical of this attitude. “You know, I heard this story on NPR the other day, it was one of those big time hip-hop guys—Jay-Z, I think—talking to Terry Gross. He was talking about why young rappers always grab their crotch when they’re on stage. You know why?”

Noah shook his head.

“It’s because when you’re on stage, you feel naked. If you’re naked, what’s the first thing you’re gonna try and hide.” Ed pointed down and said, “It’s not easy being naked on a stage.”

There were a lot of minor disagreements between Ed and Noah. Ed objected to Noah using words like “murder,” “kill,” and “ill,” even metaphorically. Noah didn’t like having to make “topic songs” like the disabilities PSA rap which they recorded the previous week. Ed was upset that the only rock band Noah knows is Dragonforce, “and that’s only because they had that one song on Guitar Hero.”  Yet despite these differences, the two of them have been making music together, co-operatively, for months, meeting up every Tuesday night at 6:30 to record.

At the end of this particular session, Ed ran out of the room yelling to Jayvi and the kids he was helping edit a loop in the other room.

“You guys hear this track Noah and I just made,” he shouted. “It’s dope!”

[Show as slideshow]

Everyone was well fed—Diane Adams made sure of it. The 56-year-old ran back and forth across the Woodlawn Mental Health Center so fast her red and orange outfit blurred into a comet. Though the lobby was filled with groups of people eating food and talking, reporters asking questions, and the sound of camera flashes, her question “Have you eaten yet?” was impossible to miss.

Adams’s biography explains her fervor—she is a member of the Mental Health Movement and Southside Together Organizing for Power (STOP), and she is a patient at the Auburn-Gresham Mental Health Center. As with her own facility, the Woodlawn clinic is scheduled to close on April 30. Though she was there to fight, the day was also a celebration of the clinic’s work—the free food made the live music that much more enjoyable.

This month the city began the process of consolidating their twelve outpatient clinics into six. They hope private mental health organizations will make up for the facilities that are being cut. However, since the transition began, the experience has been “chaos” for patients, Adams claims. According to the Mental Health Movement, patients have had difficulty making appointments—they don’t know where to go, and are unfamiliar with their new facilities. Furthermore, Spanish-speaking patients have faced cancelled appointments because of a dearth of Spanish-speaking doctors. While an eventual transition is possible, the movement believes the cost of the transition period may be too high.

The celebration was organized by a coalition of the Mental Health Movement, STOP, and Occupy Chicago. After commemorating the clinic, they planned to barricade themselves inside the building—a sign to the city that the clinic isn’t just an asset for the community, but a necessity.

Taking over the building wasn’t supposed to be easy, and they had a plan in place. Around 4:30 they would gather outside with a microphone and make their case to the city. Then the group would go inside—the doors would be chained shut, and cement would be mixed and poured to block the back and side entrances. The protestors had enough food for a month, and volunteers had signed up to stand outside as an added layer of defense.  Before the doors were shut, they even planned to take out the trash. Only force, or a change in the policy, would get them out. The plan began on schedule with a microphone and speakers outside the clinic.

When you hear someone involved with mental health as a patient or provider speak about the effects the closures are having, the issue has only one side. By the very nature of mental health, it can’t be put on hold. In extreme cases, an individual’s world is turned upside down. Standing in front of the main entrance, a few moments before the doors were shut, N’Donna Carter gave her testimony.

“We brought people together to tell stories and laugh,” she began. “People are safe when they’re at the clinic, but the city has skirted their duty.” She continued by relaying the sobering fact that “Chicago has had three suicides since the budget was passed. The day it passed, someone jumped off a Blue Line train.”

Adams spoke directly to Mayor Emanuel and his administration: “They think mental health patients are crazy people—well, WE’RE NOT! Mr. Mayor, you better enjoy your last term.”

Before beginning the sit-in, everyone inside the building was given a chance to get out. A few reporters and cameraman scuttled out after the final warning. One man rushed in yelling, “I have to get my mom out first!” Using a microphone on the inside connected to a speaker on the outside, a demonstrator warned the crowd, “If the police come, you will have to make a human wall to give us time.”

It’s good it didn’t come to that—the demonstrators needed about ten extra minutes to convince two people outside the building to surrender their bike locks to help secure the doors.  When the first police car arrived, they didn’t even slow down to examine the scene. As the microphone blared, “THE POLICE ARE HERE,” the statement was no longer true. They were gone.

A few minutes later another squad car appeared, but the officers stayed in the vehicle a block away. One of them was working on a drink from Starbucks, and they didn’t seem to be in a hurry. Eventually, the officers sauntered over to the clinic. They smiled at the demonstrators who made room for them to approach the now-locked front doors.

Gently, one of the officers tugged it the full centimeter it was capable of opening. She then looked at her partner and walked away. On the sidewalk, a man approached the officer and asked what was going on. She explained how the city was beginning to close the clinics, and how these people wanted to keep them open. Her voice was full of sympathy—an understandable reaction from an employee of another underfunded branch of the city government.

Eventually more police arrived. What else could have happened? Squad cars blocked off the road, and a higher-ranking officer began a dialogue with the protestors. At the end of a meeting between three officers and three protestors across the street from the clinic, one of the officers reassured the protestors, “We understand your cause.”

The two groups went their separate ways. Standing around in the street, one of the officers made a big grin every time a camera was pointed in his direction. He asked one photographer to make sure he was shooting in “high definition.” A group of four men in fluorescent green hats that read “National Lawyers Guild: Legal Observer” looked bored. Having arrived to “protect people’s constitutional rights,” they found little to do.

* * * *

At 12:30am the police used chainsaws and bolt cutters to enter the clinic. Twenty-three demonstrators were arrested, 11 of whom were released without charges. Carter was one of those arrested. A day after being released, her own alleged mistreatment by the police illustrates why the clinics are so desperately needed.

“I was denied my medication for three hours,” Carter claimed. Even though her name was on the prescription bottle, the police told her they were not allowed to medicate anyone who was being held. Finally, three hours late, she was allowed to take her medication.

“I was patted down by a man, even though I asked for a woman,” she continued. Her voice vibrated with anger as she related what happened while she was in custody, claiming, “They touched my private areas.”

Carter’s story—if true—illustrates an important point made by mental health advocates: with fewer resources available, some of the more severely ill mental health patients will inevitably end up behind bars. Police are not sufficiently trained in caring for or understanding mental health issues and are not legally allowed to offer the assistance these patients require. In light of this, the need for a public mental health plan that makes up for the gaps in the proposed system seems especially acute.

Ronald Jackson was also arrested that night. A former marine who has lost some mobility in his legs, Jackson’s experience reveals one of the infinite ways a non-violent inmate in need of special medical care could prove problematic for police officers.

He smiles when he tells the story, but it’s a horrible account exposing the inadequate services the CPD are prepared to offer. “When I have to go to the bathroom, I have a few minutes time before it becomes an emergency,” he laughs. “So I tried to get in there, but my hands were locked together. I struggled to get my pants down,” he continued. “When I was done, I was holding my pants up with one hand, but I couldn’t zip up. The officer would unlock me, but then I would have had to drop my pants. I told him, I wasn’t wearing any drawers. We just stood staring at each other for a long while.” If Jackson had been suffering from severe mental health issues, one wonders how much worse the situation might have become.

At a press conference across the street from the clinic on Saturday, Jackson had sharp words for the mayor. “Somewhere in between the idea that you are a king and a lord of lords, you were voted to keep the trust of the community,” he bellowed.

According to Carter, Alderman George Cardenas had told the Mental Health Movement that he couldn’t stand up to the mayor because he didn’t want to “bite the hand that feeds.” After sharing this anecdote, Carter roared, “I’LL BE DAMNED. I’M THE HAND THAT FEEDS. IT’S OUR MONEY.”

Hopefully Carter’s message, the last thing she said to reporters, won’t be overshadowed by her alleged mistreatment. On Thursday, some members of the crowd seemed excited by the prospect of blocking the police—they wanted conflict. But Carter’s mistreatment isn’t an example of the mayor exercising malice. It is the expression of a police force that is underfunded and undertrained. While jails aren’t perfect—it’s a sad truth but hardly a secret—the police still have a role to play. When the clinics close, their jobs will only get harder.

“If I had resisted the police, or said something, I could be dead,” Jackson said. If the police are asked to handle the outflow of those in extreme need of mental health care, there are bound to be mistakes. Chicago’s South and West Sides were once described as an “emergency in slow motion” by former University of Chicago sociologist William Julius Wilson. While no single, great issue exists, the list of minor tragedies—shootings, lost jobs, failed tests—can overwhelm a community. The clinic closures won’t drastically alter the South Side, but we know less mental health care will only deepen the emergency.

For this state to end, the clinics don’t only need to reopen, they need more funding. If the private clinics can expand upon what was previously offered, that may be a silver lining. But will the transition cost any more lives? Either way, if the movement redirects its energy against the police, hope may be lost.

Adams had a solution in mind, one that would help the police and the clinics—“Tax those yachts!” While her suggestion may at first seem to have more charm than reason, it’s certainly not a bad idea. The city only needs $3 million to keep the clinics open—there are yachts worth quite a bit more tied up in the lake.

Lauren Hunter Thomas contributed to the reporting of this piece. Contact (773) 340-9598 to assist the Mental Health Movement.

Claire Hungerford/Ethan Tate

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The sound of children sets Fenn House apart from its neighbors. A sunny Friday afternoon on a week when schools are out for spring break elicits inevitable shouts and laughter from children pouring out of the house. They duck in and out of a  wooden makeshift lean-to erected on the front lawn, a tribute to 1968’s Resurrection City in Washington D.C. and 2012’s Occupy movement in Chicago.

Currently, the space is home to the Southside Hub of Production (SHoP). Just as the modest wooden structure in the yard at 57th and Woodlawn brings together events from different times and places, SHoP was intended from its beginnings in October 2011 to provide a meeting point for differing perspectives. “We wanted to pull people of different backgrounds and ages and social backgrounds, drawing them into one space so that they might make connections they didn’t think they could make before,” Laura Shaeffer, SHoP’s creative director, explains.

To that end, SHoP has carefully cultivated a relationship with artists and residents of Hyde Park. No stranger to the neighborhood’s art community, this relationship was built upon SHoP’s previous guise as the Op Shop, a nomadic project which moved from storefront to storefront throughout the neighborhood. Shaeffer describes the valuable lessons learned through Op Shop’s four iterations.

“Because they were on four different corners on four different streets, you really got to know the demographics and how they do shift between blocks,” she says. “I learned so much about my community and my neighborhood through the Op Shop, and I thought it was very successful.”

She continues, “On the practical level, though, one seeks some kind of stability, and it became very obvious to me that the ideas that were the focal points of our projects needed a longer time to develop. To have a communitybuilding center, you really need longer than one month.”

Traditions and projects which have benefited from having a permanent space in Fenn House include weekly Sunday night potlucks and a small thrift store which, stocks everything from personally drawn postcards to luxurious men’s coats.

SHoP’s current arrangement, however, will soon be coming to an end in the summer with the expiration of their lease from the Unitarian Church. For Shaeffer, this new uncertainty about her own artistic future is both exciting and nerve-wracking.

On one hand, she explains that moving away from the current location allows for the next stage in the evolution of her long-term artistic project. In her view, projects like SHoP need to change with the needs of a community. “I really do treasure the freedom in being able to revisit something from a different perspective,” says Shaeffer. “There’s a freedom in not having a manifesto, and instead being responsive to the community.”

Yet, it is uncertain that the organization will find its next location in Hyde Park. They are in talks with Alderman Willie Cochran for a possible move to an open lot in Woodlawn—a change that would pose new questions for SHoP.

“When you go to a new neighborhood, you’re committed to understanding and learning about it. Woodlawn would be very different in feel and demographics, history and politics, and so we would require a new relationship with the community,” Shaeffer says. Even though her community art would have to adapt to these new surroundings, she insists that she would welcome a challenge of this nature.

What seems likely is that the new project will be centered on children and the ways in which they engage with artwork. For her next project, Shaeffer envisions a junkyard playground, a concept adapted from Denmark in the wake of the Second World War. Though a vacant lot in Woodlawn is a far cry from the rubble caused by global war, she still sees a great potential in children learning about subjects like woodworking. Ultimately, she hopes the children can put those lessons into practice by building something themselves.

This would, however, be old territory for Shaeffer and her partners in SHoP. The educative possibilities of art are already at the forefront of their installations, and much work has gone into making their current Fenn House a space for play. Time and again, this passion for engaging with children and families shines through when Shaeffer speaks. Much of this can be attributed to her own dual responsibilities as an artist and a parent, a tension which she wanted to solve in setting up SHoP.

“SHoP was always meant to be an intergenerational space, focusing a lot on the family. It’s a space where you can come with kids, or where you can even come as an older person to interact with children,” she explains.

“We need to be artists and parents at the same time and we cannot separate that,” she continues. “It’s enlivening to come into a space that is full of voices and cries. It’s fairly chaotic sometimes! But it’s orchestrated chaos.”

It is thus unsurprising that Fenn House is nearly always filled with the sound of giddy children dashing about. While their current space is well-endowed with plenty of space and a large, welcoming yard, there is the distinct possibility that the next location will be much smaller. To Shaeffer, such a transition wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing.

“We’re in a mansion now, and maybe I won’t need a mansion when I move!”

Underneath these tangled issues of location, neighborhood, and community lies the central question: What is home? It is a question she has sought to answer through the art on display at the Southside Hub, most notably in “This House Is Not a Home,” an installation which opened at the end of February. “We wanted to talk about home, and then broadening that to what makes the feeling of being at home, even if that home isn’t necessarily a physical structure,” she states. “Places like prison become your home but are not your home at the same time, so we wanted to open it up as broadly as we could.”

The pressures of being an artist and having a family at the same time also came to the fore, she says, because “some of the people in the show talked about how to be an artist and a person who has a family, and how to involve your children in that creative process.”

It therefore becomes clear that her immediate artistic interests are deeply intertwined with the larger fate of SHoP, and her life more generally. It is only fitting, then, that the last show before their move away from Fenn House will be anchored by the idea of leaving.

“The last show we’re going to title “On How Much Things Matter,” and it’ll be about ends,” she says. “We do not want this to be heavy and somber, but we wanted to end with thought and reflection on endings. What we leave behind, what we take with us, how we leave spaces.”

To leave, however, one needs a destination. Shaeffer is still unsure where that will be, and how a move away from Fenn House would be financed. She offers up a variety of possible routes, ranging from the realistic to the relatively far-fetched.

“There’s the possibility that an angel sweeps down and decides that he needs to buy this building because the Southside Hub is serving the larger community and bringing people together through the arts,” she says hopefully. “Or there’s the possibility that ten people decide to invest in this space because this building isn’t going to lose its value and it’s a good investment.”

Yet, regardless of the outcome, she remains optimistic. “Otherwise, we all leave and pack up, enjoy the wonderful year and know it was a great ending. The lease is up on July 31st, and I’m very sure everything will be clear by mid-July.”

Claire Hungerford

Political movements can be hard to maintain—especially when they intend to publically bear the force of weather, police, and internal debate for as long as it takes to bring about change. In the earliest days of Occupy Chicago (OC) way back in September, thousands of people showed up at the city’s financial district in the Loop to protest a political system that is “carrying out the agenda of the 1 percent.”

When the demonstrators could no longer fit on the sidewalks of Jackson and LaSalle—perched either outside the Bank of America, or kitty-corner, in the plaza outside the Chicago Board of Trade—they moved to Congress Plaza Gardens just outside of Grant Park, where wide, shallow steps and plenty of open space made it easier to see and hear all of the group’s members. For even larger demonstrations, they’d move into Grant Park itself. The group set up overnight encampments, held general assemblies, endured at least 300 arrests, and began to take shape as a bona fide movement.

Today, a good day at a general assembly (GA) brings in about 25 people, many of whom are “been-here-since Day-1” members. But it would be unfair to presume that the movement is floundering—the last two months have been some of its most productive, as the group has organized around the NATO summit, occupied Brian Piccolo Elementary School along with parents and students, and prepared for what they’re calling the Chicago Spring: weeks of demonstrations with other city-wide organizations to inspire the social conscience of Chicago.

While the group’s first plans were voted on outside, these days the conversations have taken place indoors. Since the end of January, OC has conducted its business from its headquarters at 500 W. Cermak. The Riverfront Work Lofts house artist studios, offices, and now two “working units” for the movement’s storage and meetings. But as the days grow warmer, OC has begun its movement back outdoors, and is working to figure out what that would mean for the indoor space they fought hard to obtain.

In the early OC days, crowds flooded the streets night and day, armed with signs, megaphones, and sleeping bags. But the movement struggled to keep account of its own goals and proceedings. Ryan Metz, a research technologist and member of OC’s Secretariat Committee, the group that helps set the agenda for each GA, said, “I became a walking filing cabinet. I had all of our files and archives in my backpack, and had to be out there every day. All I wanted back then was a filing cabinet. It was unsustainable.”

(Claire Hungerford)

The movement reorganized in order to get most of its day-to-day activities running like well-oiled machines, following relatively strict procedures voted on during general assemblies. In fact, a proposal entitled “Well Oiled Machine” passed early on to smooth out procedures for announcements, proposals, speakers’ lists, and voting at the GA meetings held four times a week. Two-dozen functional committees were formed to handle issues of housing, the press, social media, arts and recreation, education, and so on.

But as the weather facing outdoor demonstrators and overnight campers became colder and snowier, the crowds began to thin. People worried that the movement would be incapable of persisting through a Chicago winter.  “Everyone understood intuitively that we needed an indoor space,” said Metz. “People really believed that when we got the space, everyone would come out again, everyone would come back.”

Despite a consensus on the necessity of an indoor encampment, securing a specific space was far from easy. A Housing Committee was created to research real estate options and devise a list of four prime locations to be voted on during GA. Metz, who also happened to cast the final vote, said, “It was the single most contentious issue in our occupation’s history.”

Daily committee meetings and dozens of threads on the movement’s website debated the relative merit of locations around the city. The four options that were eventually brought to the table included Printer’s Row, the South Loop, a “no place at all” option, and a Cermak Road space in Pilsen. Placement was such a heated issue that the group temporarily switched to approval voting just to decide the location, with the option garnering the greatest number of votes deemed the new winter headquarters.

Though an anonymous benefactor, nicknamed Benefactor X, offered to put up half the rent, the group proceeded conservatively. Many preferred Pilsen because it was the cheapest option that included a roof. “We only had so much money from our benefactor, and the other options for their sizes just weren’t affordable,” said Metz.

Footage of the housing issue’s final December vote has been placed on YouTube—in the end, OC voted for the Pilsen option. At the end of the video, OC member Danielle Villarreal faces the camera and comments on the movement’s decision to move to Pilsen: “I am extremely excited this was approved tonight, finally, and that we will be moving into this location, in a blighted area that needs a lot of help, which is suffering from injustices across the board.”

After the votes were counted and the Pilsen space was officially chosen, the crowd began to bounce up and down, shouting, “WE ARE UNSTOPPABLE, ANOTHER WORLD IS POSSIBLE!”

* * *

“The way I originally conceived of it is by saying to people, ‘Look, this is going to be the coolest place to be in the city. It’s going to be artists, musicians, and activists plotting the peaceful revolution,’” said Metz.

And in some ways, the two spaces on Cermak—501, on the fifth floor, where tech rooms and office spaces are located, and 700, on the seventh, where GAs take place—have served their purpose as a creative, political hub for the movement.

“It’s a really cool place. We have amazing teach-ins, we’ve had conferences, we have beautiful artwork on the walls, food, murals,” said student and occupier Larissa Pittenger. The combined space is about 7,900 square feet of exposed brick, huge windows, desks, and, to many members’ relief, filing cabinets.

Between the night the decision to move to Pilsen was made, in the beginning of December, to the first indoor GA on January 20th, a month and a half went by. “That’s when people stopped showing up at GAs,” said Metz. “Because people felt like there wasn’t anything immediate to do.”

Chris Ivanovich, a member of the Press Committee, has an explanation: “It was winter, and fucking cold. Numbers were bound to drop.” But even after the move-in, Ivanovich concedes that the indoor meetings did little to encourage growth: “The movement was kept alive by conversations between smaller groups, in committees and around proposals. In that way, Cermak succeeded.”

At the Cermak site, they’ve also been building up a People’s Library (now at somewhere near 800 books), collecting art by members of the movement, and dealing with the normal problems that come from living and working in a shared space. Though members claim they effectively scared away the G8 summit through their aggressive organizing, participation in committees and at GAs has continued on a steady drop.

“There are probably 3-10 people right now who go to every GA, and spend most of their time at Cermak,” said Ivanovich. He adds, “but there are probably 20-30 more who are just as committed, but maybe are students, or have a job, and can’t make it out all the time.” The heart of the movement, it would seem, has moved from general assemblies to committees and smaller groups organizing around specific demonstrations.

Priorities for some members may have shifted, but others speculate that the space itself began to pose problems that distracted from OC’s movement.

During the GA on March 30, a newer member named Mandy took the figurative mic. “My name is Mandy, I’m going to Cermak later to sleep. I’m also going to eat there, drink there, and not do any work there,” she yelled. “Someone stop me. Please, somebody kick me out.”

Mandy’s rant was in reference to a proposal to ban a member who consistently visited Cermak to use the space’s Internet and store his things. He allegedly used threats of violence to bully other members into letting him stay late into the evenings, though he never attended GAs, and participated in none of the committees. That proposal passed with no opposition and four abstentions.

The last proposal on the floor was, in a way, an extension of the problem of policing members within Cermak. Members debated whether or not to hand in a 60-day notice for the 501 Cermak working unit, with proponents arguing that the space is a drain on resources and source of intra-movement conflict, discouraging regular participation by new potential occupiers.

But for opponents of the proposal, which was eventually tabled, the root of the issue is that the movement has yet to find a way to really take advantage of its indoor component.

“All we do now in 700 is stuff we could do in 501, and all be a little closer,” said Sam Sandmel, a member of the Press, Secretariat, and Social Media committees.

Where other Occupied cities, like Oakland and San Francisco, have fought desperately for an indoor location, Chicago is the only occupation discussing its relative merits and challenges. Members like Metz, who wasn’t present at the Friday GA, believe OC can work both in and outside of Cermak through the spring. “We have a great resource, and if we throw it away it’ll be a shame.”

During GA, a member named Margo summed it up: “Underutilized space to me sounds like underutilized minds.”

* * *

“The beauty of Chicago Spring is that it’s going to bring local and global issues into one space,” said Ivanovich. The events are clearly meant to evoke the revolutions during the Arab Spring. “We view them as brothers and sisters fighting in a companion struggle,” added Sandmel.

The Direct Action Committee has already made plans for two months worth of events, in conjunction with several other committees, numerous outside groups like STOP (SouthSide Together Organizing for Power), and the Chicago Anti-Eviction Campaign. On April 7, the kickoff day for Chicago Spring events, the Bridgeport Alliance is hosting brunch in the neighborhood’s Benton House Gardens community center to discuss local issues; the autonomous group Occupy El Barrio is hosting a Carnaval del Barrio in Pilsen “for a celebration of arts and city wide solidarity”; and Rev. Jesse Jackson, Sr. will be hosting a panel discussion with Rainbow/PUSH on the Occupy movement.

At 1pm, the smaller events will converge at Jackson and LaSalle, spending the rest of the afternoon at Butler Field, where workshops have been scheduled to engage in conversations about NATO, education, housing, and the movement. More demonstrations are planned for the following weekends in April, and other major events are slated for May Day, eventually culminating with marches and protests for the NATO summit on May 20 and 21.

Rachel Wiseman & lindsaybanks/flickr

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The dusty green and yellow “Ramova” marquee straddles a now unused entrance at the corner of 35th and South Halsted. Inside the Ramova Theater, founded in 1929, the Spanish-style auditorium gives way to what was once a midnight blue ceiling, studded with stars that glittered as Charlie Chaplin graced the silver screen. When the marquee was less dusty, childhood classics like Bambi and famous American blockbusters like Jaws played under that night sky until the Ramova closed in 1986. In 2001, the city took over the building—seemingly the final nail in a coffin containing a piece of Bridgeport’s history.

But Bridgeport resident Maureen Sullivan is striving to regain control. Born and raised in Bridgeport, the friendly yet fiercely committed Sullivan remembers her weekly trips to the Ramova Theater to watch the latest releases. Like countless other Bridgeport and Chicago residents, the Ramova is central to Sullivan’s childhood recollections, a treasured memory that has stayed with her since her youth.

“Almost everyone who has lived in the neighborhood during the last few decades has been inside the Ramova,” said Sullivan. “The theater was a focal part of this extremely vibrant life in Bridgeport that no one ever forgot, even after it was shut down.”

The vibrancy Sullivan speaks of harkens back to the 1970s, when Mexican, Chinese, and Lithuanian-Americans transformed Bridgeport into a multi-ethnic community, a place that for many constituted the quintessential Chicago neighborhood. Nowadays, the area has been a political and cultural hotbed, enticing more and more young college grads looking for affordable, safe housing.

Yet despite the influx of new residents, the stretch along South Halsted near the Ramova is somewhat bleak. Starting as far back as seven years ago, the city government began tearing down buildings near the Ramova, erasing much of the block’s former grandeur.  Though new construction projects—like the block-long condo development on 35th street—replaced the old buildings, empty lots still dot the area, and city officials remain unsure about the future of any further development.

Alarmed by the city’s intervention, Sullivan was determined to prevent the Ramova’s demolition in order to protect Bridgeport’s cultural history. In 2005, Sullivan started a petition to fight for the theater’s survival, aiming to safeguard a building that holds so much cultural value for the city and sentimental value for many Bridgeport residents.

What began as a petition grew into a full-blown initiative to not only restore the Ramova but to turn it into a hub of Bridgeport culture. With approximately 4,000 signatures on the petition by both neighborhood residents and backers outside of Bridgeport, Sullivan had gathered enough support for her case to fight for the Ramova’s restoration and reopening.

“The trick was to just keep beating the drum,” Sullivan explains. “We kept pushing the possibility of saving the Ramova out in the open and more people started to remember their days at the theater and how crucial the Ramova was to the arts scene in Bridgeport.”

Sullivan stresses that the nostalgic pull of the space is central to the restoration effort: “The Ramova was the center of entertainment and a lot of childhood memories for people in Bridgeport, and residents bring that up all the time because those memories really matter to them. It was actually a key issue at the alderman debate last year, which goes to show how many people are willing to fight for the Ramova.”

Despite widespread public support for the Ramova’s restoration, obstacles began to appear and push back the project. The economic downturn in 2008 prevented Sullivan from obtaining the necessary resources for a restoration initiative—leaving the project in the planning stages, where dreams can grow and shrink, but nothing physical moves. Furthermore, the city expressed its wish for a private party or non-profit organization to direct the restoration, meaning that city officials and funds would have minimal involvement with the project.

In light of these difficulties, Sullivan redirected her efforts into creating a cohesive support base. This base is the Friends of South Halsted, a non-profit focused on the cultural and commercial renewal of not only the theater but the whole nearby stretch of South Halsted.

While the theater itself holds most of the personal significance that drew in the initial support from the Bridgeport community, outsiders slowly began to recognize the theater’s potential as a focal point for the neighborhood’s wider redevelopment. The power of this vision spurred the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) to get involved in 2010.

Robert Chaney, an undergraduate student at IIT, identified the Ramova as a fitting project for the institution’s Interprofessional Projects Program (IPRO). The Ramova’s restoration offered an excellent opportunity for business, architecture, and arts-oriented IPRO students to receive hands-on experience in their fields by contributing to Bridgeport’s cultural development. After approval from the program coordinators, Chaney and Sullivan teamed up. Students began creating floor plans and working to attract local businesses while Sullivan promoted the cause through “Save the Ramova” fundraisers.

Sullivan’s efforts finally motivated city administrators to contact restoration and theater operations specialist Ray Shepardson, best known for his refurbishment of the Loop’s glittering Chicago Theater.

“When I select which theaters to preserve, part of my criteria involves the theater’s historical importance to their surroundings and the local community’s initiative in getting it back on its feet,” Shepardson explained. “In the Ramova’s case, Maureen’s [built up] that energy already, so my job is to draw up plans that detail what changes to the theater itself will take place, and how it will become economically viable enough to help the community grow.”

Sullivan, Shepardson, and the students aim to develop a creative environment that captures Bridgeport’s past and returning vibrancy, with the Ramova as a symbol connecting the old with the new.

While the run-down theater undergoes renovations, they hope to likewise create an energetic commercial environment along South Halsted by persuading local business owners to set up shop near the Ramova. There’s a big hole to fill—The Ramova Grill, the 82-year-old chili parlor in one of the storefronts attached to the theater, recently announced it is closing on the 14th.

Between the renovation’s economic and cultural aspirations, the end goal is to persuade Chicagoans inside and outside Bridgeport to explore the neighborhood.

“While Bridgeport is still a tight-knit neighborhood, it’s not as close as it used to be when I was growing up because people are going out of the neighborhood for entertainment and shopping,” said Sullivan. “Part of our objective is to keep people in Bridgeport and show them that there is fun to be had in the neighborhood.”

She continued, “It’s very hard to build a neighborhood’s sense of community if the residents are constantly leaving for opportunities outside. So we’re trying to use home-grown economics to revive Bridgeport’s past history as a commercial, entertainment, and artistic hotbed.”

While the Ramova of years past was focused on the silver screen, the Ramova of the future will be a multi-purpose arts venue. The new theater will have its lobby transformed into an art gallery while the auditorium will be a music venue.

The team is ever closer to officially beginning the restoration project. Shepardson and a new cohort of IPRO students continue to draw up building plans, estimate the final costs, and sell the area’s commercial potential to local business-owners. Although prospects have taken a positive turn, Sullivan still organizes Save the Ramova fundraisers to gather even more public support. Her efforts are bearing fruit, as the Ramova’s restoration was one of the top three discussion priorities at a Cultural Plan for Chicago meeting this past week.

While official funding is still hard to come by and the restoration is still under preliminary planning, the team has high hopes that the Ramova marquee will soon glimmer.

Mitchell took a deep breath, focused his attention on a single point at the back of the room, and went for it. The 25-year-old mentioned his backstory—growing up in suburban Chicago with a single mother amid family turmoil. He talked about his experience as a community organizer. He hit on all the major policy points: curbing violence, creating jobs, balancing the budget. But the message he hoped would stick most with voters was the one Mitchell made at the very end: “Punch 61.”

On March 20, voters across Illinois will take part in primary elections to determine the candidates for each party on county, state, and national levels. All candidates hope for votes—such is the nature of a democracy. But for Mitchell, the election could come down to the votes in that room.

In the 26th District, where the only two candidates in the overall race are both Democrats (Mitchell’s opponent is local businessman Kenny Johnson), the winner of the primary will go unopposed on the November ballot. Notwithstanding unforeseen circumstances, the winner of this primary will be the next district representative.

Typically, voter turnout is low for primaries—the all-time low in Chicago was set in 2010, with 27.2 percent voter turnout citywide. While the concurrent Republican presidential primary might bring Republican voters to the polls, the voter turnout for Democrats is expected to be low again this year. And with only 89,000 people in the 26th District, every vote matters.

“It’s exhilarating,” Mitchell said after the event. “You know a lot of people are going to make their decision based on what you say up there.”

It’s not just a battle of rhetoric, though. The 26th District race has been, in large part, a race for endorsements. Mitchell’s opponent, Johnson, has found support from the likes of the Chicago Teacher’s Union and U.S. Representative Danny Davis. But Mitchell has picked up his fair share of big names as well.

On the wall of his campaign headquarters, white sheets of butcher paper are covered in handwriting listing the dozens of endorsements Mitchell has received, from the Sierra Club to Mayor Emanuel to Governor Quinn. Seated at a folded table beneath the sheets of paper, Mitchell allows the occasional “maybe” and “sort of” to slip into his speech. Yet beneath that hesitancy, a sense of conviction emerges.

“I think right now is the moment that our generation has to step up, I really do,” Mitchell says from behind black-rimmed glasses. “Because we are in such a difficult situation with our budget…the easy path is to start hacking away and chopping at stuff, to use the ax instead of the scalpel. But the question becomes for those of us who are my age, or really for a citizen of Illinois, period—what do we want our state to look like in the future?”

***

The 26th District runs along Lake Michigan from Streeterville on the North Side to the abandoned steel mills of South Chicago, stretching from the empty pit of the Chicago Spire to the vacant lots along East 63rd Street. President Obama’s house is under its domain, as are numerous public housing facilities. Extreme contrasts and contradictions of wealth, race, and culture, all bundled up in a single polity. Representing the 26th District is no small task.

“You throw in farmland somewhere, and it would really be a microcosm of Illinois or a microcosm of America,” Mitchell says.

Mitchell focuses, then, on what draws individuals together rather than what drives them apart.

“When you look at a district like this, it’s amazing how similar people are,” he says. “Universally, there’s a concern about making this district and this state the best possible place to live. Maybe there are varying degrees or different iterations of that concern, but I think people universally want to make sure we start to move in the right direction.”

This is where Mitchell relies on his experience as a community organizer.

“The point of community organizing is to build power,” he says. “It’s to get people together, because the two sources of power are organized people and organized money, and more generally the other side has more of the organized money so you have to organize the people.”

He called his work as an organizer “both the best and the hardest job I ever had. It was door-to-door work, church-to-church work. It was mostly one-on-one interviews with people…trying to find common threads.”

One project Mitchell worked on was a $425 million bill in Illinois known as the Urban Weatherization Initiative. It created a program that provides government support for basic energy efficiency upgrades in low-income homes across the state, done by local workers.

Mitchell helped develop the initiative as a way to increase employment in low-income areas while promoting green technology, and wrote the first draft of the legislation. Yet he says the idea was planted much earlier than his community organizing days, in Professor Sabina Shaikh’s Environmental Economics class at the University of Chicago.

“I was kind of a seller on the whole environmental movement when I first entered that class,” Mitchell says. “Sabina really challenged me on that, and tried to help me understand that, in trying to save our planet, we could also reinvest in our cities, reinvest in our rural towns, and use it as a mechanism to uplift poor people.”

The class was the beginning of an ongoing conversation between the student and his professor, who continues to praise Mitchell.

“I recall my first meeting with Christian after he graduated,” Shaikh says. “I was so impressed by how quickly he had engaged in local policy and how he had applied his intellectual curiosity as a student into real action on the South Side of Chicago.”

***

Mitchell worked as an organizer from 2008 until 2011, when he went to run Will Burns’s campaign for 4th Ward Alderman. He then worked for Cook County Commissioner Toni Preckwinkle as she attempted to settle in and pass her first budget. In September, Mitchell started collecting signatures to get his name on the ballot. In the last few years, between his political and community commitments, Mitchell has made a major investment in public service.

This path wasn’t always so clear for Mitchell. When he began college at the UofC, Mitchell planned on majoring in economics and becoming a sports agent in southern California.

That changed when a “gangster”-themed party on campus flared racial debate and controversy. The graduate student assigned to oversee his dorm, John Eason (now a professor of criminology at Arizona State), inspired him to get involved in organizing on campus to try to work against the biases the incident made apparent. As Mitchell became more active, Eason introduced him to Burns, who then was working in the state capital as a staffer.

“It shifted my whole scope,” Mitchell said of the experience. “It made me realize that there was still a lot to be done…that I needed to dedicate my life to creating understanding, to driving change, to making the world a better place—as corny as that may sound.”

He switched from studying economics to public policy, and got involved with a group called South Siders Organizing for Unity and Liberation (SOUL), which he would continue to work for after graduation.

He remains close with Eason. And as a testament to his relationship with Burns, Mitchell’s campaign headquarters sit in an adjacent suite to Burns’s aldermanic office in Bronzeville.

However, for Mitchell, the impact of the UofC went beyond the powerful connections and influential mentors. On a philosophical level, the school changed his basic approach to life.

“If I had to sum up the value I got out of the UofC, other than meeting some really great people, I learned that, no axiom, no matter how long held, no matter how sacred, should be above scrutiny,” he says.

This principle of constant reevaluation seems to guide Mitchell’s campaign more than any single issue.

For Mitchell, a successful term would mean: “having made a substantive contribution to shifting the conversation about what it means to define success in Springfield on any number of issues, and having made real progress toward dealing with our budget situation, and starting to shift the conversation toward the front-end investments we need to make to make this state more competitive in the future.”

More than a change to any specific policy, Mitchell wants to see positive change on a fundamental level in the way the state government approaches policy-making itself.

***

“You have to be a different kind of public servant to win here, to do well here, and even really to run here,” says Mitchell. “This district, in the demands of the people of their public servants, demands [you] to stay up on the issues, to read the bills, that you are publicly accountable.”

A host of impressive politicians have come out of the South Side in recent years, touting progressive policies and the promise of political change. In light of legacy, it is hard not to contemplate Mitchell’s future. With principled ambition, powerful backers, and the boon of youth, his future looks bright. But he, for one, is reluctant to speculate.

“Will Burns is one of my great mentors,” Mitchell says, “and one of the things he always says and that I believe very strongly is that, if you do the job in front of you well, the future takes care of itself.”

Open-ended and non-committal, it is the response of a politician. And, like the response of a good politician, it has more than a kernel of truth. Mitchell has set his sights on elected politics, and for now his focus is on getting people to the polls. Come March 20, Mitchell can do no more.

MAC

Locations: Nearly 80 properties throughout Hyde Park and Kenwood

Amenities: Range widely depending on the property, but may include balcony, dishwasher, bike room, hardwood floors or carpeting, granite countertops, air conditioning, sunroom, a laundry center, private parking, fireplace, and fitness center. All apartments include heat, water, and 24-hour maintenance.

Rent Range: Studio: $600-800; one-bedroom: $800-1000; two-bedroom: $1000-1500; three-bedroom: $1400-1800; four-bedroom: $1700+; five-bedroom+: $2500+

Pros: The company has a huge selection, so just about anyone can find an apartment that suits their needs. Their website contains detailed descriptions of each property, including photographs and a floor plan, and you can quickly set up an appointment to visit the apartments yourself.

Cons: There may be “24-hour maintenance,” but residents have complained that MAC is very slow to respond to issues.

User Comments: “There were only two washers and dryers for the whole building…one set of washer/dryer broke partway through the year, and MAC didn’t fix it for months despite repeated pleas, so the entire building had only one washer and dryer.” “The maintenance service is elegant and the rooms, which are invariably shaped like ovals in a flawless 1950′s style, gives the whole experience a very modern feel.”

Notes: It’s MAC. You’ve probably heard a few horror stories about it. Nevertheless, the facts are that around 10,000 students in Hyde Park live in a MAC apartment, and the renewal rate for apartments is 60%, above the industry average of 50%. Also, note that MAC owns apartments that may include a seperate, non-MAC staff in addition to MAC’s own, or special amenities not found in other MAC apartments. Windermere House, for example, has its own on-site maintenance staff, and a 24-hour front desk. Other MAC-owned buildings include the Blackwood, Regents Park, the Algonquin, the Shoreland, and Del Prado.

Contact Info: MAC Apartments, 1364 E. 53rd St. (773)548-5077, macapartments.com (Sharon Lurye)

Regents Park

Location: The tall buildings at 5020 – 5050 South Lake Shore Drive between 50th and East Hyde Park.

Amenities: Amenities are a selling point for the Regents Park apartment complex.  The development’s North Tower features a fitness center with a 20-yard lap pool, whirlpool weight room and sauna, as well as a restaurant. Meanwhile, a small grocery store and the Regents Cup, a coffee shop with Wi-Fi, are located on the first floor of the South Tower. For whose who own a car, a garage has parking spaces which can be reserved for a fee. The fact that the complex is home to a range of people—from graduate and undergraduate students to long-time neighborhood residents—also sets it apart from the buildings of the student ghetto.

Rent Range: Studio: $1015-$1250; one-Bedroom: $1150 – $1585; two-Bedroom: $1550-$2100; Three Bedroom: $2025-$2450; four-Bedroom: $3100 – $3200

Pros: Situated in East Hyde Park, Regents Park is a stone’s throw from public transportation: a #6 stop is located at the intersection of 51st Street and East End Avenue and there’s a Metra entrance at the viaduct on 51st Street. During the academic year, the East Route shuttles past the building.  Some tenants enjoy views of Lake Michigan and the city, especially from upper floor apartments (the South Tower has 36 floors and its Northern twin has 37). And the Hyde Park Art Center, a BP gas station, and Istria Café are all a block away, while Harold Washington Park is directly south of the complex.

Cons: While a fair share of students choose to live at Regents Park, the buildings are a considerable distance–about a thirty minute walk, give or take–from the UofC campus.  Living in the complex also comes at a price: rents have increased since last year and utilities are not included.  And soon after new management arrived last October, tensions with staff over wages led to a strike, which resulted in the firing—and, after residents protested—rehiring of workers.

User Comments: “It’s very easy to go to campus and also go downtown, which is the difference between Regents Park and the dorms. Of course, the view of Lake Michigan is very pretty.”

Contact info: Regents Park LLC, 5020 S. Lake Shore Dr. (773) 288-5050. regentsparkchicago.com (Jeffrey Bishku-Aykul)

Del Prado

Location: 5307 South Hyde Park Boulevard, 2 blocks from the lake and the Metra

Amenities: New on-site fitness center, hair salon, dry cleaning, common lounges, laundry center, and bicycle storage. Units offer stainless steel appliances, granite countertops, and a dishwasher.

Rent Range: Studio $973-$1,105; One-bedroom $1,195-$1,365; Two-bedroom $1,418-$1,675; Three-bedroom available starting in July, projected around $1,800

Pros: Built in 1918, Del Prado was historically one of the classiest hotels on the South Side. Now on the National Register of Historic Places, residents enjoy the original grand staircases and intriguing Native American-themed architectural flourishes, as well as the chance to rub shoulders with the ghosts of Babe Ruth and Yogi Berra, who stayed there to play the White Sox. Last year’s renovations have fully modernized the interiors and appliances; the electrical and plumbing systems are brand new. Proximity to 53rd Street shops means accessible shopping, and a Metra stop provides a quick route downtown.

Cons: The location is a solid 20-minute walk from the quad, and rates are on the high end for a typical student. In addition, Del Prado is no party house—most current tenants are far past the cacophony and shenanigans of their own wild college days.

User Comments: “The newly renovated building is beautiful, the staff is incredibly friendly and the view cannot be beat!”

Contact Info: The Del Prado, 5307 S. Hyde Park Blvd. (888)471-7014. thedelpradoapartments.com (Bea Malsky)

Parker-Holsman

Locations: Throughout Hyde Park and South Shore

Amenities: The extra services and facilities vary from building to building.

Rent range: Studio $580-850; one-bedroom $775-1100; two-bedroom $950-1500; three-bedroom $1500+

Pros: The company is on top of its game in terms of organization and response, trying hard to respond to tenants’ needs in a timely manner. They also primarily manage buildings constructed before 1930, giving residents the opportunity to glance into Hyde Park’s storied past. While having an older stove may not always help with even cooking, they are much more attractive than the standard white box from Sears.

Cons: The buildings host a range of residents—students aren’t the main target. Instead, grad students and families abound. This translates to a lack of tolerance of rowdy student conduct, so be prepared to accept a lot of responsibility for one’s actions and a noise curfew. Depending on your taste, the cheap Van Gogh reproductions may be an annoyance.

Notes: Parker-Hoslman also manages and sells a significant number of condo units for those who are looking for a more permanent housing option. (Tyler Leeds and Isaac Dalke)

Mr. Lin

Locations: 56th and Drexel, 55th and Dorchester, two buildings on 56th and Maryland, various other listings around the neighborhood.

Amenities: Rent covers heat, water, and the internet, and electricity is included with condos.

Rent Range: Studio $850; two-bedroom $700 – $1250; three-bedroom $1600 – $1700; four-bedroom $1800 – $2100

Pros: On-site laundry, locations right next to campus, and a friendly landlord willing to negotiate with tenants. You could shoot an indie film on the skylit spiral staircase at 5635 S. Maryland.

Cons: No pets, Mr. Lin can only be contacted over the phone, and the listings are variable and sometimes unusual. Maintenance may also be spotty.

Notes: Neither Yelp! nor Google have any information on Mr. Lin’s Apartments or Edlin Realty. You’ll have to call Mr. Lin to get details on his current listings. Leases are annual and start in either June or September.

User Comments: “He keeps his books on paper. It’s not at all electronic. So it’s kind of weird in that way… When he fixes things, he’s not the best Mr. Fix-It, but then he’s easier to work with. The university was really slow about paying me for a couple different things, and then I told Ed Lin about it, and he told me, ‘All right, pay me when you get the check.’ As you can see, it’s not the nicest looking apartment, but I do prefer it to MAC.”

Contact: Call Mr. Lin at (773) 241-6854. (Nathan Worcester)

Blackstone

Location: Several properties on 54th & Woodlawn

Amenities: Heat and hot water are included. All units have hardwood floors, communal washers and dryers, and bike storage rooms. Some units have parking. Blackstone’s maintenance on-call and emergency hotline are both available 24/7. Units are freshly painted for new lessees.

Rent Range: two-bedroom $1100; three-bedroom $1700; four-bedroom $1800.

Pros: Most units have new cabinets and appliances. Aside from that, the location is a big plus. Blackstone’s apartments are close to campus, and nearby Kimbark Plaza has a grocery store and a number of different restaurants. Public transit is also easily accessible. Blackstone’s management office is located on the same street as the properties, so if you want to talk to the company about your apartment, you can walk there in your slippers.

Cons: All of Blackstone Management’s properties are located on one street, so if you’re looking to live beyond 54th and Woodlawn, this is not the company for you.

Notes: Blackstone Management has been in business since 1988 and only has properties in Hyde Park, so they know the area and the needs of local residents well. They rent properties primarily to students and faculty at the University of Chicago, but also have clients who attend Columbia College, Harold Washington College, and other local schools. Blackstone properties are family-friendly due to their close proximity to Ray Elementary School.

Contacts: Blackstone Management, 5413 S. Woodlawn Ave. (773)667-1568. blackstonemanagement.com (Madalyn Frigo)

McKey and Poague

Amenities: Because McKey and Poague do not own their buildings, amenities vary from building to building. Some have hardwood floors, laundry rooms and bike storage; it all depends on the building in question.

Rent Range: Studios $580-$1000; one-bedrooms $600-$1500; three-bedroom $800-$1,700; four bedroom $1,540-$1,750

Pros: McKey and Poague is a small company that’s been serving students looking for housing for over a century. They are located adjacent to the university and describe themselves as “pretty much a part of campus”-clearly, they are very eager to serve students.

Cons: The M&P website promises “constant personal contact with unit owners to bolster their continued intellectual as well as financial interest in the building.“ We don’t really know what that means either, but according to some tenants, the landlords “are in the dark ages” in terms of customer service.

User Comments: “Basically you walk into their office is straight out of the 1960s. They have no voicemail and they have no email. You can only call them during operating hours and they are closed on the weekends. If anything happens you are f***ed.”

Contact Info: McKey and Poague Real Estate Services, 1348 East 55th St. (773)363-6200. mandpoffice.com (Becky Stoner )

TLC

Location: Across Hyde Park; they also manage properties in a number of North Side neighborhoods

Amenities: Vary by building

Rent Range: Studio $660-805; one-bedroom $865-960; two-bedroom $1245-1280

Pros: Kudos have included an attentive and cordial maintenance staff, consistent bug spraying, excellent security, and personable managers.

Cons: Complaints have included a hefty fee for A/C installation, burned out bulbs, reluctance to fix locks, lack of reluctance to litigate, overpriced laundry machines, and malfunctioning elevators.

Notes: TLC Management Company (not to be confused with the Turner Learning Channel) is low on octuplets and the near grizzly sightings of former Alaskan Governors but high on class. At least, that’s the gist of their ads. The company recently acquired two new apartment buildings in Hyde Park, which they have classily christened The Flamingo and The Versailles.

Contacts: TLC Management Company, 100 N. LaSalle, Suite 1200. (312)553-9070. chicagorentals.com (Chris Riehle)