(Courtesy of Ten Thousand Ripples)

The intersection of East 87th Street and South Commercial Avenue in South Chicago appears safe, spacious, and lively. Countdown timers usher groups of pedestrians across the wide streets, through an intersection framed by a dollar store, car dealership, and liquor store. The streets are made of solid and unblemished concrete, the buildings of weather-worn brick. For the residents of this neighborhood, the corner’s banality has veiled a terrible memory.

On November 13, 2009, Latin Kings member Michael Vilella was shot and killed while standing near the intersection with a female companion in the early morning. Five days later, Luis Garcia stood at a small, temporary memorial for his fallen friend. Garcia had tried to transfer high schools to leave behind his gang and start anew, but failed due to poor grades and his criminal record. In a space for grief and reflection on the awful consequences of the gang violence he grew up in, he was fatally shot through the chest by a gunman some 400 feet away.

The intersection sits at the crossroads of the Latin Kings, Ambrose, and Latin Dragons territory. It’s not an easy life to escape; the death of these two boys serves as a painful reminder of that fact.  Since the shootings, the community of South Chicago has held this memory as a symbol of the uphill battle for safety. Indira Johnson’s new project, Ten Thousand Ripples, hopes to offer the neighborhood a new perspective on the future.

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“So, it doesn’t seem like this is about the physical Buddha heads,” I tell her. We’re sitting in a busy Uptown Starbucks near one of the proposed locations for the 100 Buddha heads she plans to build. According to the plans, the heads will be three feet in diameter and seemingly half-submerged in the ground.

She laughs and elaborates on the project’s goal: “I guess a lot of the communities are looking for a way to get people to come together and talk to each other.” There are ten participating organizations in ten Chicago neighborhoods. Each hopes to bring a Buddha head to their community and start a conversation about an issue important to their quality of life. “It’s more about the fact that the Buddha [head] will be there,” she explains.

Johnson is white-haired and kind, a full-time practicing artist and peace activist for over 20 years. Her work has appeared across the United States, in Mumbai, and in Brussels; her solo exhibitions have made it throughout Chicago and the Midwest, including a spot in the Museum of Contemporary Art. She draws inspiration from the same man as her artist father and activist mother: Gandhi. “They said he was the half-naked man who took on the British Empire!” she says joyfully.

Jackie Samuel, New Communities Program Director of the South Chicago host organization, Claretian Associates, shares Johnson’s spiritual affinity for peace rhetoric. “I’m hoping that people see the Buddha head and go, ‘What’s that? Why is it here?’ So that when…that conversation starts, we can start engaging the community. People will talk about what we need, and that need is peace.”

More so than Johnson, Samuel appears to feel the burden of her community on her shoulders. She grew up nearby, and now works towards “positive economic, physical, and social change” though the arts. There’s real hope that this new project will work to create just that, ten thousand ripples throughout Chicago.

First, the host organizations will survey residents to help decide on a location for the Buddha head based on how they want to help their community. For South Chicago, it’s definitely an issue of safety. The heads will stand three feet tall, emerging from concrete, gravel, or grass, a completely white face with revealed nose, eyes, and hair tied in a bun, hopefully accompanied by a QR code on the side.

It is striking, unavoidable—you have to wonder why it’s there. Or that’s what Johnson hopes. Like Samuel, she envisions residents striking up a conversation about it with a stranger on the street. As these conversations occur over and over, a broader dialogue can grow to bring the whole community closer.

But really, why the half-Buddha head?

“It stemmed from the image of the Buddha in my art,” Johnson tells me. Large Buddha heads were placed in the center of a carpet on a platform as part of a previous solo exhibition of hers. Without any prompting, people naturally began sitting down in groups in front of the Buddha. She tried it again and again. No matter where the exhibition was, they all felt the “same response of feeling peaceful,” says Johnson. A simple concept, to be sure, but she wondered, “if we had them out in the streets, what could the response be?”

As a universal icon for peace, a balance of the secular and spiritual, it’s hoped the Buddha head will resonate with all people, no matter their race or religion. The project knows itself to be “ambitious in its breadth, and bold in its objective,” according to Kickstarter.com.

As of press time, the Kickstarter campaign to fund Ten Thousand Ripples is unaccomplished. The website warns, “This project will only be funded if at least $15,000 is pledged by Sunday, May 20, 4:59AM GMT.” A donation to the project is a gamble in favor of unnamed groups for undecided purposes, a risked dollar in faith that these Chicago communities can succeed in a creative pursuit for peace. Some may argue that if money will be spent, it should go elsewhere—to the schools and police. But this project offers a new solution for a problem that is becomingly uncomfortably familiar.

(Sam Bowman)

This led me to take an interest in birria, a Mexican goat stew, when I was in Jalisco not long ago. The dish deserves the title of the state’s best culinary export, but is sadly overshadowed by a certain spirit produced near the town of Tequila. It is a slow-cooked broth of smoked chilis, and usually features goat. Though true to its name (birria is Spanish for “junk”), and to its working-class origins, other meats from beef to iguana make occasional appearances. The stew is conventionally served in a bowl piled high with fresh onions and cilantro, and eaten with fresh corn tortillas.

South Chicago’s Birrierías Ocotlán serves a fine bowl of birria. Their birria isn’t the smokey, gamey melt-in-your mouth ambrosia of Jaliscan birria. The vinegary broth was mild—the acid balanced out the gameyness of the meat (all goat), and the heat of the chilis was only quietly smoky. Their birria still can satisfy the strongest craving for goat.

Do not make the mistake we narrowly avoided. Do not take a vegetarian, or even a squeamish meat eater to Birrierías Ocotlán. The menu consisted of birria, birria to go, and a few unfamiliar sorts of taco. If you don’t object to its offerings, though, Birrierías Ocotlán makes it hard to leave hungry. The tortillas are free, and the small order of birria—enough for an almost overwhelmingly large dinner—is only $6.

Horchata was their signature drink—a sweet milky drink made with rice, and also known as agua de arroz. It was rich and cinnamony, though sadly it was their only drink not poured from a soda can.

The red and green salsas at the table were perfectly good, and complemented the tacos well. The salsas stood alongside a large basket of papery toasted dry árbol chilis. We never worked out quite what to do with them, and the other three patrons in the restaurant took no interest in theirs. The tortillas served with the birria were underwhelming. They were stale, and reheating them on the griddle only made them more brittle.

The space was small. Ocotlán had only five tables which were inexplicably numbered, one through five, as well as three blissfully numberless bar stools by the open kitchen.

The restaurant had the obligatory portrait of the food, a life-sized goat painted on the glass front door. The decor on the wall was also all that one could ask for in a birriería; portraits of Mary, maps of Ocotlán, and a tiny TV showing Spanish-language programming about wildebeest. By the way, if you are aiming to find any specific Chicago birriería, take down its name carefully. Birrierías Ocotlán is one of three unrelated birria restaurants on the South Side bearing the name Ocotlán, after the Jaliscan city.

Ocotlán is quite conveniently located, only steps away from the 87th Street Station on Metra Electric’s South Chicago branch. Remain wary of confusion though, as the restaurant is near only the easternmost of the four Metra stations along 87th Street’s vast length.
Birrierías Ocotlán. 8726 S. Commercial Ave. Entrées $5-7. 8am-8pm daily. (773)978-4881.

The man’s name is Travis, and he is a visual artist, musician, Vietnam veteran, and resident of the Jeffery Manor neighborhood. He offers us chicken gumbo, collard greens, and cornbread. Then he tells us about the young people who moved into the neighborhood after the Robert Taylor Homes closed and about the old women who keep them in line.

This is the last stop on the Heartland South Study Day, a tour of the far South Side presented last Saturday by AREA Chicago and the Smart Museum of Art. “The exhibit started from road trips,” said Stephanie Smith, co-curator of the museum’s newest exhibit, “Heartland.” So we got on the road ourselves.

We traveled to South Chicago and discussed plans for redeveloping the expansive, fenced-off former U.S. Steel site along the lakefront. At Rainbow Beach, we remembered the clash between white and black swimmers that caused the 1961 wade-in there. We stopped at a concrete wall with a faded mural that used to be the picket fence border of the mill that made the steel for the area’s railroads, the U.S. Army, and the Sears and Hancock Towers. Our guide told us of the immigrant worker communities that once sprang up around each gate in the fence, each with its own character. These were the oldest, dirtiest, and least desirable neighborhoods in the city.

Everywhere there were markers of change, past and future. One bridge near Pullman reads, “Training the community on tourism.” We hear about a man who has started keeping bees on the old U.S. Steel land, while the surrounding community waits to hear new development proposals that may take twenty to forty years to execute. At an exhibit on the Great Migration at the formerly whites-only Hotel Florence in Pullman, the curator says she imagines saying to George Pullman, “You never thought I would be able to come in the front door, did you?”

Former U.S. Steel site, future green community; Sam Bowman

One has to see the U.S. Steel plant to understand just how post-apocalyptic this part of South Chicago appears. The steel plant was officially designated as a contained disposal facility, with the hot byproducts of smelting ore, known as slag, deposited there. As the factory complex expanded, more buildings were built upon the slag, including housing for plant employees. In the 1980s, U.S. Steel closed the plant and demolished everything except the ore walls and employee housing. What remained was a bare landscape of “slag, concrete, and railroad tracks,” as Marilyn Engwall, chief planner of the new development, described the site in a presentation broadcast by Chicago Public Radio.

The site occupied prime lakefront real estate, and most of the land had reverted to government control after the departure of U.S. Steel. It took nearly ten years to secure the rights to the plant and to purchase a large amount of bordering property, with the city ultimately staking out over 1,140 acres of land for the project. Half of the plot now consists of former U.S. Steel land, almost all of it either empty or covered with slag. The other half consists of older neighborhoods, in which the more decrepit housing will likely be demolished. The plot runs from 79th Street to 87th Street and from Commercial Avenue east to the lake. Commercial Avenue, projected to be an area for restaurants and retail areas, is also convenient because it is large enough to support a trolley system on tracks, a key component of the plan.

Trolleys are an old idea brought in the service of a new goal. As Enghall noted in her presentation, “Over 30 cities are currently studying trolleys as a green way of transportation. Chicago had a world-class trolley system until the 1950s. Trolleys are an affordable, neighborhood-friendly means of transportation for quick runs.” They’re emblematic for LEED sites seeking to reduce the use of cars and to encourage a walkable city—“a healthy [area] where you can walk to places, almost like the kind of city our grandparents lived in,” in Engman’s words. They are just one part of the development’s overwhelming focus on environmental sustainability.

The project is designed around the rigorous Leader in Environmental and Environmental Design (LEED) guidelines for neighborhood development put forth by the U.S. Green Building Council, a nonprofit organization. Molly Sullivan of the Chicago Department of Community Development says that all buildings in the area will have at least a Silver rating, awarded for a high level of eco-friendly design. Approved residential buildings will be primarily three-story apartments, each containing up to three flats. According to Engwall, the land will be mixed-use, with retail and residential homes just a trolley ride, if not a stone’s toss, away. She clarified, “We are anticipating one car per family; when gas was $4.50 a gallon, we thought we could get zero cars. You won’t need to drive out to get milk.” Even the new highway connecting the area to the rest of the city will narrow down from four lanes to one as it enters the residential quarter. It’s expected that the waterfront park that dominates the development will be a walk away as well.

Turning an industrial building with no soil to speak of into a park is not the simplest thing to do; early estimates placed the cost of soil alone at $100 million. As it turns out, Chicago’s need for soil concurred with concern in Peoria over the silt deposits in the Illinois River nearby. The river had filled up with silt from navigation canals, reducing the depth from 18 to 3 feet and killing fishing- and boating-related tourism. With a $2 million grant from the state, the cities made a deal: barges began to dredge out the silt in Peoria and transport it up the river up to Chicago. The sediment was then transferred in garbage trucks and set down on the lakefront in a layer 2 to 3 feet deep. Fourteen million tons of silt were transported from Peoria to Chicago for the purpose of covering over the silt. The area is currently not open due to security concerns, but it is slowly growing into a forested park.

Even with all of the intelligence, manpower, and luck behind the project, the planners could not anticipate the economic slowdown and investors’ resulting loss of interest in development. This is a major issue. Prior to the crash, plots were offered at low prices to encourage development, but only 65 had been sold. Sullivan confirms that they are advocating legislation to encourage developers to build there.

One troubling question is how this new development will change the demographics of the South Side. The project is oriented towards the “middle to upward class,” according to Engman’s presentation, and should support 12,000 residents. While the project does replace the abandoned site of a former major employer with a retail, service industry, and commercial hub, the damning label of “urban gentrification” might well be applied here. Only half of the project is set on the old U.S. Steel site; the rest of the land consists of adjacent neighborhoods, and at least some of the current homes in those areas will be demolished to make way. The Office of Community Development had no comment on any plans to reach out to South Side residents. Another question is whether the families with young children that would most appreciate a contained park/city environment will choose this development in the middle of the city over the Chicago suburbs: the site might be there, but residents will not necessarily come.

Fully LEED-compliant neighborhoods are appearing across the U.S., mostly concentrated on the East Coast and in California. When the U.S. Council for Green Building Institute launched a pilot program for the LEED for Neighborhood Development guidelines, it received over 240 proposals. Are artificial isles of nature and calm residential areas in the middle of the city becoming the new face of American urban development? It is especially interesting to see hubs of commerce wiping the old industrial plants off the map. Regardless of the fate of this particular development, future construction will change the face of the South Side.

Image by Ellis Calvin

What comes next for an ex-competitive triathlete with a love for all things Russian and an expertise in carpentry? Building Chicago’s most sustainable house, apparently.
Tim Heppner, a native of Iowa whose roots ultimately lead back to Chicago, thought about buying a plot of land in the country and building an eco-friendly abode in the shade of the forest. But the more he thought about it, the more it just seemed like a practice in hypocrisy—why use new resources to build on an untouched plot of land when you can improve what has already been built? The opportunity to invest in the latter idea presented itself when an acquaintance put her house on the market. Heppner and his brother Charles, although unsure of their plans, decided to buy the property in 2005 and let it sit while they formulated their next steps.
And formulate they did. What began as a project to build a more efficient house spiraled quickly into an all-encompassing mission of extremes; literally every inch of the property has been scrutinized for its environmental impact, from the furthest blades of glass on the lawn to the lumber in the walls. Even the location of the house—on South Marquette Avenue, in the neighborhood of South Chicago—has been determined a good fit for environmentally friendly living, as it falls within walking distance of bike paths, the Metra, and several bus stops.
While the building is not projected to be completed until  the beginning of June, much of the structure is already in place and in use. Currently lacking siding but cloaked in pink insulation, the house is already habitable for Heppner, who occasionally sleeps there when the sun goes down and he doesn’t feel like walking to the Metra. The insulation alone has reduced the building’s energy use by 70 percent, meaning his incomplete, unheated house is comparable to the already built and heated house next door. “This place has better climate control than my brother’s apartment,” he says.
But before Heppner even began his construction on the house—which, in addition to the new insulation, included gutting the inside and reversing the floor plan—he waited and watched how it interacted with the natural elements. He mapped out the elevation changes in his lawn and measured the angles at which the sun hit the windows in the summer and winter months. He researched roughly the amount of rain that falls on his property annually (200,000 gallons) and, from that amount, how much flows into the sewer system (100,000 gallons). It was partially the simple and ancient habit of watching and understanding the Earth’s processes that inspired so many of Heppner’s construction methods.
“It became an academic exercise for me,” he explains, gesturing toward the piles of books lining the shelves in his combination bedroom and workspace. “The questions were, ‘How can we reduce our long-term costs?’ and then ‘How can it be environmentally friendly?’” The reference books on the subject seem to be targeted toward the bourgeois environmentalists—those who want only organic lavender in their linen water. “All of the houses I was looking at were in the 3 to 3.5 million dollar range,” Heppner says of the homes in his books. “I was sure there must be a way to do it less expensively.”
Some of the ways in which Heppner built sustainably actually went hand-in-hand with saving money. After he gutted the inside of the house, he didn’t go looking for the most eco-friendly new lumber available; instead, he saved the high-quality, old-growth lumber that he removed from the house and planted it right back inside as wall planks and wood floors—in his design. Heppner’s leftover material sits in his garage, waiting for a little creativity and a new project. Patting the dirty pile of lumber, he explains jokingly, “We call it biomass. We don’t call it firewood, like normal people.”
While some of the infrastructure, particularly the energy-saving appliances, has proven more costly, much of the alteration and construction has just been a game of working with the weather patterns. After calculating the angles of the sun’s rays in alternating seasons, Heppner repositioned the windows so that the maximum amount of sunlight would enter the house in the winter and the minimum would come through in the summer. Adding in solar panels between the windows will further increase the heat available from the sun in the winter.
After learning the rain averages and mapping out the lawn’s terrain, Heppner built a rain garden at the lowest level in the yard, where the rain drains. The garden, dug five inches deeper in to the ground, is capable of holding 900 gallons of water—filled in with wood chips, it can support local, semi-aquatic plants such as red milkweed, sweet black-eyed Susan, and ironweed. Once the rain drains into the garden, it eventually replenishes the local aquifer. Other rain traps on the property include several rain barrels which collect run-off from the roof (to later be distributed throughout the lawn), a vegetable garden (from which kale from last summer is already springing up), and a butterfly garden. In addition, the garage will have a vegetative roof.
The municipal water supply will prove unusually useful in heating the Heppner household as well—by keeping an 80-gallon water storage tank and running the water through a thermal solar panel, Heppner will be able to heat the water without a gas-powered water heater. He will also run a series of pipes with the water, called a “sub-slab earth loop,” under the house to provide heat in the winter and cooling conditions in the summer.
While Tim Heppner has been the major designer of their new eco-dwelling, his brother Charles has been instrumental in providing the funds. An artist whose works have been displayed in Pilsen, Charles is also a vegan with a fervent interest in the vegetable garden.
One of Charles’ major concerns has been the eradication of extraneous costs, which is something his brother makes sure to emphasize as well: “It’s about freedom—imagine not having a utility bill.” Some may scoff at the Heppners’ efforts, perceiving a need to gain eco-cred, but the practical side of the issue can hardly be dismissed. “I’m a cheap bastard,” Tim Heppner explains.
For now, the “homeless” life is a comfortable and familiarly unorthodox situation for Heppner, whose established residence is still in Iowa City and who, as the fourth of nine children, can always find a bed to crash on in the city. When he prefers not to leave the house, he rolls out a sleeping mat—an arrangement he plans to continue even after the house is finished—and spends the night in his unfinished eco-abode. Some might find the instability of the situation intimidating, but Heppner shrugs it off, explaining, “That’s the way my life is.” An autodidact at heart, Heppner’s carpentry experience has been independent and largely self-taught, while his degrees—a major in Health, Leisure, and Sports Studies and a minor in Russian Studies—came later in life. Following the standard path to success has never been Heppner’s style.
As far as the future is concerned, his new passion has opened up a wealth of opportunities—from a potential position as an adjunct professor in a local college to the possibility of building modular homes in Russia. In addition, with President Obama expounding on the virtues of weatherization on every news network available, Heppner has found himself the unlikely expert in a suddenly relevant field. As the stimulus money rolls into Chicago, Heppner may end up with a much bigger role than anticipated. But for now, installing dual flush toilets and rolling out the Japanese bed mat will do.

To hear more extensive plans for Tim Heppner’s eco-house and talk to him in person, sign up for the University of Chicago Divinity School’s luncheon for April 14; $5 at the door, $4 with a student ID. E-mail divinitylunch@gmail.com to sign up or for more information.