With a straw hat on his head and a crêpe stand that was once displayed in the Museum of Contemporary Art, Zak Arctander is hard to miss. Every Saturday, the vendor at the 61st Street Farmers Market turns four simple ingredients—flour, milk, eggs, and water—into golden, steaming, oh-so-tasty crêpes. Read the rest of this entry »

Benjamin Murphy wedges his cigarette butt into the gray planks of a picnic table and squints, surveying his sanctuary. In the fading light of a late-May Thursday afternoon, the 65th and Woodlawn Community Garden resembles a living patchwork quilt—some plots in this roughly 1000 square-foot space are lined with misshapen bricks, others are freestanding mounds of soil punctuated by the occasional wire trellis, tree branch, or toiling gardener. Murphy laughs, “You can’t gang-bang on this corner.” Read the rest of this entry »

Around a rectangular table in a conference room at the Bessie Coleman Library, a group of University of Chicago students and community members are meeting to discuss this year’s Art in Action festival. “Okay, who is taking care of sign-making Monday?” one student asks. Several hands go up from the planning committee, made up of seven students and seven community members, including a local pastor, several artists, and members of various South Side organizations. Enthusiasm is high and periodic chatter interrupts the main agenda: the logistics of an event meant to bring the UofC community into contact with those around it. Read the rest of this entry »

Scouting for a seat in the crowded lecture hall of the University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy, it’s difficult not to notice the unusual heterogeneity of the people who are making the task so difficult. Their nametags identify them as University students, neighborhood schoolteachers, pastors, and parents, and all of them are here to learn about a new organization known as the Woodlawn Children’s Promise Zone. Read the rest of this entry »

At 8:20am on a beautiful spring morning, sunlight is streaming through the chipped windows of a third floor classroom of Woodlawn Charter High School at 64th Street and Woodlawn Avenue, onto the sleepy faces of a group of high school seniors, their heads resting on their hands. On the walls of the classroom are two posters of Muhammed Ali (“I am the greatest”) and one of Che Guevara (“The people liberate themselves”). The two University of Chicago freshmen standing in the circle of tables, themselves barely out of senior year, are trying to bring the students a different kind of inspiration.

“What do you guys think made Barack Obama president?” Dustin Popiel asks the class. No response. It’s the Monday after spring break, and his audience is unenthusiastic. “Obama’s a great communicator. Communication is important for success.” Today’s class is a break from the usual curriculum; the students are participating in Moneythink, a nonprofit mentorship organization that works to bring college students into high school classrooms to promote financial literacy and entrepreneurship in some of the poorest neighborhoods on Chicago’s South Side. Read the rest of this entry »

Movement is part of the American dream. Across an ocean to the new world, west to the last frontier, then up the social ladder, out to the suburbs—or so they say it­ goes. Social mobility and housing mobility are inextricably linked in the national psyche. But there is a darker, less public story about this movement; for many Americans, a change of housing isn’t an opportunity—it’s a necessity. On Chicago’s South Side, gentrification, the foreclosure crisis, and the city government’s demolition of public housing have in recent years forced thousands of people from their homes. Read the rest of this entry »

Michelle Alexander, author of “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness,” was supposed to discuss her book last Wednesday evening in the large central room of the Experimental Station, but the heating went out. So instead, about a hundred of us packed tightly into a small, multi-purpose room next door, filling even the kitchen at the back of the space, piling our coats together on refrigerators and over each other’s seats. Read the rest of this entry »

Art is meant to draw people together, to forge cultural bonds that cross social boundaries. And yet, for decades, issues of race have impeded the diffusion of artistic innovation across the South Side’s social and racial lines. Although the University of Chicago’s presence in Hyde Park has engendered cynicism from surrounding communities, a few years ago, several Woodlawn residents and UofC students joined forces in an effort to dismantle the boundaries that have been impeding productive musical and artistic dialogue. The result was the creation of Woodlawn Collaborative, a communal space for art and activism. This Friday, the space will encourage the larger South Side community to come together and make music by providing a smorgasbord of artistic forms and flavors. Read the rest of this entry »