Woodlawn
Slow-Motion Emergency
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. »
South of 60th
The streets of Hyde Park are saturated with lush trees forming gentle archways over the pedestrians below. Walking the streets of Woodlawn, the lack of trees is immediate. The few growths along sidewalks are mostly skinny and small, recent transplants years away from providing shade to the pavement below. But the streets are not... »
Breakdown
The communal dining room and kitchen at Northwest Mental Health Center has long been a fixture of programming at the clinic. Rosa Torres, who has worked as a clinical therapist at Northwest for 21 years, recalls how busy the kitchen used to be. Many of the clinic’s Psychosocial Rehabilitation and Support (PSR) programs were... »
New Beginnings for Woodlawn
If it were up to Pastor Corey Brooks of New Beginnings Church, Chicago would be filled with “contemporary, credible, and creative” neighborhood centers. These spaces would offer everything from job placement services and drug rehabilitation assistance, to green technology labs and Panera Bread franchises. They would be hubs of activity, located at the heart... »
Redistricting Fault Lines
On October 25, the assembly hall of the Hyde Park Union Church was nearly empty. This gathering was a preliminary informational meeting concerning a process that Chicago undergoes every decade—aldermanic ward redistricting. »
Making house a home
A sonic blend of jazz, funk, blues, disco, soul and New Wave, the house music celebrated by the women of Honey Pot Performance is not the heavily-digitized music we think of today. Their inaugural show at the Experimental Station at 61st and Blackstone last Thursday attempted to recreate the energy and intimacy of the... »
Ghosts of Camp Douglas
The history of Camp Douglas seems especially poignant this time of year. Halloween’s parallel in Christian theology is All Souls’ Day, which recognizes the dead trapped in limbo. Camp Douglas is responsible for the 6000-plus Confederates interred in a mass grave in the South Side’s Oak Woods Cemetery. »
Shouts ring out
Last Friday night, this performance, called “Ladies Ring Shout,” brought a crowd of South Side residents out of a cool rain and into the Experimental Station at 61st and Blackstone. »
