Claire Hungerford

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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 conducted here, where patients received instruction in meal planning and food preparation. But in recent years the kitchen has been used less and less, since funding for the meals has long since disappeared. Now Torres and her remaining colleagues, who have to wear many hats in their work as therapists and administrators, take turns providing money out-of-pocket for groceries.

Those in Torres’s field use PSR to refer to many of the programs that serve as material and emotional support infrastructure for adults suffering from mental illness–whether chronic or acute. Included in the health center’s PSR offerings are the various group therapy sessions held by clinicians, such as the Spanish-speaking women’s group that Ana Navarro has coordinated for over a decade.

The announcement of Chicago’s 2012 fiscal budget last October sealed the fate of mental health care across Chicago. The city’s outlined plan is to consolidate the clinics—transferring, for example, responsibility for the entire Back of the Yard’s patient population to the Southwest Side’s Greater Lawn Public Health Center. In the context of the prolonged and dramatic decline in mental health resources in Illinois, the measures will prove another painful blow to an already broken system, suffering from a lack of funding and legislative protection, which used to provide some insulation for Illinois’s mentally ill against homelessness and unemployment.

Northwest, which is located in Logan Square, will be merging with the South Side’s Lawndale clinic. Five other clinics will close their doors: Rogers Park, Woodlawn, Auburn Gresham, Beverly-Morgan Park, and Back of the Yards. Chicago will soon be serving upwards of 5,100 patients with a mere six operational clinics—a third as many as were open at the start of Richard M. Daley’s tenure. Since 2009 funding has seen a 36 percent reduction, a cumulative loss of $33.5 million.

The current mental health system has its origin in the Community Mental Health Services Act of 1963 (CMHA), signed into law by President Kennedy. CMHA called for the closure of state hospitals, while providing funding for mental health care at a local level through federal grants. With federal support, community health centers were able to serve as effective primary care providers for the mentally ill. This legislation was part of a national shift—both in public opinion and the field of healthcare—away from health policy that saw inpatient and institutionalized care as the best method of treating mental illness.

Over the past half-century, federal allocations have been starved and legislation distorted into what Mark Heyrman, a professor of law at the University of Chicago who specializes in mental health advocacy, calls “a variety of un-funded, uncoordinated services.” The central deficiency in many respects is a severe lack of human and financial resources, a fact hardly disputable when compared to the Illinois of yesteryear. According to Heyrman, there were 35,000 beds in Illinois available to patients in both outpatient and institutional facilities 60 years ago. Today there are 1,300.

Heyrman believes that successful mental health programs exist—they just haven’t been implemented on a large enough scale in Illinois. One such program is the Assertive Community Treatment, or ACT model. Under this system, patients are provided  “the multidisciplinary, round-the-clock staffing of a psychiatric unit, but within the comfort of their own home and community.” According to the National Alliance on Mental Illness, ACT recognizes that “individuals with the most severe mental illnesses are typically not served well by the traditional outpatient model, with various services that the patient must navigate on their own.” Throughout Illinois, ACT is almost nowhere to be found, since it is simply too costly for health providers to offer. Heyrman notes that the number of ACT teams in the state “has declined precipitously as providers have increasingly had to secure funding [outside of their budgets] in order to afford it.”

The consequences of this dearth of resources are perhaps nowhere quite so visible as in city hospitals. Urgent care facilities are increasingly saddled with the severely ill—those who struggle with cyclical but nonetheless debilitating symptoms—and the newly unemployed or homeless. The latter’s need for mental health services would ideally be mitigated by the network of support—as simple as food and cots—that Torres and other long-time clinicians know to be very effective in the treatment and prevention of mental illness.

As the mental health clinics close, these preventative resources—and their benefits—will be in jeopardy. Torres is still shaking her head over the proposal:, “It doesn’t make sense any which way. From a [fiscal] perspective it doesn’t make sense, because of the increased cost of hospitalizations, incarcerations…If people aren’t stable they’re going to lose their jobs, their houses…You’re denying very basic rights.”

For patients, clinicians, and activists alike, the expected drop in quality of care is an unending source of disappointment and frustration. But the defunding is, distressingly, not simply a matter of money drying up. To make matters worse, some say the loss of state dollars is due to gross financial mismanagement.

In February 2008, Illinois’s Department of Human Services was notified of a transition from a state system to a computerized bill payment system provided by a subcontracted tech company, CERNER Corporation. The system was revealed to be largely nonfunctional, as shown in documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act according to the Coalition to Save Our Mental Health Centers. In the months after its implementation, an overwhelming 95 percent of bills submitted to the state government by the new software were rejected on grounds of missing data.

Because the claims couldn’t be processed, the state’s Division of Mental Health elected to withhold the funding necessary to cover the operational costs of clinics like the soon-to-be terminated Woodlawn Mental Health Center. A spokesman for the Department of Human Services, Tom Green, stated that the decision to cut funding on the order of $1.2 million was based solely on the city’s inability to provide billing data.

Michael Snedeker, who has worked for the Coalition to Save Our Mental Health Centers since 2008, recounts an incident that could be an omen of what’s to come: when the roof of the Rogers Park Clinic partially collapsed last year, its patients were temporarily directed to the nearest operational mental health center, North River, where they remained under the care of Rogers Park staff. Roughly half of those patients never sought treatment at the stopgap location.

Snedeker regards this figure as a generous estimation of the number of patients who will make it through the transition. For many of the nearly 2,600 current clients whose local clinics will be shuttered, the forced relocation is more than a logistical inconvenience. A longer commute for patients means a hike in the cost of treatment—especially for those who have been unable to secure coverage and who have long relied on the unflagging generosity of therapists like Torres and Navarro.

“We took it as a betrayal,” Torres says of the budget. “They’re annihilating health, period. Not just the clinics. And especially for Ana [Navarro]—she’s been here 27 years, she’s from this community, born and raised, people from her church come here. So it’s also a betrayal of the community, not just of the clients but of their families too.”

Other patients face the possibility of arriving at a new facility where there are no therapists who speak their language. Meanwhile, relationships that have been built over years are likely to end. As Navarro explains, “We’re merging with Lawndale, but that doesn’t necessarily mean Rosa and I will be going to Lawndale.” The city’s transition team hasn’t yet told them when their clinic will close or where they’ll be reassigned, she says.

Torres is most distressed by the uncertain fate of her clients: “We’re staff—we’re used to being tossed around like foster children. But the clients? It’s very humiliating for them…they just want to send ten of them here, move ten over there. And will it be today, or tomorrow, or a week from today?”

Patients’ prospects for dependable treatment will remain bleak as the slated closures take effect, possibly as soon as mid February or March, according to a Greater Lawn clinician. Torres states that just under 40 therapists will be terminated, a figure that does not include the psychiatrists and other clinic staff who will be laid off.

“In terms of the physical size of Chicago alone, six centers is pretty pathetic,” Snedeker says. “And as to the claim that services will be improved, I just don’t see how that’s possible with the reduction in staff that’s taking place.” He foresees a grim landscape of meager mental healthcare resources, which he likens to the food deserts that also plague expanses of the South Side. “Conceivably very soon,” he portends, “in these neighborhoods where resources have been so depleted, a near-absence of care could definitely come about, and I think to a very sobering effect.”

all photos courtesy of Jason Thomas

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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 of what are occasionally desolate, run-down neighborhood areas. These centers would represent a solution to youth violence and systemic inequality.

These places don’t exist, but Pastor Brooks hopes to begin to change that in the next 31 days.

As part of an effort called “Project HOOD,” Brooks is living out of a tent atop a Super Motel at 66th and King. Brooks claims the abandoned motel, which was once notorious for gang activity, drug deals, and prostitution, lies within “the highest murder area in the city.”  Located right across the street from New Beginnings Church, the shuttered, run-down building is an eyesore that the pastor hopes to acquire for the community. The letters in the project’s name stand for “helping others obtain destiny,” and with this program, Brooks intends to transform “the hood” into his vision for a new, better Woodlawn.

Brooks has been in the tent all day, every day for—at the time of this article’s publication—43 days. Prior to being raised atop the motel on a scissor lift, the pastor fasted on water and faith alone. He initially attempted to maintain the prohibitions on the roof, but has now taken a more practical approach to survival. He keeps warm with a giant space heater and plenty of company—congregants come to pray with their pastor for success in his mission to change Woodlawn. He sends frequent Facebook and Twitter updates with inspirational messages—“The Kingdom of God never advances without sacrifice. We must inconvenience ourselves to the point of sacrifice even when others call us fools”—and requests for donations. The total has hovered around $200,000 for the past three weeks, but Brooks insists that he will not come down until they reach the full amount of $450,000 required to purchase the Super Motel property.

According to his blog, the reasons for his demonstration are varied, but “the 10 most important reasons are dead, buried 6 feet underground—teenagers, with names and families whose funerals I did this past summer!” Those men, he believes, might still be alive if they had had a place to go in their neighborhood that allowed access to more positive role models. In a phone interview, Pastor Brooks reflected on “the one thing, besides church,” that kept him on “the straight and narrow” growing up. For Brooks “it was a little place called the Multi-Service Center.” According to the pastor, “there were some strong men that taught me there. I was into sports, I was into partying, but this guy constantly challenged me to think. That community center experience helped to mold me into the person I am now.”

In various articles about the project, this new epicenter has been referred to as a “youth center,” a “community center,” and a “community development center.” Brooks has another title in mind: “I almost want to call it the Dream Center. I want the little boy who wants to be a doctor to go and be inspired by meeting a doctor there or reading about a doctor.”

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There are no blueprints or business plans for the project on the table—“that’s for ‘Phase 2,’” he explains—and the funding sources for that process are even more ill defined, but Brooks is committed to raising the amount it would take to purchase the land from the two banks that currently own it. He has plans to one day acquire TIFF funds to attract the commercial investment he hopes will promote Woodlawn’s redevelopment, but at the end of the day, Brooks is a pastor, not a businessman.

Brooks became the head pastor of New Beginnings in 2000, when he founded the church after moving from West Point Church in Bronzeville. He hoped to create a place of worship that was “cutting edge, with a little more flavor.” But the frills are restricted to the congregation’s expressions of faith. His message is simple—unique parish problems require unique solutions. New Beginnings is an unpretentious space with straightforward beliefs. New Beginnings’s 46,000 square-foot space includes a school, gym, recording studio, long front lobby, and enormous sanctuary. There are no gilded baptismal fonts on the floor, and no stained glass panels adorning the walls.

The sanctuary looks a bit like a high-ceilinged convention center. Rows of seats wrap around a long stage where a drum kit stands beside a couple of electric guitars. During services, cameramen film the services for online streaming. Two rows of theater lights hang from the rafters and point at the dozen or so choir members who line the front in their Sunday best.

On the first day of the new year, the church is packed. Though some are certainly fighting off the morning fatigue that comes with January 1, no one is short of energy or passion during the 35-minute introductory songs that start off the day’s service. Bodies sway and palms are lifted up to the ceiling as voices throw a “Hallelujah!” into already ecstatic verses. The tunes are catchy, punctuated by call-and-response choruses. The lyrics are displayed on giant white projector screens hanging above the stage. Behind the pulpit, the leader of the choir repeats until her voice cracks, “there’s NOTHING my GOD cannot DO.” Her arms rise up, inviting the audience toward the crescendo, as she shouts full-voiced, “SING IT LIKE YOU BELIEVE IT!”

After two more songs, and a special guest performance by gospel duo Dawkins & Dawkins, the pulpit prepares the congregation to welcome Pastor Brooks, so he can virtually deliver his sermon from the rooftop. “Receive with me our pastor,” the lead singer requests, giving thanks for “our man of God,” who, the congregation agrees, is “making a change for Chicago and for the world.” Her faith in the pastor is unwavering, and she thanks god again and again “for blessing us with a pastor with a vision.” She asks the crowd to practice rejoicing Brooks’s presence twice before his visage appears on the projector screens, smiling through his winter wear and a spotty Internet connection.

“Whatever you used to get through last year, is not going to work for this year, unless you make adjustments,” he proclaims. “This is a new year of possibilities.” He reminds the church that the future is unknown and unknowable, and will require each person to confront old problems and new problems differently. Continuing, Pastor Brooks recited a loose rendition of Mark 2:22, which contains the passage, “And no one pours new wine into old wineskins. Otherwise, the wine will burst the skins, and both the wine and the wineskins will be ruined. No, they pour new wine into new wineskins.”

“In 2012,” he says, “He wants you to stretch yourself.” Closing in a prayer, and a request for the worshippers to embrace one another with hugs, the screen turned blank.

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With all of the press that Project HOOD has received in the last month, it’s surprising that Pastor Brooks isn’t more practiced in delivering the facts and details of his plans. When asked about how much money he’s raised so far, his answer is vague: “Around $200,000,” adding, “maybe a little more than that. I know that amount is going to go up, but I haven’t counted recently.” For him the coverage has been both a blessing and a curse. Major headlines in the Chicago Tribune and New York Times have spread the word about the pastor’s mission and led to major individual donations, but the South Sider’s high profile has attracted unwanted help. “The most difficult thing with the media attention has been people who come along to try to attach themselves to your cause. It’s really important to keep your message on point,” says Brooks, who then quotes Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.: “You have to have a tough mind and a tender heart.”

For the pastor, the embodiment of King’s tough-mindedness seems to be his retinue of large, muscular assistants. While the three men standing in the church lobby are warm and personable, you still wouldn’t want to cross them. “They seem like opposites—you’ve got your idealistic view and your realistic view. But you gotta have both,” Brooks says.

When the lights and the cameras are off, the pastor’s live stream stays fixed on the word “OFFLINE” over static color bars. His followers have only the occasional Tweet to divine how Brooks’s mission is coming along—most recently he’s communicated a collection of quotations from figures like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Cornel West. We can’t watch Pastor Brooks on his spiritual and activist journey, despite his attempts to blog the experience and the mass media attention. But the power of Brooks’s demonstration has almost nothing to do with the quality of his blog posts. People pull all kinds of stuff to get media attention, but what makes Brooks different is the total conviction he exudes in his vision for a better Woodlawn, and in his belief that God is with him in making it happen. That kind of hope gets to people.

When asked what would happen if he didn’t raise the $450,000 needed to buy the Super Motel from the bank, he responded confidently, “I don’t know. I haven’t even thought about that.” Pastor Brooks believes wholeheartedly that this is a project that will succeed. And that confidence has touched an entire neighborhood. He went on, “it’s not an option to not make enough money.” And at the end of the day, it’s hard not to believe him.

Rachel Wiseman & Eric Fischer/flickr

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On October 25, the assembly hall of the Hyde Park Union Church was nearly empty. Of the two-dozen chairs arranged in rows before a projector screen, only six were filled. The attendees, all beyond middle age, waited expectantly.

This gathering was a preliminary informational meeting concerning a process that Chicago undergoes every decade—aldermanic ward redistricting. The sparse turnout can be seen as emblematic of the public’s obliviousness toward the issue, or, perhaps, their indifference.

Which ever it is, community activists on the South Side are trying to change it.

Mary Schaafsma from the League of Women Voters and Jocelyn Woodards of the South Side NAACP presided over the information session—a “Redistricting 101” meeting—in front of the half-dozen longtime Hyde Parkers.

A preliminary slide exhibited a polychromatic rendering of Chicago’s jigsaw puzzle of political fault lines. Although law requires wards to remain “compact and contiguous,” boundaries have been drawn to circumscribe individual blocks and avoid others. Take the 20th ward, a region that encompasses parts of Englewood, Washington Park, and Woodlawn with one winding tendril that snakes up north and then west to grab a piece of Back of the Yards.

“It looks like Medusa’s hair going in all directions,” Schaafsma observed, gesticulating broadly.

Woodards points out that, thanks to the clandestine nature of Chicago politics, “a lot of people have no idea this is even happening.”

Ward redistricting is a process that takes place in Chicago following every U.S. Census. State law requires that aldermanic ward borders be redrawn in order to ensure that each alderman represents an equally populated district. The deadline for the new map is fast approaching: aldermen must agree upon the new borders this Thursday, December 1.

In the last decade, Chicago experienced significant population loss that was exacerbated by the recession. Approximately 200,000 people left the city from 2000 to 2009, setting the population back to the same number that inhabited Chicago in 1920.

While African-Americans still make up the largest ethnic minority in Chicago, their numbers took the biggest toll, decreasing from 1,065,009 to 887,608 according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Meanwhile, the city’s Hispanic population grew by 25,000 residents.

These shifting numbers have caused aldermen in City Hall to scramble. The conflicts over space are often complicated by race. Although African-Americans suffered the largest population loss, the Black Caucus—African-American members of city council—is determined to maintain their 19 aldermanic wards. Anticipating a game of political chess, the Black Caucus decided to make the first move by submitting their own map on September 19.

The Redistricting 101 Meeting condensed all of this information into a neat, 60 minute PowerPoint—something the city hadn’t been doing. Schaafsma described her organization’s demands in a nutshell: “All we are asking is that the city engage the public, for equal representation under the law, and for basic government processes.” A bit heated, she quickly chugged two Styrofoam cups of water. “Emanuel has taken a stand-back approach, taking his cues from Daley,” she continued icily. “For example, is Englewood inherently a bad neighborhood or is it because they have six alderman and no one is paying attention?”

But people outside City Council are paying attention.

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The day after Halloween the West Chesterfield Community Association held a special meeting at their headquarters in a stubby brick bungalow on 93rd and Michigan. About forty people gathered inside on cramped rows of metal folding chairs. The crowd was mixed: residents, local politicians, and representatives from community organizations. A small boy ate a Happy Meal, while leaning sleepily against his mother.

West Chesterfield Community Association President Michael LaFargue began the meeting by saying, “We’re all working together because we’re in this together.”

The West Chesterfield residents in attendance are proud of their traditionally strong voter turn-out and enjoy being grouped in the sixth ward with the comparatively stable Chatham community. In other words, the residents don’t want the neighborhood to be tainted with the problems of the neighboring wards. LaFargue gestures to the Black Caucus map proposal, with West Chesterfield resting in an expanded ninth ward. “That’s a very large ward, how can anyone handle that? …We’re going to fight this thing.”

LaFargue introduced Jocelyn Woodards to the crowd, who a week before had assisted in the Hyde Park meeting. Woodards took to the lectern dressed in a lime green suit coat. Behind Woodards, a Holy Bible and a three volume tome entitled Black America rested on a mantelpiece before a wall plastered in large posters with anti-redistricting slogans. Woodards began, “They [the city council] are claiming we lost 200,000 people. Who were they and where did they go?”

“Black people,” the crowd murmured unanimously.

“And what does that mean for us?” Woodards inquired.

“Less representation,” was the resounding reply.

“It’s time for us to get it together and ensure we have the best representation possible.” Woodards’s statement was met with applause and amens.

In an open discussion that followed, audience members voiced suspicion, confusion, and even outright anger at the proposal to move West Chesterfield from the sixth to the ninth ward. The room, heated with bodies and emotion, caused someone to yank the cord of a ceiling fan.

“We need to make sure we maintain the integrity of the community,” an audience member affirmed. “That is what’s wrong with Englewood. It’s like many cooks have spoiled the broth. We don’t want four or five or six aldermanic districts in the community.”

One woman said frankly, “It’s like a slap in the face because we’re subjected to people we didn’t vote for.” The crowd stirred in agreement.

Their suspicion is not unwarranted. While wards have given ethnic groups access to political power and city resources, Chicago has seen politicians resort to gerrymandering—drawing political borders for private political gain—to expand their clout in the city. Redistricting becomes a game that is less about representation and more about maintaining office by lassoing pockets of community areas that will guarantee an alderman’s reelection—historically, districts containing fewer residents with college degrees and which usually have low voter turnout rates. The 14th ward, for example, a predominately Latino community where fewer than one in ten people have graduated from college, has had the same alderman since 1969.

Following the meeting, guests chatted and posed for pictures holding 8-by-10-inch printer paper reading, “We Oppose West Chesterfield Redistricting.” Resident Shirley Adams rose from her folding chair. Putting on her winter coat, she explained she attended the meeting “just to be briefed on what is going on and how much progress is being made.” For Adams, the intentions of the community are clear—“we want to stay in the 6th ward.”

But West Chesterfield isn’t the only neighborhood on alert. A blue leaflet has been circulated around Englewood promoting another redistricting meeting. On the pamphlet reads the following challenge: “You say we are never informed of what is going on in our communities before it happens, well, Resident Matters is trying to change that! Now the rest is up to you!”

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“I was taught a sign of a good compromise is that everybody walks out of the room mad,” said Fredrenna Lyle at the meeting in the Englewood branch of the Chicago Police Department on November 2.

Lyle—a lawyer who lost her third reelection campaign for Alderman of the 6th ward this spring—defended the Black Caucus proposal. After dividing up their wards legally and with the aid of a professional cartographer from Lansing, Michigan, the Black Caucus let a computer program draw the remaining wards.

Although she explained the Black Caucus’s position logically—one based on sheer legality—a distinct “us versus them” tone permeated her argument, particularly against the Latino Caucus. “They can come up with anything they want. We even gave them an extra ward. This whole thing is a blank canvas in terms where they can go.”

Lyle addressed the lack of congruity in Englewood—a neighborhood fractured into six aldermanic wards: “Englewood is the biggest change [on our map]. It’s about consolidating. The map we’ve drawn reduced the current six aldermen by one. We couldn’t reduce it ten years ago. Your aldermen loved you so much they didn’t want to leave!” In response, the audience laughed wryly.

“Change is scary,” Lyle admitted. “It’s understandable, but we are trying to maximize African-American representation without stepping or trampling on any other groups’ wards.”

She emphasized that the Black Caucus map was not an incumbency plan and blamed the media for propagating such a message. “Not all the alderman [of the Black Caucus] even agreed on this map…We didn’t want individual interest to supersede the interest of the African-American community.” Everyone, she stressed, had to make sacrifices, even if it meant drawing up less-than-ideal ward boundaries to satisfy legal requirements. “You [the aldermen] can have x,y, and z in la-la-land, but in the real world this is what we were dealt.”

“So,” she concluded, “if you can draw a better map, bring it in.”

On November 10, The Latino Caucus attempted just that.

This version included four more majority-Hispanic wards. One new ward on the southwest side would sweep up isolated Latino areas in the 3rd, 15th, 16th, 18th and 20th wards, all of which currently have a black majority. Ricardo Muñoz, 22nd ward alderman, told the Chicago Sun-Times, “If we’re one-third of the city, why are we one-fifth of the City Council? It’s not that we deserve it. That’s the law.”

Chicago’s Asian community is voicing similar concerns. Although the Asian population has expanded 40 percent in the past decade and is the fastest growing minority in Chicago, Asian populations in Chinatown and Bridgeport have never seen an Asian alderman. According to the Asian American Institute, “this lack of government representation is unacceptable…The Asian American community will organize itself…in a call for the importance of promoting transparency and public participation in the redistricting process.”

After being badgered by the public, 33rd ward alderman Richard Mell issued a public notice announcing six public hearings on the City of Chicago redistricting process. This got the City Council’s stamp of approval on October 31. The first meeting was held on November 2, giving community members only one day to mobilize and only three weeks until the actual vote.

The process to approve a new map can be murky and prolonged. Each alderman goes individually into the city’s map room to demonstrate how they want their ward redrawn. The city mapmakers then produce a map. If ten or more members of city council disagree with the proposed map, they can propose another map and the process drags on until a referendum can be held in March, a potentially costly procedure. The most infamous example of prolonging the process was the 1992 referendum that cost taxpayers millions of dollars.

There is a reason that redistricting is so important this time around. Hyde Park resident and political activist Dorothy Scheff made this explicit after the Redistricting 101 meeting: “There is more hope now—for the first time all the aldermen have been elected and there is a new mayor. The aldermen have not been appointed like the Daley crop. [Redistricting] is a problem we have been aware of for generations.” She gestured toward her fellow Montgomery Place retirement home residents and said, “I think now we feel there is a chance for change.”

Sasha Tycko

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 house scene the dancers grew up in.

The ’80s house culture that originated on the South Side extended far beyond music and parties, especially for dancers Media McNeal, Abra Johnson, Boogie McClarin, and Ni’Ja Whitson. It provided a safe outlet for youth grappling with issues of gender, sexuality, race, and class. Aptly named, house music served as a home for those who needed one. “The Chicago house culture,” Johnson said, “is one rooted in family.”

Led by McNeal, the group’s artistic director, the four women created the Sweet Goddess Project to bring more attention to the rise of women in the house scene, where more and more girls are becoming DJs, dancers, and promoters.

As the audience trickled in and took their seats, a DJ spun jazz records in the dim light of the corner. The small space of the Experimental Station added to the mellow party vibe.

Swathed in the soft blue and yellow light, the Honey Pot dancers flung themselves into the music with palpable energy. Though choreographed and well disciplined, the dancing had an improvisational air to it. The women writhed, twirled, glided and stomped around the floor, yet the diverse movements were rooted in rhythm and fluidity. In their dialogue and video clips that were interspersed throughout the performance, the women addressed big issues such as freedom, sexuality, consciousness, and exclusion. But with the varying pace of the dance and the shifting character of their movements—sometimes interlocking and moving as one unified mass of bodies, other times flitting around dizzily—they seemed to physically break out of the confines of these words and problems.

The audience bobbed along and yelped out catcalls, their own minor contributions to the lively atmosphere. Each dancer brought a personal element to her performance—in one solo, Johnson spoke aloud about her family’s relentless migration through the city in pursuit of better education and more security. Clutching her chest, she ended her monologue with the statement, “I want a home that wants me too.” House music was that home. The Honey Pot Performance will return to the South Side on December 18 at eta Creative Arts.

Ruthieki/flickr

If the Band had needed another verse in their Confederate dirge, “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” the Union Army’s Camp Douglas would provide stirring material. The former site of the camp runs four blocks west from Cottage Grove Avenue to King Boulevard, and two blocks north from East 33rd Place to East 31st Street. Established after the outbreak of the Civil War as a temporary Union training and housing outpost, Camp Douglas eventually became the most infamous prisoner of war camp in the Northern States.

After the Union victory at Fort Donelson, the camp—which takes its name from Senator Stephen Douglas—was converted into a holding tank of sorts for the Confederate soldiers captured by General Grant. Before the end of the war, 26,000 Confederate troops would be imprisoned in Camp Douglas—and roughly a quarter of them wouldn’t make it out alive. The officers placed in command of Douglas had a range of opinions on how best to police the inmates. Their punishments were often severe: they practiced hanging offenders by their thumbs and shot escapees on sight. Appalling sanitation conditions due to the camp’s swampy locale cemented Douglas’s notoriety as a literal sinkhole.

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. These souls are consigned to anonymity while nearby monuments pay homage to Enrico Fermi and Jesse Owens. While such treatment of POWs is clearly abhorrent, the Confederates had even more sinister plans. The historian I. W. Ayer recounts a Southern sympathizer noting that, “if once at liberty, [the prisoners] would send abolitionists to hell in a hand basket.” Perhaps All Hallows will be liberty enough for Dixie’s undead.

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. Channeling this genre of spiritual ritual performed by African slaves, “Ladies Ring Shout” combined spoken word, song, dance, and video to probe some of the images of African-American women found in contemporary American culture.

Historically, ring shouts provided an emotional and artistic forum for African slaves to express the complex feelings born from their condition. This struggle is evident in the opening act of the show, when sorrowful groans combine with specter-like shadows projected on the wall behind, reminding the viewer of both the physical and spiritual nature of the activity.

The workshop and performance was developed by three accomplished academics and performers, Felicia Holman, Meida Teresa McNeal, and Abra Johnson. The trio has worked together for over ten years, confronting issues of race, religion, gender, unemployment, and sexuality from both a deeply personal and sweeping societal perspective. With “Ladies Ring Shout,” described by Johnson as a “combination of scholarship and life experiences,” they hoped to contextualize some of their own deep emotions into a holistic narrative on the place of black women in 21st-century America. “We wanted to draw off this story and tradition of the ring shout as a safe place to come and share stories,” McNeal said.

The artists used a variety of forms and perspectives to examine what they called the “(mis)representations of the black female in popular culture.” At times the show verged on the scholastic: in one segment, Johnson used a slideshow to lecture on misconceptions proliferated by pop culture figures like Tyler Perry’s “Madea” character. In a more theatrical section, the women donned black and white suits and simulated an interrogation in which two cast members aggressively demanded that a third answer to various stereotypes.

In the Q&A that followed the performance, which was moderated by WTTW journalist Sylvia Ewing, it became that the trio intended the performance to raise just as many questions as it would answer. Audience member Kulvinder Arora summed the evening up: “I feel like this performance reorients the frame for us. Each of us is able to relate to it through our own experiences.”

Maggie Sivit

Boarded-up storefronts not withstanding, 63rd Street is a pretty happening place. A terminus of the Green Line, “L” cars rumble above Cottage Grove. Underneath, Daley’s serves up steaming omelets, as it has since the restaurant opened in the 1930s. Across the street, shoppers rush in and out of a grocery store. Along the sidewalk, the displays of multiple clothing boutiques and beauty supply stores sell their wares to teenagers passing by. Just south of the “L” tracks, there are Jamaican restaurants and the world’s second Harold’s Chicken Shack. But the food, shoes, and booze end after only three blocks, and the activity comes to a dead stop.

While nightclubs formerly stretched all along 63rd, their signs blinking into the Chicago night, today empty lots are a frequent sight. Along the northern edge of 61st Street, new glassy constructions loom, casting shadows across the neighborhood. Further progress into Woodlawn stalled by an agreement with the community, the University of Chicago is cramming its southernmost expanse with new buildings.

Yet, the social divide is not as clear the physical, despite unofficial University warnings to avoid straying south of 61st. Set alight by their frustration with Hyde Park’s historically isolated position on the South Side, many student and community groups have expanded the reach of their activities into Woodlawn. Every day, scores of students work with neighborhood elementary school kids on their math homework. Meanwhile, residents of both areas have worked to establish community gardens between 61st and 63rd Streets. Furthermore, many businesses and organizations like Robust Coffee and the Woodlawn Collaborative, who offer free programming in the performing arts, bookmaking, serve patrons from both communities. Undergraduates frequent Blackstone Bicycle Works to learn how to fix popped tires from Woodlawn teenagers. While tension exists, collaboration is growing.

Best Raw Vegan Deli
B’Gabs Goodies
Picture the best pad Thai you’ve ever had—the sweet peanut sauce, crunchy bean sprouts, shredded carrot, and the vitamin K-rich curly-leaf kale. If that last ingredient threw you off a bit, you’re not alone. B’Gabs Goodies is a vegan deli known for such healthy twists. Run by Gabrielle Darvassy, a woman who is as kind and motherly to her customers as she is to her elementary school-age son (and the store’s cutest employee) Marley. Before fixing your creamy and naturally sweetened smoothie, she’ll ask you for your food allergies and taste preferences. You’ll be having flashbacks to the smoothie’s vivid, fruity notes for weeks. The bill of fare is deceptively imaginative and complex—their plainest item, the veggie sandwich, uses a flax seed “bun” wafer to hold together a garden of greens and avocado. The restaurant’s interior is cozy but sparse. A few mismatched tables appear in the front, while dozens upon dozens of herbs, spices, and teas fill shelves in the back. With Darvassy’s friends and family members often preparing dishes and handling the register, a trip to B’Gabs makes you feel like part of the family. A home-cooked meal without the cooking, you’ll leave the shop feeling happier and healthier than when you entered. 6100 S. Blackstone Ave. Tuesday-Saturday, 9am-3pm. (773)251-3071. bgabsgoodies.com (Kelsey Gee)

Best Meeting Grounds
Robust Coffee Lounge
Located a short walk from the University of Chicago’s South Campus Residence Hall, Robust Coffee Lounge was originally projected to be a student hang-out and study spot. While the industrial-chic decor, breakfast options, unlimited free Wi-Fi, and comfy seating make it a perfect place to settle down with a laptop, Robust has also attracted a significant following from more permanent Woodlawn residents. The clientele are generally quiet, their faces captivated by laptops or distracted by the fluffy, fruit-filled Belgian waffles on their plates. But by noon, the volume is turned up as folks stop in on their lunch break for corned beef sandwiches. The storefront is embellished with advertisements of specials and a wall displays the many accolades Robust has won. Continuing the legacy of the former Backstory Café, Robust acts as a meeting place for both undergraduates entirely new to the city and residents whose Woodlawn roots go three generations back. 6300 S. Woodlawn Ave. Monday-Friday, 6am-8pm; Saturday-Sunday, 7am-7pm. (773)891-4240. robustcoffeelounge.com (Maria Nelson)

Best Cemetery
Oak Woods Cemetery
Every life is fitting of a monument, though few are lucky enough to see theirs erected. Roland Burris, the former Illinois attorney general, is a notable exception. Though still living, his (self-financed) Oak Woods Cemetery memorial is already emblazoned with his feats and the epitaph reads, “TRAIL BLAZER.” It’s hard to blame him for wanting to be interred amid such greatness—the site contains thousand of monuments, some dignified, others garish, scattered across its 180 acres of man-made hills and ponds. Among those entombed are Jesse Owens, Enrico Fermi, Harold Washington, and Ida B. Wells. Surrounded by a row of elm trees, the remains of over 5,000 Confederate soldiers and prisoners of war lay beneath a 46-foot-tall Confederate memorial. Victims of starvation, the soldiers died imprisoned in Camp Douglas along modern-day Cottage Grove Avenue. Nearby, city officials and crooks like “Big Bill” Thompson and James “Big Jim” Colosimo are venerated by ornate limestone obelisks and mausoleums—matched only by the white bronze statues and angelic figures marking big businessmen like Hyde Park founder Paul Cornell. The Chicago Architecture Foundation offers regular $15 tours of the gravesite, but if you have a free afternoon, a self-guided stroll will let you explore in peace. 1035 E. 67th St. Daily, 8am-4:30pm. (773)288-3800 (Kelsey Gee)

Williams, who is a regular participant in the festival, is mostly motivated by her love of crafting. “You see, I’ve had this niche, since I was seven,” she said, in reference to her work. “I’ve just always been making things, anything.” Her items were made in support of last Saturday’s sixth annual Arts in Action festival, a gathering meant to bring together the often segregated communities of the University of Chicago and Woodlawn. Organized in part by the UofC student-run Southside Solidarity Network (SSN) and the community interest group Southside Together Organizing for Power (STOP), this year’s event featured work by students and Woodlawn community members, ranging from visual art to performance pieces and advocacy projects.

Some displays at the festival had a pointedly political agenda. High on STOP’s priority list was to raise awareness about inadequate mental health services on Chicago’s South Side. STOP representatives handed out letters addressed to Mayor Rahm Emanuel, discouraging the newly elected mayor from closing or privatizing mental health clinics in Chicago. Many Woodlawn residents, the fliers said, depend on the cost-adjusted mental health services provided by local clinics and would suffer if they lost mental health support.

Several of the student displays at the festival also carried a political message. First-year student Christopher Hester passed out fliers on behalf of the Sierra Club, promoting a Clean Air Act which will reduce pollution and toxic emissions from power plants. The display was also set-up up for children to make paper windmills, symbolizing support for alternative forms of energy. Samantha Evans, also a member of the class of 2011 and the Community Service Leadership Training Corps, helped sell t-shirts in support of the event.

Saturday’s heavy rain threatened the success of the festival, which is typically held outside. The move inside, however, created a feeling of closeness which is, after all, the aim of the festival. With hundreds of students and local residents packed into one building, the festival succeeded in bringing people together to support both community activism and artistic expression, if only for one rainy day.

The theme of the Summit seemed to be community responsibility and ownership for a neighborhood that badly needs it. Taking cues from  similar neighborhoods across the country, Woodlawn’s public leaders realized that, as Ald. Freddrenna Lyle put it, “business as usual is no longer going to cut it…[and] government can’t do it alone.” Roundtable discussions led by aldermen and local activists detailed new efforts to promote “creative solutions” by inspiring informal leadership—everything from education to crime prevention to neighborhood beauty.

However, the community’s deeper problems cannot be listed so discretely. Thomas Trotter, the new principal at Hyde Park High School, eagerly emphasized in his presentation the role of the South Side public school as not only a place to educate local kids, but also, and perhaps more crucially, a consistent safe-zone for young people who live in gang turf. In this way, making school a more attractive avenue for students can reduce crime, which is one of the chief antagonists responsible for Chicago’s notorious educational achievement gap.

While some of the speakers and organizational leaders in attendance—Rudy Nimocks, for example, former chief of the University of Chicago Police Department—remember well the South Side’s heyday, everyone seemed quite confident that Woodlawn’s best times are yet to come. Vance Henry, speaking on behalf of the Mayor’s office, reminisced about the times when the neighborhood matriarch—more precisely, his grandmother—was all the muscle you needed on the streets of Woodlawn. Calling on everyone to remember, or at least imagine, such times, he stepped down with an African proverb that could easily become Woodlawn’s new motto: “I am, because we are.”

by Claire Hungerford

[Show as slideshow]

“Read my lips…Obama won’t kill Grandma.” The slogan is printed over the image “Whistler’s Mother,” and the button-seller tells the small student crowd around her that this one was very popular during the President’s push for health care reform. There are salesmen like her all along the 59th street Midway, men and women vending and hawking and politicking their products: carts of campaign buttons, anti-Republican buttons, Obama buttons; tables of t-shirts and posters; glossy handouts for PATRICIA VAN PELT-WATKINS, Democrat; printer paper pamphlets on the FBI’s repression of civil liberties; glossy pocket-sized cards with pictures of OUR PRESIDENT, who NEEDS YOU to VOTE DEMOCRAT; volunteers walking the lines calling out for you to please support the Party and the candidates in this critical time by registering as a campaign volunteer; a man planting signs every few yards for MILLER, Comptroller; women selling shirts and calling for you to “proclaim your nationality—Islam, sister” and to “come and get some food for the soul!”

There’s advertising everywhere but there are people everywhere, too; people lined west down the Midway Plaisance, students and faculty and neighborhood residents and salesmen and all standing and sitting and everybody waiting to see what’s going to happen, waiting to see the President, waiting to see Common, waiting to see something. A few students sit on the road reading copies of Karl Marx’s “Selected Writings,” studying in silence. Just off the line kids play in the park. Girls dance through the fallen leaves and look up at the sky and its vapor trails, laugh and fall down. A boy lies apart from them, propped up on one elbow, prone in the park leaves. He has a stick pushed back against his shoulder and he’s looking down the barrel of his stick-gun at the hundreds of people waiting in line, shooting imaginary bullets at unknowing targets. No, his mom says when she notices him killing off the crowd, this isn’t the time to play stick-gun, we’re going to see President Obama—but the boy can’t help but get caught up in all the excitement of the rally, it’s the day before Halloween after all. He smiles and runs off again, laughing, and a couple of girls walk by in their Halloween costumes. It’s getting cold but like the boy they can’t help but be excited; they’re costumed in shorts, tiaras, and face paint anyway—it’s the day before Halloween after all.

By the time the gates open at 4:30pm and everyone is searched, screened, and sent into the center of the Midway the tens of thousands have extended out towards the setting sun and moved closer together, extending the hope that this will be something like King’s March on Washington, that this crowd will be witness to some great and historic moment. An opening band plays for an hour; police horses watch the crowd. The sun goes down and the names come up: Pastor Clay Evans, Toni Preckwinkle, Mayor Daley, Sheena Patton, Senator Dick Durbin; names from headlines, snapshots from newspapers, voices in the dark now illuminated under the lights so that when Common comes out and plays his set the crowd knows that they are seeing faces of history, seeing something that for so long has seemed distant and far removed, untouchable and unalterable, driven by the actions of the few, unaffiliated with the lives of the many.

The President comes on stage and the crowd raises up hands and cameras and video cameras, anything to see. He talks about coming home, sleeping in his own bed, mentions Slurpees; he laughs and smiles. He makes the same home as his audience, drinks the same drinks. Has feeling and is real and alive, no less than anyone else in attendance, but as President will probably outlive most everyone there through history. It doesn’t matter though, they can see that history, and with that sight, the feeling—the tell-the-grandkids feeling—that this moment has been important, that they have been a part of it. The I-was-there feeling.