On a Saturday morning in May, the line for a table at the Living Room Café goes out the door. Every seat around each hardwood table is filled and the atmosphere is noisy with conversation. Servers take orders and drop off stacks of pancakes, strips of bacon, and plates piled with eggs, hash browns, and steamed vegetables. On the surface, the scene looks like any other neighborhood breakfast place. But the community that regulars find at this café goes much deeper than that of a typical restaurant. Since its founding in 1995 out of a storefront space at 64th Street and Cottage Grove, the Living Room Café has been providing hot meals and social services to individuals and families that are homeless or at risk of being homeless because of unemployment. Members accepted into the program come for dinner several times a week and for breakfast on Saturday and Sunday, and are assigned a case manager to help them take steps towards steady employment and secure housing. Read the rest of this entry »

Strange contraptions greet revelers who come to try their hand at King Ludd’s Midway Arcade, housed at the Experimental Station on 61st Street and Blackstone Avenue. Don’t expect to see Pac-Man, and leave your quarters at home. This arcade is different. Here, gaming meets art, and basic mechanics trump the digital age. The Experimental Station calls the arcade a “wonderful interactive installation,” curated by Material Exchange (MX). “These games have another layer that allows them to become sculptural,” said Sara Black of MX. It is art you can play with; games that provoke thought. Read the rest of this entry »

Huge, empty fields spread across the Midway at 59th Street and the wide expanse of Washington Park borders Cottage Grove Avenue to the west. Few University of Chicago students, buildings, or student-targeted shops are spotted past these buffer zones, and fewer still go south of the traditional boundary of 61st Street. Private property stickers are plastered on the doors of University buildings, and a private police force is ready to enforce them. In Hyde Park, one-way streets and an island-like apartment complex in the middle of 55th Street complicate through traffic, setting this area apart from the rest of Chicago’s grid. There are no physical walls; these borders between the University of Chicago and the communities around it are soft and sometimes porous, but they effectively divide the geography of the South Side into separate University and community spaces. The Woodlawn Collaborative wants to change this. Read the rest of this entry »

As bulbs emerge from the muddy thaw of winter and tight buds loosen their petals on tree branches, the dormant 61st Street Community Garden waits to be cultivated for another growing season in Woodlawn. And as members of the 61st Street Community Garden dust off their trowels and gloves in preparation for softening their plots’ soil and planting seeds for future bounty, the University of Chicago silently sets in motion another phase of its South Campus Plan. Read the rest of this entry »

On Saturday, March 21, chicken enthusiasts from all over Chicago flocked to Woodlawn’s Angelic Organics Learning Center to attend a free workshop on basic backyard chicken care. It was the Center’s second such workshop and, like the first held in Lakeview last November, reservations for its thirty spots sold out quickly. The crowd that gathered around the potluck afterward contained longtime chicken owners as well as many urban gardeners looking to include eggs among their home-grown produce. Read the rest of this entry »

The Woodlawn Center, a mental health clinic that serves the low-income community of Woodlawn, offers its clients a quiet refuge from the harsh and often bewildering realities of the outside world. But on Thursday morning, this inconspicuous one-story building became the site of a heated political protest, as a group of about thirty patients, activists and community members rallied against the potential closure of the clinic. Read the rest of this entry »

Since its opening last year, Woodlawn’s Backstory Café has established itself as a slow-food coffee shop, a used bookstore, and a “supporting member of the vibrant independent cultural infrastructure.” Last week, it took on another title: avant-garde jazz and jam venue. In a new musical program curated by Alex Wing, groups and solo artists perform scheduled sets every Wednesday night, followed by an open-invitation jam session that lasts until the café closes. Read the rest of this entry »

Enter Woodlawn: Get off the Cottage Grove bus at Marquette Road. Turn east and cross the street. Keep trudging through knee-deep snow for as long as you can stand it; if there are no cars coming, it might be easier to walk in the less-snowy street. Use your judgment. Look around and you’ll see some abandoned lots, a package of beef jerky peeking through the frost, sad-looking brownstones sighing under the weight of winter. But if you look closer, some color starts to peek out of the snowy grayness: some of the brownstones don’t look so sad, and they have bright signs in their front yards advertising amenities like high-grade soy insulation, hardwood floors, and energy-efficient construction (call for details). Read the rest of this entry »