Isaac Dalke

Norma van der Meulen says that she is getting old, that she can’t quite remember as well as she used to. She is modest, seated in front of a pot of tea in her Hyde Park apartment. Her eyes come alive behind her glasses. Opera comes from WFMT in the background.

A small-town Ohio girl, she fell in love with the Spanish language in college and later taught at Hope College in Michigan, where she met her husband, an architect. For a while, they traveled around Europe; he designed buildings for the State Department, she cared for their two young children. In 1956, the young couple moved to Hyde Park where she has lived continuously ever since (minus a four-year respite to the Virgin Islands) raising three children and keeping active in the neighborhood community.

She speaks lucidly of the time a student she advised offered her marijuana, of befriending the future proprietor of the Medici when he was a graduate student, of a neighborhood with strong currents of change, and brings up the racial tension in the neighborhood with a frankness that would leave some addled.

The following is an edited interview with her, on a sunny New Year’s Eve, sitting in her apartment overlooking the Museum of Science and Industry. She speaks with a soft, sweet voice, and her arms move energetically as she tells her stories.

You volunteer at the Oriental Museum?

I do! I’ve been there for thirty years. I’m behind the counter Wednesday mornings, and Monday mornings I make jewelry for them. It’s a little room that’s  stuffed with ties and carpets and boxes and all kinds of stuff. I have these metal cabinets with amber and amethyst and malphite and lapis and fish vertebrae and little hand-carved skulls from Africa—all kinds of stuff. Wonderful stuff. And a lot of Afghani pendants and beads and what-not. It’s just like Christmas, I go in there and I say, “What will I make today?” And I pull out the drawer. I make about five, six necklaces a morning. Most of them sell.

I’ve made some observations of men shoppers, vis-à-vis men shoppers. Men come in and they have a purpose. They come in and say, “I’ll take that one.” Bingo. The women: “Can I see this one? Well, no wait a minute…” It drives you nuts! It’s a different thing, a man and a woman shopper. I also learned that people in general like an even string of stuff. They don’t like kooky things on their necklaces.

So that’s what I do. I have great fun. I go down there and turn on WFMT, the classical music station, with my bottle of water and my banana, and I make jewelry. I still don’t know how on earth they make those little beads.

How was advising at the UofC?

You know who one of my advisees was? Though I take no credit. David Axelrod. Nice bright boy. Barbara Curry, in the senate here, was one too. I had a lot of wonderful kids. [Axelrod] wouldn’t remember me, but I remember him. I didn’t have that much do with him, I would have these appointments and they would come in.

Some of these kids were very dependent, they would come over and over again whether they had an appointment or not, because they were lonely and they needed some advice or just to vent a bit, you know?

I had one boy from the North Shore—gorgeous tailoring, very handsome boy. He would come to my door with his coffee Thermos in his hand and we would talk a while. He is now in New York a huge success with some sort of advice for finances, I don’t know, it’s more than I can figure out. He writes books and things. I hear from him every Christmas, he sends me a picture of his kids. They’re a very treasured lot, that lot over there. A very privileged lot I would say.

Do you know any UofC Professors?

I used to, but I don’t anymore because they all died or moved. A lot of them went to Hawaii. They weren’t going to hang around here. Saul Bellow, he used to be very apparent in the neighborhood. Good writer. He knew so many people who had lived and died and remarried and had fights and what-not. He said too many houses had ghosts so he moved to Evanston (laughs). Got a new wife and all that. He used to eat over here at Piccolo Mondo.

Harold Washington used to live around here?

I know exactly where he lived. There is a tennis court over here on 53rd Street. There’s an apartment building on the corner; he lived there. He could see the green cockatoo birds out there.

We had some trees with big nests. Some green parrots got out of their cage out of O’Hare. They made it down here and made that their home and they squawked away. You could see these cubbies of green parrots flying all around the neighborhood. Harold loved those parrots!

What was it like raising children in Hyde Park?

Well, I’ll tell you. I had them walk to school every day when they were little. My eldest daughter went to Hyde Park High School, one of the last viable classes. The day Martin Luther King was killed, she came into my office wearing a dress about the green of your jacket and she was ashen-faced. She had been with one of her little boyfriends, who had glasses on. They kicked him to the floor and broke his glasses and beat him. She was absolutely undone. That was a bad thing.

My second daughter went to the new Kenwood High School [current-day Kenwood Academy]. Because it was new, [the administration was] trying very hard. They had a wonderful music teacher, and really nice teachers. She got through that all right and then went to Oberlin.

My son, Peter, went to Kenwood. When he was a freshman in high school, about 14 or 15, we lived in a six-flat down here. He was coming down the alley and a guy from Kenwood High School came behind him, jumped on his back, put his hands in his mouth and pulled and slammed his head on the sidewalk. Peter screamed out. The lady on the first floor heard him, stuck her head out the window and yelled at [the assailant] and he ran away.

Well, the kid was the son of two doctors—Haitian—who had lied about their address to get him into Kenwood High School. We got Peter out of Kenwood right then and put him into the Lab School. But the thing is that kid still remained at that school and he attacked the son of a lawyer. The fur flew, and they got him out of there and sent him to Haiti. When we got back from the Virgin Islands, his name was a headline in the newspaper. He had just murdered a DePaul student, a tennis star.

We had some bad, bad things happen in Hyde Park. They still do… These are not politically correct things to say, but I’m telling you, well, that’s the way things are.

Matt Wan

Thousands of electric wires run across Chicago. Within their black rubber casings, sleepless bundles of energy wait for our cue to wake up and go to work, lighting our homes and running our refrigerators. But how we use energy is only one side of the story: where it comes from is an equally important, though sometimes troubling question. Over half of Illinois’ energy is produced by nuclear plants and there are more nuclear reactors in Illinois than in any other state. According to the Nuclear Energy Information Service (NEIS), a non-profit based in Chicago, “if Illinois were a country, we’d be the 12th largest nuclear power in the world, tied with China.”

April 26 marked the 25th anniversary of the Chernobyl power plant explosion in northern Ukraine. On Monday, a crowd gathered at the Henry Moore Sculpture to Atomic Energy on the University of Chicago campus. Cast in  indomitable bronze, the sculpture has stood since 1967 to mark the location of the first self-sustaining nuclear reaction and the birthplace of the Atomic Age. Twenty-five candles were lit to the chime of a bell, and geographical distance of oceans and countries collapsed as those at the vigil recalled the tragedy at Chernobyl.

Years after Chernobyl, a disproportionally high number of cases of radiation sickness and cancer continue to burden people living near the site—and in the wake of the earthquake and nuclear crisis in Japan, these concerns have returned to the fore. The shutdown at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear facility and the subsequent radiation leak has raised Chernobyl-levels of alarm across the globe. Residents within a twelve-mile radius were evacuated to avoid radioactive contamination, and thousands more are living with under the specter of spreading pollution.

Amid the many global relief efforts organized to assist Japan during this bleak time, a few UofC students are taking action. Immediately following the disaster, the Japan Relief and Rebuild committee was created under the Japanese Student Association. Tabling daily at the Reynolds Club, the committee encouraged students to donate to the cause, while last Friday’s “UChicago’s Got Talent” event raised funds for humanitarian relief. Reaching out to a nation halfway across the world, the committee assures those who contribute to their cause that “the people of Japan will receive our warm messages.”

Last week the UofC Alumni Association hosted a panel discussion entitled “Lessons from Fukushima,” in conjunction with the Argonne National Laboratory and the Harris Energy Policy Institute. Eluding any serious discussion of the human toll at Fukushima and only slightly dipping into nuclear energy policy evaluation, the message delivered was, according to Kraft, all too well orchestrated. On the panel, one of the Argonne scientists asserted the “intrinsic safety” of new reactor designs while Booth School economist Robert Topel spoke in the jargon of markets, profit, and externalities. Most sensible was Kennette Benedict, director of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, who made explicit that we are the gatekeepers of a power that can destroy the world.

With International Radioactive Waste Awareness Day passing this Tuesday, many Chicagoans are unaware of our reliance on the seemingly distant Braidwood nuclear power plant, which lies merely 50 miles southwest of O’Hare International Airport and supplies electricity to the entire city of Chicago. The devastation in Japan looms a little too close to home: the Braidwood plant has experienced shutdowns and waste leakages as recently as August 2010. As Benedict said in last week’s panel discussion, “a nuclear disaster is one everywhere.”

As Chernobyl and Fukushima stand side by side this week, we can only hope that our messages, like the ones sent to Japan, will reach an ear that will listen.

Mehves Konuk

Black SUVs glint in the sunlight, tall skyscrapers provide the most friendly of bland backdrops, and a woman with a faint Chicago accent speaks in platitudes about the greatness of Chicago and the “history behind it we’ve never been able to escape.”

The good guys are riding in the SUVs; the bad guys are taking bribes and killing children. The superheroes—the well-worn tropes, the marvels of so many generations—have landed in Chicago. A minute into the pilot episode of The Chicago Code, and you can bet that nothing you haven’t already heard about Chicago will ever make it onto the program.

But in an America that has outgrown real Marvels, the superhero has taken on a new form. Instead of arachno-sapiens we look for more believable heroes—the people we actually look to for protection: the police. This trend is not new, as the FBI, the CIA, the LAPD, the NYPD—even 24’s fictional CTU—have given us guardian angels, conjured up in the comfort of our own imaginations. While such shows have at times broached moral ambiguity, they leave no doubt of the face of the greater good fighting against unquestionably evil forces. It is surprising, then, that it has taken so long for a show to be made about the Chicago Police, considering Chicago’s historical abundance of grand tales filled with twisted, grandiose crooks and the loyal stewards of the law who fought them.

However, the Chicago Code has at last been made, and already, half a dozen episodes in to the first season, gained the 9/8c slot on FOX and a considerable fan base, despite a weak ad campaign. But the show has also left many wondering whether the Chicago Police are really the superheroes in the SUVs, and why they should be portrayed as such if they are not. As a program that purports on its website to “follow the Windy City’s most powerful and respected cops” weaving at break-neck speed through offices, cars, alleys and rundown houses, it’s true that the show follows the cops outside the Loop to locations around the city. Indeed, the show has been much lauded for its use of Chicago itself as a character. Yet the slick and shiny Chicago we are given isn’t far off from, say, Michael Bay’s treatment of the metropolis in the upcoming “Transformers 3,” ignoring the realities of the city and its inhabitants.

A word with Dennis O’Connor, a Sergeant from the Chicago Narcotics team, indicates how blatantly false the Chicago Code seems to anyone who has lived the part. “The show is much more melodramatic than real life,” he said. “For example, it’s against departmental policy in Chicago to have car chases now, we only do them in the most serious of cases.” In the real Chicago, a car chase request has to be approved by a supervisor before it can go ahead. “The Chicago Code just shows the highlights of being a police officer,” said Mr. O’Connor. “We do have exciting chases sometimes. My scariest one was probably one we did from West Rogers Park to O’Hare at 2:30 in the morning, but these don’t happen every day.”

This “highlighting” extends to the relationships within Chicago’s institutions of law enforcement: the Chicago Code creates intrigue where there is none. According to O’Connor, Ryan’s portrayal of pandemic corruption running riot in the bodies of mean-fisted millionaires with large backsides in leather seating, is an unnecessary and exaggerated stereotype. There is no need for a superhero to save Chicago from an evil alderman, such as Mr. Gibbons in the show, because there are many aldermen in Chicago—none with nearly as much power as Gibbons. “We all want the same thing,” said O’Connor.

While the show seeks to create a singular vision of crime in Chicago, the narrative simply doesn’t match up to reality. The writers attempt to shore up the dubious actions of Chicago’s criminal organizations and link them to the corrupt alderman’s office, but this tidy narrative proves dissatisfying. In fact, Chicago’s criminal activity has more mundane, though persistent, causes than simply a corrupt city official controlling the entire city’s underworld. A member of the Chicago Police’s Bureau of Administrative Services who wishes to remain anonymous, offered more realistic insights about the hungry, doped-up criminals that populate America’s third largest city. “A lot of violent crime is associated with drugs,” he said. “There’s a strong correlation between the use of hand guns and drug abuse.”

The reason for this is twofold. First, there is the plight of users. “There’s a lot of misguidance in the sentencing process. Despite the overcrowding of prisons, having a $10 bag of crack is treated like a huge felony. The culprit cannot participate in society. He can’t vote, he can’t get loans for college,” says the source. Crime isn’t a means of grabbing political power; it’s the only way some know how to get by. “The state spends money on punishment rather than rehabilitation,” continued the officer. “How else is an unemployable felon to fund a habit that no one is helping him flee from?”

Second, there are the gangs that dominate the South Side drug scene. “Ever since the high rise projects were torn down [since the implementation of Mayor Daley’s ‘Plan for Transformation’], the South Side has seen a lot of drug related violence,” the officer said. “Small drug businesses have moved to neighborhoods where they establish cultures of fear in order to claim territory,” and the ensuing land grabbing can have dreadfully gory consequences. But ugly syringes and tired users hardly feature at all amongst the tough mean bad guys in the series that claims to show us the “Chicago Way.”

The treatment of gang violence by real police presents another departure from the image of ever-present heroes that populate comics. “We typically don’t participate in how gangs do business,” our source said. “If one gang does something to another and there’s a risk of retaliation, we have policemen saturate the hot area but they try and stay uninvolved.” This is not the story that the Chicago Code tells. Inter-gang rivalry is non-existent in the show, failing to address the zip code segregation in Chicago. The facts that, as our source notes, “certain areas in the South and West sides are completely excluded from the city’s economic system” or that Englewood has the highest population of mentally ill people in Chicago (which may correlate to its high incidence of crime), is not an issue in this program that purports a unified code, or grand narrative, for all of Chicago, as opposed to the layers of codes that criss-cross neighborhoods.

The tradition of portraying the city as a cohesive industrialized metropolis is one that dates back to the Chicago of steel mills and stockyards. And it is this portrayal that the Chicago Code uses, pumping $25 million into Chicago’s economy in the process. It seems like everyone should be happy—more people attracted to one of the only two large cities in America whose population is declining, jobs for all, tourists attracted, Chicago back on the city radar—so what is it that tickles the conscience? That systemic poverty is not addressed, that drugs and guns abound, and people are being deluded into thinking that the bad guy is a shadowy alderman whose oily fingers have Chicago in their grip, and the good guy is the police detective shouting “Great Scott!” from somewhere atop his moral high ground. But what’s true is important too, and when reality hits us, we’ll have to put the superheroes away.

A Barcade in Brooklyn. Photo by chadmagiera/flickr

A few weekends ago, I sat in a certain Hyde Park bar a half-hour before closing, as bleary-eyed bartenders rather vociferously ushered lingering patrons out into the 15-degree winter night. Having just bought a round, my group lingered longer than the rest of the crowd, sure we would be out by 2am. We were soon met with more assertive tactics to get us out the door. After asking for a few minutes to drain our glasses, and promising to leave before business hours were up, a girl in our group was informed, “you’re not special,” and we were notified that we had to go. How was it, we wondered, that this bar in a college neighborhood (which shall remain nameless but is not The Cove) could treat its patrons so rudely? That same week, on January 21, the Chicago Maroon reported a failed attempt to open up an arcade-themed space in Hyde Park that would have served as a café by day and a bar by night. The “barcade” idea—“a cross between nerd and awesome,” according to Laura Green, the aspiring proprietor—flopped due to zoning red tape and a lack of community support. Valois manager John Lathouris justified this lack, saying simply, “People don’t drink here.” Greg Estrada, owner of Futons-n-More, was quoted as saying. “People don’t really like the idea of a bar in a college neighborhood like this.”

A Barcade in Brooklyn. Photo by Rob Boudon/flickr

As I spoke to friends about what had happened that night at the bar, they usually suggested the problem must be linked to the driving force of economics—competition. There isn’t much of it on 55th Street, so places can be curt with their clients without fear of losing business. To be fair, this was the first time I’d ever experienced such poor service at any Hyde Park business, and we all have our bad days. But the concern here is not poor service or the degree to which any individual business respects its patrons. Rather, it is about a neighborhood with a mindset that willingly eschews a promise of greater urban vibrancy and attraction of capital. On the Chicagoist blog, a post about the failed barcade idea calls Hyde Park, “a quiet, vibrant melting pot and perhaps the most boring campus community around.” This community with so many assets—population density; diversity of color, age, and class; short, walkable blocks; neighborhood institutions, from the Seminary Co-op to Promontory Point—is for the most part dead after 10pm.

Instead of reiterating the problem, though, I want to ask a question. Any young resident of Hyde Park will understand what a dearth of social spaces means for everyday life. How often do we wish longingly for an all-night diner, or one more bar option, or for interesting shops in which to stop and browse? How often have we wished for a CTA “L” line to make trips outside the neighborhood even more expedient? I once heard an esteemed member of the University bureaucracy deadpan that he moved to Hyde Park and realized it was a great place to raise kids because there was nothing for them to do except to go to school, come back home, and study. The same rule applies to those of us in college and beyond. We are confronted with a truth that any young person living in Hyde Park, University-affiliated or otherwise, has taken as self-evident: in terms of urban vibrancy, in terms of the degree to which our neighborhood captures our interest, Hyde Park leaves a lot to be desired.

The problem of creating vibrant urban spaces is one that constituted the work of the civic-minded activist and urbanist, Jane Jacobs. In her seminal work, “The Death and Life of Great American Cities,” she devotes a chapter to what she calls “mixed primary uses”—put simply, “The district…must serve more than one primary function; preferably more than two.” It is a conceit as remarkable for its social acuity as for its economic pragmatism. For Jacobs, a lively city street is one that attracts a range of users for any given social resource—parks, the street itself, businesses, etc. Jacobs’s ideal vision for city life can be conceptualized as a sort of urban symbiosis. Numerous attractions would “expose our commerce to a still larger and more diverse population,” as residents, as well those who come to the neighborhood to work or shop, to frequent coffee shops, newsstands, and—yes—even bars. For Jacobs, the compassionate urbanist, a vibrant neighborhood is more than the sum of its parts, as consumers and workers interact with local residents to develop city streets teeming with life. And yet, though Jacobs idealizes these symbiotic patterns of socialization, she never loses sight of the fact that a lively neighborhood is one where people will spend not only their time, but their money too. Businesses, after all, have to run on something other than goodwill.

So, what a business owner has to say about a business proposal’s viability is a paper tiger compared to the steps taken to prevent businesses from setting up in the first place. The right precedents have not been set. In November 2008, as Hyde Parkers helped vote one of their own into the Oval Office, so too did they vote to prohibit alcohol sales in the 39th precinct of the 5th ward, the proposed site of a redevelopment of the Doctors’ Hospital into a hotel. Disputes between the University, residents, and business owners were settled de facto with a ballot measure, as no developer would build a hotel on a dry site. The Doctors’ Hospital still stands empty.

Then and now, the issue was not alcohol. Instead, the disagreement was about what direction Hyde Park should take in pursuing its redevelopment. Opposition to the Doctors’ Hospital redevelopment process centered more on the University’s plans to hire non-unionized workers and dissatisfaction with the degree of community input sought out by the site’s developers rather than a desire to teetotal. Consider: Hans Morsbach, the owner of Medici on 57th, played a key role in organizing the vote on the ballot measure to ban alcohol sales at the Doctors’ Hospital site. Yet in an October 2007 interview in the Chicago Maroon, he is quoted as touting the Medici’s outpost in Normal, IL as “my dream place.” “We can have liquor,” he said, “and it is in a good location close to Illinois State University, and we have good management and I am looking forward to that.” Giving a few undergrads the opportunity to cop a beer or two does not seem to be the problem. (Another factor: Morsbach’s Medici operates The Pub in the UofC’s Ida Noyes Hall—the establishment has something of a monopoly to guard.)

Is the issue, then, that Hyde Park has become complacent in pursuing its redevelopment? Always present around this question are two institutions, the first of which is the University, which according to the Hyde Park Chamber of Commerce attracts 17,000 employees to the neighborhood, in addition to the 15,000 students enrolled in its academic programs. The second is Hyde Park residents themselves, who may have different ideas about how their neighborhood should grow and change. For some, their vision of a revitalized Hyde Park is embodied in a community garden; to other, perhaps younger residents, it might be embodied in a barcade that melds “nerd and awesome” to suit a nerdy and awesome student body. These two players in Hyde Park’s future are failing to work together to produce something greater than the sum of their parts.

We should not ignore recent events in redevelopment. The redevelopment of Harper Court, controlled by the University and aimed at showcasing “all that Hyde Park is,” promises to change the feel of 53rd Street for years to come. And yet, when Green, a young entrepreneur with ties to the neighborhood, suggests an enterprise that would increase community’s commercial diversity, the response is overwhelmingly negative. The barcade might have provided another meeting place in a neighborhood with a paucity of options, or it might have lent a touch of individuality to Hyde Park’s sorely lacking bar and café scene. Above all, it might have been cool. But instead of embracing a proposal for something new and different, Hyde Park waves it off with a flick of the wrist. Don’t you know people don’t drink here?

Here Jacobs is prescient. In her chapter on mixed primary uses, she writes about disjointed downtowns, districts where business and pleasure are segregated, resulting in empty, boring neighborhoods after the workday is done. “Among downtown planners and businessmen’s groups who work with them, there is a myth (or alibi) that Americans all stay home at night watching TV… ‘People don’t go out,’ is one of the alibis also used in Pittsburgh to explain its dead downtown.’” Sound familiar?

The truth is that people do go out, that they do drink—especially in Hyde Park—and that the neighborhood would do well not only to acknowledge, but to support good ideas when they come around. We already know the alternative: a nightlife dominated by long swaths of a barren 55th Street, and a steady departure of young people towards those parts of Chicago that would be glad to accept their goodwill and hard-earned money in exchange for a drink and some good times.

Todd Cooke

[Show as slideshow]

At the entrance to Windy City Furniture at 22nd and Michigan a colossal pile of furniture stands. Stacks of chairs rise toward the ceiling in precarious columns. Lampshades pop out above the horizon of upholstery, while others spill out from an opening in the ceiling. The neatly stacked piles of kitschy hotel art around the perimeter give the impression that the room itself is framed with gold. The creative use of space, though motivated by sheer pragmatism, yields some truly artistic arrangements: a wobbly stack of chairs and tables could be a Duchamp work. Behind the mountain of furniture, five adjacent televisions argue amongst themselves while one of Chopin’s Nocturnes quietly attempts to restore calm from a nearby radio.

In the center of the room, another argument takes place between the father-son owners, Jerry and Michael Cooper, and one of their customers, Cora. The debate surrounds a certain piece of furniture that has either been sold or simply lost amid the snarl of furnishings. Cora adamantly insists that she saw the piece “right there” not more than a week ago. Some of Cora’s determination stems from the fact that she has been shopping at Windy City Retailers for over 20 years, as she reminds Jerry before he embarks on the treasure hunt for her vanishing cabinet: “He”—referring to Michael—“wasn’t even born when I started coming here.”

Jerry doesn’t find the piece, but Cora seems content with the other odds and ends she’s acquired while roaming the aisles. With her departure, I finally get the chance to talk to the elder storeowner. His Blackhawks cap, puffy North Face jacket, and accent so strongly speak to his city roots, that I immediately regret my first question: “Why Chicago?” It turns out that Jerry’s grandfather, Michael’s great-grandfather, was a security guard for The Hilton Chicago in the 1920s. When the hotel threw out old or broken furniture, he sometimes took the pieces to be sold on Maxwell Street as a way to make a little extra cash. When the hotel started doing bigger renovations, he realized he could turn his side operation into a business.

Jerry tells me this laconically, glossing over the intricacies of the changing family ownership as “a long complicated story,” and urging me not to get into it. What I do gather, from the fragments he chooses to share, is that at one point in the family’s history there was a “split”—the result was two furniture store locations, one that became Windy City Liquidators and another that has since gone out of business. Jerry doesn’t want to go into it, but not because he’s worried about privacy; it’s because he thinks it’s boring. For him, business history is just more family history.

After we conclude the interview I ask him out of curiosity if there’s a story behind a signed poster I happened to notice of former Makita power tool pinup girl Charlene Kelly. His response is as humble as his explanation of the store’s history, “I went to the hardware store to buy a screwdriver and she was signing posters,” he says, adding after a pause, “I wish there was more of a story to it.”

Jerry’s retelling of the store’s history is modest, but walking through the piles of furnishings, I can’t help but ascribe a greater importance to it. Windy City Liquidators has a story; you might just have to be on the outside of the family business in order to see that. The story unfolds best not through Q&A, but through a casual perusing of its aisles. While the pieces are meant to be inconspicuous in the context of a hotel, here they acquire a comedic value by virtue of their stage-like presentation. One can’t help but admire, for example, a lonely copy of a Jimmy Buffet novel on an otherwise empty shelf, or an oscillating fan with a for sale sign, that is nonetheless put to use by the store’s workers. The objects on display are themselves characters—for now piled together in the stacks of Windy City Furniture as they wait to enter the lives of their buyers. This is a story best told through things.

Mehves Konuk

On a poster mailed to incoming University of Chicago students, the campus is portrayed looking north. The gothic architecture lining the Midway Plaisance is in the foreground, while the remaining portion of campus holds the middle of the frame. In the back, the canopy of Hyde Park gives way to a blurring of the urban landscape until the Loop rises triumphantly into view. This may be how the university wants its incoming students to think of Chicago—Hyde Park, then a place to ride through, then the Loop and beyond. More telling of the university’s stance, however, is what is left out of this image, namely the Midway and the southern half of campus beneath it.

In recent weeks, the Midway and the grounds immediately to the south of it have weighed heavily on University minds. In these spaces the University is expanding—an 811-resident dormitory was completed last year while ground has been broken on a new art center. And it was on this southern part of campus where in 2007 a graduate student was fatally shot, and where two months ago a student was punched in the face and robbed. On that same night, and only a few minutes after, a student was knocked unconscious beneath a statue of Linné as he crossed the Midway. The University responded by hiring a private company to escort students crossing the park. For some, the sloping edges of the park no longer looked like Chicago’s excuse for sledding hills—they looked like trenches. This winter, however, the University completed a transformation of the face of the park, attempting to once again turn the Midway into innocuous scenery. Now, the security is built-in.

The Midway Crossings Project, a $6 million University investment, has not really enhanced the park so much as enhanced one’s passage through it. Sidewalks were added and the trees and cement planters were installed. In line with a wider effort to increase security, additional emergency lights have been installed. The most dramatic change, however, occupies in total less than 20 square feet. Spread along Woodlawn and Ellis Avenues, 40-foot tall LED spires tower over the sidewalk, illuminating the Midway’s two main thoroughfares. These structures take their name from their collective effect—light bridges.

Mehves Konuk

Strictly from an urban design standpoint, the light bridges are low on material and high on impact. During the day, the metallic masts create an architectural theme that unifies the north and south halves of campus. To ease fears of nighttime crimes, the light bridges create more of a light tunnel, visually linking the two halves of campus and simultaneously increasing visibility and thus safety. An aerial view of the scene must surely be dramatic.

The image of a light tunnel is appropriate in understanding the University’s intent—the provision of a secure passageway through a space of increased anxiety. But as a result of this intent, the project has created an improved path, not an improved park. The northern and southern sides of campus are now more integrated, but the Midway remains an expanse to be traversed rather than enjoyed.

If security were the real issue at hand, then designing a more attractive, multi-use park would have enhanced security while benefiting the community at large as well. As the great urbanist Jane Jacobs pointed out in “The Death and Life of Great American Cities,” what makes any public space safe is the presence of people. Streets, parks, buses and the like are made secure by the collective eye of our anonymous neighbors. If the University had invested $6 million in the improvement of the park as a center of community life and play, perhaps then its thoroughfares would not need light to prevent crime but to illuminate soccer games and nature walks.

Jacob’s observations were not limited to safety, but dealt also with one’s “right to the city.” Such a right, she believed, should be universal. In her work, she recounts how the UofC did not always prescribe to such a philosophy. In the 1940s, the University would let security dogs run around the campus at night to keep people from the surrounding neighborhoods out. Today, the University faces similar, albeit more subtle, questions concerning one’s “right to the city.” People may not be chased out, but the light bridges ensure that their presence will be known.

Despite the University’s overwhelming influence over the Midway, it still belongs to the city in practice. Though the recent reconfiguration of the park may make crossing safer for all—the cement planters will protect a pedestrian from a straying car regardless of whether or not they are registered students—it is undertaken from the perspective of the University alone. The school, in their construction of the light bridges, appears to be suffering from tunnel vision. Here a problem plaguing all urban universities becomes apparent—how to balance its commitment to the safety of its students while maintaining a space to which everyone has a right. With the construction of the light bridges, has the school enhanced the student experience when it could have enhanced everyone’s? Converting the value attached to one person’s well-being versus another’s makes for tricky calculus in discerning the net effect of the University on the people living beside it.

Is the university’s role, as a private institution, to pursue what it sees as its own best interests? In a way, yes. If the university does not maintain its image as a safe and enriching place of learning, then it will lose its authority—and accordingly the power and resources—allow it to make a positive impact on its community.

Mehves Konuk

Standing on Ellis Avenue at midnight, I turned and looked at the light bridge surrounding me. The luminescence made the surrounding park appear blurred. In a way, the whole project has blurred the reality of the city for students. Now that the light bridge exists, one may pass north and south without worry. Maybe this is a bad thing. In plenty of places on the South Side, the worry is still real. This city is still dangerous. The light bridges in Hyde Park will not so much change the city as make it easier to ignore. Unfortunately, it seems the university may be using light to blind its own students.

by Kim Buisson

When you ask people what they are thankful for, they tend to be specific. When you ask them what they are thankful for on Thanksgiving Day at Valois on 53rd Street, they tend to be prolific. It was around 4pm and a dozen diners were sitting behind heaping trays of food. A bearded man spoke loudly to one of the restaurant owners about a recent picture of Obama on the wall, and though the owner stood far away, seemingly disinterested, he replied in a thick Greek accent that the President had stopped by the joint during his last visit to Hyde Park.

Since the majority of the cafeteria’s customers sat alone, the room was quiet, and unlike most other days at Valois, no children were present. A man and woman sat at a table near the counter. Their eyes were closed and they held hands above the trays in between them. They were saying grace.

A poster board boasting the Thanksgiving specials was hanging in front of the menu: roast turkey, baked ham, roast beef, or baked fish or chicken, with a choice of soup or salad, and a couple of sides, all for $8.95. Not bad considering what it would have cost me to fly home for this meal.

Veteran James, the bearded man, greeted me as I wandered past his table. I asked him what he was thankful for this Thanksgiving. Without contemplation, he promptly replied, “I am thankful for the Jesse Brown Medical Center taking care of my medical needs for the past seven years.”

A woman sitting a few tables away was vaguely gazing at the muted Dr. Phil on the television. She spoke quietly and told me her name was Linda. “I am thankful for the safety and health of my children,” she said. She paused. “And for my new job,” she added. I jokingly asked if there was anything for which she was not thankful; she smiled and answered with levity, “For not having a good man in my life.”

Fully clothed in University of Chicago paraphernalia, two students were eavesdropping at the next table.  They were international relations students, and in unison said that they were “not thankful for North Korea right now.” They must have been alluding to the reckless artillery attack it carried out against South Korea last week.

Two other students were feasting in their winter coats at a table nearby. It was unclear whether the meal they were having was their breakfast or their dinner, for they seemed to have just rolled out of bed. In fact, one of them, Andreas, said he was thankful “for good nights of sleep and not thankful for the fucking flu.” His friend Jeremy was eager to say he was thankful for art and sternly added that he was unthankful for “the obligatory requirements of technology in our everyday life.”

In the corner by the entrance, a couple in their mid-20s, Nick and Jen, were dining. Jen, in a plaid flannel shirt, said she was not thankful for capitalism and globalization. Clearly she had another economic design in mind because she also said, “I am thankful for my dog Georgie, and for my bike, and decaf coffee.”

Her friend Nick declared, “I am not thankful for hate. That’s it.” He then earnestly added, “I am thankful for leg warmers, sweatpants, wind, earth, water, fire.”

In fact, at the risk of sounding trite, it seemed that many of the students hadn’t been thinking too much about the question.

An habitué of Valois, an old man with a hat, a cane, and a trench coat was making his way around the restaurant, saluting busboys and customers. All he said when asked what he was thankful for was, “I am just glad to be here!”

One of the employees was helping Ahmed and his wheelchair get settled at a table. Ahmed’s response to my question was: “Family. I am thankful for family. They’ve been so good to me this year. And the grace of God. It brought me this far. I am grateful for today. For talking with—what’s your name?—for talking with you, Kim. Did you write that down? Talking with Kim? I’ve been through thirteen surgeries. Now I am healthy and wise…I got that from the Bible, healthy and wise.” He also asked me to write down that he was not thankful for people not having health insurance in this country.

Elaine was serenely sitting alone and looking out onto the street. She told me she was thankful for the many Thanksgivings her son gave her and for all the places they had gone together. She explained, “Today he’s in California and his girlfriend has diabetes, but I am thankful I can help. I am thankful I can sit here and enjoy this meal. For all that I have. For my apartment. And everyday, I praise the Lord, the Holy Spirit. I am thankful for the past and for the present. And I am thankful for you asking me this question!”

A woman and her son overheard my conversation with Elaine, with whom I was speaking loudly, since she was hard of hearing. She came up to me and said, “I have things to be grateful for. Will you write them down?” I nodded. “To be alive! That’s a great thing! To be able to eat and pray. I’ve had problems with gastric reflux and I was in the hospital, unable to eat. And being here now…” She paused and laid her hand on my shoulder. “Being able to eat is a great thing.”

by Mehves Konuk

Last April was a hard month for Cindy Agustin. Despite massive protests, the State of Arizona passed immigration reforms that the University of Chicago College fourth-year sees as discriminatory. Perhaps worse, Congress voted down the DREAM Act, a bipartisan piece of legislation for which she had been advocating since high school. By the end of September, though, Agustin, the founder of the University of Chicago Coalition for Immigration Reform (UCCIR) had something to cheer about: a statement written and released on behalf of the Uof C administration by Dean of Students Kimberly Goff-Crews stated, “All students who apply, regardless of citizenship, are considered for admission and for every type of financial aid that the University offers.”

Agustin grew up in a Latino neighborhood in southwest Chicago. From childhood onwards, she met a large array of immigrants, with and without papers, and was increasingly moved by the hardships of adapting to life in an utterly foreign metropolis. There are two million undocumented minors in the United States, and each year 65,000 graduate from high schools and are thrust into a unique and devastating form of political limbo. English is their primary language and their closest friends and family members are here, but the vast majority of colleges will not accept them, health insurance and drivers licenses can be denied them, and they live with the constant threat of deportation to countries they may not even remember living in.

Upon matriculating to the UofC, Agustin encountered several undocumented students at the University and noticed that there was virtually no campus-wide dialogue about the issue. In response, she and a small cadre of interested undergraduates attended a rally for comprehensive immigration in Washington. “We came back wondering about the next big issue to tackle, what could we do locally that could yield real results?” Through conversations with University and high-school students, the UCCIR determined that a public statement of support by the University administration could have enormous ripple effects.

For Agustin and her organization, this public articulation of a long-standing policy represented a major breakthrough. After months of effort, the UofC would become one of a few universities to openly enable undocumented students to attend.

In clarifying its position regarding undocumented students, the UofC, which has a tradition of maintaining political neutrality on even the most extreme issues, inadvertently weighed in on a debate that grows both more ugly and more important by the day. It should hardly be worth consideration that a private university, which, even in the midst of the lingering recession has a multibillion-dollar endowment, would choose to cultivate the best student body it can find. But the statement had barely been made before it became clear that many Americans and even other centers of higher learning flatly disagree with that policy.

Less than a week after UofC’s public acknowledgement, Georgia announced that its five most-selective public universities would not accept undocumented students at all. The Board of Regents, the supervisory council for the state’s education system, issued a series of terse, if rational explanations. The purpose of a public university is presumably to educate a state’s citizens in an effort to improve their collective quality of life. No university is immune to the recession, and in a desperate attempt to cut costs, severe scrutiny has been placed on the students that, in the minds of many money-conscious (and perhaps economically embittered) Americans, simply should not be there. As some see it, these students’ parents broke the law, never paid into the system, and now seek to utilize some of this country’s most expensive public services.

The DREAM Act, Agustin says, provides a practical answer that should satisfy both sides of the aisle. It allows people who entered the country illegally before the age of six and have resided here for at least five years to obtain citizenship through two years of college or military service—achieving core liberal aims of incorporating neglected demographics into society while assuring conservatives that the passage into full civil standing will not be a free one. But today’s entrenched partisan divide has made even that seemingly natural consensus impossible.

When asked before the election what the best action a person could take to impact this unanswered crisis, Agustin said, “Honestly, the big thing right now is to vote. The senator we send from Illinois will vote on issues like the DREAM Act and Comprehensive Reform for the next six years.”

Last Tuesday, the late-night verdict showed victories for a number of immigrant candidates, but a decided loss for the undocumented. Nikki Haley, the governor-elect of South Carolina, is the daughter of Sikh immigrants from India, future-Floridian Senator Marco Rubio’s background is proudly Cuban, and the nation added two Latino governors. All of these candidates achieved victory, however, by running on unambiguously anti-immigrant platforms. Closer to home, Agustin’s fears were realized with the election of Mark Kirk, who promised point-blank during his campaign to vote against the DREAM Act. A journey that a significant number of Americans made unknowingly as children will continue to define them into adulthood. For undocumented minors across the country, the prospect of a future with full, guaranteed rights is a dream that has just been indefinitely deferred.

Many Ivy League universities have publicly endorsed the DREAM Act, but the UofC, arguably the most eminent school in a city with the second largest Mexican population and third largest Hispanic population in the country, has chosen not to make a direct political commitment. It simply reiterated a policy intended (albeit problematically) to be apolitical, aimed only at keeping a broad application pool, and thus a high quality of ideas fostered by its community. That this quietest of commitments stands against the political rhetoric of one of the country’s most important debates says something important and sad about the level of that debate. Hopefully it says it loud enough.

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.

by Andrea Rummel

My heartbeat swells quickly to the rhythm of the saxophone. I am in an apartment near 55th and Everett, praying I don’t knock any of the thousands of art pieces down to the ground. Alice Scott is showing us around her home, and with each step through the old wooden doorways, paintings, figurines, dioramas, and masks appear and disappear back into the depths of her home. “These are all things that remind us of something,” she says over the music, gesturing vaguely behind her. Soft murmurs and firm nods follow, as everyone in attendance seems to remember something.

A conceptual installation artist, a South Shore government ethics activist, and a first-year University of Chicago student are among the hundred or so guests who crowded onto trolleys for the sixth annual Collectors’ Home Tour, run by Diasporal Rhythms, an organization comprised of African Diaspora art collectors. Earlier this morning, at the tour’s commencement, the organization’s logistics chair Cynthia Bowman speaks to me between hugging her Diasporal Rhythm friends. “Oh, we have been working for 20 hours a week since August 3 or 4 for this day. I hope it’s good–if it is, put my name on it!” she laughs.

During the 40-minute tour of the Scott residence, the 35 guests in the first group play a careful game, walking, peering, and sharing their thoughts. In her den, Scott proudly turns on a light-up plaque of an African king, which is actually a Budweiser advertisement, but then quickly moves on to her masks from Mali, Burkina Faso, and Ghana. In her dining room, she points to shiny translucent statues of African-American men and women in a mirrored armoire and explains, “We got these at a flea market! Aren’t they great?”

At the end of the tour she introduces Nigerian-born artist Dayo Laoye, who talks about his sketches, charcoal drawings, ceramics and oil paintings hanging on the walls around us. “My works here are of Ashanti princesses, Yoruba drummers, lovers…anything…but I am mostly stimulated by music.” Laoye points to a speaker playing peppy jazz tunes that seem to have gotten louder since we arrived.  “Mr. and Mrs. Scott love the unusualness of art. They love what catches their mind,” He leads a few of us to a framed sketch of continuous, thin black strokes that roughly resemble a wind instrument. It hangs prominently on the wall of a hallway. “They are the ones who pick these crumbles of drawings on my studio floor, grab it up and frame it here.” Laoye pauses, “There is a simplicity in the pieces. See this sculpture? It is made of few materials, yet means something so symbolic to the people who made it and now means something to the Scotts. There is a complexity there as well.”

With one last glance at the elephant foot footstool beside the door, our group hops on its transport for the day, a stately trolley—jovial driver included. We pass around the provided boxed lunches and crack open lemonades and sodas. As we drive by a small outdoor sculpture exhibition, the curious gasps are just as loud as the splitting aluminum.
We arrive at the McCoy residence, greeted by Patric McCoy in an orange tunic. As soon as he welcomes us into his home, a guest knocks down a framed drawing—one of the 1,100 pieces McCoy has accrued over 43 years. Everyone stares, while I breathe a sigh of relief knowing I won’t be the first one to cause any damage. McCoy continues speaking. Unlike the Scotts, McCoy has organized his works in thematic clusters. Near the front door, there are images of eyes. In the bathroom, the artwork has to do with flowers. One side of the hallway is covered in illustrations of men and the other side in women, because “men and women are always looking at each other,” he says.
Here the art is overwhelming, splaying like ivy over all available planes, and McCoy loves it that way. “The whole notion of displaying a painting by itself on a white wall isn’t always the best. I really want people to see all of this and let them focus on what they want. You’ll be drawn to something at first, and you can move to the next thing after that. I call it a ‘visual gumbo.’ I’m giving you a variety.”

The ingredients in the collection are produced by around 300 living artists, most of whom are African-Americans from Chicago. He advises the collectors in the group, “Get what moves you and what touches you. There are so many visual artists in this area, in our midst, and they just get overlooked. We just don’t see it. But we need to.”
I meander around his home, sometimes discussing a piece with a fellow guest and other times venturing on my own. I keep forgetting that I’m in someone’s home, not a gallery. This afternoon has made it clear how blurry the line between the two can be.

“Art is durable,” says McCoy. As long as their art lasts, I have a feeling these Chicago collectors will continue to open their doors to show curious visitors their collections, displayed according to their tastes, around their musings, and above their kitchen sinks. “Remember when that drawing fell? I didn’t get flustered. You know all those paintings from the Middle Ages? They used to be in castles, hanging next to torches in damp basements. Only now have we begun putting them in glass, but there’s no need to.  Art lasts!”