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Just west of Torrence Avenue, 134th Street acts as a divide. To the south, the fringes of a junkyard gradually merge with warehouses and factories. Some of the street signs are hand-painted. There are cattails and prairie grasses that soar 12 feet into the air. A few feet away, a rusted-out shell of a car frame sits among tree trunks, its seats mustard-yellow. Deer tracks sidestep the jagged pieces of metal that protrude through the snow—remnants of long-gone industry. Coyotes and dogs pick their way through the discarded boats from the neighboring Calumet River.

To the north, Hegewisch Marsh stretches off into the distance. Given its polluted state, the wildlife doesn’t seem to notice where the nature reserve ends and the abandoned block to the south begins. Deep in the marsh, the only sign of the city is a deep rumble of distant traffic and the occasional whistle of a freight train. Soon the whistling trains, howling canines, and fragile snatches of birdsong will likely be accompanied by the not-so-distant refrain of hollow-point bullets.

On January 5, the board of the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago (MWRD) held a meeting regarding the future of a plot directly across the river from the marsh. The MWRD voted five-to-four to issue a 39-year lease to the Chicago Police Department for a site near 2025 E. 134th Street. Using money from a federal narcotics forfeiture fund, the department intends to build a new training facility that will include an outdoor gun range.

The Metropolitan Water Reclamation District is an independent governing and taxing body in Cook County. The MWRD, which treats wastewater and controls stormwater for several million people, owns several thousand acres in the Calumet region. In recent decades, it has managed the Tunnel and Reservoir Plan, better known as the Big Tunnel Project—a multi-billion-dollar network of tunnels and reservoirs meant to improve floodwater management and reduce sewage pollution of local waterways. This most recent decision signals a big change.

In recent months, the proposed gun range has faced opposition from various environmental groups who argue that the noise of gunfire will disrupt both visitors and endangered birds at the marsh. The groups are concerned that the gun range will be too close to the marsh, which is in the process of being restored as part of the mayor’s Millennium Reserve Project. Despite the Millennium funding, the proposed range has now received Mayor Emanuel’s public support. Emanuel maintains that the facility is not “in contradiction to what we’re trying to do in Millennium.”

But in the Calumet region of Chicago’s Southeast Side, it wouldn’t be unusual for the city to renege on its promises. The forces of industry, commerce, and local government have quite literally reshaped the earth here, draining wetlands and displacing neighborhoods with impunity. Even today, the power politics of Cook County are clear enough: cops trump birds.

More troubling than this, the surrounding neighborhoods and the people who live in them seem to matter less to officials than the wetlands and the ecotourists they are intended to draw. Tom Shepherd, a lifelong resident of the area and longtime activist with the Southeast Environmental Task Force (SETF), opposes what he sees as a more general disregard for the Southeast Side: “Some people are of the opinion that because we are largely contaminated that they can come down here and locate any sort of dirty business down here. We’re trying to maintain a reasonable standard of living.” Shepherd worries that the gun range symbolizes a lack of commitment to the environmental restoration promised by the Millennium Reserve Project.

The space near 2025 E. 134th Street was last used by a contractor working on the Big Tunnel during the early 2000s. Today, the site is marked as a green space as part of the Calumet Area Land Use Plan, adopted by the Chicago Plan Commission in March of 2004. This plan seeks to promote the redevelopment of underused industrial spaces and restore drained wetland basins, forests, and historic prairies while linking these sites to existing conservation lands, such as Wolf Lake and the Indiana Dunes region

This plan was supported by—among others—the city and state government, various Aldermen, the Army Corps of Engineers, the Forest Preserve District, and the MWRD, with the consultation of the Openlands Project and the SETF. The more recent Millennium Reserve Project, unveiled by Governor Quinn and Mayor Emanuel in December, is an attempt to facilitate the accomplishment of the Calumet Area Land Use Plan goals. Several million dollars of federal funding have been earmarked to push ahead with the marsh restoration.

Despite its isolation and relative underuse, the site near 2505 E. 134th Street is far from pristine. Ringed on three sides by capped landfills, massive terraced mountains of the city’s garbage, it has been indirectly or directly polluted for years. Terrance O’Brien, chairman of the MWRD, noted that an environmental investigation of the property “revealed the presence of soil and groundwater contamination,” including semi volatile organic compounds and metals.

O’Brien, who voted for the proposed facility, points out that the lease would require the City to monitor groundwater at the site and prevent further contamination. “There will be improvement to the quality of the land,” he claims.

When asked about alternative locations for the gun range, O’Brien emphasized that this site was the only one offered. As for the possibility of a suburban range, O’Brien said that the CPD wanted a facility within city limits “to prevent excess travel by their officers for training.”

The department’s supposed concern with travel costs is belied by the chosen site’s isolation; the site at 2025 E. 134th Street is located over 20 miles south of the police academy at 1300 W. Jackson Boulevard, roughly the same distance from the academy as suburban Downers Grove. But the proposed site seems to be supported by both municipal bureaucrats and workaday cops.

The webmaster of the blog “Second City Cop,” an anonymous Chicago police officer, sees a clear need for an outdoor range: “The ranges we have are literally gas chambers—when they’re up and functional.” The blogger writes, “it’s near impossible to run 12,000 officers [through] a suburban range,” especially when those suburban communities have to train their own police forces.

”Second City Cop” also claimed that noise from the site would be negligible, and agreed with other online commentators who had argued that, in light of the recent legalization of handgun ownership in the city, the range should be accessible to civilians: “[The range] would probably end up paying for itself in short order.” As it stands, the site will only serve the CPD, Homeland Security, and possibly suburban police departments.

Speaking on behalf of several officials in the mayor’s office, city spokesperson Eve Rodriguez would not provide <i>the Chicago Weekly</i> with information on projected noise levels from the facility or comment on the possibility of an alternative site, noting that the training facility was still being developed. Like O’Brien and the “Second City Cop” blogger, she underscored the need for an outdoor facility.

But among the critics of the site, no one seems to oppose an outdoor range in general. “I see the need for an outdoor firing range,” said MWRD board member Debra Shore, who voted against the lease proposal. But they also stress that the proposed location is an important habitat for migratory birds. When the police only offered one site, the MWRD found that its hands were tied.

In April, the MWRD asked the Illinois Department of Natural Resources to carry out a survey of the area’s wildlife. Six black-crowned night herons—an endangered species—were identified. Because they found no nests, the state did not register an objection to the project. However, the survey also noted that a longer-term, specialized study would be needed in order to determine the impact that gun noise might have. According to Carolyn Marsh of the Audubon Society, during a recent Christmas bird count two bald eagles were spotted. While no longer endangered, the bald eagle is protected under the Migratory Bird Act Treaty. Without thorough, extended sound study, no one can predict how these birds will be affected.

Some wonder why the gun range site is no longer slated for restoration. “It is pretty remote, and it’s pretty degraded. But parts of it have vegetation and could be restored,” said Shore. Since the police have taken an interest, the original restoration plan appears to have been abandoned, and the range seems increasingly like a foregone conclusion. At this stage, three more City Council committees will review the proposal before the full council votes. Spokesperson Rodriguez estimates that this will take roughly four months. Although the lease may be rejected or curtailed at one of the upcoming stages, Shore seems resigned to the gun range: “Each step of the way, I think it’s going to get harder.”

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Roughly two blocks south of 135th, a pirate sculpted from scrap metal points the way to the M&M Windjammer, a nautical-themed bar which overlooks the Calumet River. In January, the docks of the river are flanked by tarp-covered boats and an unlit neon palm tree stapled to a telephone pole. Just across the water, behind the snowy bluffs of a capped landfill, lies the gun range site.

Inside the Windjammer, no one particularly seems to care about the gun range. Squiggy, a man playing video poker at a machine near the door, knew that the range was coming, but not when. “I go shooting, too,” he said, before turning back to his video poker machine.

Neighborhoods like South Deering and Hegewisch grew up around factories and railroads. Although the area had long supported a variety of industrial uses, by the mid-twentieth century, US Steel and other steelworks had become the region’s economic base. But during the 1970s and ’80s, the American steel industry collapsed, and people began to leave.

Nowadays, according to the Encyclopedia of Chicago, the economy in Hegewisch is heavily dependent on casinos across the Indiana border. Tom Shepherd of the SETF has seen the area change: “Wisconsin Steel, Republic Steel, Acme Steel are all gone,” he notes. Other companies, including Pullman Locomotive, Electro-Motive Diesel, and Sherwin-Williams, have also shut down or moved, taking with them thousands of jobs.

Although the steel mills have mostly left, traces of them remain. In the Calumet Region, what at a distance might be meadow turns out to be a junkyard, and ragged forests cloak the detritus of heavy industry.

About a mile north of 2025 E. 134th Street lies the 87-acre Lake Calumet Cluster, chosen by the EPA as a Superfund Redevelopment site in 2000. Slag dumping and other industrial practices left a robust mix of contaminants in the cluster, including lead, chloroform, PCBs, and arsenic. The Dutch Boy Superfund site (described in an EPA fact sheet as a “former lead and lead-based paint manufacturing facility”) is also nearby.

Across the Indiana border, industrial suburbs that were once beacons of progress (Josef Stalin proudly boasted that the city of Magnitogorsk’s production output was equal to Gary) now command six EPA National Priorities List sites within a radius of roughly two miles. Shepherd himself first got involved in SETF while opposing the use of a Waste Management-owned incinerator to burn hazardous materials; these actions, though in violation of the company’s permit and eventually discontinued, were clearly in keeping with historical precedent.

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Traveling through this region, it takes a great deal of faith in the power and virtue of government to imagine something like the Millennium Reserve succeeding. Nature has returned to the area by default rather than by design.

A few miles east of Lake Calumet, Wolf Lake spills out across the Indiana border. While Lake Calumet has been radically expanded, contracted, alkalified, and acidified by over a century of changing industrial interests, Wolf Lake is relatively healthy—at least where it isn’t crossed by I-90 or filled in with ferrous slag. Power lines and smokestacks jut out above its eastern shore, but on the relatively bucolic Chicago side, a whiting of swans has settled near a cluster of ice fishing shanties.

A few ice fishermen watch the swans, but most focus on drilling through the surface and dropping in their lines. One fisherman, bundled up in arctic exploration gear, hadn’t heard anything about the range. “I’m not from around here,” he said, turning back towards the lake. Startled by encroaching humans, the swans scatter, settling a few hundred yards away. The fishermen keep drilling.

The city hopes to create such a scene in the marshlands, but it’s unclear whether this kind of tranquility can exist with a gun range next door.

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.”

To say that 1919 was a bad year would be to undersell it. Having lost 150,000 men in the killing fields of Europe, Americans started the interwar years with a slumping economy overseen by a sickly president. African-American soldiers returned to a nation that expected them to sit down now that they had successfully saved democracy for France. That year’s World Series proved that the American Pastime could be rigged. It was also, incidentally, the year when drinking your troubles away became a crime.

Reading through “Red Summer” by Cameron McWhirter is to watch the worst of America on a parade that pitilessly refuses to end. Dispensing taut, no-nonsense prose, the veteran Wall Street Journal reporter marches us through the most public racial atrocities to occur that year across the country. McWhirter’s narrative begins—as stories of this vile American vintage inevitably must—in the Jim Crow South, but unlike other accounts it does not remain confined there. It is a catalogue of savagery that takes care to include the whole Union, from our nation’s capital to flat, pacific Nebraska. Out of the ten locales, Chicago gets the most ink. Of all the violence that that sanguinary summer brought—the hangings, stonings, burnings, shootings, often in combination—the conflagration that broke out on the South Side was to become the symbol of the rotten state of race relations in America at large.

So why, as the Chicago Defender presciently put it the preceding spring, was “The Land of Lincoln and Grant stepping into the same column with Georgia and Mississippi?” McWhirter traces the origins of the smoldering tension to sudden changes in the city’s population. In the late 19th century, a flood of European immigration divided Chicago into a series of cantonized neighborhoods, separated by culture and ethnicity. By 1890, 40 percent of the city was foreign-born. The majority of this new wave of immigrants worked in factories and slaughterhouses that, with the dawning of the progressive era, were increasingly unionized. After a certain Archduke caught a bullet in Sarejevo, war ended the European influx. The needs of burgeoning industry were not sated, so factories began to look to black Southerners.  With the promise of employment, the Great Migration picked up speed. African-Americans, fleeing the legal inequality and impromptu pogroms of the Deep South, put up with wages and conditions that would have set Europeans striking.

As a result, industries used them to undermine unions, which usually excluded black workers. This tactic gave ordinarily fractious ethnic groups a common scapegoat for their woes. Gangs quickly formed.

The city’s black population was forced to inhabit derelict, overpriced housing, where landowners were able to exploit their obvious lack of options.  Desperation to quit these depressed areas led African-Americans south and fed white paranoia about the coming black “invasion.” McWhirter offers us glimpses into the racist Hyde Park-Kenwood Association, which winked at the fire bombing of black homes, browbeat realtors, and held posh meetings where leaders would spout vainglorious slogans like “They Shall Not Pass.” At the time, the phrase was meant to evoke the noble act of holding the line against the Huns at Verdun. It now reads like it’s been cribbed from some crackpot, sinister Gandalf.

After Eugene Williams’s body was recovered from the lake, witnesses identified the man who had thrown the rock and a crowd arrived to demand his arrest. When white police officers refused, a riot broke out. A number of whites were beaten, and not long after, rumor spread that there had been black-on-white drownings. The reprisals would rock the city, white gangs of up to a thousand men would walk into black neighborhoods and mercilessly attack everything they came across.

McWhirter’s chronicle of the known atrocities is appropriately exhaustive, the staggering number of incidents he manages to unearth from the historical record about Chicago alone is beyond dispiriting. A few low-lights include: 40 white youths sacking a South Side grocer and then gathering round to drown an aging black man in a sink, a black teen hauled off his bicycle and shot 14 times in retaliation for a baseless rumor, 200 men descending on a single black man to stab him to death, and a series of attacks on hospitals to ambush recovering victims. Then there was the wanton property destruction. Mobs gathered to stone and then loot black houses and a systemic arson campaign incinerated whole streets.

It was only at this point, this Nero-like nadir, with much of the South Side actually in flames, that Mayor Thompson decided that the situation was out of his control and called for 6,000 state troops to restore the peace. These disciplined young men are among the few Caucasians in the entire book that don’t come across as utterly contemptible. They brought order with an iron fist, but unlike this book’s invariably venal policemen they also raise their bayonets to protect black women and stop mobs from stringing men up from telephone poles. Throughout the Red Summer, President Wilson was too busy saving Europe to so much as comment on the carnage in his own country.

Few history books can make it into print (assuming they bother) these days without the obligatory cache of photos nestled inside. Accompanying Red Summer are stills from Chicago showing demolished South Side houses, a frenetic white mob storming a home, and rioters bludgeoning a man to death with bricks.  But it’s the photo of the lynching of Willie Brown that finally haunts you. A group of 40 normal-looking Nebraskan males are huddled close together, grinning broadly, as a human body burns in the foreground.

McWhirter tries valiantly to keep this book from being the most singularly depressing text you’ve ever set eyes on. In between the numerous lynchings he asks the reader to imagine, he discusses the rise of the NAACP and how the Red Summer fueled the tireless advocacy of leaders like Ida B. Wells and W.E. B. Dubois. In a coda, McWhirter serendipitously finds in rural Georgia a descendant of a man whose gruesome lynching he has described. McWhirter then reflects on the immense progress implied by the fact this man could reach the highest levels in the state that butchered his family. These silver linings, needless to say, feel more than a little bit forced. The anti-lynching legislation, for all the advocacy and evidence, had to wait another 40 years. The fact that 80 years later his grandson could live with basic dignity does not feel like a genuine coup for human decency.

It’s particularly jarring to be trudging this through this historical horror show, while in the background on CNN politicians are traipsing through cornfields waxing less-than-poetic about American exceptionalism. The statement that the United States is this orb’s greatest democracy with its most humane, compassionate people should be treated like the dangerous proposition that it is. On one of the most crucial tests of the 20th century we failed or, in the more alarming leap, were average. The point of contemplating an unpardonable past is to ensure no part of its legacy touches. The fact that, as of last year, Chicago remains the nation’s third-most segregated city means Cameron McWhirter’s book should be considered required reading. The dividing lines were drawn in red.

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.

(Justin Bianchi, ArtistJ/flickr)

95th and Dan Ryan is the end of the line. The farthest point south on the map of the ‘El,’ it is also where Michael Pleasance was killed in 2003. He was unarmed and standing in place when a police officer shot him in the head.

On New Year’s Day, one of the many Occupy offshoots, Occupy the South Side, organized a demonstration at the ‘El’ stop to protest police brutality and intimidation of minorities. Occupy the South Side was acting in solidarity with their counterparts in Oakland, California, where a similar protest was held.

“Are you here for the action?” Mark Clements wanted to know. It was hard to tell which of the people standing in the station on New Year’s Day were there for the protest, waiting for a bus, or just standing around. After exchanging a few glances, a small circle formed and the logistical details were hashed out. The protestors split into two groups, on either side of the station, and joined the shuffling crowd coming up from the south.

“Indict, convict, send the killer cops to jail. The whole damn system is guilty as hell,” they shouted in unison, carrying banners and picket signs. One sign read “DON’T TASE ME BRO.” Among the 60-plus protesters were a middle-aged radical bookseller, a twenty-something bakery worker and political activist, and a street preacher. The demonstrators huddled close by the walls of the entrance to battle the freezing temperatures and keep a corridor open for CTA customers to pass.

“We are not here to be disrespectful,” a woman representing Occupy the South Side declared, talking into a microphone. “We are here to be powerful.” She spoke out against the violence and racial profiling committed by Chicago police, and read out a proposed New Year’s resolution for law officers, that they might protect and serve without torture or terror, and report incidences of police misconduct without delay.

Clements stepped up to tell his story. As a teenager, he was beaten by police until he confessed to a crime he didn’t commit. After 28 years in prison, his conviction was finally overturned. A little later, Emmett Farmer took the mic. His son was shot by a police officer last June. “We want justice! It’s on video, it’s on tape. We gotta stand together.”

The protesters demanded more accountability among those on the force. One woman asked the police to adopt the slogan that the city asks its residents to abide by: “If you see something, say something.” If they ask non-uniformed citizens to “snitch on our neighbors to make our communities safer,” she wondered why law enforcement officers aren’t reporting wrongdoing among their ranks.

Surveillance was a common thread in their speeches, as they called for greater vigilance among everyday Chicagoans to halt the abuse. It’s not without complications, though—according to one speaker from the Campaign Against Police Sexual Assault, when a woman recorded her discussion with two investigators on her BlackBerry to support a sexual harassment complaint against another officer, she was charged—but not convicted—with criminal eavesdropping. The case underscores the conflict between the watchful eye of the law and the citizen-watchdogs who denounce abuses of power, which the Occupy movement as a whole has brought to the fore, Images of clashes with riot police from the Occupy demonstrations around the country have become ubiquitous, capturing the misuse of force in high resolution.

As the rally wrapped up, a leader thanked the Chicago Police Department for not arresting them. A few officers stood in a line, watching the protesters disperse.

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.

*   *   *   *

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!”

*   *   *   *

“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.”

Since winter is fast approaching, Ruyter—a lively octogenarian and Hyde Park resident—decided soup would be the best donation she could give in support of the movement. To help protesters battle the cold weather and boost spirits,  she prepared several Thermoses full of homemade soup, and hopped on a bus headed downtown to hand out the hearty sustenance.  Ruyter explained her political motivation for taking up her ladle for the cause to a group of about ten volunteers, “the current situation is untenable, and it is appropriate for somebody to speak out.”

In no time, Ruyter’s friends and neighbors got wind of the project. Some, no longer spring chickens, sympathized with the demonstrators and wanted to help. “My bones can’t take that cold weather,” explained Cecilia Briscle, a volunteer who lives in the same building as Ruyter, but the Soup Brigade gave her an accessible way to be involved in the movement.

The volunteers hope to make regular soup deliveries to the protesters, but in order to lay the logistical groundwork they will need lots of cooks in the kitchen. That means that anyone—master chef or not—can be useful. Newcomer Barbara Roy described herself as “no soup-maker,” but was still eager to help make and transport it.

The Soup Brigade has already attracted attention from the local media and news of their work has spread beyond the neighborhood. Donations have come not only from the local grocer, Hyde Park Produce, but Ruyter received a call from a farmer in Wisconsin wanting to deliver produce for the cause.

This Thursday though, the mood at the meeting was not self-congratulatory, but rather ambitious for further success. Ruyter, a petite but commanding woman, projected warmth as she spoke with volunteers before the start of the meeting, and doled out thanks and hugs along with samples of her soup. One spoonful alone conjured up the sensation of being tucked warmly indoors, safe from any flurry stemming from political upheaval—or simply cold weather.

Jacqueline Friduss/Rachel Wiseman

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“It is clear how you feel about the new front desk staff,” repeated Eli Ungar last Tuesday in the Kenwood Academy auditorium. Ungar, partner and principal of Antheus Capital LLC, directed his comment to a section of riled up Regent’s Park residents. On October 27, the building, located at 50th Street and Lake Shore Drive, was sold by Crescent Heights to Antheus, a New Jersey-based developer locally represented by its affiliate, MAC Property Management. The $160 million deal had been in the works since late August, according to Crain’s Chicago Business, but what that sale meant for the building’s employees remained unclear until 6pm on Thursday, October 27. At that time, Peter Richter, who had been the building manager for the past 23 years, carried his things out the front door.

“He exited the premises, and had a tear in his eye as he walked out,” recalls Brian Phillips, a doorman who has worked at Regents Park for five years. In spite of this bad omen, Phillips and Wes Allen, the other doorman on duty, remained at their posts until something strange occurred: a van of unfamiliar uniformed staff arrived at the building.

“There were quick introductions, some very friendly-seeming guys, and the next moment we were being bombarded with questions,” says Allen, who has worked at Regents Park for 19 years. “’How much does a cab cost to downtown? What does this button do?’” Phillips shakes his head, continuing, “I’ve always tried to show that I’m excellent at what I do here. But then a light bulb went off—I realized they were trying to get a crash course.”

At 7:50pm, the two doormen got a phone call from Richter. “He said that if we hadn’t gotten a job offer from MAC, we should come back the next morning at 8am to talk to Crescent Heights.” When they started to leave, one of the new arrivals tried to stop them, imploring, “Don’t go!” Then, Phillips recalls with disgust, he asked them if they liked the nearby gelato and offered some coupons in exchange for a lesson on how to operate the front desk.

The Crescent Heights employees returned the next morning to find their posts at the front desk filled by strangers, and a stack of papers notifying them that MAC would not take on their current contracts. Through September and October, Crescent Heights had given their employees only vague answers about what would happen to their jobs after ownership of the building was transferred. According to employee accounts of the events leading up to October 27, representatives from Crescent Heights told workers that MAC had “accepted” their contracts and that they would “probably” be extended—though, they maintained, “they didn’t know” for sure.

However, after the keys were turned over to MAC, about 50 employees were let go—including maintenance workers, security, garage attendants, and doormen. Coming in to work on the 28th, employees were met with a stack of dismissal letters. For some, those dismissal letters were the only form of notification they received. “I’m the bottom man here in terms of seniority,” Brian Phillips says, having worked for only five years at Regents. “But some of these guys put in 23 years and it was all taken from them in twelve hours.”

When Crescent Heights purchased the building from Clinton Management five years ago, the company decided to keep all the original staff. As a result, it was not anticipated that—as one resident calls it—a “hostile takeover” would occur. Although during this prior ownership transfer union members engaged Crescent Heights in collective bargaining, no such negotiations occurred between former employees and the new owners. MAC insists that it has fulfilled all contractual obligations with Crescent Heights—there was no clause in the buy-sell agreement that required the old employees to stay on at the building. Sister Mary Rosen, a longtime resident, expressed the views of many tenants when she told Ungar, “What’s legal is not always moral, and I don’t want to be complicit in a grave social injustice.”

On October 30, Regents Park residents—some of whom have lived there for three decades—came together in support of the terminated employees, flooding the lounge on the top floor. Over 90 percent of the buildings’ occupants signed a petition expressing their “disapproval of the unjust dismissals of [the] concierge, garage and maintenance staffs” who “have done an excellent job” and are viewed as “friends, confidants, and extended family members.” The petition calls for the reinstatement of fired staff, if MAC hopes to “maintain harmonious relationships with [its] residents.”

Antheus responded by flying Ungar out from New Jersey for the meeting at Kenwood Academy, where all the seats in the residents’ section were filled. The audience had to be reminded by Wallace Good, president of the Hyde Park Chamber of Commerce and moderator of the meeting, that Hyde Park has “a tradition of sitting discourse,” and that all questions should be held until Ungar had said his piece.

Ungar began with a brief history of Antheus’s rapid rise since 2002, emphasizing his organization’s humble origins—from managing one building to owning almost a third of the real estate units in Hyde Park—and its contributions to the neighborhood. “We actively support numerous community organizations, including this school,” Ungar began. “We’ve paid for many of the seats you are sitting in, and given scholarships to many students.” He made promises regarding various improvements to the building, insisting on his commitment to “preserving Regents Park as superlative.”  With regard to the staff overhaul, he maintained that his company “followed the letter of the law,” but that “this was a complicated decision and not one [the company] entered into lightly.” He gave examples of how Antheus has “reached out to many former employees” and tried to place them in positions at other MAC properties.

Phillips, the former doorman, shot up from his seat in the second row and had to wait for cheers to subside before addressing Ungar. “My call to the Algonquin was not returned,” he said. “I suspect it’s because of my pro-Union affiliation.” The audience erupted into boos, compelling Ungar to reassure Phillips that his calls would be returned. Ungar reemphasized that Antheus has been making an effort to help out the Crescent Heights employees: some had been offered jobs, while those living in Regents received three months of free rent. One former employee, German García, received the rent voucher and a new job offer, but he declined. The new position came with a lower wage.

Ungar’s repeated promise that “the new staff will do superbly” if the residents “give them a chance” was met with both outrage and mockery. Resident after resident emphasized the closeness of the Regents Park community, the trust that was built over the years, and the existence of an extended family in the building. “You’re not going to succeed until you return that goodwill,” said Marly Rosenbush, a longtime resident.

Other tenants tried to communicate the new staff’s incompetence, decrying the “foolishness” of the new staff who “run around like chickens with their heads cut off,” unable to operate the handicapped doors and failing to fix broken sinks. Ungar responded: “We have worked hard over the last week and a half to understand the operation of the front desk, and I think we’re getting better.” More boos filled the auditorium.

Whether or not the transition was illegal, it may prove to have been a bad business move. “We’re going to obliterate your ratings for Regents Park,” said two suit-sporting law and business school students, referring to the building’s Google reviews. “We won’t stop until we make sure this building is empty.”

Phillips and other members of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local One have been picketing every day outside the building since November 7. On Saturday morning, they were eating doughnuts and coffee—gifts from the residents. “You just missed it,” Phillips says, pointing to the backed up driveway. “Two elderly people crashed into the wall—you can see the dent there.” There was a delayed response time from emergency services, he says, adding, “The new staff gave the 5020-5050 S. Lake Shore Drive address, but the one normally given to emergency services is 5025 S. East End. Fire trucks and ambulances were circling around the building for a long time.” No one was hurt, but “imagine if it had been something more serious,” he tuts.

In response to a question over whether he thought Ungar would keep his word about the Algonquin job offer, Phillips shakes his head. Gesturing over to the building’s offices across the street, he claims, “They probably see me out here every day, and they don’t like my jacket.” Doug Ball, a SEIU union representative, adds that though the Algonquin has over 100 employees, only four of them belong to a union. “And that’s MAC’s only unionized location.”

Both SEIU Local 1, which represents the concierge, doormen, and maintenance, and Teamsters Local 727, which represents the garage attendants, plan to file charges against MAC for discriminating against unions in its hiring practices. Though the employees who were let go are both union and non-union, all of the new hires are “temporary employees hired through temporary firms,” according to Ball. “There’s not one union member in there.”

At Kenwood Academy last Tuesday, Ungar committed to responding to the residents’ demands within a week. Wednesday morning, picketers saw him speed off in a limo to the airport. As of press time, he still has not delivered a response about whether the old employees will be rehired.

Meanwhile, residents are fulfilling their promises: the online ratings for Regents Park have dropped, and community boards are buzzing with complaints, anecdotes, and open letters to Ungar. “We don’t need six large security guards to protect us from our FRIENDS,” one letter reads, referring to the security guards Antheus has hired to make sure the picketers don’t get rowdy. “Your security force does nothing other than intimidate residents from talking to, embracing, and supporting men that we consider family.” But from looking at the picket line, where  residents often stop for a hug or to talk, it’s clear that this family is doing its best not to be torn apart.

Disclosure: The author of this article is a resident of an apartment owned and managed by MAC.

Claire Hungerford & Verbonkos/flickr

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The battle is over. A war has been won. So announced Mari Gallagher, the social scientist whose landmark 2006 report on food access in Chicago coined the term “food desert.”

Gallagher defines a food desert simply as “a large geographic area with no or distant grocery stores.” But in recent years, the word has taken on a particular meaning, wrapped in the image of a poor, urban area where residents must travel for miles just to find a few vegetables. Residents of a food desert may have access to plenty of junk food, but they have almost no nearby access to food that is high-quality, healthy, and—above all—affordable. As a result, they are far more at risk for diseases such as obesity, diabetes, and cancer.

While food deserts remain a persistent problem in Chicago, the reality is not as grim as it seems. Gallagher’s latest report, released last month, contained a heartening and perhaps unexpected message: “As we mark the fifth year of our original report’s release, we realized it was time to retire the Food Desert awareness campaign. We feel the awareness war has been won, as evidenced by this week’s arrival of our nation’s First Lady.”

Gallagher and her research team are referring to Michelle Obama’s visit to Chicago’s “food summit” on October 25. Mayor Rahm Emanuel gathered up the First Lady, local urban farmers, grocery store CEOs and eight mayors from across the country to convene and discuss the problem of urban food deserts. The summit coincided with news that Chicago’s food desert has shrunk by 40 percent in the last five years. With so much attention from major politicians, it’s easy to believe that the first step in the fight against food deserts—raising awareness—has been won. But now that the food desert issue has come to the fore and the preliminary actions seem to be working, where does Chicago go from here?

The First Lady visited two very different locations on October 25: a newly expanded Walgreens on 75th Street and an urban farm in Bridgeport. At the Walgreens, she stood at a podium in front of the drug store’s new produce section and spoke to an audience of local, national, and corporate leaders on the issue of food access in poverty-stricken areas. Obama, whom the Chicago Sun-Times calls “the country’s most recognizable symbol of healthy living,” went on to visit the Iron Street Urban Farm for a tour of the facilities, but not before Rahm Emanuel, the man who invited her to the food summit, had some important announcements to make.

He declared that 17 new grocery stores would open in Chicago, and 19 Walgreens would expand to include a produce section. Most of the stores will be on the city’s South and West Sides, in areas like North Lawndale, West Pullman, Englewood, Bronzeville and Roseland. Walgreens claims that it will provide around 600 new jobs for the city in the next two years.

Why does the definition of a food desert center around the grocery store, and why was the opening of new grocery stores announced with such flourish? Large chain grocers can sell fresh produce at cheaper prices and higher quantities than local corner stores. High poverty rates are a major feature of food deserts—the USDA’s definition of food desert even includes a specification that at least 20 percent of the population must be under the poverty line. And while there may be many local corner stores in a food desert, these small shops are better equipped to sell highly-processed food with a long shelf life than produce, milk or meat, which all need to be sold and restocked quickly before they spoil.

What makes matters worse is that many shops that accept food stamp benefits are exactly these kinds of corner stores. There are 2,200 stores that accept food stamps in Chicago, but according to a 2010 WBEZ investigation, 30 percent of them are not grocers, but rather liquor stores, gas stations, a­­nd dollar stores. That means that those who can least afford the high costs of diseases connected to poor diet are also those who can only afford to shop at stores that stock unhealthier food.

The well-publicized meeting on October 25 was not the mayor’s first mention of the food desert problem, although it might be his most high-profile food access event to date. In June, one month after his inauguration, Emanuel convened six CEOs from companies like Walmart, Walgreens, and Save-a-Lot for his first food summit, a candid talk about why there weren’t more grocery stores in underserved communities, and how there could be.

Emanuel showed the CEOs a map of the city’s food deserts, studded with stars that represented “sites for food retail opportunity.” Concerns over the prospect of opening up new grocery stores included, “lack of transportation, security, real estate development and bureaucratic red tape,” according to a press release from the mayor’s office. Emanuel offered to fast-track permits, zoning, and licensing procedures for developments in designated food deserts. He said that if a company wanted to open multiple stores at the same time, they would only have to submit one general zoning request rather than one per store.

Emanuel’s strategy is clear: he can’t force corporations to open new grocery stores in food deserts, but he can give them incentives so that it’s worth their investment.

He sees his solution as a compromise that will allow both the mayor and the corporations to align their bottom lines, so that the stores will turn a profit and the city will see an increase in healthy food options.

“Although it’s morally motivating for me, they’re not in the moral business,” he said on a WBEZ radio program. “As one CEO said to me and I won’t say who, ‘Look, if you want to grandstand I’ll write you a check and I’ll be done with it.’ I said that’s not what I want. I want you to open open stores that serve people, create jobs and make money. I want you to make money.”

However, more will open up in the city than just Save-a-Lots and expanded Walgreens: the city has also taken steps to support urban agriculture. Kraft and Safeway agreed to commit $150,000 to pilot up to five new farmers markets in Chicago’s west side over the next two years, and Growing Power, the organization that runs the Iron Street Urban Farm, signed a memorandum of understanding with Walgreens and Aldi that will hopefully lead to locally-grown produce being sold in those stores.

Most significantly, in September, a new city ordinance passed that officially legitimizes urban farms in the zoning code. It eliminated many of the obstacles that large, commercial urban farms faced in order to grow their business. The ordinance increased the size limit on community gardens to 25,000 square feet, relaxed fencing and parking regulations, granted some produce sales in residential areas, and allowed the installation of hydroponic and aquaponic systems, as well as honey bees.

By promoting an increase in both grocery store chains and farmers markets in food desert areas, Emanuel has pushed together two very unlikely companions: major grocery store and pharmacy chains and urban farms. One operates on a huge scale and is profit-driven, while the other is hyper-local and propeled in large part by visions of social change. The two sides may be opposite in terms of aims and motivation, but for once, CEOs and CSAs are on the same team.

Just a month after the new city ordinance passed, on October 14, the first urban farm officially zoned as such opened in Englewood. Honore Street Farm, on the eponymous street between 58th and 59th streets, is still just a bare concrete lot, but as the first farm to open after the new ordinance, it represents a new beginning for urban farming.

The farm is part of Growing Home, an organization that provides transitional employment and job training to people whose trouble pasts make it difficult for them to find a job. Growing Home runs three certified organic farms in addition to the Honore Street site: Les Brown Memorial Farm in Marseilles, Illinois; Su Casa Market Garden in Back of the Yards; and the Wood Street Urban Farm, close to the Honore Street Farm in Englewood.

According to Harry Rhodes, executive director of Growing Home, setting up urban farms was not always easy. Wood Street Farm, for example, had to be zoned as a technical institute. “We had a lot of obligations that made getting the farm up and running difficult, including parking places, landscaping, and fencing,” he says over the phone. “This ordinance makes it easier and lessens the burden.”

Now urban farms can worry less if a new administration comes in that doesn’t care about urban agriculture, says Seneca Kern, the Community Outreach Organizer for Growing Home. “It’s not at their whim,” he says, “It’s in the books.”

I meet Kern in his job-training classroom at the Wood Street Farm. Founded in 2005, Wood Street is in the middle of a highly residential neighborhood. Houses line up block after block, and out of nowhere a patch of green appears, spanning two-thirds of an acre, surrounded by a chain-link fence. Inside, the hoophouses are filled with vibrant green lettuce and jewel-bright rainbow chard.

The visit to the Wood Street farm underscores what makes grocery stores and urban farms different in their approach and contributions to food access. Urban agriculture is very much rooted in its neighborhood, while many of these corporations have are headquartered outside of Chicago. Grocery stores and urban farms both provide jobs, but the farms organize educational events and community activism. The farm runs a market and holds movie nights, potlucks, cooking demos, tours to get people engaged.

“We see a lot of kids who come just to spend time here,” Kern says. “This is a real, direct solution.”

Kern himself was born in Englewood, and he remembers hating the wilted, sad little vegetables at the corner stores. So his grandmother, who grew up in Mississippi, would drive her grandkids all the way to Indiana to pick fruit straight off the vine.

“A lot of Southern folks did that,” Kern recalls. “I vividly remember it. My favorite was the grapes.”

But Kern’s take on Englewood’s food desert is unique. First of all, he says don’t call it a food desert. As Kern points out, it’s more of a “food swamp.”

“There’s food here,” he shrugs, “it’s just shitty.”

A quick tour of the area surrounding the Wood Street Farm perfectly illustrates his point. Just a short walk away from Wood Street is a corner store, with a big yellow sign in front that says it accepts LINK, the Illinois state food stamp card. A row of cereal boxes, as brightly colored and eye-catching as the rainbow chard on Wood Street, greets shoppers as soon as they come in. The aisles are filled with canned food, candy, soda, and the like. As for the produce offerings are concerned, the pickings are slim: one box of onions and a few potatoes, hidden in the corner.

Grocery stores isn’t a cure-all, Kern notes. As a kid, Kern didn’t mind the long drive to Indiana; for him, quality matters above convenience, and so he’s skeptical about how much Walmart and Walgreens can help.

“The grocery store can be just a bigger corner store,” he says. Even if the food desert completely disappeared according to the official statistics, there there would be, he thinks, “the same amount of crap food, but maybe it would be easier to get it. Sure, they could have a big parade and say food deserts are gone, but it wouldn’t be true.”

Corporate grocery stores are vital to increase broad access to fresh food in poor areas, many experts say, but they can’t stand alone. “They are part of the solution but not the only solution,” Rhodes acknowledges. A more holistic approach would include backyard gardens, community gardens, farm stands, and more. He also suggested that the mayor’s office should create a position for a food system and enterprise coordinator. Instead of running around different departments within the City Hall to try and find answers to their questions about permits and regulations, they could go to just one point person.

“We’re talking about changing local economies and investing in local economies,” he says. “Putting in a grocery store won’t solve all your problems.” Nevertheless, he admits, “It would just be ignoring reality to say that they’re not going to exist.”

Laure Dutirou, a volunteer at the 61st Street Farmer’s Market in Woodlawn, commented on the relationship between grocery stores and farmer’s markets. “They are complementary, they don’t exclude each other,” she said. “Let’s face it, not everyone can afford [farmers markets], especially here…we probably should have an Aldi right at the corner.”

As Emanuel said on Windy City Live, he’s not the first politician in the country to look at the food desert problem. What makes Chicago special is not that they’re the leader in any one field, but they’re exploring options in every field.

“What will be unique for Chicago,” he said, “is that…we’re bringing farmer’s markets, urban agriculture, and grocery stores all together, which is what no one has done before.”

Claire Hungerford

[Show as slideshow]

On October 13, Cecilia Butler spoke before the Chicago Transit Board for the second time in four months. Standing before the seven-member board, the 63-year-old woman repeated what they had already heard her say four times before, with few new changes: that the historic station house across the street from the Garfield Green Line stop could and should be a building operated by and for the community; that the old station house was a historic building and deserved recognition as such; and that she was willing to work with CTA and do whatever it took to make that happen. “Please give us this opportunity,” she said. “That’s all we ask. We’re willing to pay whatever it takes to renovate this location.”

And with that, without comment, the board moved on to the next speaker. Cecilia Butler, having spoken her mind before the board about the station house for the fifth time since 1995, leaned away from the microphone. Wearing a hat and coat to protect from the first cold day in over a week, Butler let the next speaker of the meeting’s public comments period finish before returning to her seat, one of a hundred in CTA’s second-floor boardroom.

The station house Butler is fighting for doesn’t leave much of an impression these days. Dwarfed by the Green Line tracks above it and the active station across from it, the 1892 station house is, for the most part, ignored or unseen. Its bay window has remained intact, crowned with a half-cone roof, though the station’s polychrome brickwork has been painted white, one of its small arched windows has been bricked in, and a pair of steel doors—locked—now marks the entrance.

When it opened on October 12, 1892, the building’s doors served as the gateway to the great parks of the city’s South Side: “The new station at Fifty-fifth street occupies a fine situation,” wrote the Chicago Daily Tribune, a day after trains began servicing the station. “Everywhere there is a profusion of trees and foliage. One may stand on the platform and look over the rural scene, whose picturesqueness is heightened by the beautiful boulevard which to the east curves gracefully and is lost in a wood of sturdy young oak trees, over the tops of which rise the domes and roofs of the World’s Fair buildings.” The dedication of the Columbian Exposition was nine days away, the grand opening of the fair to the public was six months away, and Washington Park—the 372-acre vision of Central Park architects Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux—was just two decades old.

By the turn of the century,  Washington Park was becoming a predominately African-American neighborhood. By 1950 it was 99-percent African- American and had grown to over 56,000 people. Right around the time Cecilia Butler was attending elementary school in the neighborhood, however, the people began to disappear. By 2010 the population had dropped below 12,000, and current data from the U.S. Dept. of Housing and Urban Development show that businesses have disappeared along with the population: the neighborhood has a business vacancy rate of 26 percent—three times that of neighboring Hyde Park.

As the neighborhood deteriorated, so did the Green Line that served it. In 1994, the entire length of the line was shut down for a 28-month renovation. That included talk of building “superstations,” which would have included shops, a bank, and even a daycare center, at both the Garfield and Pulaski stops. A 1995 Sun-Times story, written when construction of the superstation seemed imminent, quotes a younger Cecilia Butler as saying, “A change is coming to Washington Park.”

But the change didn’t happen. In an e-mailed statement, CTA, looking back on the superstation discussions, said that it “was a bit ahead of its time and there were no retail outlets interested in having their business be a part of the station renovations.” Unexpected expenditures in the Green Line renovation as a whole may also have played a role: the renovation project ultimately ran $100 million over budget, and the plans for a renovated superstation never materialized

“The community never envisioned what they built across the street,” said Butler in a phone interview. “We were still working on [the old historic location] and building up around it.” As a representative of the Greater Washington Park Development Corp., Butler came before CTA in 1995 with a unique plan for a “superstation,” to turn the historic station into a site where visitors could get information on the community and nearby museums.

With the superstation idea rejected, a new station on the north side of Garfield was completed in 2001. In December of that year the Commission on Chicago Landmarks designated the historic station a Chicago landmark, granting it legal protection as one of the oldest mass transit stations in the country.

A decade later, and the station house was still on Butler’s mind. Her vision for the building expanded in the mid-2000s, and what had once been envisioned as an information center developed into a community center with a “micro-library” offering coffee and Wi-Fi. Community members who work or used to work at WVON, an African-American talk radio station, have donated over a thousand books to the project in hopes of creating a public library in the neighborhood.

In 2009 Butler and her new vision for the building were given a swift response by the Transit Board: write a one-page business plan, figure out how to make your idea financially viable, and then get back to us. Undeterred, Butler founded the Washington Park Historical Society to consolidate support for the renovation of the station house. A year later and she was back before the board, presenting her idea and going on to meet with the board’s chairman.

Once again, however, no progress was made. On July 15, 2011, Butler made her fourth appearance before the Transit Board. In the following weeks she began discussing her plan and its logistics with CTA officials, going over its details and plan of execution until, on August 25, she received a letter from CTA’s director of infrastructure support services. Unbeknownst to Butler, the historic station house had served as a maintenance facility for Green Line rail staff since the station’s closure. “I thought that was insulting,” said Butler. “I just couldn’t understand.” CTA went on to inform Butler that its maintenance operations could not be relocated, but that it would work with her to find a new location for the historical society and the planned community center.

“The purpose of us being there,” said Butler, repeating a refrain she’s used many times in speaking to various CTA officials, “is because that’s a landmark. Give it to the community. The city named it as a historical location, so why shouldn’t the historical society be located there?” The Hyde Park Historical Society, she notes, has been able to work out a deal with Metra to rent a historic cable car building on Lake Park and 55th—why shouldn’t the Washington Park Historical Society be able to work out a deal with CTA?

Butler has offered to pay CTA for use of the station house, to cover the cost of renovating the building, and—after hearing of the agency’s use of the building as a maintenance storage space—to build a steel storage unit across the street, on the vacant land surrounding the current station or beneath the tracks that run over it. Cost, she says, is not an issue. Even after she was asked how she planned to maintain the facility once it was renovated, Butler maintained that “we have money, as an organization.” She would not specify how much capital the project had behind it, or where the money was coming from. Neither would she estimate how much the project would cost—she was last inside the building 15 years ago, and CTA, she says, will not let her and her organization back inside to evaluate its condition. And even though the station is located within the 47th and State TIF district, Butler says, “We don’t need a TIF to do what we’re trying to do.”

CTA, for its part, has consistently turned down her offer to build them a new maintenance facility. The agency responded to an inquiry about its rejection of Butler’s proposal by saying that the properties it presently owns “are being reviewed for possible transit-oriented development opportunities. Consequently we cannot use those properties for the needs of our maintenance operations.” It could be that CTA opposes her idea to refurbish the old station house on the south side of Garfield because they are planning to more thoroughly develop the north side of the street. Or, Butler’s proposal doesn’t constitute what the agency considers “transit-oriented development,” though their definition of what that means is hazy at best.

CTA noted in a statement that “transit-oriented development opportunities have greatly increased” since the failed superstations of the ‘90s. In 2008, the agency partnered with Chicago-based real estate firm Jones Lang LaSalle to develop land around stops throughout its system to help boost ridership and neighborhood economies. Currently, the firm is marketing a number of CTA stations for development—but the Garfield Green Line stop is not one of them. CTA, then, is at once opposing Butler’s proposition because it seeks to develop the land around the Garfield station, and doing nothing to develop that land.

“Transit-oriented development,” the agency wrote in another statement, “will position CTA as an anchor within communities and help attract further capital improvements through commercial and residential development.” The agency neither confirmed nor denied that Butler’s plan conformed to their idea of transit-oriented development as something that would “help and attract further capital improvements.” But it seems as though the conversion of a private maintenance facility into a public space would, at the very least, bring additional foot traffic—additional people—into the area. Five presentations before the board have yet to convince CTA.

Yet in the aftermath of her most recent presentation to the board, Butler remains optimistic. As the meeting transitioned into its official proceedings, Butler rose from her seat and slipped out the back door, followed closely by a CTA official. The two talked quietly for about a minute, he craning his neck down, she looking up and nodding in agreement, until the official returned to the board meeting and Butler started down the stairs with a smile. “He said, ‘Keep on fighting.’ And that’s what I plan to do.”