The recently tabled “Event Promoters” ordinance, originally scheduled to be voted on by the Chicago City Council on Wednesday, May 14, is so patently fatuous and overbroad that you are moved to wonder how it was ever considered for passage into civic code. While the entire proposed law runs to several thousands of words, its most egregious proposal must be that “event promoters” register every performance they organize with the city of Chicago and pay a filing fee scaled to the expected size of the audience. The price of a promoter’s license ranges from $500 to $2000 for two years. Fines for offenses under the terms of the license range from $500 to $1000, and penalties for holding events without a license can reach $10,000. The definition of an “event promoter” is among the worst of the proposed law’s perversions; the tortured wordiness of the proposed ordinance makes every small-scale music professional, from the booking agent at the Empty Bottle to a singer-songwriter scheduling his or her own shows, subject to the law’s requirements. For the courageous few willing to pay the ridiculous registration fees, more strictures follow: every applicant must be over 21 years old, subjected to a background check, and fingerprinted. And each event promoter would have to inform the police of any performance seven days in advance of its scheduled start. Read the rest of this entry »

I have to admit, the setting was not as glamorous as I had pictured it. I was less than three feet away from Gloria Steinem, but despite the artful curve of Ratner Athletics Center’s side window I was still sitting on bleachers in a gym and two rooms away from a sorority pool party. Yet, as soon as Steinem took the podium last Saturday, that awareness faded. Laughing, she declared, “Progressives have taken over the University of Chicago!” Read the rest of this entry »

The Friend Family Health Center treats over 5,000 patients every month. Located at the corner of 55th Street and Cottage Grove Avenue, its patients come from all over the South Side, and many are under- or uninsured. The University of Chicago Medical Center, its affiliate, often refers patients there, and it is especially vital when their emergency room gets too busy. In recent months, the FFHC has been treating more patients than ever, providing pediatric, obstetric, and primary medical care as well as a number of social services. To the casual observer, it would seem that the FFHC is living up to its pledge: “To treat everyone with respect and kindness…That’s a friend.”

For the people who work at the FFHC, however, it’s an entirely different story. Employees tell stories of blatant disrespect and harassment from management. One woman who has been working there since the center was established in 1997—we’ll call her Janet—described being told frequently to “be quiet” and to “use critical thinking.” “Management doesn’t seem to respect us,” she said. “They talk down to us like we’re children.” At the same time, they enforce a double standard: Once, when Janet used the intercom to ask some noisy children to quiet down—a reasonable decision, which “hadn’t been a problem before”—her supervisor, Director of Operations Tanya Ford, gave her “an immediate write-up,” bypassing the procedural three verbal warnings, as she said, “because of the severity of the infraction.” Read the rest of this entry »

I am a minority on the University of Chicago campus. Not in the ways that the University characterizes me as one—Asian, bisexual, female—but as a Hillary Clinton supporter a stone’s throw from her opponent’s home. The walk to campus takes me about twenty minutes along 53rd Street, and no less than ten Obama signs invade my eyes during that time. This is deep Obama territory, and though Hillary is Chicago-bred, the former is much better received here. Read the rest of this entry »

Forty years ago, Chicago played host to the Democratic National Convention. It was to be a tumultuous affair. In a situation with loose parallels to this year’s presidential campaign, the Democratic nomination was a toss-up between the youth favorite, anti-war candidate Senator Eugene McCarthy, and Vice President Hubert Humphrey, who would eventually secure the nod despite largely eschewing the primaries, relying instead on the support of party bigwigs for delegate votes. The year was 1968. The Democratic Party was split in its loyalties and beliefs. The country found itself mired in the horrors of the Vietnam War. Students were upset, and they protested the Convention. It was rather chaotic: city officials sent the police out in force, students got arrested, party members were disgruntled. It’s all widely chronicled; it was a notable time in our nation’s history. Read the rest of this entry »

Marisol Flores has proof: stacks of Polaroid photographs documenting bruises and welts, emergency room bills, police and Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) reports, reams of court testimony. All these tell in painful detail the history of her twelve-year marriage that has dramatically colored her life in the United States, retold by the Chicago Reporter. It’s a different story for Monica Bejar: as she told the American Prospect, her papers fell victim to her ex-husband’s drunken rages, in which he ripped up the very immigration forms he offered to file for her. Read the rest of this entry »

Development in Hyde Park has been a contentious issue since the urban renewal of the 1950s, and judging by the crowd at the panel discussion “Making Hyde Park: Development in our Community,” it’s as hot a topic as ever. Over one hundred students and Hyde Park residents crowded into an undersized room in Ida Noyes on Tuesday, March 4, to listen as a diverse group of panelists put forward their visions for the future of Hyde Park. It was an occasion for “conversation, not debate,” as moderator and University Community Service Center director Wallace Goode emphasized, but that didn’t mean voices were not raised as the panelists argued about issues like retail, density, architecture, and the University’s involvement in development. Read the rest of this entry »

Last spring, Clare Johnson and her boyfriend went bike riding on the North Side in search of a neighborhood that wasn’t undergoing gentrification. Johnson, at the time a third-year undergraduate at the University of Chicago, was looking for someplace she could live without contributing to the controversial process whereby working-class, often physically dilapidated neighborhoods are redeveloped and then shoot up in property value. Although gentrification can bring benefits to a neighborhood, from better city services to more extensive retail options, it often has the effect of displacing the current residents, whose families may have lived in that area for generations. Johnson’s four-hour bike ride yielded disappointing results. “Some places are a little worse, some places are a little better,” she says, but nowhere is exempt. “Every neighborhood is in some process of gentrification,” agrees Rebecca Shi, Johnson’s friend and fellow UofC fourth-year. Read the rest of this entry »