Mueller, a priest from the UofC’s Orthodox Christian Fellowship, came to bless rooms in honor of the recent feast day of Theophany. The holiday celebrates the Baptism of Jesus in the Jordan River, and according to Orthodox tradition, the practice of blessing the home represents the ongoing sanctification of the material world.

Mueller has performed the annual blessings at UofC dorms for four years. As of Friday morning, he had blessed seven rooms and expected to carry out nearly 20 more by the end of winter.

In one room, Mueller began to sing in front of a makeshift altar he placed on a desk. The tenants participated in the ceremony, contributing names of deceased loved ones and listening to the prayer. Mueller placed the incense stick into the bowl of holy water and showered the room, droplets splattering across dressers and walls.

The students stepped forward to receive the priest’s blessing. Mueller dampened their heads with holy water as he held up a carved wooden cross. He then anointed the doorway with oil and once more sprinkled water on the heads of the students.

Though they had different reasons for requesting the room blessing, the students enjoyed the ceremony. One resident, Alexandra Mathews, explained, “Growing up with the Orthodox tradition, I always feel a bit of comfort when my house gets blessed because it provides security.” For some of the other, though, this was a new experience. Alexandra Bassen, who is not Eastern Orthodox, got her room blessed because she thinks “It [is] a culturally enriching experience.”

The oil, bowl, stick and cross returned to Mueller’s bag. He then departed, passing a pile of pink pillows and a display of paper cutout snowflakes, on his way to bless another room.

Jane Fentress

“How can we help expand a community for woman artists and artists of color throughout the city and South Side?”

Theaster Gates, Director of Arts and Public Life at the University of Chicago, has asked himself this question for years. A nationally recognized artist who is trained in urban planning, Gates is known for taking a leading role in community development programs on the South Side. One such development, the Dorchester Project in Grand Crossing, is a house that Gates transformed into a performance space and multimedia library. But one project is not enough to serve an entire city and satisfy what Gates calls his “grand ambition” of “seeing the arts flourish on the South Side.” As a result, Gates is spearheading a new UofC Arts and Public Life initiative aimed at strengthening the connection between the arts communities on and off campus.

The cornerstone of this $1.85 million University-funded initiative will be an “arts incubator” in Washington Park. The space, a nearly century-old two-story terra cotta building and former liquor store on Garfield Boulevard, is currently being transformed into a space for South Side artists to gather and work. The initiative will fund three one-year artist fellowships and residencies in order to create an environment of collaboration that Gates feels is key to the creative process. “The value of having multiple artists sharing one space is that they can be colleagues and engage each other in the why of their practices,” he says. In addition to studios, the incubator will also host performance and exhibition space. And Gates plans to reach out to neighborhood schools through a K-12 after school arts program that will collaborate with existing UofC student organizations engaged in teaching art across the South Side.

The incubator is set to open in late 2012. Gates has worked closely with Bill Michel, the executive director of the UofC’s Reva and David Logan Center for Creative and Performing Arts. The two have been collaborating with existing arts education programs in the area since the beginning of the last school year. They see the new incubator as a response to a pressing need: “There is no lack of culture on the South Side. There is no lack of creative people on the South Side. The thing we lack is spaces where people can convene, rehearse, we lack venues for arts engagement. When venues are identified, the cultural wealth of the neighbors makes itself present.”

But Gates doesn’t think the work he and his colleagues are doing stops at the promotion of culture. “When culture lives in a place and when space is made for cultural life, other things grow in this kind of ecological system. How do we make space for artists so that the creative community around them has a place where they can share culture?” he asks. With the new Logan Center opening in 2012 and the Washington Park incubator to open soon after, it seems as though the South Side art scene will have lots of new room to grow.

Last Wednesday, Peirce screened this clip during a public discussion at the University of Chicago with the UofC English professor Lauren Berlant. Though the film went on to win an Academy Award, it was initially given an NC-17 rating by the MPAA, which would have banned the movie from playing in most theaters. It was this scene, showing the female protagonist in the throes of an orgasm, which caused most of the hullabaloo. However, after an appeal by Peirce, the rating was eventually lowered to R. Peirce, a UofC alumna, has gone on to direct two more major films. In her talk, Peirce poked fun at the prudishness of the Motion Picture Association of America, asking the audience, “When has anyone ever been hurt by an orgasm that lasted too long?”

Peirce went on to discuss a clip from her 2008 film, “Stop-Loss.” The movie, inspired by her brother’s experience in the Iraq War, portrays the emotional devastation of GIs. The three-minute clip she showed depicted an urban firefight in which American soldiers were simultaneously victims and villains shooting into civilian homes where attackers sought refuge. The film explores what happens after such a morally ambiguous encounter, and, according to Peirce, proves that “a story can have a tragic ending and still move forward.”

But this event’s ending was a happy one—for some, the climax of the night was the reception, bringing to students and guests an opportunity for hors d’oeuvres and more intimate conversation with Peirce.

Courtesy of Jeremiah Hulsebos-Spofford

Jeremiah Hulsebos-Spofford stands behind his worktable, wearing camouflage patterned pants and a work shirt. The Hyde Park Arts Alliance space, where Hulsebos-Spofford has set up camp, looks more like the backstage of a high school theater than the studio of an artist-in-residence. Two large structures resembling parade floats rest in the middle of the narrow workspace. A foam figure, covered in intricate carved designs and a thick coat of black paint stands in a solid, domineering pose. At around six-feet tall, this statue could be the mascot of “Give me a place to stand and I will move the world,” Hulsebos-Spofford’s current collaborative work.

As a teacher at the Chicago High School for the Arts (ChiArts), Hulsebos-Spofford noticed that “there are a number of CPS kids who are undocumented. We all know—some of these kids can’t even apply to college or request financial aid.” Moved by their stories and the diversity of their backgrounds, and interested in the idea of “how people end up where they are, what they find, and what happens in their transit,” the artist mapped out a plan for an “immigrant landing.”  He says, “I just thought about how strange the situation was—where is Chicago with immigration? What could we do to make a statement or ask these questions?”

Hulsebos-Spofford’s answer was to build rafts. Working with his ChiArts students everyday after school and on weekends for the past few months, the team has designed and begun to build usable rafts out of discarded construction materials from projects on the University of Chicago campus. They have made two wooden rafts and one out of PVC pipe, sealed at the ends and tied together.

Along the side wall of the studio, rows of inner tubes are stacked up. Hulsebos-Spofford plans to attach them to the two wooden rafts so that they can float on Lake Michigan. According to Hulsebos-Spofford, “Lake Michigan has become this beer drinking, recreational body of water. There is no longer that aspect of transit or the movement of goods.” He hopes to dramatically reimagine the lakefront: “I had a vision to come off the water with a flotilla of rafts.”

This vision pays homage to George Streeter, whose story Hulsebos-Spofford elaborates upon excitedly: “So you know Oak Street Beach, where that weird, crazy boathouse is? Well, the myth goes that a guy named George Streeter beached his ship there. Historians debate it, but basically he carted sand and debris and made a sort of squatter’s community right on this patch of beach where bankers and wealthy Chicagoans lived.” Laughing, he continues, “Then the bankers of the Gold Coast tried to get him evicted. This story really feeds into my project, where the paths people take meet.”

But on April 21 Hulsebos-Spofford’s plan came to an unforeseen halt. The Chicago Park District denied his formal request to land his three rafts on Oak Street Beach, citing injury and safety liabilities. Hulsebos-Spofford says, “I would have paid all the insurance necessary for this…I guess they just didn’t want to support the project.”

Hulsebos-Spofford, like rejected immigrants before him, dealt with the setback as best as he could. He rerouted his trip to a beach in Gary, Indiana where he and his students have been given the go-ahead to land. “It’s funny, maybe it’s perfect that the authorities wouldn’t let us land where we wanted to,” he says, alluding to the stringent immigration regulations that his work comments upon.

Over the past few months, as the project came to fruition, Hulsebos-Spofford has built a sense of community and collaboration in his studio. Faiz Razi, a colleague of Hulsebos-Spofford’s has stepped up to provide a live soundtrack for the landing. Hulsebos-Spofford’s students have undoubtedly been both the impetus and the force behind the project. “The kids, they come from all over Chicago. ChiArts is about 50 percent African-American, 25 percent Latino and 25 percent ‘other.’ We’ve got all types of students working on this project.”

Several of the students have consistently come in to work, and it will be these students who ride and steer the rafts ashore, while Hulsebos-Spofford films from the sand.  “One of my students brought in their mom, dad, and siblings,” he says, beaming. “It was great to see them all here.” He explains how a more reserved student “just started building one of the rafts almost entirely by himself and truly making it a personal project.” Parents have been so supportive that Hulsebos-Spofford wants them to sit on the rafts with the students. Some have gone above and beyond in their commitment to the project: “One of the moms brought home our garbage bags and created costumes for the kids to wear.”

As much as the students have inspired and contributed to the project, Hulsebos-Spofford takes pride in the personal touches he added that appear throughout the rafts and the statue. “I’m really into sci-fi, so we’re riffing off of Tron. And also, the Mayan 2012 myths, some jungle relics….” In his excitement, Hulsebos-Spofford almost resembles an eager kid, gushing about his favorite subjects in school. It is clear that this project has been brewing in his mind for a while. “This project has made me re-evaluate my practice,” he says. “It’s bringing my work together.”

The efforts of Hulsebos-Spofford, Razi, the students, and their families will culminate this upcoming weekend. On June 3 HyPa and Hulsebos-Spofford will be hosting a pre-launch event at the HyPa space from 6:30pm to 8pm. On June 4, he and his students invite everyone to head to Gary, Indiana for the long-awaited landing.

Curator Hamza Walker and the Renaissance Society host his first solo exhibition, appropriately titled “William J. O’Brien.” It’s a nice anti-title for an exhibition that does its best to avoid sweeping categorization and a singular meaning (i.e., there’s a hell of a lot of stuff going on here, and anyone trying to come up with a title that neatly touches upon all that stuff will probably fail).

Like “Age of Aquarius,” the gallery’s previous show, “O’Brien” is a fun exhibition, wild, eclectic, and colorful. About a hundred ceramic pieces sit tightly arranged on a wooden, T-shaped table, and while a few terraced pyramids on the tabletop elevate some ceramics above the others, for the most part it’s pieces next to pieces next to pieces. There are plaster white faces and rusty browns vases, red masks and sea blue jars; about a hundred pieces and none of them with names.

Most of these ceramic pieces are faces, many of them smiling, a few expressionless or unhappy. One is the blue ceramic face of a woman with sunken eyes and a wide grin. There are white spots around her eyes and over parts of her hair, which is—like her nose and her smile—beady. Some of the ceramic faces take the form of elongated masks, primitive but not unfriendly. Four are red tribal masks, each about a foot-and-a-half tall, smiling with star-shaped designs between their eyes and on their foreheads.

Sitting beside many of the faces are abstract, geometric pieces. One, a black ceramic, looks like a futuristic Swiss-cheese sailing ship. The piece’s cheese-holed sides are, like every other ceramic in the gallery, neither perfectly straight nor perfectly smooth.   O’Brien doesn’t seem to be very interested in technical precision—many of his pieces look like the products of a community center ceramics class—but that’s not to say that his work is “bad.” Technical precision does not equate to artistic quality.

Because there are so many pieces, all nameless and placed inches away from each other, O’Brien’s work refuses to be evaluated on a piece by piece basis.   The forms his works take vary from piece to piece, but all retain an inexplicable quality that lends them a sameness in the midst of their structural or formal differences. In fact, the exhibition’s most notable piece—a  bricolage bust of carpet and fabric—seems to be the only piece in the gallery that doesn’t incorporate ceramics. Pieces of carpet form the upper body of the bust, which upholds a fabricated head contained under a net of pink twine. The whole bust somehow rests on top of a glass case that houses another ceramic head, this one milky white and brown.

Like every other piece in the gallery, the carpet bust is untitled. It’s a strange assemblage, a piece that stands out as a sculpture rather than as a ceramic, and one of the few pieces that suggests a title: Self-Portrait. The fabric of the head, it turns out, is waste from O’Brien’s studio, the recycled remains of other failed or completed projects. The medium, then, seems to be the fabric of O’Brien’s mind, the ideas (used or discarded) of an artist with a wildly active imagination. His head looks like it’s about to explode, and, luckily, it does, its ideas flowing out of O’Brien’s mind and onto the gallery table.

Josh Oxley, the University’s Humanist advisor, welcomed attendees and encouraged them to throw salt over their shoulder or bite into toast imprinted with the image of Jesus. “We wanted to make people aware of how these superstitions and beliefs affect their lives,” he said of the night’s events.

If the “I Doubt It” stickers and various issues of the magazine “Skeptical Inquirer” (including the UFO special issue) strewn across the tables did not raise awareness, the improv group Occam’s Razor certainly did. For their last skit, the troupe acted out a courtroom debate on a topic fielded from the audience: the existence of God. The  lighthearted and whimsical trial ended with the judge’s decree: “The verdict here is guilty; how it pertains to this case is up to you.”

Though the intentionally ambiguous verdict left some onlookers unfulfilled, the homeopathic bar satiated even the most discerning audience member. Mocking the claim that water possesses memory, a bartender served water from various bottles of fine alcohol. Next to the bar, “power bands” were laid out for the taking, professing powers of flight, invisibility, and the ability to master economics problem sets. Attendees balancing heaping plates of Leona’s lasagna and salad, eagerly grabbed at the glorified rubber bands.

Alex Novet, president of the Secular Student Alliance, observed the crowd as he stood in front of a pixilated poster of Bigfoot. “This is great general publicity and outreach,” he said. “Over 50 percent of the campus identifies as atheist, so it’s great to get together and make our presence known.” For Novet, however, the bash was certainly about more than outreach and recognition—it was a time to let loose. “We atheists can have a good time,” he laughed, “instead of just sitting around and being skeptical.”

Terence Lee

Delirious “whoops” only world record-breakers could produce emanated from the main quad of the University of Chicago campus at 5:40pm last Friday. Admittedly, the celebration was premature—the old record was still standing—but if the endless mass of individuals filling the quad stuck with the challenge, breaking the record was certainly imminent.

The record they aimed to break was established in June 18, 2010, when 212 elementary school children participated in the largest scavenger hunt in human history, as certified by the Guinness Book of World Records, organized by St. Anthony’s School in Ontario, Canada.  On May 6 2011, it was the University of Chicago’s turn. Judges frantically registered groups of four in the hour before the event started, handing each team a Ziploc bag containing four purple wristbands to be collected and tallied at the end of the hunt, detailed instructions and rules, a pencil, and a sealed envelope with the list of items to be hunted. The rules were simple: the scavenging was to last exactly one hour and participants were forbidden from leaving the main quad until the event was over.

“…And go!” shouted Daniel Citron, head honcho of the event. The masses ripped open their envelopes, eager to begin the quest. “Get on my back, get on my back!” demanded one shrill gentleman, insisting that the girl next to him climb on his shoulders so she could low-five a judge in exchange for four points. “Pythagorean,” one girl said to her team, answering one of the challenges on the list: identify the theorem written on the side of Eckhart Hall. Running awkwardly through the main quad, participants flailed limbs in hot pursuit of the judge whistling “In the Hall of the Mountain King,” or raced to reach the top of fire escape stairs to determine what brand of fire escapes the university prefers.

Most participants were UofC students, but some came from as far away as Wisconsin and Ohio, and at least one team had a stroller-bound member. Exactly one hour after the event started, 924 wristbands were collected, officially making the evening a wild success.

The reward for each participant’s hard work? A free scoop of catered ice cream complete with whipped cream and cherries, knowledge of the UofC class of 1991 gift (a set of lights on the Classics Quad), and the rights to tell their children that they set a world record.

The mic was open to people of all persuasions to rhyme or rap about their faith. The call received an eclectic response. One grad student cited both John Calvin and Sufjan Stevens as inspirations, another undergrad delivered a rhythmic tirade against the perception of mainstream Chinese culture as faithless, and a third staged a conversation with the Almighty, mixing burning theological queries with questions like “will I ever manage to finish that paper?”

The evening’s headliner, nationally renowned hip-hop artist Capital D, arrived in a crisp tan suit fresh off work from his blue-chip law firm in the Loop. Capital D’s rap condemned gang violence and chronicled his conversion to Islam, but he saved his most incisive lyrics for American and Israeli foreign policy: “We say we’re hated for our freedom’s, but maybe it’s the hate that hate created, lets debate it, we’re five percent of the population, but using 25 percent of the world’s resources, and making up the difference through the use of armed forces.”

Some of the evening’s most memorable lines, however, came from Illinois Institute of Technology senior Leena Suleiman about halfway through the program. A devout Muslim, she spoke strongly of 9/11’s aftermath: “So don’t tell me I am failing at freedom / Don’t tell me that I must conform to be accepted / Don’t tell me lies, because my truth sees right through them.”

The evening’s unlikely coda came in form of Clarence, a member of the housekeeping staff, who had been set to clean the shop as midnight loomed. Sidling up to the mic, Clarence whipped out his flip phone and began reciting with growing confidence poetry he’d texted to his friends about observations around campus. He recalled a scene from earlier in the week, when he watched a little boy run in circles, disobeying his father: “I thought it was so cool, that little boy out there doing a happy dance, so free and innocent. I wish we all could get a little bit of that back.” (Chris Riehle)

Matt Wan

“Devastated,” says Linda, a housekeeper in a University of Chicago dormitory. That’s how she felt when she heard the news. “I was devastated. I felt like we weren’t going to have a job anymore…We don’t know what to do. We’re just waiting here like sitting ducks.”

In a meeting with housekeepers on April 7, University of Chicago administrators announced their plans for major changes to the current housekeeping staff. The proposal calls for a consolidation of Housing personnel, the full-time housekeepers who serve the residence halls, and Facilities staff, who work in on-campus buildings. Additionally, the proposal suggests outsourcing housekeeping jobs. In an e-mail interview, University spokesman Steven Kloehn clarifies that the plan involved “the hiring of a contractor, a firm outside the University staff, which would be responsible for performing that work.” Currently, workers in the Housing staff receive their paychecks directly from the UofC, and Facilities workers are employed by a private sub-contractor. If all goes according to the University’s plan, a new, independent cleaning company will manage the housekeepers in all dorms, on-campus buildings and the surrounding grounds.

The purpose of the change, according to University officials, is to increase efficiency and quality of service by consolidating the Housing and Facilities services under one umbrella. Shortly after the housekeeping staff was notified of the change, a document of frequently-asked questions was sent to all Resident Heads, emphasizing the “functional expertise” of the Facilities staff. The consolidation, according to the document, would provide the “best leverage [of] the skills and resources we have at the University.” However, the department merger spells an uncertain future for campus workers and the possibility of lay-offs hangs over their head.

“I was kind of shocked,” says William, the head housekeeper in one of the undergraduate residence halls, “because just two years ago we had an hour taken from us.” In 2009, the University cut the Housing staff’s 40-hour work week to 35 hours, citing fiscal constraints. That year, in response to the University’s decision to slash Housing workers’ paychecks by eight percent, the student group Students Organizing United with Labor (SOUL) organized months of activities in campus-wide protests.

Matt Wan

Although University administrators have not made any official decisions regarding Housing personnel, the first round of proposed changes has stirred up a storm of controversy on campus. Committed to raising awareness of the situation and drumming up support, students and workers have been organizing protests together. Dormitory residents have started and joined Facebook groups to demand that familiar faces stay in the dorm rooms—the group “Keep Housekeepers at the University of Chicago” had garnered 478 fans on Facebook by the time this issue went to print. On the student-made website keephousekeepers.com, launched only days after the announcement, the banner blares: “THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO HAS DECIDED TO FIRE ALL OF ITS HOUSEKEEPERS.”

But statements like this one, and other knee-jerk reactions to the April 7 announcement, obscure the complexities of the story. The University hasn’t said that it will fire anyone. It also hasn’t it said that it won’t. As Kloehn explains, “Facilities Services contracts out its cleaning responsibilities, and it is the University’s intention to contract out the cleaning in the buildings involved in this transition. That means it is highly likely many of the housekeepers now responsible for those buildings will no longer be University employees after the transition.”

However, the affected workers could still be employees, not of the University, but in the University. It remains a distinct possibility that the future sub-contractor could choose to keep all non-managerial workers who currently work for the University, as Aramark did when it took over dining services. Alternatively, the contractor could choose to bring in a whole new staff of temporary workers—and probably pay them barely above minimum wage. Or they could keep the old staff but reduce their pay and benefits. The University has yet to guarantee anything.

So what, exactly, will happen to workers? The University has said that it is too early to predict exactly how this change will affect jobs, wages, or benefits. Although the administration knows that it will start the transition on July 1 and complete the process by the end of August, the actual search for the new sub-contractor is only beginning: 23 companies are competing for the contract right now. “It would be premature to speculate about what will be involved in the contract, and what the possibilities are for individuals,” Kloehn says.

So the real problem does not lie in what the University has decided to do—truth be told, they haven’t decided on much. The real problem lies in the uncertainty. People don’t know what the future holds—and in this kind of economy, any sort of unpredictability can be a major source of anxiety.

The same week they made the announcements to housekeepers and residence heads, the University’s central administration declared the third week of Spring quarter “Employee Appreciation Week.” Students showed their love for the staff with cards, posters and thank-you notes. Now the Worker-Student Coalition (composed of a variety of student groups on campus) is holding what they call a “real Staff Appreciation Week:” a week of action to rally against possible job losses for the people they’ve come to see not just as house-cleaners, but as friends.

“My friend Jules told us he was getting fired,” reflects Paul Dueck, one of the founders of keephousekeepers.com and the corresponding Facebook group. “I was like, ‘Are your serious?!’…Jules was a really good friend to me.” Fear that his friend would be fired inspired Paul and two other residents of South Campus Residence Hall to create the website, which demands that the University preserve housekeeping jobs for the staff members, precisely because many students have developed relationships. The website lists many reasons to keep the same faces on campus next year: the current workers are experienced; bringing in strangers to clean the dorm might pose a risk for student safety; without the current workers, service quality would decrease. However, the main reason, Dueck claims, is that the housekeepers are friends. “They’re really part of our community,” says Dueck.

But other students oppose the changes as a matter of principle. Vitas Zukowski explained, “A lot of these people have been here for a long time and there are no other jobs on the South Side…[it is] blatantly unfair to people who…built their lives to support the university and its students.” Zukowski is a member of SOUL, the group that organized protested workers’ pay cuts in 2009. Right now, SOUL is leading the Worker-Student Coalition, applying many of the strategies that elicited responses from administrators in the past to the present week of action, including mass calls to President Zimmer’s office and a rally in front of the administration building last Thursday.

SOUL does not oppose the transition to a private sub-contractor outright, but they do demand that the University guarantee it will “retain housekeeping staff with the same wages and benefits” and “contractually stipulate that the new dining service provider retain all non-managerial dining service employees.”

Despite pressure from student groups, the University has so far declined to make this guarantee. But ambiguities may be inevitable at this point, as it is still very early on in the process and the University will not select a sub-contractor for several months. As Kloehn explains, “We recognize that a change like this can generate anxiety among those directly affected—anxiety that is amplified in this case by the fact that the University has announced its attentions early in the process, with many details yet to be determined.” The most crucial detail, of course, is the question on everyone’s mind: will people lose their jobs? “It is too early to speculate about that,” Kloehn says.

William accepts that response. “They’re being pretty fair because they really don’t have all the answers to the questions,” he says. “They just have to wait.” And as they wait, the housekeeping staff is left hanging.

Linda, however, is less confident in the University’s handling of the situation—she wants answers. “’We don’t know this, we don’t know that’,” she worries. “What’s that to us? They can’t tell why, and that’s the biggest problem, we can’t understand why. We get a question with a question, we never get answers.”

The University also declines to speculate on how the consolidation and outsourcing will affect specific individuals—staff and students alike. Whether that’s prudent caution or bureaucratic question-dodging is a matter of opinion. However, what’s certain is that no one has stopped the workers themselves from speculating on what the future will bring.

“I predict being unemployed, no job, all my dreams shattered, no retirement, no medical benefits,” says Linda. She worries about what will happen to her pension and her health insurance. She wonders if she’ll have to move in with relatives if she loses her job. But mostly, she’s thinking about her family. Because her daughter is unemployed, Linda was planning on supporting her granddaughter financially so that she would not have to go to public school. “I need my job,” she says, “because I want my granddaughter to go to private school and continue her piano lessons.”

The University is one of the biggest employers in the South Side, and there are few other job options for workers in the area. If they lay off many employees, then the reverberations will be felt in the communities surrounding Hyde Park.

But some, like William, remain hopeful. He’s confident that he will keep his job, for the simple reason that it is not in the University’s best interests to fire an experienced workforce. “I have a real strong belief that I will still keep my job,” he says. “The relationship with the students plays a big part. They’ll look at the big picture in that aspect, because it’s about you all, your safety and protection. I don’t think they would do something like that.”

Aliya Ram

On rainy spring days just before noon, the sidewalks of the University of Chicago campus are usually quiet. Occasionally, activists stand on corners collecting signatures, or companies like Zipcar and Monster promote their products with free giveaways, though most passersby are too busy to pay them any mind. Yet in the past few weeks, one sidewalk attraction has started to gain attention. On certain days, an average-looking pickup with a brushed stainless-steel food cart attachment parks along 57th Street. The name of the cart is emblazoned on the side of the cab: “Meatyballs Mobile” has arrived.

If the name “Meatyballs Mobile” doesn’t already give a sense of the truck’s marketing strategy, a glance at the provisions makes the aim clear. Offering an intriguing medley of subs and individual meatballs, the menu ranges from buffalo chicken “buff balls” to the vegetarian-friendly “veg’ta balls.” Though shape isn’t typically a way to classify cuisine, Meatyballs somehow makes it work.

According to Meatyballs truck driver Rich Levy, members of the UofC community and other South Siders appear to be enjoying the fare. “This is our third time at the UofC, and it’s really been a positive experience each time,” he says enthusiastically as a line of customers braving a dreary Friday formed nearby. A small menu circulates through the small crowd, as Levy recommended his favorite sandwiches and praised executive chef Phillip Foss’s most recent additions to the list.

Most of the sandwiches, called “torpedoes,” consist of a few round pieces of meat and a smattering of vegetables, all dressed in a housemade sauce. The truck currently offers six standard options and a rotating special. For those seeking a smaller snack, individual “grenades” of meat are available alongside “Truffle Dusted Potato Chips” and “Chocolate Salty Balls.” The prices, unfortunately, are a little higher than your average Subway sandwich: one standard torpedo will cost you $7-$9. But Meatyballs’s food is so good it’s well worth it to bypass the fast food chain and take a chance on this four-wheeled sub shop. Meatyballs has a gourmet pedigree: Foss served as executive chef of the Palmer House’s Lockwood restaurant until last August.

While the unique style of Foss’s menu sets Meatyballs apart from other mobile canteens, the company is following trends and strategies that have proven successful for other food carts around the country. Meatyballs uses social media to alert customers to their daily locations, and this has been a key factor in their success. Through Twitter and Facebook, the drivers make quick, public announcements to inspire their followers to find them on the street or to suggest new locations. Fans can even use the trail of Tweets to follow the three existing Meatyballs trucks as they traverse different corners of the city in real time.

Whether set up outside of the Regenstein Library on the UofC campus or at the intersection of Dearborn and Monroe, the Meatyballs trucks seem to be enjoying a measure of success wherever they travel. “Often we’ll show up five minutes late to a corner and we’ll already have a line of hungry customers waiting for us,” Levy says, delighted by the new following Meatyballs has cultivated.

If the truck that has begun parking itself at 57th and Ellis is representative of the company’s operations on the whole, then it is easy to see Phillip Foss’s business model as a recipe for success. His employees are friendly and approachable, brimming with charm and quick to answer any questions customers might have. They attract a publicity buzz through effective use of social media, and they follow up with a great product. It’s a combination that their customers—whether bespectacled UofC students or those working on the Mansueto Library construction site—can really savor.

“We’d love to keep coming back, we’ve had great experiences here,” said Levy. Hopefully Chicago’s record gas prices—the nation’s highest—won’t create problems only a brick-and-mortar business can beat.

Follow Meatyballs online for their current locations around the city at meatyballsmobile.com