Tag Archive
Best of the South Side 2010
Around the turn of the last century, workers and businessmen attracted by the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition settled down in Woodlawn and South Shore. New homes and brick apartment buildings were built for the predominately upper-middle class white Protestant residents. The streets of South Shore are filled with remnants of the first decades of... »
Rise and Swing: Jazz brunch on the South Side
Senegalese musician Morikeba Kouyate sits in the sunny front window of Hyde Park’s Chant restaurant, his twenty-one-stringed kora resting in his lap. He is taking a breather in between songs, which layer his high, strong voice over complex fingerwork on the gourd-and-stretched-skin instrument. In the expansive dining room, a few diners circle around the... »
Best of the South Side 2009: South Shore and Woodlawn
South of Hyde Park stretch two lakefront neighborhoods with very different histories. Woodlawn was once a prosperous neighborhood, helped along by the World’s Fair of 1893 and the El tracks that connected it to downtown. In the 1940s and ’50s, integration brought a sudden demographic shift, and after the 1968 riots that raged across... »
Lectures and Fries
To the list of great pairings of culture and snack food, including movies and popcorn and art galleries and cheese plates, we can now add Lectures and Fries. Hyde Park’s largest housing cooperative, Bowers House, located on 51st Street and University Avenue, has cooked up a new kind of home-schooling with its Lectures and... »
Cosmic Reverberations: Backstory Café introduces Wednesday night concerts with a community vibe
Since its opening last year, Woodlawn’s Backstory Café has established itself as a slow-food coffee shop, a used bookstore, and a “supporting member of the vibrant independent cultural infrastructure.” Last week, it took on another title: avant-garde jazz and jam venue. In a new musical program curated by Alex Wing, groups and solo artists... »
In the Footsteps of Killers
Leave it to the University of Chicago to create a pair of Nietzsche-inspired murderers. Nearly eighty-five years ago, Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, graduate students at the University, committed the “perfect crime” on the streets of Kenwood, kidnapping and suffocating to death 14-year-old Bobby Franks. The deranged duo was caught soon after the murder,... »
