“Why not put food and entertainment all under one bun?” Taylor Mallory asks, reciting the slogan of his new food and music webshow, “Music Burger.” Wearing a smart sport jacket and his signature black baseball cap backwards, Mallory doesn’t look stressed, but the musician and teacher has a lot on his plate. Read the rest of this entry »

“The Man Who Saved New Orleans” is the latest play at eta Creative Arts Foundation. Written by Thomas Meloncon, it returns the narrative of New Orleans to the people who were kicked out of the city when Katrina moved in. It tells the story of the Prejeans, an African American family from the Lower 9th Ward who have been relocated to the Houston home of an evangelical cousin. A blind grandfather, a broken mother, a tormented son, and a silent daughter populate the cast list of the family drama that unfolds over two lengthy acts. A host of supporting characters, most notably a snarky, seductive fellow refugee named Eva (played by Ina Houston), add commentary but little complexity to the Prejeans’ struggles. Read the rest of this entry »

“My work is context specific. It’s about social context. It’s about place. Place refers to more than land; place is about land that has history. It feels more alive,” explains Nance Klehm, an artist and activist based on the South Side. This particular morning, Klehm is in a motel room in Tucson, Arizona. It’s 6am, and she’s ready to hit the road. Read the rest of this entry »

Movement is part of the American dream. Across an ocean to the new world, west to the last frontier, then up the social ladder, out to the suburbs—or so they say it­ goes. Social mobility and housing mobility are inextricably linked in the national psyche. But there is a darker, less public story about this movement; for many Americans, a change of housing isn’t an opportunity—it’s a necessity. On Chicago’s South Side, gentrification, the foreclosure crisis, and the city government’s demolition of public housing have in recent years forced thousands of people from their homes. Read the rest of this entry »

Twelve years ago, when the late Gary Comer visited his former elementary school, he was brought to a room where ten new computers sat unused because the school lacked the funds to power them. Today, Paul Revere Elementary is outfitted with a wireless network, new software programs, and a $10 million investment.

Comer, the son of a railroad employee, graduated from Paul Revere Elementary in 1942. In 1963, he started Lands’ End Clothing Company, and in 2002, he sold it to Sears for $1.9 billion. Of that fortune, $100 million has since been poured into developing and revitalizing his childhood neighborhood.
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“You think six feet of dirt means something?” quips the ghost of Leon Goldwater’s trumpet-toting father in eta’s new production of “Fathers and Sons.” The essence of the story is encapsulated in this sentence. Although the show is not a remake of the original Russian classic, it does explore much of the same emotional terrain. Read the rest of this entry »

In the early 1850s, the Lake Shore and Michigan Southern Railway was one of several connecting Chicago to parts south, and competition was fierce. When the Illinois Central Railroad lost a court battle to cross the LS&MSR tracks with its own, it responded in true Chicago style, kidnapping a guard and laying an intersecting track in the dead of night. Within a year, a fatal collision at what’s now 75th and South Chicago occurred between trains of two other companies operating on the disputed tracks. That didn’t deter Hyde Park founder Paul Cornell from developing the marshy surroundings, and when it was learned that a downstate village was already named Cornell, the area became Grand Crossing in honor of the intersection. By the late 19th century it was home to a range of factories and their mostly German workers. Successive decades brought demographic changes, and by 1920, eight years after the namesake railroads had finally been elevated above street level, Grand Crossing was mostly Hungarian. As in many South Side neighborhoods, the ’60s were years of white flight. To the immediate south across 79th Street, the neighborhood of Chatham remained middle-class through the transition. In contrast, Grand Crossing declined. But in spite of the—let’s not mince words—sketchiness, it’s got more to see and do than most parts of Chicago. Read the rest of this entry »

Anybody can tell you about Chicago’s culinary specialties. Some cities might stop at a single dish, but between the pizza, hot dogs, and Italian beef, our broad-shouldered town has a rock-solid reputation. Alas, it doesn’t extend so much to barbecue, for which Chicago has a distinctly lackluster reputation. Frankly, it’s deserved. Even though barbecue joints dot the city, especially the South Side, most of them aren’t very good. But most is not all, and at least two of them could go head to head with the best Memphis or Kansas City have to offer. Moreover, they put to rest the notion that there’s no such thing as Chicago-style barbecue. Read the rest of this entry »