Kelsey Gee

The streets of Hyde Park are saturated with lush trees forming gentle archways over the pedestrians below. Walking the streets of Woodlawn, the lack of trees is immediate. The few growths along sidewalks are mostly skinny and small, recent transplants years away from providing shade to the pavement below.

But the streets are not any younger than those in Hyde Park—many years back, Woodlawn was a neighborhood full of professors and faculty. Yet despite its past, the collegiate aura of Woodlawn evaporated long ago. No packs of students roam the streets, no apartments display UofC paraphernalia in the windows. No shops advertise for student customers, no bikes are tethered to street signs.

In the recent collective memory of the UofC, Woodlawn has been conjured in a dark light. The murder of a grad student in 2007, recurring safety alerts, and images of trash-filled streets lined with empty lots and broken windows have informed an exaggerated view of the neighborhood amongst many students. The University’s presence along 60th Street is long-established with the UofC press and a host of grad schools, but development further south of the midway has been staunchly halted for decades.

That is until recently. Within the past three years, the UofC Police headquarters, the South Campus Residence Hall, and the Logan Center for the Arts have all arrived between 60th and 61st. Blue light emergency phones have popped up further south, and the UofC transportation and police provide coverage to 64th Street. Nonetheless, the University has vowed to uphold its promise to the Woodlawn community not to build south of 61st St. But north of that cross-street, the University has moved in for good. With the expansion, the long-inscribed image of the neighborhood is beginning to change, along with its actual character.

Cheap rent has drawn an increasing number of students and faculty south of the Midway. I am one. From my front gate, the walk is no more than ten minutes to anywhere on the quads. Off my back porch, elementary school children play every day out on the blacktop, in the shadow of the Logan Center’s eleven-story tower. Walking the streets on a Sunday morning, every block seems to ring with bells and hymns. The 63rd and Cottage Grove Green Line stop, avoided by many students, supports a thicket of shops and restaurants.

Kelsey Gee

Which brings us to food—a different matter altogether. Treasure Island and Hyde Park Produce are both 20 minutes by foot or 15 minutes by public transit, but regular produce can be found at Farmer’s Food Basket and Family Dollar. Daley’s and Robust Coffee Lounge on 63rd serve hearty meals, but for better or worse they are far away from the student haunts of 53rd, 55th, and 57th. South Campus now has a subway and mini-mart for a quick snack. From mid-May through mid-December, the Experimental Station at 61st and Blackstone runs an outdoors farmers’ market.

The social distance is far from Hyde Park, for which I’ve been appreciative. The lifestyle of the academe can blind its students to different visions of life. It’s easy to loose sight of a greater Chicago, and the city manifest in Woodlawn is decidedly different than the city nestled in Hyde Park.

Years from now, the young trees of Woodlawn will have grown a bit taller, a bit farther out. I am a student, and as such my residency in Woodlawn is fated to end after a few more academic quarters. I probably won’t see those trees.

Maggie Sivit

Boarded-up storefronts not withstanding, 63rd Street is a pretty happening place. A terminus of the Green Line, “L” cars rumble above Cottage Grove. Underneath, Daley’s serves up steaming omelets, as it has since the restaurant opened in the 1930s. Across the street, shoppers rush in and out of a grocery store. Along the sidewalk, the displays of multiple clothing boutiques and beauty supply stores sell their wares to teenagers passing by. Just south of the “L” tracks, there are Jamaican restaurants and the world’s second Harold’s Chicken Shack. But the food, shoes, and booze end after only three blocks, and the activity comes to a dead stop.

While nightclubs formerly stretched all along 63rd, their signs blinking into the Chicago night, today empty lots are a frequent sight. Along the northern edge of 61st Street, new glassy constructions loom, casting shadows across the neighborhood. Further progress into Woodlawn stalled by an agreement with the community, the University of Chicago is cramming its southernmost expanse with new buildings.

Yet, the social divide is not as clear the physical, despite unofficial University warnings to avoid straying south of 61st. Set alight by their frustration with Hyde Park’s historically isolated position on the South Side, many student and community groups have expanded the reach of their activities into Woodlawn. Every day, scores of students work with neighborhood elementary school kids on their math homework. Meanwhile, residents of both areas have worked to establish community gardens between 61st and 63rd Streets. Furthermore, many businesses and organizations like Robust Coffee and the Woodlawn Collaborative, who offer free programming in the performing arts, bookmaking, serve patrons from both communities. Undergraduates frequent Blackstone Bicycle Works to learn how to fix popped tires from Woodlawn teenagers. While tension exists, collaboration is growing.

Best Raw Vegan Deli
B’Gabs Goodies
Picture the best pad Thai you’ve ever had—the sweet peanut sauce, crunchy bean sprouts, shredded carrot, and the vitamin K-rich curly-leaf kale. If that last ingredient threw you off a bit, you’re not alone. B’Gabs Goodies is a vegan deli known for such healthy twists. Run by Gabrielle Darvassy, a woman who is as kind and motherly to her customers as she is to her elementary school-age son (and the store’s cutest employee) Marley. Before fixing your creamy and naturally sweetened smoothie, she’ll ask you for your food allergies and taste preferences. You’ll be having flashbacks to the smoothie’s vivid, fruity notes for weeks. The bill of fare is deceptively imaginative and complex—their plainest item, the veggie sandwich, uses a flax seed “bun” wafer to hold together a garden of greens and avocado. The restaurant’s interior is cozy but sparse. A few mismatched tables appear in the front, while dozens upon dozens of herbs, spices, and teas fill shelves in the back. With Darvassy’s friends and family members often preparing dishes and handling the register, a trip to B’Gabs makes you feel like part of the family. A home-cooked meal without the cooking, you’ll leave the shop feeling happier and healthier than when you entered. 6100 S. Blackstone Ave. Tuesday-Saturday, 9am-3pm. (773)251-3071. bgabsgoodies.com (Kelsey Gee)

Best Meeting Grounds
Robust Coffee Lounge
Located a short walk from the University of Chicago’s South Campus Residence Hall, Robust Coffee Lounge was originally projected to be a student hang-out and study spot. While the industrial-chic decor, breakfast options, unlimited free Wi-Fi, and comfy seating make it a perfect place to settle down with a laptop, Robust has also attracted a significant following from more permanent Woodlawn residents. The clientele are generally quiet, their faces captivated by laptops or distracted by the fluffy, fruit-filled Belgian waffles on their plates. But by noon, the volume is turned up as folks stop in on their lunch break for corned beef sandwiches. The storefront is embellished with advertisements of specials and a wall displays the many accolades Robust has won. Continuing the legacy of the former Backstory Café, Robust acts as a meeting place for both undergraduates entirely new to the city and residents whose Woodlawn roots go three generations back. 6300 S. Woodlawn Ave. Monday-Friday, 6am-8pm; Saturday-Sunday, 7am-7pm. (773)891-4240. robustcoffeelounge.com (Maria Nelson)

Best Cemetery
Oak Woods Cemetery
Every life is fitting of a monument, though few are lucky enough to see theirs erected. Roland Burris, the former Illinois attorney general, is a notable exception. Though still living, his (self-financed) Oak Woods Cemetery memorial is already emblazoned with his feats and the epitaph reads, “TRAIL BLAZER.” It’s hard to blame him for wanting to be interred amid such greatness—the site contains thousand of monuments, some dignified, others garish, scattered across its 180 acres of man-made hills and ponds. Among those entombed are Jesse Owens, Enrico Fermi, Harold Washington, and Ida B. Wells. Surrounded by a row of elm trees, the remains of over 5,000 Confederate soldiers and prisoners of war lay beneath a 46-foot-tall Confederate memorial. Victims of starvation, the soldiers died imprisoned in Camp Douglas along modern-day Cottage Grove Avenue. Nearby, city officials and crooks like “Big Bill” Thompson and James “Big Jim” Colosimo are venerated by ornate limestone obelisks and mausoleums—matched only by the white bronze statues and angelic figures marking big businessmen like Hyde Park founder Paul Cornell. The Chicago Architecture Foundation offers regular $15 tours of the gravesite, but if you have a free afternoon, a self-guided stroll will let you explore in peace. 1035 E. 67th St. Daily, 8am-4:30pm. (773)288-3800 (Kelsey Gee)

(Temple Shipley)

Benjamin Murphy wedges his cigarette butt into the gray planks of a picnic table and squints, surveying his sanctuary. In the fading light of a late-May Thursday afternoon, the 65th and Woodlawn Community Garden resembles a living patchwork quilt—some plots in this roughly 1000 square-foot space are lined with misshapen bricks, others are freestanding mounds of soil punctuated by the occasional wire trellis, tree branch, or toiling gardener. Murphy laughs, “You can’t gang-bang on this corner.”

Murphy, this location’s new manager, is explaining the positive social effects of community gardens. The goal of such gardens is not limited to the acquisition of fresh produce for the gardeners themselves; the people weeding and watering on 65th Street and Woodlawn Avenue call it a “community garden” for a reason. Along the perimeter of the plot, for instance, the gardeners are growing produce that is free for the taking. That way, the garden serves people who haven’t rented a tract of land for the season. Mike Slatton, a newcomer to the 65th Street site and veteran gardener, says of his past community gardening experiences, “I met people who I wouldn’t have spoken to otherwise.” He is not alone; the garden has inspired genuine interest in the well-being of Woodlawn and the South Side as a whole. For now, the garden is an isolated pocket of dedicated organic farmers fending for themselves in one of the United States’ most infamous food deserts, but Murphy hopes to see it grow to be “something about the fabric of the neighborhood.”

In order to make a lasting impact on the Woodlawn community, however, this garden will need to stay put—no small feat, considering the history of community gardens in the area. “In ten years, this could be a building,” Murphy says. Many of the gardeners in this location tended plots at the 61st Street garden, which was paved over last November by the University of Chicago for the expansion of its campus. The displaced gardeners were forced to grow elsewhere, some finding available spots in gardens at 65th and Woodlawn, 62nd and Dorchester, and 63rd and Ellis. This forced migration has contributed to the already uneasy relations between the University and the surrounding neighborhoods. As Slatton puts it, “Yes, there’s tension. They took our garden.”

The University has taken measures to soften the blow of the 61st Street garden’s demolition. It donated 1200 cubic yards—34 semi trucks’ worth—of dirt to the 65th Street Garden and contributed other resources to the 62nd and 63rd Street locations. Despite this apparent generosity, some community members remain wary of the University’s intentions. One woman who shares a plot with Slatton sees the donations as a means of discouraging protest rather than giving back. She says of the University’s administration, “They’re a bunch of liars.”

On the following Sunday, frustration with the University’s actions is far from obvious. Benjamin Murphy is shirtless today, a grinning Adam in his makeshift Eden. The air is thick with insects and smoke from the brick grill, and the garden is vibrating with activity. Toddlers struggle with the weight of full watering cans and urban farmers plant marigolds, nature’s insect repellent, along the border of their plots. Community members stay into the late afternoon, working and laughing: the gardeners at 65th and Woodlawn are in no hurry to leave.

Art in Action will take place this Saturday, May 29th at First Presbyterian Church in Woodlawn from 11 am to 7 pm. The festival is full of music, art, vendors, and workshops. This year’s musical acts include Queen Portia, a local blues singer, jazz pianist Paris Smith, hip-hop artist and activist HB Sol, and Lakesigns, a student rock band. The event also features workshops for belly dancing and slam poetry. In addition to the entertainment, there will be discussion groups focused on South Side issues, like the impact of the 2016 Olympic Bid, a financial literacy workshop, and a discussion exploring the nature of racism. “There’s a hell of a lot of talented people but there isn’t a place to sell their art,” University of Chicago graduate student Mark Hopwood says. He gestures to a woman in the planning committee, “Dessie Williams is a great example. She makes jewelry, paintings, and children’s toys. Art in Action is somewhere she can sell it.” This year, Art in Action will include a free barbeque lunch and dinner.

Advertising for the festival has been almost entirely word of mouth, but the word has spread. What started as a 70-person event five years ago drew over 400 people last year. “I think this will be our biggest year yet,” Carol, a South side resident says confidently. This time around the committee is planning for about 500 visitors. Art in Action began with the partnership between the Southside Solidarity Network (SSN), a University of Chicago student run organization, and Southside Together Organizing for Power (STOP), a community advocacy group from Woodlawn. The two groups found they had overlapping goals: SSN, a student group at the University, seeks to facilitate connections between the University of Chicago and the South Side; STOP aims to encourage political and economic awareness among South Side residents. Art in Action was a way to encourage the dialogue that both groups want to see.

Within the university community, regions south of the campus have traditionally been represented as uniformly dangerous, and students have been discouraged from venturing outside of typical University stomping grounds. “The mentality was that if you cross the Midway, you were going to get killed,” says STOP community liaison Wardell Lavender. The same sentiments ring true in the other direction as well—there has been mistrust in the Woodlawn community with regard to the University. “The University and the community were just never together,” Lavender says. “But then guys from the University came to the community and said ‘Look, we want a festival where the community mingles with the University.’”

Art in Action has grown out of a belief that the presence and practice of art can be a form of activism by breaking down cultural barriers and forging relationships with the community. “This event is meant to give students a different view of Woodlawn,” says Hopwood. “It is not a threat, but a community with a history, and it is possible for a relationship with the residents.”

For more information about Art in Action visit artinactionchicago.com

(Mehveş Konuk)

For the past three weeks, she has been working on a project in the Los Angeles area that assesses waste flow and finds creative ways to redirect it. The project involves three different locations: a public housing project in L.A., a hospital for Vietnam veterans in a mental health program, and a community of ranchers and members of the Shoshone Paiute Indian tribe in Owens Valley (where the city of L.A. obtains most of its water).

Klehm’s L.A. project has many independently evolving parts. She has developed two bio-filters, which contain a mechanical sand-gravel filter in addition to a soil-plant filtering component. One is constructed from a shipping crate, the other from 55-gallon barrels. Both filter rainwater and river water from the city. She is also cultivating wetlands for water filtration and purification. In Owens Valley, Klehm set up a large-scale earthworm composting and green waste program. “I’m working with the dynamic of my context,” explains Klehm. “The Latino community’s dynamic, the veteran’s dynamic, and this tiny town of ranchers and natives’ dynamic.”

“A lot of people don’t really see what I do as art-making,” Klehm pauses. “But I really don’t care. Others say this is art. I call it ‘social ecologies.’ I use aesthetic strategies to re-enliven dialogues around land use. And I engage people and help create a system that works for them.” Although Klehm has been in California for the past several weeks, most of her projects are based in her hometown Chicago, a historic center for community-based art forms.

For example, in 1993, the arts organization Sculpture Chicago joined with artists and local community organizations to create eight large-scale public art projects in several Chicago neighborhoods. The project, entitled “Culture in Action,” included a neighborhood parade that brought Mexican-Americans and African-Americans together, a hydroponic garden for HIV and AIDS patients, and a block party organized by neighborhood youth groups. Despite the project’s attempt to create a new dialogue between the artist and community, seventeen years later almost none of its effects remain. Most of the works in “Culture in Action” didn’t last; Klehm wants to make sure that hers do.

A few years ago, Klehm started the “Seed Archive Project.” Housed in Chicago, the archive is a public-access surplus of seeds, which Klehm gives to anyone committed to sowing and growing them. The project has an estimated eighteen-year development period. Klehm also started a “Neighborhood Orchard” near her Little Village home. The project has been developing for eight years, and continues to grow. Klehm began the community apple orchard when her neighbor, Trevino, refused money for a favor, asking her instead to plant him an apple tree. The orchard now takes up three-quarters of an acre. In 2007, Klehm built “Greenhouses of Hope”: two 2,500-square-foot earthworm compost sites in Chicago’s Pacific Garden Mission, a homeless shelter on South Canal Street. The project is continuous and ongoing. “Everything I do, I birth, has its own momentum, and eventually projects move away from me. I just have to keep up with them.”

Klehm, who grew up on a farm, clearly knows how to keep up with nature, but reconnecting urban residents with their landscapes is more difficult, and she knows what happens when community projects become dependent on a single individual. Twenty years ago, Klehm planted a hundred fruit trees in Grand Crossing. Today, only two remain, and they are now located at the Experimental Station at 61st and Blackstone. “People may want urban gardens, but they don’t know how to take care of them, or what it means to build an ecology and maintain it. That’s the missing piece, and that’s the hardest thing to teach because we’ve been so divorced from those long-term rhythms.”

As Klehm’s career continues to take her to new places, the resilience and relevance of her projects will be tested. But she has confidence in both her work and the communities they engage. “What I do is teach a system and see how people grab onto it. People I work with become collaborators. We are all on equal ground.”

(Mehveş Konuk)

The housing crisis is responsible for much of the movement in Woodlawn, according to Mattie Butler, executive director of Woodlawn East Community and Neighbors (WECAN). “People are moving because they lost one place, so they move in with relatives or friends and in about a month they have to move out because their friends start to have a problem [paying their rent or mortgage]. They keep on moving within Woodlawn till they exhaust their options.” WECAN provides affordable housing and supportive services to Woodlawn residents, like those displaced by the 557 foreclosures that occurred in the neighborhood this past January. With many cases still pending, Butler predicts that the worst of the foreclosures is yet to come.

Woodlawn is also one of many neighborhoods in Chicago undergoing gentrification—or, at least, it was before the housing market collapsed. “We have more affluent people who have moved to Woodlawn, but now they’re not moving that often because the housing market has got a great big hole in the bottom of it,” Butler says. But this hasn’t prevented the displacement of low-income residents. “We were having a problem with poor people being pushed out because rental housing was used for condo conversion, but it didn’t stop fast enough to keep people from being moved,” explains Butler. Developers were hit by the foreclosures too, and now, at the same time as many struggle to afford housing, “there’s a lot of new construction sitting on the ground, vacant and boarded-up.”

The foreclosure crisis is also driving an increase in movement throughout the South Side. According to Carlos Nelson, executive director of the Greater Auburn-Gresham Development Corporation, people in his neighborhood “are typically moving around just for additional housing.” They tend to stay within about a five-mile radius that includes Englewood and Grand Crossing. Jacques Conway, a member of the community organization Teamwork Englewood, adds, “People move frequently based on how many times they run out of money to stay in a particular apartment. Often, when they know they have to move or they will be evicted, instead of paying their landlord back – which they know they can’t do – they use it as a security deposit to rent at another place. They usually stay in the community, but either move when they get behind on rent, or when the building is in such disrepair that they don’t want to rent there anymore.”

This process can quickly become a self-perpetuating cycle, as each move leads to greater instability. In a November 2009 report, researchers at D.C.-based think tank the Urban Institute dubbed this process “residential churning.” “Churning movers,” or people who move frequently without improving their situations, made up nearly half of all moving families in ten U.S. cities surveyed in the study (Chicago was not among them). These families tend to be young and low-income, and dissatisfied and disconnected from their neighborhoods, though they rarely move far outside them.

One woman who fits the profile of a churning mover is Cheryl*, a 38-year-old mother of three. She has moved around a lot in her lifetime, twice due to evictions. “I had to start over once, then I got divorced and I had to start over after that. Now I’m at a place in my life where I’m starting over again.”

One eviction followed her divorce. With her husband gone and without a job, “I didn’t have the means to care for the apartment or pay the rent,” she says. The second happened because, she says, “I was living a life at that time where I was reckless—I wasn’t too smart. Today I’m a different person. I think more about the consequences of my actions.”

Cheryl currently lives in Englewood with her children and partner, and she wants to move. “There’s a lot of open [criminal] activity here,” she explains. She would like to live in a more culturally and economically diverse neighborhood such as Oak Lawn, where she lived several years ago, or Hyde Park. In the latter, she says, “everything’s convenient. It’s a thriving area. There are lots of different places that my children can become a part of—a wealth of things going on in the area.”

Cheryl’s evictions pose an obstacle—she has “horrible credit,” she says, and her partner has none. But as she tries to start over this time, she’s in a much better position. “I have a different team of people with me. I have a companion now who helps me with everything, which makes it a lot easier. I have resources now.” She’s also working with an organization in Hyde Park to try to find an affordable apartment there.

Cheryl may have been a churning mover in the past, but she’s in a good position to become what the Urban Institute calls an “up-and-out mover” if she relocates to a higher-income community with more opportunities. The very fact that she knows about neighborhoods like Oak Lawn and Hyde Park puts her at a significant advantage.

Chicagoans tend to be familiar with neighborhoods in which their own racial group predominates, according to the 2008 study “Racial Blind Spots: Black-White-Latino Differences in Community Knowledge.” The study, led by University of Illinois-Chicago professor Maria Krysan, found that people decide where to move based primarily on information from social networks and realtors, two sources that usually resemble them racially, thus reinforcing the already extreme segregation of Chicago’s neighborhoods.

But as Krysan and her colleagues found—and Cheryl attests—people want to live in more diverse neighborhoods than they actually do. The fact that African-Americans, for example, tend to congregate in particular neighborhoods has more to do with the fear of discrimination elsewhere, plus the aforementioned “blind spots,” than with an innate preference to be around people of the same race.

A new nonprofit called MoveSmart is trying to remedy these racial blind spots by providing movers with easy access to housing-related information. Their “Neighborhood Finder” allows users to plug in their priorities—low density or high, good schools, banks, farmers markets, libraries—and see which areas fit them best.

According to Executive Director Justin Massa, the idea for MoveSmart was born over coffee with two other fair housing advocates in Chicago. “We started realizing that lots of housing counselors don’t have access to all the rich information that’s out there.” After a lot of brainstorming, he says, “We finally got around to the concept of taking lots of data that’s complex and honing it down into a system where average people can address their own needs.”

(courtesy of Zol87/Flickr)

Now, an agency called Housing Choice Partners (HCP) has a contract with the CHA to counsel former public housing residents with Section 8 vouchers (federal rental subsidies). “We work with them pretty intensively,” says Executive Director Christine Klepper. “We lead tours so they can see what we call ‘opportunity areas,’ which are areas with a lower poverty rate and a lower [minority] population. We talk about considering the quality of schools, researching the crime rate, what kind of amenities are nearby.”

“So often, low-income people, don’t necessarily think about those things, because they’ve never had a choice,” Klepper explains. “They just kind of look around them and make decisions based on what’s nearby.” HCP’s counseling has measurable success: the average participant moves from a census tract with 60 percent poverty to one with 30 percent. But, Klepper says, “A neighborhood that has 30 percent of its residents in poverty is still a pretty distressed neighborhood. [The first move] is just a stopping point.”

Although most people don’t want to move far from the communities they know, Klepper says that “families that move to opportunity areas are always more satisfied. They like their neighborhoods better, their landlords better, their units better.”

Sometimes, we need a big move in order to get a fresh start. In economic hard times, and across the intensely divided geography of Chicago, the services that organizations like MoveSmart and HCP provide to residents can mean, at the very least, a move in the right direction.

Sitting on a small stage in the Experimental Station across from Chicago Public Radio host Steve Edwards, Michelle Alexander described the systematic discrimination against racial minorities by the United States’ criminal justice system. Author of “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness,” Alexander explained that the supposedly colorblind narcotics laws that came out of the War on Drugs specifically target people of color, especially young black men. This has led to mass incarceration of minorities, many of whom are stripped of their legal rights upon release. In the ’70s, before drug legislation was implemented, there were around 300,000 people incarcerated in America. Now there are over two million people in American prisons, Alexander said, and it’s not an accident that most of them are black.

What if, Alexander asked us to consider, the police treated drug use in college fraternities like they do in poor minority communities? What if they entered parties, lawfully seized the personal property of the offenders, sent 18-year-old University of Chicago students to jail for years, and stripped them of legal rights when they got out? A murmur rose up among us.

This discrimination is real, said Alexander, but it is not simple to explain. There are more black officers on police forces now than ever before, she pointed out to us, and there are more black men in prison now than ever before. She told us that she herself, an African-American civil rights lawyer born a generation after Jim Crow was dismantled, still finds her perceptions colored by racial biases.

“Martin Luther King, Jr. used to say over and over again in his speeches that racial caste systems are supported more by racial indifference than racial hostility,” Alexander reminded us. “The same thing can be said about mass incarceration. We don’t care enough as a nation about black and brown youth, and if we did, the system of mass incarceration would not exist.”

When the discussion ended, many listeners lingered. We passed out fliers, we exchanged numbers, we filled the space with conversation. We left that small crowded room slowly, because we felt connected, and we did not want to be indifferent.

Clare Feinberg contributed reporting to this article.

(Anna Gregaline/courtesy of ONO)

The evening’s performers have been drawn from various sectors of the profoundly heterogeneous Chicago music world. Organized by Noah Moskowitz, who will head a number of classical composers and musicians from the University of Chicago, the event also features Dada-esque free-improvisers Suckling Pigs (who describe their sound as “fiber fullified flavored cesspools when eating snakes”) and anemrostone, a local synth-based drone outfit. No-wave war gods ONO will also lead the audience through their spiritual exercise in musical diversity. Indeed, it is quite appropriate that ONO appear, since they were one of the pioneers of destructo-wild-man performance art in Chicago, overcoming perpetual and severe criticism of their unique and experimental form. Moskowitz, who runs the Student Composer Alliance at the University, says, “The idea was…to have a general performance within a timeframe with lots of different stuff going on: lots of different styles and ideas and methods of communication.”

The venue, the Woodlawn Collaborative, was created with this very goal in mind. Beginning in the spring of 2006, travis, the psychotropic wundermensch vocalist of ONO, along with students and graduates from the University, began toying with the idea of creating a space for experimental art on the South Side, where students and local artists could congregate and mingle their artistic outpourings. However, travis laments, currying support for a collaborative effort with the University from local members of the community was not an easy task, “I was trying to get people I knew had been active in the South Side community [to help establish the Woodlawn Collaborative]. People still have a lot of wounds from the ‘60s and ‘70s on the South Side, and they don’t come easily to this idea of [participating in a project with the University].”

Though issues of race may have hindered the establishment of the Collaborative, they will certainly figure prominently in ONO’s performance there this Friday. In radical contrast to the traditional classical pieces that are to be performed by the student composers, ONO has planned a post-apocalyptic slave spiritual. With a sampled slave chant droning in the background, travis will be led around the space on a makeshift barge, drifting amidst a sea of harsh noise, orchestrated by P.Michael, the band’s bassist and founder, and Jesse Thomas, its guitar and saxophone noisemaker. Upon reaching center stage, travis will then bellow lines from another traditional slave song, “I’ve Got Shoes,” before resuming command of his processional barge and sailing out of the room. “In this Black History Month,” travis proclaims, “so many black folks have forgotten that the revolution isn’t over…[Our presentation is meant to be] a noisy protest.”

The performance seeks to draw local musicians out of their respective corners and into the diverse community of South Side artists. Those attending the show will be subjected to musical eloquence and harassment, both meant to demonstrate the universality of diverse kinds of authentic music.
Woodlawn Collaborative, 6400 S. Kimbark Ave. February 26. Friday, 7pm. Free. woodlawncollaborative.org

Nimocks, former chief of the University of Chicago Police Department and current Director of Community Partnerships, has lived in Woodlawn since the early 1950s. Speaking to a rapt audience of both University students and neighborhood advocates last Thursday as panelist for the public forum called “What’s Up In Woodlawn?,” he gave an account of a Woodlawn that is difficult to picture today. The neighborhood, which once laid claim to an affluent population of over 90,000, started to go downhill in the 1960s with the proliferation of narcotics and gang violence, he explained. Today, Woodlawn has just over 20,000 residents.

Nimocks, however, is confident in the future of Woodlawn. “Woodlawn is coming back!” he insisted. And he’s certainly not the only one who thinks so. Other optimistic panelists included Arvin Strange, the Program Director of the New Communities Program in Woodlawn, and fellow former Chicago police officer and current alderman Willie Cochran (20th).

Two issues emerged as the group’s predominant concerns: education and affordable housing. Speaking most to the former issue was Latesha Dickerson, who entreated attendees to volunteer as tutors for an organization called the Woodlawn Children’s Promise Zone. “If you’re not making an investment in young people,” she argued, “you’re not investing in the future.”

Questions closed the evening, and, the discussion settled on relations between Woodlawn and the University. Nimocks, who had been silent for nearly an hour, stood up. “We need to be a part of, rather than apart from the Woodlawn community,” he urged, to a final peal of applause.

The origin of the jazz brunch is hard to pinpoint, but it most likely began in New Orleans as entertainment for wealthy tourists. Restaurant brunches almost always tend towards the American and French standards of omelets, pancakes, and eggs Benedict, and the musical entertainment is almost as uniformly jazz or gospel, never Baroque or rock ‘n’ roll brunch. It’s a meal in keeping with the culturally mixed and commercial culture of New Orleans. The central problem, then, is that because brunch is by nature a complacent experience, must it domesticate the jazz that is paired with it? What does that mean when the jazz brunch comes to a city with such a long and strong jazz tradition?

In Chant’s case, the restaurant invites a diverse mix of musicians to provide entertainment at the Sunday brunch. In addition to Morikeba, Chant has featured blues singer Gloria Shannon, jazz vocalist Maggie Brown, and many others beyond the norm of the standard jazz quartet. As an Asian-inspired fusion restaurant, says Chant catering manager Angelique Connor, “we’re interested in combining cultures.” That means accompanying the fried, lobster-stuffed wontons with traditional West African storytelling and songs. As for having a musical brunch at all, Chant’s upscale appeal makes it a natural fit for an experience not offered by many other restaurants on the South Side. And Hyde Park, as Connor points out, “has a very rich history in music.”

In Woodlawn, Backstory Café has a weekly jazz brunch with a buffet and made-to-order menu. In its cozy one-room space, it’s a more intimate affair than at Chant. Though the menu changes weekly, jazz trio Recovery are returning guests; members Ben Brown, Jeff Kimmel, and Brian Sulpizio play experimental music throughout the city. Backstory’s jazz brunch is an enjoyable experience, a good way to spend a Sunday afternoon. But to enjoy jazz as an active experience, the café’s weekly avant garde jazz night is a better bet.

W.C. Handy’s Bistro in South Shore is a “health and entertainment bar” that promises a jazz brunch on Sunday, though they were closed when the Chicago Weekly visited. The restaurant claims to be the “Only One of it’s [sic] Kind in the Mid-West,” and it may be the only of its kind in Chicago: serving meat-filled and vegetarian dishes alike, offerings include salmon croquettes with grits and eggs or vegetarian corned beef with yams. Live music on Sunday afternoons recall the mission of the original W.C. Handy, often called the Father of the Blues, who is credited with bringing blues to the mainstream in the teens and twenties. As jazz has become ubiquitous background music, it may take such a mission to make it a focus once again.