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The South Loop is not an easy neighborhood to encapsulate. “It’s not very cohesive yet,” admits Ryan of Sloopin, a blog dedicated to the going-ons in the swathe of land that bleeds into the touristy gleam of Grant Park to its north, the buzz of McCormick Place on its east, and the storied history of Motor Row on its southern reaches.

2012 should have been a time of celebration for the community. The city expected the sprawling McCormick Place complex to host the world’s luminaries for a double-header of G8 and NATO conferences in May. March saw basketball’s latest phenomenon Anthony Davis—the 19-year-old who grew up in the South Loop—lead his University of Kentucky team to national March Madness glory and then win an Olympic gold medal with Team USA. Mayor Emanuel announced a new Cermak CTA stop on the Green Line, driving hopes that an area currently filled with empty lots could experience a regeneration. In the afterglow of these flashes of excitement, new eateries, community spaces, and businesses opened in the neighborhood at an unprecedented rate.

However, this justified optimism is not readily apparent on the streets of the South Loop. Just two blocks away from the lauded new restaurant Acadia, a new office building lies empty, its rain-streaked and dirty glass windows promising retail space for lease. Lunch hour each weekday sees only the rare office worker making the trip down from the Loop, and the foot traffic is often sparse along the South Loop’s main streets. The financial bonanza from the two conferences also failed to materialize, with the G8 summit relocating to Camp David and the NATO summit likely only to be remembered in the neighborhood for crippling street protests.

It’s a neighborhood on the up—incrementally so, but it will take more than external intervention and active storefronts to reintroduce vitality to the neighborhood’s quietest areas. The emotional investment in the fate of their neighborhood is palpable among business owners like the husband and wife team running Overflow Coffee, organizations like Greater South Loop, and the lively comment threads on Sloopin. With residents like these, it won’t be too long till the South Loop recaptures its former glories.

Best Hyper Local News Source
Sloopin
In this time of often bewildering change in the South Loop, it can often be difficult to keep tabs on whether that new restaurant has managed to outlast its teething problems, where exactly that new gastropub joint is located, or what’s going on with the moving trucks at that street corner. Sloopin fills that gap with its coverage of businesses coming and going and is an invaluable resource for both residents and visitors to the area. It’s more akin to a modern town hall than a bulletin board, though, which is especially useful given the great diversity found within the South Loop’s limits. On its message boards and comment threads, heated debates range from the consequences of a new ‘L’ stop to whether a new pizza joint deserves its hype. sloopin.com (Patrick Leow)

Best Start to a Morning After the Night Before
Waffles
With its orange tinted walls and bright naked lamps, Waffles is not for the bleary eyes of partygoers looking to fill their stomachs in the early hours of Sunday morning. What it lacks in eye-appeasing color is however made up by some of the best breakfasts on the South Side. Waffles serves up two kinds of Belgian waffles—Brussels and Liege, the latter being sweeter and promising to melt on your tongue in an explosion of sugary bliss—paired with the standouts that are decadent crispy pork shoulder and Albondigas, where puréed tomatoes are slathered over a mixture of lamb and meatballs. Those with a sweet tooth should opt for the sinful but rewarding Mexican chocolate, and vegetarians aren’t forgotten with options ranging from green tea to banana, both of which will provide a light yet satisfying start to your day. 1400 S. Michigan Ave. Monday – Friday, 8am-2pm; Saturday-Sunday, 8am-3pm. 312-854-8572. waffleschicago.com (Patrick Leow)

Best Trip Back in Time
Clarke House Museum
In 1836, lured from Utica, New York by the prospect of great riches in the frontier town of Chicago, a merchant named Henry B. Clarke decided to set down his monumental family south of the Chicago River. Still standing today, the Clarke House is considered Chicago’s oldest structure. Inside, one is introduced to slightly stuffy trappings of family life: brightly colored tea sets, ornate armoires, and intricately carved rocking chairs. Yet, it is the outside that really steals the show, with its impeccably maintained Doric columns and imposing steps leading to the entrance. By the end of the 1800s, it would come to be overshadowed by the huge mansions of Prairie Avenue as the area enjoyed an unprecedented era of wealth, housing Pullmans and Armours, Potters and Fields. While those mansions are long gone, Clarke House stands proud beside sleek modern towers. 1827 S. Indiana Ave. Tours on Wednesday-Sunday, 12pm and 2pm. (312) 326-1480. (Patrick Leow)

Best Socially Minded Cup of Coffee
Overflow Coffee Bar
Overflow Coffee Bar occupies the bottom floor of a building that also houses the Loop Christian Ministries and the Daystar School. Inside, with the quiet thrum of diligently working Columbia College students hovering over a softly piped Belle and Sebastian album, Overflow comes across as a thoroughly undistinguished coffee shop. In the midst of this peaceful idyll, though, lies a driving social purpose. Between  its weekly open mics for writers and artists in the neighborhood, movie screenings, and t-shirt sales, the little shop advances the twin goals of tackling global inequity and building an attachment to the community among South Loop residents. Of course, they take their coffee as seriously as their activism. With ingredients including coconut milk, hazelnut, mocha and the crucial cayenne pepper, The Overflow is a cup of coffee that tastes like no other. 1550 S. State St. Monday-Friday, 7am-9pm; Saturday-Sunday, 8am-6pm. (312) 772-2356. overflowcoffeebar.org (Patrick Leow)

September 27, 2012 By Chicago Weekly Staff

Best of the South Side 2012

Ethan Tate

Last Sunday afternoon, most of Shimer College crowded into a small room to discuss the future of their school. The Assembly—a democratic body in which all students, faculty, staff, and trustees have equal votes—has traditionally been the moral authority of the college, while legal authority rests with the Board of Trustees. In last Sunday’s special session, those two authorities clashed as the Assembly voted on resolutions condemning the Board’s recent actions and the college’s president.

The current conflict that threatens to rip Shimer apart is only the latest tribulation in the history of the tiny school, which bills itself as “Chicago’s Great Books College” and has an enrollment of a little over 100 students. Founded in 1853 in bucolic Mount Carroll in western Illinois, the college faced mounting debts and declining enrollment in the 1970s. In 1978 the Board of Trustees voted to shut down the school, but the faculty and students wouldn’t give up. They moved into a Victorian mansion in Waukegan at the mayor’s invitation and remained there for almost 30 years with a communal government centered around the Assembly. In 2006, the college moved again to its present location in a few buildings on the Illinois Institute of Technology campus in the hope of attracting more students. Until recently it remained tucked away there, largely unnoticed by the outside world.

But then Thomas Lindsay came along. The school’s new president was inaugurated last year and quickly stirred up opposition. “This thing really got going when President Lindsay fired the director of admissions without any internal consultation whatsoever,” says Professor Albert Fernandez, who also serves as a trustee and the Speaker of the Assembly. Lindsay then chose a replacement whom a search committee had twice rejected. In a meeting on November 15, the Assembly passed several resolutions calling on Lindsay and the Board to respect Shimer’s tradition of shared governance. In response, trustee Patrick Parker ’54 wrote a letter to the Assembly informing them that financial donors like himself “expect, in return for our support, that the rest of the community will do its job, i.e. for the teachers to teach, the students to learn, and the managers to manage.”

Parker’s letter was accompanied by very similar ones from five other trustees, all of whom had several things in common. All had been appointed to the Board very recently. All had no previous ties to Shimer. All attacked the school’s history of communal democracy. And almost all were prominent political conservatives, a point that articles in the Tribune and Chicago Reader have fixed on.

The letters caused an uproar among Assembly members, and tensions only rose over the following months. The next battle would be joined over the school’s mission statement, which needed to be reviewed as part of the reaccreditation process. An online petition in support of the current mission statement, posted in December, received 144 signatures—almost one and a half times the size of the student body—but Lindsay made it clear that he wanted a new statement. On February 7, the Assembly voted to retain the current statement. Two days later, the faculty sat down for a meeting with Lindsay in which he informed them that he would be meeting with faculty members individually “to ascertain their commitment to the new mission statement,” according to Professor and Dean of Students Stuart Patterson in an email interview. “To a person, the Faculty felt strongly that President Lindsay was indicating a linkage between commitment to his mission statement and employment at Shimer.”

The faculty’s response was a unanimous letter in support of the current mission statement that was read at the Board meeting on February 19 and 20, but to no effect. The vote, which was conducted by secret ballot for the first time Fernandez can remember, was 18 to 16 in favor of the new mission statement.

The resolution passed by the Assembly last Sunday took issue with the questionable process by which the Board had approved Lindsay’s mission statement. The day before the Board vote, Parker had informed the trustees of an agreement signed three years before with a charitable foundation that he claimed required the school to adopt a new mission statement before the next Board meeting. When the Board’s Executive Committee indicated its unanimous disapproval of the new statement, Lindsay had urged them to resign. In light of all this, the Assembly declared by an almost unanimous vote that it didn’t recognize the “legitimacy or authority” of the new mission statement.

The other scheduled resolution, that the Assembly “has no confidence in the ability of President Thomas Lindsay to lead Shimer College,” was tabled indefinitely after long and heated debate. “This is a very serious vote. It could well spell the death of the school,” said Patterson. “If that’s the will of the Assembly, then it’s the will of the Assembly to strike out on their own as a new college.” Owen Brugh ‘06, who attended the meeting, said that even considering the resolution sent a message to “the hardline Board members.” “I don’t think that they believe that this community is capable of this type of action,” he says. “Are you really sure we’re not capable of that?”

“Let me tell you something: if this were the Wild West, Jesse James and all, we wouldn’t have problems with gun violence.” The smell of hard liquor heavy on his breath, a patch of stubbly white hairs hanging off his lower chin, the man proceeded out of the basement of St. Sabina Catholic Church with $75 fresh in hand. Having voluntarily relinquished his gun minutes before, this seemed like a strange sentiment to be voicing. Even more so considering he gave it to the Chicago Police Department as part of a program to get guns off of the streets of Chicago. But the apparent contradictions of this response aren’t an anomaly; they reflect much broader ambiguities in Chicago’s approach to gun control.

The event at St. Sabina was part of a greater citywide effort by the Chicago Alternative Policing Strategy department (CAPS) to buy back and destroy guns from Chicago citizens. From 10am to 4pm on May 8th, the Chicago Police Department set up locations at 22 sites across the city where anyone could turn in a gun. In exchange, participants received a prepaid MasterCard, no questions asked. $100 for an assault weapon, $75 for a handgun, $10 for a model or BB gun.

Upwards of 4,000 guns (and two hand grenades) were collected in total on Saturday, although turnout varied from site to site. At St. Sabina, serving as the official media location on 78th and Racine, upwards of 550 guns were collected. But another location, Fellowship Missionary Baptist Church at 45th and Princeton, the site was struggling to collect 50 guns.

There were no AKs or other assault rifles collected in my presence. Instead, the guns didn’t look too far off from the toy guns I played with in my youth: a variety of small firearms reminiscent of water guns, six shooters out of a John Wayne movie, small revolvers a la Clue. The guns, spanning the range of rusted handguns to hunting rifles held together by electrical tapes, were nothing like the weapons used by the gangsters and drug dealers on the nightly news.

Few of these guns came from the hands of gang members or others likely to commit a crime with a gun. Most of the participants were there because they saw no use for their guns. The former security guard no longer in need of his firearm, the senior who found a gun he had forgotten about in his basement, and the man who had decided that he was tired of hearing about gun deaths all seem unlikely candidates to be implicated in any sort of homicide or gun-related incident. There were a few tales of weapons coming out of the hands of at-risk youth and young adults, such as the father who found a gun in his son’s room (the gift card was going to the kid’s mother for Mother’s Day). But most of the participants seemed to be far removed from the young male demographic that is most likely to commit a crime with a firearm.

This disconnect—that most of the guns come from those least likely to use them—has made Chicago’s gun turn-in program the center of some controversy. The basic points are not disputed: guns kill people, gun violence is an issue in Chicago, gun violence can be at least quelled, if not eradicated. The social cost of a gunshot injury has been estimated at 1 million dollars, and total gunshot wounds at almost 2.5 billion dollars a year for the city of Chicago.

Despite having collected more than 20,000 guns since the program’s introduction in 2005, there have been persistent questions as to whether the program has had any sort of impact on gun violence in Chicago. University of Chicago economist Stephen Levitt has disputed the effectiveness of gun buy-backs in general. In his paper “Understanding Why Crime Fell in the 1990s,” Dr. Levitt argues that “research evaluations have consistently failed to document any link between gun buy-back programs and reductions in gun violence.” A study done on a similar program in Milwaukee found that the types of guns turned in did not correspond to the types of guns most often used for crime. Turn-in programs have been repeatedly called a waste of resources that distract from the issue at hand: finding effective ways to decrease gun crime.

A cynical dismissal of the Chicago program’s persistence would find its real aims more political in nature, nothing but a good photo opportunity. On April 29th, in anticipation of the turn-in, Mayor Daley stood in front of a table of assault rifles and a room full of press, discussing his hard stance on crime. “I don’t know of any other city or state that regularly asks their residents to turn in their illegal weapons like we do in Chicago,” he said sternly. “We’re going to continue removing guns from our streets.”

But gun turn-ins might hold potential for more than just publicity. The University of Chicago Crime Lab, an academic group studying crime in Chicago, has pointed to the irregularity of Chicago’s gun turn-in program as a place for improvement. Holding up a sustained national gun turn-in attempt in Australia as an example of a more successful program, the group has argued that relying on more regular efforts could be a more effective method.

But maybe even the occasional turn-in may have value beyond the immediate, pragmatic returns. Pastor Charles Jenkins of Fellowship Missionary Baptist Church argues just this: “I think [the gun turn-in] says number one, the issue is at the forefront of our minds, and I think it says two, the gun turn-in is a statement that we are committed to doing something about the issue, and I think three, the gun turn-in is a voice box of sorts that, in turn, brings more attention to the issue and brings more support to the whole effort to get the guns off the streets.” Rather than a distraction from real improvement, the program may serve as a catalyst for greater public awareness of gun violence, and more community involvement in preventing it. At some point, the hundreds of murders in Chicago each year become a dismissible bottom line, and it is easy for guns to fade into the periphery of community issues.

The debate over the gun turn-in program rests against the backdrop of Chicago’s handgun ban, which is currently being challenged in the Supreme Court case McDonald v. Chicago. Enacted in 1982, the city’s ban on handguns is one of the most stringent gun restriction laws in the nation. In Chicago, all firearms must be registered with the police, but handguns cannot be registered. In effect, it is illegal for a citizen of the city to possess any sort of handgun in the city of Chicago.

Otis McDonald, a South Side resident, decided to challenge the constitutionality of this ban, citing his rights under the Second Amendment. Afraid that he would not be in a position to protect himself against armed assaulters, McDonald sought to decrease the threat of violence in his neighborhood by challenging his right to possess a handgun.

The case comes in the wake of another Supreme Court case in which a similar gun ban in Washington, DC was overturned. Both cases have served as a rallying point for the NRA and other gun rights advocacy groups. The DC case could not be applied to states because DC falls solely under federal jurisdiction, but a repeal of the gun ban in Chicago would limit the ability of states and local governments across the country to regulate gun possession.

The future of the gun turn-in program hangs over McDonald v. Chicago, which is expected to be decided sometime in June. A major caveat of the turn-in efforts is that the compensation money cannot be used to buy another weapon: the whole program is predicated on the idea of reducing the amount of guns available to criminals. An overturning of the gun ban would necessarily dictate a new strategy for the Chicago Police Department and make the gun turn-in program irrelevant.

At 4pm, the police begin to box up the guns and carry them out to armored vehicles, off to be destroyed and never to return to the streets of Chicago. The last stragglers to turn in their guns head up from the basement of St. Sabina, satisfied with the gift cards in their wallets. Since the beginning of 2010, there have been 127 murders in Chicago. There is a chance that one of the guns turned in could have been responsible for a death in the future—at least, this is the hope of the police. Seeing the guns carried out brings a definite sense of accomplishment to the day. And despite the convoluted nature of the turn-in and the questions surrounding its effectiveness, there is a clear logic driving the program. One father’s sentiment could be the city of Chicago’s: “We ain’t keeping guns in the house.”

The Mall of America purports to have everything, and maybe that’s why we went, just to see what “everything” could look like. The Mall is less than twenty years old, and boasts 4.2 million feet of shopping and entertainment. But we weren’t going to buy anything—we were going to be somewhere completely different. Hyde Park had become cold and unpleasant, with finals looming like the terrifying monstrosities they are. The exact reasons that we took an overnight bus to Minnesota are unclear, even to us. But we found ourselves at Union Station at ten on a Friday evening, waiting for the double-decker bus that would transport us across the great Midwest, towards the consumerist American dream. Whether we found it or not is as obscured to us as our reasons for seeking it in the first place.

The Mall of America at 10:30 in the morning on a Saturday, a half-hour after it opens its doors, is a strangely perfect place. Shoppers mill, in sweaters and coats, rosy cheeked as they shed scarves and mittens. They wait in line for tickets to the amusement park rides and lounge on the benches under the atrium, which floods the entire gallery with natural light. The Mall of America is located in Bloomington, Minnesota, a suburb of Minneapolis. A mall like this could only really exist in the suburbs. It’s expansive, overwhelming, and completely innocuous. Despite having a wedding chapel and an indoor theme park, the Mall doesn’t have the flashy, sexy glitz of Vegas. Instead, the Mall of America looks almost exactly like whatever mall was closest to your house growing up—huge chain stores, lots of light, about a dozen coffee shops with holiday special drinks like Spiced Gingerbread Latte and Peppermint White Chocolate Mocha. Small retail carts abound, selling massagers, silver jewelry, and every color of Crocs. Except for the roller coaster roaring at a snail’s pace above our heads, there was little to differentiate the Mall from any other.

When we rode the too-slow roller coaster at the Mall, we saw into its most visible guts. The theme park is set to become Nickelodeon-themed in the near future, and the building leading to a massive Sponge Bob ride carved out neutral, sand-colored holes which dotted the atrium. But aside from these strange footprints, even the smallest things were eerily perfect—there are no rowdy teenagers in the Mall of America, and mall security rarely appeared during our visit. When they did, it was at the entrance, turning away un-chaperoned youths as afternoon slid into evening. Families with children swarmed the tamest of the rides and the McDonald’s in the food court. A huge Christmas tree loomed in the entrance, and the line for Santa’s Village snaked around the indoor trees and plywood walls for the construction pits. The Mall of America is self-heating—the temperature maintains itself from the light in the atrium and the extra energy generated by the visitors and the operation of the stores and restaurants. In the winter, during peak shopping season, the Mall sometimes runs air conditioners despite temperatures far below freezing on the outside. Almost everyone in the Mall of America looks unbearably happy, or unbearably bored. Rather than making trouble, the teenagers stand in line to ride rollercoasters, and scream loudly at the most basic of twists and turns.

A community-oriented brewery with a strong focus on play opens at the Plant

“I still get really excited about Zelda,” Chris Tourre says, not hesitating to respond when asked if there are any recently released video games he’s jonesing for. In a gray hoodie, sneakers, and thick, black-rimmed glasses, he is at once cute and nerdy, like overgrown kids always are. After all, he co-founded a company based on what he calls the “untapped marriage of video games and beer.” This seemingly juvenile obsession with beer is misleading, though, because Tourre is into good beer, really good beer. He and his business partner Lance Curran are the two guys behind Arcade Brewery.

Surprising ideas come from surprising places: an experiment with poultry was Tourre’s inspiration for the project. For his MFA thesis from the University of Illinois at Chicago, Tourre raised a flock of chickens and delivered the eggs across Pilsen. Traveling around the neighborhood, he realized he could bring together the South Side’s bourgeoning culinary scene and its blue-collar population to create a unique, community-oriented product.

Soon after the egg delivery experiment, Tourre started holding brewing workshops and participating in local beer conventions. Sparked by his love of the brew, the part-time artist began concocting his own beer at home before taking his craft public.

Although the word “artisanal” never came up in conversation, Tourre is obviously a craftsman. His recipes are playful and seasonal—take, for example, the Arcade Grapefruit IPA, a golden hoppy concoction with a quirky grapefruit kick. The brewers are also open to customers’ input on what ingredients to use. “From conception to consumption,” Tourre says, “our customers will have a stake of what goes in the bottle.” After the 8-Bit Series, Arcade’s first line of beer, the brewery will release Six Pack Stories, a line that aims to blur the boundary between maker and taster.

Each bottle will have a custom-drawn comic frame, and Tourre hopes to get one artist for each series, who will be chosen by popular vote on Facebook or Twitter. Graphic illustrator Tony Moore—more famously known as the illustrator of the comic book series, The Walking Dead—is the first artist signed on to illustrate what Arcade hopes will be a dynamic, custom label, rather than a typical company masthead.

Arcade has located a physical space for their project—they are the latest planned addition to the Plant, an abandoned warehouse in Back of the Yards that is in the process of becoming the city’s first self-sustainable vertical farm. They will share the 16,800 square-foot first floor space of the Plant with another brewery, the New Chicago Beer Company. Both companies intend to use the space for brewing, bottling, and kegging, and—if things go according to plan—they will eventually be joined by a beer garden. As of now, however, the first floor feels like it belongs in an episode of Ghost Adventures, not in someone’s memories of a half-drunk night in Back of the Yards. Construction won’t begin for another five weeks, but once work on the space begins things will have to move quickly—both breweries want to be up and running by March of next year.

Like many fine alcohols, time is what the Plant needs: time for construction, and time for a $2.1 million anaerobic digester (a fancy power generator) to come through the mail. In the meantime, both Tourre and Curran are keeping busy. Curran is working full-time at Threadless, and, in anticipation of Arcade’s grand opening, Tourre has managed to get ahold of a Winnitron 1000—an old-school arcade console that he and Curran plan to deck out in Arcade “schwag.” The Arcade aesthetic is slowly coming together, but Tourre and Curran don’t plan on becoming beer snobs anytime soon.   “I’m not a style Nazi,” Tourre says. “I just like to make fun beers that are enjoyable.”

A lamprey is a parasite that feeds on underbellies. But in Chicago, the Lampreys are whoever is in the kitchen of Kenneth Morrison. That kitchen, though, and the building that once enclosed it, no longer exist. Morrison, Michelle Faust, and Nat Ward, the trio who started the Chicago artists’ society the Ever-So-Secret Order of the Lamprey, lost all their possessions recently in the December 17 fire that destroyed their home and the nerve-center of the Lampreys, a building in Pilsen they had christened the Whale.

For ten years, the Ever-So-Secret Order of the Lamprey has met under the auspices of a word, and, until the fire, in the depths of the Whale. Visitors to the Whale were unpredictable and members in the society changed depending on the week. The society was never a secret and there are no requirements for membership. It is characterized by the unexpected.

Morrison is a metal sculptor who opened his doors to the Chicago community. Calling the organization “Ever-So-Secret” was a characteristic critique of the glamour of exclusion and secrecy, the opposite of the philosophy of the organization. Anyone was welcome—in Morrison’s view, one shared by many others, the community owned the residence. “That’s why it was called the Whale and not Kenneth’s place,” he says.

A meeting of the Ever-So-Secret Order of the Lamprey includes these agenda points: food, drink, celebration, making, chatting, arguing. Also included is an ever-present element of familiarity and surprise. Mairead Case, a member since moving to Chicago, calls the Whale an “immediate family.” Lampreys are connected by what each person creates, regardless of age, profession, nationality, or position on healthcare.

“At every meeting we had a word,” says Jerry Boyle, a lawyer and member of the Lampreys. “‘Scissors.’ Say the word was scissors. Everybody who came was supposed to bring a piece that had something to do with the word scissors. It could range from a painting or a drawing or a sculpture or a performance, but it had to have something to do with the word scissors.”

The weekly process of a meeting goes like this: someone is elected adjudicator, on no basis other than chance. This person assumes a particular cloaking: cape, scepter (pipe-cleaning brush), hat…what Boyle calls “the chains of obligation.” The art that members have made based on the word is called forth, and the chosen one commences to judge. Awards are distributed.

Case described one week where the word was “jealousy.” Someone cut up little pieces of paper, put them in envelopes, and passed them out. There were not enough envelopes for everyone at the meeting.

Once the word was “spicy.” A computer programmer, in a singular act of obsession, sewed two hundred chili peppers to his underwear. Then, in another singular act, he arrived in Morrison’s kitchen wearing only his fringed underwear and proceeded to dance in an unexpectedly improvisation-rich performance.

He was not ostracized or awarded a blue ribbon. His contribution and presence—even his performance—were accepted in the secret society to the same degree the work of everyone else was, including University of Chicago grad students, professional painters, actors, social workers, and attorneys at law.

Like any membership society, there are non-negotiable rituals involved in its gatherings. “They would give out award-slash-punishments. Every member was expected to contribute an award-slash-punishment. Thing is, you didn’t get to keep the award-slash-punishment, and you didn’t get to keep your piece, either. The piece became the property of the archive.” Examples of titles bestowed upon notable work: “The Gourd of Insignificance,” “The Matted Hair of Revulsion,” and “The Banana of Ill Repute.”

The Whale was not just a networking center for active, creative minds—it was a place where borders were nudged and boundaries dismissed in a host of other ways. Many of the gatherings were raucous and fun—events like pig roasts and “the Real Saint Patrick’s Day Parade” (“We didn’t have a permit,” says Boyle). More importantly, though, there was an effect of equalizing and making two people from different experience sets learn, innovate, and enjoy together. In a supportive, experimental atmosphere, people were encouraged to leave normalcy at the front door—to push their creative inclinations free of negative repercussions, save good-natured teasing.

Not every piece was genius. There were, however, moments of brilliance. A young woman wrote a poem, wrapped it around her body, and her fiance read it as she stood. There were eye-rolling concepts with results grudgingly deemed good—rose petals burned into a violin case. And there were complete failures, as sometimes happens with experimentation and lawyers trying interpretive dance. “People would bring pieces and the fire wouldn’t light, or the eyeball would pop out,” says Case.

But it was all in good fun—which, of course, was the point.

Morrison described the initial motivation for opening his doors to the Lampreys as a result of a certain deadening of adventurism that happens when art turns from passion to profession. He started the Order of the Lamprey in 1997 with the idea of regaining the joy and electric inspiration he experienced in art school.

“We usually manage to challenge people to do things a little different, which was the idea,” he says of the Lampreys.
The night of the fire was also opening night at the Hideout’s annual Holiday Panto, a tradition at the North Side bar and venue where Ward works. This year’s pantomime, “Ho Ho Ho the Humanity,” told the story of Santa Claus’s earlier career as a zeppelin pirate, and the inhabitants of the Whale, as yearly participants, were at the performance.

“They had to cancel the Panto. Most of the cast ended up [at the Whale], which was kind of bizarre, because we had a whole bunch of people dressed up as pirates doing the board-up and cleanup,” Boyle notes.

Since the fire, there has been a rallying of the community surrounding the Lampreys in direct proportion to the generosity displayed by the hosts of the society. “I’ve met most of the people I know in Chicago in my kitchen,” Morrison says. After the fire at the Whale, that kitchen is no longer in operation. What does remain, though, is the meaning invested in background-blind art, appreciated for its animation of new ideas rather than value at auction, and the wide net of people invested in the Whale. And that net is giving back, with Lampreys donating time and supplies to help bring the building back from the dead.

The Lampreys hail from as broad a canvas as the city itself—a rarity in a metropolis known for culture-specific coves of dynamicism. The Whale took Lincoln Park to Bronzeville and initiated them both in the fare offered in Wrigleyville, and started doing it long before anyone noticed the authenticity and ragged charm of Pilsen, where it was all happening. The people involved prided themselves on dropping pretense in favor of exploration and thoughtful criticism. The Whale might be gone for now, but Chicago can do its utmost to make sure the Order of the Lamprey survives as an inclusive example of pursuit of inspiration and an approach to art that places importance on such neglected concepts as “because it is fun” and “‘underbellies.”