SSW 01.13.22

JANUARY 13, 2022

ARTS, CULTURE, POLITICS

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TESTING FAQ, THREE GIRLS FROM BRONZEVILLE, REFRAMING GUN VIOLENCE, AND MORE INSIDE

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SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY The South Side Weekly is an independent non-profit newspaper by and for the South Side of Chicago. We provide high-quality, critical arts and public interest coverage, and equip and develop journalists, artists, photographers, and mediamakers of all backgrounds.

Volume 9, Issue 8 Editor-in-Chief Jacqueline Serrato Interim Managing Editor Jim Daley Senior Editors Christopher Good Olivia Stovicek Sam Stecklow Martha Bayne Arts Editor Politics Editor Education Editor Housing Editor Community Organizing Editor Immigration Editor

Isabel Nieves Jim Daley Madeleine Parrish Malik Jackson Chima Ikoro Alma Campos

Contributing Editors Lucia Geng Matt Moore

Francisco Ramírez Pinedo Jocelyn Vega Scott Pemberton Staff Writers Kiran Misra Yiwen Lu Director of Fact Checking: Kate Gallagher Fact Checkers: Grace Del Vecchio, Hannah Farris, Savannah Hugueley, Caroline Kubzansky, Yiwen Lu, and Sky Patterson Interim Visuals Editor Jason Schumer Deputy Visuals Editors Shane Tolentino Mell Montezuma Staff Illustrators Mell Montezuma Shane Tolentino Layout Editors Haley Tweedell Shane Tolentino Tony Zralka Webmaster Pat Sier Managing Director Jason Schumer Director of Operations Brigid Maniates The Weekly is produced by a mostly all-volunteer editorial staff and seeks contributions from across the city. We publish online weekly and in print every other Thursday.

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IN CHICAGO IN THIS ISSUE Workers organizing Baristas in the Loop are the first ones in the Midwest to publicly push to unionize, after Starbucks workers in the East Coast and other major cities have done so. About a dozen employees from the downtown store submitted signed cards to join SEIU, which could trigger a hearing and an election this month. Shortly thereafter they were joined by employees from a Logan Square store. By forming an organizing committee, they are hoping to improve their wages, work schedules, and labor conditions. Meanwhile, employees at the Art Institute of Chicago voted to unionize on Tuesday after months of actions, and will be recognized as the first major museum union in Chicago, representing curators, librarians, custodians, retail workers, and others. Right before Christmas, about thirty Amazon workers staged walkouts from the Gage Park and Cicero facilities during their busiest season, accusing their supervisors of overworking them and underpaying them. They demand fair and consistent pay across warehouses and respect in the workplace, as Amazon rapidly expands in the city and suburbs.

public meetings report

Omicron wave About half of COVID deaths in Illinois since the beginning of the pandemic are in Cook County, and half of those in Chicago, according to public health officials. Since the highly-transmissible Omicron variant showed up, the City of Chicago and Cook County have mandates in place that require proof of vaccination for anyone over five years old that visits indoor places like restaurants, gyms, and entertainment venues where food and drinks are served.

Children who are twelve or older are eligible to schedule a booster shot five months after they’re fully vaccinated, per the CDC. While many pop-up rapid testing sites can be found throughout the city, they’re largely unregulated and their reliability is debatable. People with private health insurance can soon be reimbursed for up to eight over-the-counter COVID rapid tests a month per individual, according to the Biden administration.

on the rocks

New laws in 2022 A new year always means new laws. Schools in Illinois can no longer reprimand students for wearing afros, cornrows, locs, braids, etc. or to discriminate against them based on any hairstyle. Illinois gun owners can have their FOID cards automatically renewed if they provide their fingerprints. State Police will also be combining FOID and conceal carry licenses into one, will start a database of all guns that have been reported stolen, and will remove guns from people with revoked cards. In the City of Chicago, all domestic workers, which include nannies, house cleaners, and care workers, must have a written contract with the person who hired them. The documents must be written in the workers' preferred language and include pay rate, schedule, and work duties, and should be renewed annually or when work responsibilities change.

A recap of select open meetings at the local, county, and state level. documenters, india daniels, scott pemberton, ..................................4 omicron and testing faq

When to test, how accurate are home tests and more. university of chicago medicine..........5 the storm after winter break

Some have felt gaslighted by City officials who have attempted to strongarm them into attending school in person. madeleine parrish, chima ikoro, jacqueline serrato................................7 Landmark designation may prove promising in the fight to preserve Promontory Point’s limestone. molly morrow.......................................10 no price too high

South Side leaders push for holistic approaches to curb gun violence. max blaisdell.......................................12 tense meetings

Organizers say the metal scrapper’s permitting process exposes real malice from City officials. ermina veljacic....................................14 sisters and soulmates

A conversation with Dawn Turner, author of Three Girls from Bronzeville. carr harkrader....................................16 five chicago women ahead of their time

An exhibit and catalog elevate the stories of influential female artists in the first half of the twentieth century. lauren beard........................................18 ‘above all’

A conversation with Milwaukee-born rapper Myquale. lauren johnson.....................................20 the exchange

The Weekly’s new poetry corner offers our thoughts in exchange for yours. chima ikoro, yvette marie.................21 calendar

Cover Illustration by Gaby FeBland

Bulletin and events. south side weekly staff......................22

Public Meetings Report ILLUSTRATION BY HOLLEY APPOLD

Dec. 2 The Muddy Waters House, Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley House, Glessner House, and several places of worship are among twelve recipients of $4.3 million in building-repair grants from Adopt-A-Landmark. The Department of Planning and Development (DPD) reported on the grants at the Commission on Chicago Landmarks meeting. The report prioritized “shovel-ready” projects in INVEST South/West areas that support exterior and structural integrity and have a revitalizing effect on buildings and neighboring communities. The funds are a significantly greater commitment to Chicago’s architectural heritage than the one million dollars in grants for 2019. Individual grants over $250,000 must be ratified by a City Council vote.

Dec. 7 Cook County Assessor Fritz Kaegi defended his office’s commercial property assessments at a hearing with the City Council Committee on Finance. He explained that commercial properties are taxed at a higher rate than residential properties (twenty-five percent of market value versus ten percent). Commercial properties previously received much lower assessments, he explained, which resulted in residential property owners shouldering more of the tax burden. A City agency or nonprofit could support small banks and credit unions in completing the application process to serve as municipal depositories, Horacio Mendez, president and CEO of the Woodstock Institute, suggested at the meeting. Despite targeted outreach, no neighborhood banks applied to serve as the City’s and Chicago Public Schools’ checking account for the upcoming year. The Woodstock Institute analyzed data from the eleven banks that did apply using four metrics to assess their lending to small businesses and people of color.

They found that Citibank performed above average on all metrics, First Midwest Bank performed above average on three, and Fifth Third Bank and PNC performed above average on two.

Dec. 9 At the Commission on Human Relations Board of Commissioners meeting, the commission’s Equity Advisory Council announced 2022 as a “year of healing,” consisting of a series of programs, a summit, and a comprehensive report. The public safety committee of the commission’s LGBTQ+ Advisory Council plans to work with the Chicago Police Department as CPD relaunches its LGBTQ+ liaison team. The goal is to improve the department’s relationship with the city’s queer communities. The commission’s ad hoc committee on Anti-Asian American/Pacific Islander hate crimes announced an upcoming meeting to discuss the daytime murder of seventy-one-yearold Woom Sing Tse in Chinatown on December 7. The AAPI committee comprises key stakeholders from Asian organizations and community leaders, including Ninth District Chicago Police Commander Don Jerome. The CCHR is tasked with enforcing two Chicago anti-discrimination ordinances, one for fair housing and one for human rights.

Dec. 10 Due to the high number of people who signed up for public comment, each speaker’s 4 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY ¬ JANUARY 13, 2022

A recap of select open meetings at the local, county, and state level for the January 13 issue.

BY DOCUMENTERS, INDIA DANIELS, SCOTT PEMBERTON

time was shortened from three minutes to two at a City Council Committee on Committees and Rules redistricting hearing. Eight Canaryville residents shared concerns about their neighborhood being split up and urged Council members to keep it in the 11th Ward. Other speakers shared concerns with the committee’s current map proposal and suggestions for the placement of ward lines in relation to the Barbara Jean Wright Courts, Englewood, the Gold Coast, and Cabrini-Green. Committee Chair Michelle Harris (8th Ward) was absent due to a death in the family; Alderman Matt O’Shea (19th Ward) served as chair.

Dec. 13 A $2.9 million settlement offer to Anjanette Young was approved at a meeting of the City Council Committee on Finance. The City’s offer of one million dollars had previously been rejected. Even though five of six charges against police were dismissed in the fall, new Corporation Counsel Celia Meza explained that a jury trial on the remaining charge of “willful and wanton conduct” posed a risk of significantly higher damages. Three other settlements, which concerned allegations of police misconduct in 2014, were also discussed.

Dec. 15 Two board members and two public commenters spoke against granting a permit for RMG, the parent company of metal recycler formerly known as General Iron, a metal recycling facility on the Southeast Side during a meeting of the Chicago Board of Health. Board member Steven K. Rothschild said, “By our own data, our role, I would hope … is to reduce [air] particulates. The application is clear that under the best of circumstances it will increase particulates in this Latinx community.” Another board member, Carmen Vergara, added, “Allowing this permit will set us back, particularly with all the work we’ve done with COVID over the last two years.” Public Health Commissioner Allison Arwady added that because several lawsuits have been filed on the permit, with more likely on the way, she can’t say much on the topic. Substance abuse, mental health care, violence prevention, and housing are all important, high priority needs of many Chicago residents. The Chicago Department of Public Health is currently tackling these relevant intertwined public health issues but more coordination and funds are drastically needed.

Dec. 16 Chicago Police Department (CPD) Superintendent David O. Brown reported that his team cleared 374 homicide cases in 2021, the most in nineteen years. At the meeting of the Chicago Police Board, Andrea Kersten, recently confirmed as Civilian Office of Police Accountability (COPA) chief administrator, reported that COPA received 475 police misconduct complaints in November. During the meeting, the Police Board reviewed a case in which Brown and COPA disagreed on disciplinary action for Sergeant Juan Perez in connection with an October 2019 incident in which Perez was found to have misused his body camera and conducted a vehicle stop, search, and seizure without justification. COPA recommended Perez’s dismissal from the force; Superintendent Brown recommended a 180-day suspension. As the deciding vote, the Police Board ruled in favor of the 180-day suspension. As of this meeting, 812 homicides had been committed in 2021, the most in a single year since 1996. This information was collected in large part using reporting from City Bureau’s Documenters at documenters.org

Omicron and Testing FAQ When to test, how accurate are home tests and more.

BY UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO MEDICINE

PHOTO BY SHUTTERSTOCK

A

s the Omicron variant of COVID-19 surges around the country, we're seeing increases in infections, even among people who've been fully vaccinated and have what are called breakthrough infections. As case counts surge, so does demand for testing. As an infectious diseases expert and a hospital epidemiologist, here's what you should know about when to get a COVID-19 test, what kind you should use, what to do if you can't get one at all and why it's still important to get vaccinated and boosted.

When should I get a COVID-19 test?

Isolate and get a COVID-19 test if you have ANY symptoms of COVID-19, even if they’re mild and even if you’re fully vaccinated and/or boosted. Symptoms may include sniffles, congestion or a cough, and might resemble a mild cold, especially in fully vaccinated and boosted people. Even if you have minor symptoms, you are still contagious. People who are unvaccinated or immunocompromised may still get severe disease. Stay isolated if you have any symptoms, even if you cannot quickly get a COVID-19 test.

How are “rapid tests” different from PCR (polymerase chain reaction) tests? Is one better than another?

Rapid antigen tests, which you can buy in most pharmacies, are great in specific circumstances and less good in others. Rapid antigen tests detect COVID-19 when people have a higher amount of virus particles in their system and are more contagious.

But a negative antigen test doesn’t necessarily mean you aren’t contagious. That’s why if someone has COVID-19, but hasn’t yet reached the test's threshold of viral particles, they may still test negative with an antigen test but positive on a PCR test. That’s why I tell people they should trust a positive antigen test, but be more skeptical about a negative one.

PCR tests are far more sensitive than antigen tests. They’re able to detect smaller quantities of the virus and detect them sooner (and for more time) than antigen tests.

While they’re considered the gold standard for a COVID-19 diagnosis, PCR tests are unnecessary for those who have already tested positive on an antigen test. That's important to know as wait times for PCR tests grow due to increased demand. In short: any positive test (PCR or antigen) counts as a positive, but a negative antigen test (“rapid test”) needs to be confirmed with a PCR test.

When should I use an at-home test?

A rapid, at-home antigen test is a useful tool to have in your COVID-19 arsenal. But you need to know when and how to use these tests.

JANUARY 13, 2022 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 5

COVID-19

If you have COVID-19 symptoms and test positive on an at-home test, you have COVID-19. You don’t need to get another test to confirm the results. But if you have symptoms and you test negative, you should not rule out COVID-19 just yet. In this case, we recommend getting a more sensitive PCR test. If you can’t get in for a PCR test quickly, it’s recommended to repeat the antigen test the following day, being sure to isolate until you get your PCR test and results. If you can’t get a PCR test at all, isolate for ten days.

If you don’t have COVID-19 symptoms, using these tests before a gathering will reduce (but not eliminate) the risk that someone attending has COVID-19.

Remember: antigen test results can change quickly and a negative result is really only trustworthy for eight to twelve hours. In other words, you shouldn’t rely on a negative test in the morning if you want to get together in the evening with friends or family.

Make sure everyone who’s attending an event uses an at-home test as close as possible to the time they’re gathering and understands that a negative test doesn’t guarantee safety or completely prevent exposure. If you’ve had a known COVID-19 exposure, no test is going to make it safe for you to gather unmasked with high-risk individuals.

Stay home.

How do I interpret at-home tests?

If you’re taking an at-home COVID-19 test, consider any positive result to mean you have COVID-19. You don’t need to confirm with a PCR test. (Even if it’s an extremely faint line, you should consider yourself infected and isolate.) If you’re unclear about what your test result says, isolate and repeat the test in six to twelve hours. You’ll likely see a clearer line on the test strip next time. Don’t forget: a negative at-home test is only reliable for eight to twelve hours and still doesn’t guarantee you’re COVID-free.

You should get a PCR test if you have symptoms.

What should I do if I’ve been exposed or have symptoms?

Given the widespread transmission of the Omicron variant, you should assume you are infected with COVID-19 if you have symptoms, regardless of your vaccination status.

Isolate for the amount of time that’s recommended by the health department.

If you’ve been exposed, but have no symptoms AND you are fully vaccinated and boosted, you don’t need to quarantine. But you should get a COVID-19 test on day four, five, or six following your exposure. (For example, if you learn you were exposed on Monday, you should get tested on the Thursday, Friday or Saturday.) If you develop symptoms, assume you’re infected and begin isolation.

If you’ve been exposed and are vaccinated, but not boosted, you need to quarantine for five days after an exposure and wear masks for another five days after that. You are still at high risk of infection, especially from the quickly spreading Omicron variant.

You should wear a mask around other people and get tested four to six days after the exposure and anytime you develop symptoms. Avoid gatherings and do your best to limit contact with people who are immunocompromised or who are unvaccinated.

If you’ve been exposed, have no symptoms, but are NOT vaccinated, stay home and quarantine for five days. You'll need to wear a mask for another five days after that.

I’m vaccinated and boosted. Why did I still get COVID-19?

COVID-19 vaccines and boosters are hugely valuable. In addition to providing protection from the virus, vaccines and boosters reduce the chances of serious illness, hospitalization and death. But people can still get infected when they’re fully vaccinated and boosted. This may be because the vaccine’s protection has decreased over time or because a new variant (like the Omicron variant) is better at getting around the vaccine’s protective properties.

6 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY ¬ JANUARY 13, 2022

COVID-19 infections in fully vaccinated people are called breakthrough infections, which usually result in milder symptoms versus infections in the unvaccinated. Your body’s memory B cells and T cells, which developed after your vaccine, respond quickly to stop the infection and prevent severe damage. Immunocompromised people may not have strong B cell- and T cell-immunity even after vaccination, so they remain at higher risk. If you are immunocompromised and have a breakthrough infection, you should contact your doctor even if you only have mild symptoms.

Unvaccinated people don’t have existing antibodies or memory B cells or T cells waiting to fight off COVID-19, so they have to start their immune response from scratch if they become infected. Infections typically cause more damage to their organs and tissues, which can lead to complications like having low oxygen levels, as well as problems with the lungs, kidney and heart. Unvaccinated individuals are also much more likely to need intensive care support or have lingering symptoms known as long COVID-19.

If I have a breakthrough infection after my COVID-19 vaccine, will I still be contagious for the same amount of time?

There’s a good amount of evidence showing most fully vaccinated and boosted people with breakthrough infections are both less contagious and contagious for a shorter time. They're also more likely to get mild infections. This was recently supported by the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention, which changed its isolation guidelines for asymptomatic breakthrough infections.

Can I report my positive at-home test results to public health officials?

At-home antigen test results are not typically reported to public health agencies nor are they usually included in official case tallies. This means statistics are significantly under-reported. In some communities, local health departments are setting up portals for people to self-report at-home results, but you’ll need to check to see what’s available in your area. The most important thing to do is stay home and isolate. If you have certain health conditions—especially if you’re immunocompromised—contact your doctor ASAP so they are aware of your diagnosis.

When can I get the new medicine that’s received emergency use authorization to fight or prevent COVID-19?

The good news is that new antiviral medication and a preventative monoclonal antibody treatment have received emergency use authorization from the U.S. Food & Drug Administration. They’ll be very important resources for doctors and high-risk patients. Even so, these treatments will be extremely limited at first. They will first be distributed by public health agencies and will only be available to the highestrisk patients. If you are a transplant recipient, have a primary immunodeficiency, take immunosuppressive medication or are undergoing active chemotherapy and you test positive for COVID-19, you should contact your doctor right Do COVID-19 booster shots offer added protection against the Omicron variant?

Boosters offer the best protection from catching Covid, but they aren’t perfect.

Scientists are still gathering data on the effectiveness of vaccines against Omicron, but existing data show people who are vaccinated and boosted have additional protection and are less likely to be hospitalized than those who are unvaccinated. This article was originally published by University of Chicago Medicine and republished with permission.

ILLUSTRATION BY GABY FEBLAND

The Storm After Winter Break Protracted negotiations between the Chicago Teachers Union and City officials left parents and students in limbo.

BY MADELEINE PARRISH, CHIMA IKORO, JACQUELINE SERRATO

W

ith a fifth wave of COVID picking up steam during the holiday break due to the Omicron variant, a significant number of Chicago Public School (CPS) parents were reluctant to send their children back to the classroom even before school resumed January 3. So far, the new year at school has been short-lived.

After the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) officially voted to switch to remote learning and resume in-person classes on January 18, CPS CEO Pedro Martinez canceled all classes and extracurricular activities, claiming that teachers were refusing to work and threatening to not pay them.

Some teachers and parents say they have felt gaslighted by City officials who have attempted to strongarm them into attending

school in person despite rising cases and no comprehensive mitigation plan.

As of Monday, January 10, students were out of school for the fourth day in a row and teachers were locked out of their virtual classrooms, unable to directly contact their students. But that night, after days of negotiations with CTU, Mayor Lori Lightfoot announced that teachers would return to school the next day and students would return on Wednesday.

The tentative agreement, which will be voted on by union members later this week, includes provisions like additional KN95 masks and a switch to remote learning if forty percent of students in a school are in quarantine or thirty percent of staff are absent for two days in a row.

The agreement also allows every school

to have a contact-tracing team, allowing staff to be paid to do contact tracing for student cases in their school.

“These are not the exact metrics that we would like to hit, but it provides some safeguard going forward,” said CTU chief of staff Jen Johnson at a press conference that followed a CTU vote Monday night.

Though the CTU has been seeking opt-out testing, which would automatically make every student eligible for a weekly randomized testing program unless parents opted out, Mayor Lightfoot did not agree to this provision. But Johnson said that the tentative agreement would still significantly increase testing in schools, with the aim of quickly ramping up a screening testing program so that at least ten percent of students in every

school would be tested on a weekly basis.

It is still unclear whether CPS will make up the five lost instructional days or if CTU members will be paid for the days of canceled classes—these decisions will be left up to Martinez.

Throughout the first week of class, Mayor Lightfoot accused the CTU of “abandoning” their kids during this time.

Some parents and teachers who spoke to the Weekly characterized the mayor’s rhetoric as harmful to teacher-parent relations. The mayor has since tested positive for COVID. “She’s trying to punish the teachers, but she doesn’t realize that she’s punishing the kids,” said parent Liliana Rosas.

When her sons returned home from school on January 3, they brought back

JANUARY 13, 2022 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 7

EDUCATION

“We are worried and afraid that COVID will continue to take lives away if wrong decisions continue to be made.”

—Jazmine Cerda, CPS parent laptops issued by their teachers with the expectation that they would shift to remote learning the next day. But students and teachers were caught by surprise that morning. Teachers attempting to log in to the CPS website found themselves locked out–a deja vu of last January, when CPS kicked teachers out of their accounts during the pandemic. As CTU and CPS continued their negotiations, Rosas’s younger son, who attends pre-K at Shields Elementary School in Brighton Park, was receiving assignments from his teacher through a separate platform.

But Rosas worried about her third grader at Shields. He has an Individualized Education Program (IEP), a legally required document for children who receive special education to address the child’s needs. In school, he sees a social worker once or twice a week, and last year when school went remote, he was able to meet virtually with his occupational teach-

er or social worker. “I haven’t received no email or something from a teacher regarding him, what he needs to be doing. I know he needs that extra help and he’s not receiving it right now,” Rosas said.

While they waited days for a resolution, Rosas tried to continue her son’s learning by encouraging him to use educational apps, do math, and read. “But it's not gonna be the same as a teacher teaching him, like someone that is educated and has a degree. I don't have that.

So I can’t teach my son what a teacher could—even remotely,” she said.

On Wednesday, January 5, the Brighton Park Neighborhood Council (BPNC) held a press conference alongside Raise Your Hand IL and Alliance of the South East. “We are worried and afraid that COVID will continue to take lives away if wrong decisions continue to be made,” said Jazmine Cerda, a parent organizer, at the presser.

PHOTO BY JASON SCHUMER

8 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY ¬ JANUARY 13, 2022

She said teachers and students have been in a push and pull with CPS since the start of the pandemic, and two years later some of the same problems have persisted.

“Why are we still here?” Cerda asked.

“We are fighting for a remote option for parents who are afraid to send their children to school because cases keep rising, schools are not properly being disinfected, many students are putting themselves on the line because they have tested positive,” she continued.

Another parent, Jennifer Baez, spoke about what happened when her ten-yearold child tested positive prior to winter vacation. A parent from her son’s school replied to an email thread directed at the principal; Baez said they asked the principal, “Am I to understand that you just announced the closure of a fifth grade classroom via Facebook?”

The principal, admitting to having notified parents and students with a Facebook post, confirmed that class was canceled, Baez said. She hadn’t seen the post or been made aware of the closure until that moment. “[I had] a lot of emotions happening at once because I had already sent my son out the door to go to school, and had I not seen that email my son with special needs would have just been sitting in the lot at the school waiting to go in, and nobody would have come out to get him,” she said.

Upon the cancellation of the class, the fifth graders were assigned to remote learning for the time being. The remote class was led by a substitute teacher and Baez later discovered it was their regular teacher who’d tested positive. The next day, when her son began to feel ill, he tested positive as well. Baez also tested positive.

Citing official claims that schools have low positivity rates, Baez said she

thinks that this is mostly attributed to parents noticing when their children are sick and just refusing to send them to school without reporting a positive test.

The voluntary CPS testing program that sent take-home testing kits to families over winter break proved to be a logistical nightmare that had FedEx mailboxes overflowing with packages on New Year’s Eve. According to CPS data, 24,843 out of 35,590 of the completed tests-by-mail were ruled invalid.

CPS officials have held that schools are safe, saying that there has not been evidence of widespread in-school spread of COVID, that there were only fiftythree instances of outbreaks in the fall, and that less than five percent of students who quarantined were found to have COVID. At Monday night’s press conference, Mayor Lightfoot said that during remote learning last year, CPS lost contact with 100,000 children, nearly one-third of the student population.

The Principals and Administrators Association reported that about the same number of students missed inperson class on January 3 and 4. They wrote in a public letter that they were blindsided by the CEO and called for a districtwide strategy. “It should not be an ad hoc reactionary response that creates inequities that are predictable among social and economic lines,” the January 6 letter read in part. “It feels as if the district’s approach was more focused on eroding the trust we’ve worked so hard to develop by pitting schools, principals, parents, and staff against each other than on actually providing safety and support for students and communities.”

The majority of suburban school districts and other districts downstate

EDUCATION

held classes remotely on the first week of school after the holiday break and have continued to do so as of press time. The Illinois Department of Public Health’s dashboard continues to show that schools are the place with the highest potential for exposure.

Catlyn Savado, a youth organizer and freshman at Percy L. Julian High School, said, “I heard the CEO himself say yesterday that ‘every one of our kids are wearing masks in school.’ The CEO was at my school on Monday and I know he didn’t see every high schooler at my school with a mask on.”

In a CTU poll, teachers responded that high-quality masks for students are a higher bargaining priority than masks for themselves.

As of January 4, CPS reported 446 new student cases and 276 new adult cases, more than double the previous daily record this school year. There were also 7,951 students and 2,076 adults in quarantine (isolation), the highest number since the start of school, that has since been surpassed, with almost 10,000 students reported to be in isolation on Friday, January 7.

There are wide disparities in vaccination rates across high schools in CPS. Chalkbeat found that majority Black high schools had an average vaccination rate of twenty-eight percent, compared to schools with fewer than half of Black students, which had a vaccination rate of 57.62 percent.

PHOTO BY JASON SCHUMER

Opt-in rates for school-based testing also vary, and some South and West Side schools have almost no students opting in.

A CPS middle school teacher who prefered to remain anonymous, was out of the classroom when students returned from winter break because they’d contracted COVID. “I was already teaching remotely Monday and Tuesday,” they said. “Tuesday evening they were doing the vote with the House of Delegates with the CTU. “We were going to send messages to students [the next day and] send them some remote work or enrichment to do while the classes were canceled, but we had been locked out of everything: Gradebook, parent contacts, Google Classroom, email, all of that stuff we are still completely locked out of, so there's no way to communicate with parents or students,” they said.

The teacher said parents rely on communication with teachers in order to stay in the know. “For a lot of students and families, their main source of trust and communication is that child's homeroom teacher. Teachers at my school really pride themselves in making that relationship with their parents: texting, calling, emailing, sending updates. And so when that was locked out and not able to [be accessed], I know that was really difficult for parents to even reach out with questions.”

Bill Schmit, a teacher at Lindblom

Math and Science Academy in Englewood, described the result of the spike in COVID cases after the holiday break in his classes. “My attendance numbers on Monday and Tuesday were abysmal. I've never had such low attendance in my career,” he said. “The last couple of weeks [before the winter break] were so disruptive with students being in and out that, for all of its shortcomings, remote learning would have been a far more equitable option for everyone,” he said.

He described having to juggle teaching in-person with ensuring his students in quarantine were being taught the lessons remotely as well. “I'm not very big on remote learning. Personally, I had a horrible time with it and I did not want to go back to it,” he said. “But for the sake of this wave and how many kids were getting sick, I didn't see too much of an alternative.”

Brittany Nash, a teacher at Henry R. Clissold Elementary in Morgan Park, said, “This fight, the ones before, and the ones to come, are always, at the root, about the students and

the teachers.”

On Monday morning, hours before CPS and CTU reached a deal, teachers and parents from West Side high schools and schools across the city organized a caravan to City Hall.

Around lunch hour, they congested downtown, honking their horns and waving signs in support of a comprehensive safety plan that called for temporary remote learning and weekly testing.

“It’s been powerful standing with the union and realizing that it is much bigger than me, my classroom, and even my school,” Nash said. “It’s hard hearing that teachers don’t care, they don’t want to work, they don’t want to support families and students, which is exactly the opposite.” Madeleine Parrish is the Weekly’s education editor, Chima Ikoro is the Weekly’s community organizing editor, and Jacqueline Serrato is the Weekly’s editor-in-chief.

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JANUARY 13, 2022 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 9

DEVELOPMENT

On the Rocks

Landmark designation may prove promising in the fight to preserve Promontory Point’s limestone.

BY MOLLY MORROW

T

he non-profit organization Preservation Chicago reignited the debate surrounding the restoration of Promontory Point’s limestone at a September meeting of the Commission on Chicago Landmarks Program Committee. Currently, the Chicago Department of Transportation (CDOT) and the Chicago Park District plan to demolish and replace the Point’s limestone revetments with a concreteand-steel barrier. But a nomination for landmark designation by Preservation Chicago, which, as outlined by the City, would necessitate a preservationist approach to its restoration, may hold promise for preventing the limestone’s demolition.

Promontory Point is a forty-acre artificial peninsula running from 54th to 56th Streets on Chicago’s lakefront.

Its landscape design was developed by renowned architect Alfred Caldwell, and the limestone revetments were built in between 1937 and 1938 as a Works Progress Administration (WPA) project meant to serve as a buffer against flooding from DuSable Lake Shore Drive. Now, the Point serves as a recreational place for residents.

Chicago’s lakeshore limestone barriers were built nearly one hundred years ago. CDOT and the Park District determined in 1993 that the limestone revetments had degraded to the point where they no longer sufficiently protected the shore against flooding and erosion. A $300 million plan to repair or replace revetments from Montrose Ave. to 79th Street was created by the Chicago Park District, the City of Chicago, and the Army Corps of Engineers. Emergency

protection measures at the Morgan Shoal nearby were completed in 2020. The City announced work underway for the final restoration project at Morgan in April 2021, with the Point being the next and final project.

In 2000, the Park District and CDOT presented a plan to demolish the limestone and replace it with concrete, a move the Promontory Point Conservancy stated on their website “severely restricted access to the water.” Support from the community and from then-Senator Barack Obama in 2006 pushed the City to further consider a preservationist approach.

Finally, in 2018, the Promontory Point Conservancy applied for Promontory Point to be listed as part of the National Register of Historic Places, and this status was awarded, which according to the conservancy group is a positive step towards protecting the limestone.

CDOT's June 2021 “Strategic Plan for Transportation,” indicates an intention to “[reconstruct] over nine miles of Chicago’s lakefront with concrete and steel structures, stone retaining walls, and beaches.” Regarding CDOT’s current plan, Michael Claffey, Director of Public Affairs at CDOT, told the Weekly that CDOT is “committed to a preservation-based approach, with the intent to save and reuse as much of the existing limestone as feasible as part of an engineered solution that will protect the Promontory Point for decades to come.”

Mary Lu Seidel, the director of community engagement at Preservation Chicago, told the Weekly that though there is currently a memorandum of agreement from CDOT and the Park District outlining potential plans

10 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY ¬ JANUARY 13, 2022

“The people need to lead the process of revitalizing their neighborhoods as well as the lakefront sites that are important to them.”

— Mary Lu Seidel to preserve or partially preserve the limestone revetments, “the current thinking coming from the City would be to remove the limestone and fill in with concrete.” Though these older plans exist, preservation activists like Seidel are suspicious that these memorandums will be ignored in favor of new plans to replace the limestone with concrete.

Organizations like Preservation Chicago and the Promontory Point Conservancy are of the belief that this demolition is neither necessary nor favorable for residents, and as such there remains pushback from these groups.

A study prepared for the Hyde Park Historical Society and the Community Task Force for Promontory Point in 2002 found that repairing the limestone would be more cost-effective than replacing it with concrete. Additionally, recent water levels in Lake Michigan have actually been found to be declining due to lower precipitation levels over the past year.

From July 2020 to July 2021, water levels declined by about seventeen inches.

In an interview for the Weekly, Spicer said that, because of Caldwell’s expertise,

the Point’s limestone has fared well for eighty years and is expected to continue to do so, so there is no real compelling reason to get rid of the limestone completely. Spicer also said that the plan may be, in part, an effort to discourage residents from swimming at the Point as a precautionary measure. However, Spicer pointed to its importance as a community gathering place, and claimed concrete revetments would likely pose even more danger for swimmers than the limestone ones do.

Preservation Chicago deals with the landmarking of historic sites, and Promontory Point is one of their priorities in terms of taking action for its preservation. In an interview for the Weekly, Ward Miller, its executive director, described his own experiences, and those of his parents and other members of the community, with the Point as a place for social gathering.

Miller said, “Your soul is a little wrapped in these communities.”

Recently, this effort has been concentrated in the suggestion of a landmark designation for the Point.

DEVELOPMENT

PHOTO BY J E KOONCE

A formal landmark designation from the City mandates a preservationist approach, protecting against any plans for demolition or renovation of the revetments on the part of CDOT that may be considered “urban deterioration.”

The suggestion for a landmark designation was submitted by Preservation Chicago at the September meeting.

The Chicago Landmarks Committee received over one hundred emails and letters from residents and community groups in support of granting the Point a landmark designation. Miller pointed to the inherent beauty of the Point and its importance to the South Side. He also points to a similar landmarking process in notable pieces of architecture like Caldwell’s Lincoln Park Lily Pool. “If we landmarked a Caldwell landscape on the North Side, I think we should landmark a Caldwell landscape on the South Side.”

Seidel noted the importance of community involvement in the Point’s

preservation. “The people need to lead the process of revitalizing their neighborhoods as well as the lakefront sites that are important to them,” Seidel said. “The planners, engineers and leaders need to bring their extensive skills and facilitate a community-driven process that gets the results the City needs and retains the history and culture of Chicago’s lakefront.”

Lifelong Chicagoan and recent University of Chicago graduate Ileana López-Martínez commented on the Point’s importance as a beach, a place to spend time with friends and family, and even a place to enjoy on one’s own.

Particularly during the pandemic, LópezMartínez appreciates the Point as a place to “walk along the paths with [her] friends to get out of the house safely,” and that for these reasons, “the value of the Point is indescribable.”

Illinois Rep. Robin L. Kelly (D) wrote a letter of support for a preservation

approach of the Point, to Colonel Paul Culberson, Commander and District Engineer of the US Army Corps of Engineers. “As [the Point] stands now, in the National Register, it is given a certain amount of bureaucratic protection,” Spicer said. “To call it a landmark would make it much more difficult to destroy.”

He explained that, if deemed a landmark, the revetments on the Point could only be demolished if it is “a matter of public threat,” which he does not believe it to be. The Landmarks Ordinance stipulates that if permits to renovate or demolish any part of a designated landmark “adversely affect or destroy any significant historical or architectural feature of the improvement or of the district or is inappropriate or inconsistent with the designation… the Commission shall issue a preliminary decision disapproving the application for permit,” as long as the changes are not a matter of public safety. As such, a

landmark designation would most likely require a preservationist approach to the limestone’s restoration.

Preservation Chicago hopes that federal infrastructure funding will be directed towards important restoration projects such as these, making the Point’s restoration a greater priority. He said he hopes that, with greater funds for infrastructure and restoration, along with a landmark designation, the limestone revetments can simply be reset on a new foundation, so that community residents can enjoy them for generations to come. Molly Morrow is a second-year student at the University of Chicago. She also writes for the university’s political newspaper, The Gate, and also serves as their Chicago section editor. This is her first story for the Weekly.

JANUARY 13, 2022 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 11

COMMUNITY ORGANIZING

No Price Too High

South Side leaders push for holistic approaches to curb gun violence.

BY MAX BLAISDELL

“W

e should be talking about gun violence as a public health issue—but not treat it like we’ve done with COVID-19,” said Kam Buckner, Illinois State Representative for the 26th District, referring to the Trump administration's early, bungled handling of the pandemic.

In a clean, well-lit room in the University of Chicago’s Center for Identity + Inclusion on a rainy, overcast afternoon in October, Buckner declared, “We should treat gun violence as if there’s no price too high to prevent it.” Damp hung in the room. The audience of twenty was hushed, the only sound made by rain jackets swishing against chair backs.

Sitting with Buckner on the “Reducing Gun Violence in America” panel was Arne Duncan, former CEO of Chicago Public Schools (CPS) from 2001 to 2008, the U.S. Secretary of Education under former president Barack Obama, and co-founder of Chicago CRED. Chicago CRED is one of many violence prevention organizations working on the South and West Sides of Chicago aimed at curbing the number of shootings.

Duncan spoke about the founding of CRED in 2016 in personal terms: he brought up visiting the grieving parents of CPS students killed in shootings, a rate he said at the time was one student killed every two weeks.

During his tenure, Duncan was responsible for a large number of school closures, incentivizing school choice by opening of public charter and selective enrollment high schools. Although he

ILLUSTRATION BY GABY FEBLAND

was rumored to be considering a run for Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s job in 2023, Duncan has since attested that he’s not interested in the job and wants to focus on his current role.

To gain greater insight into the current increase in violence and the work

12 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY ¬ JANUARY 13, 2022

of violence prevention organizations like CRED, South Side Weekly reached out to an array of activists, leaders of community and neighborhood organizations, and the director of an academic research lab that studies the issue.

Jahmal Cole, activist and founder

of My Block, My Hood, My City, a social justice organization focused on education programming and volunteer opportunities for teens, and Democratic candidate for the U.S. 1st Congressional District, praised Duncan for “putting his money where his mouth is” by working

COMMUNITY ORGANIZING

with those most involved and affected by gun violence in the city. “We need a thousand Arne Duncans, if you ask me.”

Cole argued for reframing the issue away from a narrow focus on the violence itself, and instead in terms of the racial and economic disparities that drive it.

“When people get shot in Chicago, it's like they didn't wake up today wanting to go shoot someone, somebody goes to the L and says I want all your money, and the guy on the ground says ‘Don't shoot me, you know I got kids at home.’ And the guy with the gun says, ‘Same, why do you think I'm doing this?’”

When asked how greater coordination amongst nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) like My Block, My Hood, My City and CRED could make real change in Chicago, Cole said, “You can't program your way out of poverty. If that could be done My Block My Hood My City would be doing that.

NGOs are filling in a gap for the federal government, but the government still needs to step up and support us as well.

They have the resources and power to do that.”

And so, in one respect at least, they have. The City Council of Chicago recently voted by a margin of thirty-five to fifteen in favor of Mayor Lightfoot’s budget for 2022, allocating $85 million for violence intervention, a figure orders of magnitude higher than in former mayor Rahm Emmanuel's final budget in 2019.

One of the organizations that received funding in 2020 and does work very similar to CRED, is UCAN, a youth-oriented social services organization working in North Lawndale and Roseland. Frank Perez, its director of violence intervention and prevention services, explained how their approach works and differs from policing. He hires “credible messengers” for his street outreach teams, often Black or Brown men who “may have been exposed to violence, perpetrated it themselves, or [been] victims of it.”

The outreach teams engage Black and Brown men and boys in their teens to mid-twenties who are considered to be at “high risk” of being involved with

gun violence. Their goal is to “change their mindset around having to use violence to resolve a problem, or having to use violence to get back some respect,” said Perez. “Somebody disrespects you, somebody bumps into you, and doesn't say excuse me. The code of conduct in the street says, you've got to do something violent to them…people have accepted that as normal behavior when that's actually abnormal.”

On the street, for shifts that last anywhere from four in the afternoon until six in the morning during the summer months, UCAN’s team intervenes when

is provoking familiar calls amongst politicians for heightened surveillance and greater policing in certain affected neighborhoods, as demonstrated by increased security patrols and installation of more surveillance cameras in Hyde Park in response to Shaoxiong (Dennis) Zheng’s death, the knifing of two men, and gunshots fired at Cole in broad daylight while he was campaigning at Harpers Court, all happening in the span of a single day in November.

Roseanna Ander, executive director of The University of Chicago Crime and Education Labs, pointed to a

“You're not going to be able to do this from behind the desk or, you know, sitting in and looking out of your living room window. You actually have to be out here in it.”

— Tamar Manasseh, founder and president of Mothers/Men Against Senseless Killings (MASK) they have advance knowledge that a shooting could be about to happen or mediates between individuals before tensions escalate into retaliatory shootings. The street outreach workers then connect those individuals with a case worker who can facilitate getting a job, clinical services, or returning to school.

UCAN also works with the family or kin network to support that individual.

Increased funding comes at a time when Chicago is on pace for the most murders in a calendar year since 1996, and when violence is spiking not only in major urban centers like New York and Los Angeles, but also in rural, smalltown America. Already this uptick

number of structural factors behind the present surge in gun violence, including the negative economic impact of the pandemic being disproportionately felt by young Black and Brown men, the murder of George Floyd and the consequent crisis of legitimacy around policing and government, residential segregation making access to employment and mental health services difficult, and the lack of a robust social safety net to provide those services in the first place to low-income communities. However, this came with a caveat. She said, “anyone who tells you they know with certainty it's X, I would just take that with an enormous grain of salt.”

Because there are so many contributing and mutually reinforcing factors to this issue, Ander contended that comprehensive interventions involving street outreach, trauma-informed therapy, and employment offer “real promise in terms of improving outcomes for adult men that had significant justice system contact and exposure to gun violence.”

While violence in areas like the Loop or Hyde Park garners extensive coverage by local media, the voices of people from the most-affected neighborhoods are often left out. Longtime South Side resident and community leader Tamar Manasseh, founder and president of Mothers/Men Against Senseless Killings (MASK), injected a poignant dose of realism into the discussion, where previous conversations tended to drift towards familiar talking points.

“Who's going to go to school if you're not going to learn anything, but you still might get murdered? Like, no one's going to do that. And I can't blame them,” Manasseh said, referring to the negative consequences of school closures that have forced students to cross neighborhood gang lines in order to pursue a decent education.

Against the notion that this is a matter for policymakers to deal with, Manasseh urged residents to take direct action and get outside the comfort and safety of their homes. “You're not going to be able to do this from behind the desk or, you know, sitting in and looking out of your living room window. You actually have to be out here in it,” she said. “It's almost like, you know, face-to-face combat with violence in Chicago. Like you have to actually look at it in the face in order to stop it.”

Manasseh also disagreed with the idea that a groundbreaking solution was going to arrive like a shining savior from downtown offices, especially from people like Duncan, whose prior public record renders some of their motives suspect.

“More of the same, breeds more of the same. So, if you keep giving the same funding to the same people, and then they keep doing the same things, you keep getting the same results. So, I'm really hoping that, hey, they gave the money

JANUARY 13, 2022 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 13

COMMUNITY ORGANIZING

to somebody who's doing something different and maybe that'll help, but I'm not holding my breath.”

When Manasseh met with Susan Lee, Mayor Lightfoot’s former deputy mayor for public safety and now chief of strategy and policy at CRED Chicago, back in 2019, Lee urged patience for the new administration’s programs to work.

From Manasseh’s perspective, things have only gotten worse. To counter despair and to mark the immense tragedy that any instance of gun violence represents, Manasseh, who is Jewish, lit a candle for every person who died between last year’s Yom Kippur and this one’s. Over that period, she has lit about 800 candles.

As an alternative to giving money solely to police or violence interruption organizations, Asiaha Butler, another longtime South Sider and the co-founder and CEO of Residents Association of Greater Englewood (RAGE), argued for taking a holistic approach and appropriating money for direct community investments: “It's kind of one angle, which is like violence prevention, street outreach, and police, but we're not thinking about the environment or the residents already in the area, who can be, you know, supported as block leaders. We would just love to see a little bit more of that.”

Butler pointed to projects RAGE has worked on to change the physical environment of the neighborhood, like their Englewood Alt_Market on 66th and Halsted St., which transformed an abandoned storefront, known to be a neighborhood hotspot for violence, into a place where residents could pick up nonperishable foodstuffs and essential items.

Broken streetlights, vacant lots, and abandoned buildings all breed violence, according to Butler, and so a simple solution is to demonstrate concern through strategic investments directed by the community. Butler argued that a vacant school in Englewood with over 40,000 square feet could be turned into a place for workforce development, a boarding school, or social services office that could bring in mental health services.

Creating sustainable solutions to longstanding problems like gun violence,

Butler told me, requires listening to what community members are actually saying and demanding, relying on their rootedness and knowledge to create “peaceful oases.”

“They can let you know which abandoned building is the one that everybody stashes and drops the drugs at, or are dropping their guns at,” said Butler, but only if community members are brought to the center of the conversation around gun violence.

Butler and Manasseh both suggested that empowering and rewarding community members for daily actions would be a simple and suitable way to foster and keep the peace. “It's about giving the power to make our community safer to the people in the communities,” Manasseh said. This article was first published online on December 26, 2021.

Max Blaisdell is an educator and basketball coach based in Hyde Park. He is originally from New York City and later served in Peace Corps Morocco. He last wrote about the book “The Next Shift” for the Weekly.

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14 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY ¬ JANUARY 13, 2022

Tense Meetings Organizers say the metal scrapper’s permitting process exposes real malice from City officials.

BY ERMINA VELJACIC

O

n December 9, a community engagement consulting firm hired by the Chicago Department of Public Health (CDPH) led a virtual town hall about the relocation of Reserve Management Group’s (RMG) metalshredding facility from Lincoln Park, an affluent, majority-white neighborhood on the North Side, to the Southeast Side. The proposed new location is in a community that once boasted a booming industrial corridor and is plagued by environmental injustice as a result, according to activists.

Their opposition to the move is supported by a recent report issued by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) that says pollution on the Southeast Side “epitomize[s] the problem of environmental injustice”, and the proposed plant raises “significant civil rights concerns.”

Dozens of organizations and communities all across the City have expressed solidarity with activists. The environmental injustice concerns have even prompted the Department of Housing and Urban Development to launch a civil rights investigation.

In a letter addressed to City officials, Wayne Giles, the dean of the UIC School of Public Health, wrote, “The welldocumented excess burden of pollution already experienced by residents living in Southeast Chicago is strong enough evidence against a permit for the RMG/ Southside Recycling’s facility in the Southeast Side.”

At the beginning of the meeting, CPDH’s managing deputy commissioner issued an apology for a series of scheduling flops that resulted in the meeting getting

cancelled forty-eight hours prior to its originally scheduled date of December 2. The meeting was initially rescheduled for a future in-person event, then changed to a virtual session the following week that conflicted with an existing community meeting.

Officials presented no new information at the meeting, which capped registration at 150 attendees, including eighteen users listed as co-hosts with the department, three reporters, and an unclear number of RMG affiliates. The RMG affiliates engaged in discussions with moderators and 10th Ward residents in break-out rooms, prompting questions about the potential benefits of permit approval, the community burdens, and consideration of resident life experience. The meeting was the second session of a Health Impact Assessment (HIA) the City promised to host in order to collect, analyze and consider resident life experience as part of the permitting decision.

“With the lack of community involvement in this investigation through the Health Impact Assessment and the reporting of it, we have seen how they are rushing,'' Alliance of the SouthEast (ASE) Director of Youth and Restorative Justice Programming Óscar Sánchez said in an email to the Weekly after the meeting. “It demonstrates how two city initiatives/events are planned at the same time and day, showing the disregard for intention and true community participation.”

Linda Gonzalez, who lives in South Deering and works in Hegewisch, described the City’s approach to the

COMMUNITY ORGANIZING

A DEMONSTRATOR HOLDS A SIGN AT A RALLY NEAR CDPH COMMISSIONER ALISON ARWADY’S HOME IN DECEMBER. PHOTO BY ERMINA VELJACIC

assessment as “a rush to approve this permit regardless of the impact on our community.”

"It fails to address the impact of the large hole in the ozone over [the] region and the cumulative impact of pollution from neighboring [Environmental Justice] communities in Indiana," Gonzalez said. “We are supposed to have a cumulative impact assessment then a cumulative [health] impact ordinance.”

The evening of the meeting, The Tribune published text messages between 10th Ward Ald. Susan Sadlowski Garza and Mayor Lori Lightfoot from April 2020 about a call Sadlowski Garza had with local environmental activists regarding the shredder’s relocation.

According to The Tribune, Sadlowski Garza texted, “They disseminate the wrong information. They dont play well

with others So Fuck them,” to which Lightfoot replied, “I am riding with you til the end!”

When asked by the Weekly about Saldowski Garza’s text messages, Gina Ramirez, an organizer with the Southeast Environmental Task Force, said, “it’s unprofessional but sadly not [surprising], because Sue [Sadlowski] Garza has in a meeting told us, literally, ‘f— you.’”

In a statement emailed to the Weekly, Sadlowski Garza denied that, and did not comment directly on the content of the text messages. “I refuse to engage in this pearl clutching hysteria,” she said. There was no sign of Sadlowski Garza at the meeting or the rally organized for the following afternoon on Friday, December 10, outside Chicago Department of Public Health (CDPH) Commissioner Allison Arwady’s home in Lincoln Park.

Sadlowski Garza told the Weekly in an email that she wasn’t told about the rally beforehand.

Chloe Gurin, a Little Italy resident and manager at the Metropolitan Planning Council, was among the first to arrive at the rally, and had only one message for Dr. Arwady: “Listen to the people. Deny the permit.”

Byron Sigcho-Lopez, the 25th Ward alderperson, joined more than seventyfive community members, wearing ponchos and carrying umbrellas, to call on Arwady to deny the permit.

“What affects the city of Chicago should concern all of us,” ​​Sigcho-Lopez said. “Those decisions have implications for every neighborhood. If today is General Iron, tomorrow will be another facility affecting another industrial corridor in our communities, and what is

clear is our working class neighborhoods, Black and brown communities, get affected the most.”

This past spring, Sigcho-Lopez was among hundreds of supporters who briefly joined community activists’ thirtyday hunger strike to urge Mayor Lightfoot to reconsider issuing the permit, prior to EPA officials intervening in May and prompting the health assessment.

“Denying the permit is important because it will set a precedent that the lives in our communities are not disposable and ultimately we have the right to voice our concerns,” Sigcho-Lopez continued.

“The majority of residents are challenging this permit. …Dr. Arwady has the responsibility as a public health expert [and] as the commissioner of public health to review this permit based on the public health guidelines, and what we’ve heard from many public health experts is this permit should be denied.”

This past summer, the City declared racism a public health crisis—but that gesture apparently did little to spur completion of the health impact assessment or broaden the City’s accountability to the community around long-standing systemic health inequities suffered by vulnerable residents of the Southeast Side, in a ZIP code where pre-existing conditions exacerbate the health challenges caused by COVID-19.

The City has not released scheduling information for the final session of the health impact assessment expected to take place in January.

“It hasn’t been a community-driven process at all,” Ramirez said at the rally.

“I had to take time away from my family to sit in on another meeting where two RMG employees were in my break-out room. It’s like a bad class college project that they’re schlepping together and it just really shows that they aren’t taking this seriously.” This article was first published online on December 24, 2021.

Ermina Veljacic is a writer who was born in Bosnia and bred on Chicago's Southeast Side. She last wrote about the East Side and South Chicago for the Weekly’s 2021 “Best of the South Side” issue.

JANUARY 13, 2022 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 15

LIT

Sisters and Soulmates A conversation with author Dawn Turner.

BY CARR HARKRADER

It’s a Saturday morning in the early 1970s and two sisters just want to watch cartoons. But their mom, grandmother, and aunt are discussing their dreams. Between sips of coffee and bites of Necco Wafers, the women pore over barely held-together numerology books. Their hope is to convert their dreams into numbers and those numbers into luck for the next time they play policy, the “not-so-legal precursor to the lottery” popular among Black communities. The game “was creed to the women” in her house. So, as the older women monopolized the living room with the tv, the sisters had to wait.

Dawn Turner documents many scenes like these in her new memoir, Three Girls from Bronzeville: A Uniquely American Memoir of Race, Fate, and Sisterhood. Turner grew up in the Lawless Gardens apartment complex off 35th Street with her younger sister Kim and their mother. Dawn’s best friend, Debra, lived in the apartment above them. From this place, all three of their lives would take wildly different turns.

Turner tells the story of herself, Kim, and Debra as they come of age in Bronzeville.

After leaving the neighborhood, Dawn achieves remarkable success, while Kim and Debra encounter and inflict almost unimaginable pain and loss. Weaving together personal reflections, original reporting, historical research, and policy analysis, Three Girls from Bronzeville tries to explain what happens when dreams encounter the odds against them.

South Side Weekly spoke with Turner about growing up on the South Side in the 70s, how history and housing intertwine in Chicago, and the lasting bonds of sisterhood.

One of the things that your book conveys is how deep Bronzeville still is in your senses — the smells, the shapes, the sayings, the sounds of the time in the late 60s and 70s. When you think of your childhood, what are those sensory images that come to mind?

Dawn Turner: Well, we need to go back a little bit and start with my great grandparents moving to Bronzeville. My great grandparents arrived in Bronzeville in 1916. My grandmother was three years old and they arrived as part of the Great Migration of Black people moving from the Jim Crow South to the North. They believed Chicago to be the promised land and in the beginning it was. But there were so many things that conspired to change that in the community. So they struggled as a lot of the Black people in the neighborhood did after a few years. And my grandmother said, as I write in the book, Black people “took a bunch of scraps and stitched together a world.” So many of the memories that I imbued the book with come from my grandmother telling us about Bronzeville.

My mother and my aunt grew up there as well, in the Ida B. Wells Homes when that housing project was brand new. I just remember growing up with a part of that inheritance from my grandmother and my mother. In my own experience, I was a kid who grew up in the Theodore K. Lawless apartments. The Lawless apartments were also brand new and unblemished, and I remember in the summer just being able to traverse our world. The grass was always meticulously mowed. There were flowers that were planted, the playgrounds were clean and bright and shiny and colorful. And we were allowed to be kids and to experience that world through that lens of childhood.

16 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY ¬ JANUARY 13, 2022

LIT And for a while it was fairly charmed. And I saw [it was charmed] even after my parents divorced. One of the reasons why I remained so close to Debra is because she rescued my childhood. We became good friends and then best friends. And I was allowed to be a child again.

How did Debra and you become friends at Doolittle Elementary School? It was somewhat of an unlikely friendship; you called yourself a “follower of rules and a maker of lists,” and Debra was most definitely not that.

In the second grade, I used to just stare at her from afar. I was just in awe of this little girl who just always trafficked in trouble [laughs]. And interestingly, she was a lot like my sister [Kim] in that regard. But you know, things look different on someone else than they do on the little girl you share a bedroom with. So I was not attracted to that in my sister, but definitely was in Debra. And I say that Debra and I were best friends, but Kim and Debra were soulmates.

So I first saw [Debra] in the second grade and even though we were in the same classroom, our teacher arranged us according to height, and I was the tallest kid in the class and Debra was the shortest, and so our worlds barely touched. But in the third grade, we were arranged alphabetically. So “Dawn Turner” sat across from “Debra Trice” and that one little logistical shift made all the difference.

I will say that I was attracted to her, but she was attracted to me, too, because we both had something in the other that we were trying to foster in ourselves. The whole idea of opposites attracting. We also learned that we lived not just in the same apartment tower, but that her apartment and her bedroom were directly above mine.

That cemented our friendship. I would knock on my ceiling or she would knock on her bedroom floor, you know, just so that we could kind of communicate across the divide.

That played a huge role as well.

One of the things that struck me early on in the book is when you wrote, “my earliest memory of myself is of my sister.” How did the arrival of Kim as your little sister change your life?

Some of this is memory and some of this is just what I was told by my mother and father. But I do remember my sister from the very beginning being a mystery to me.

She was from the start a headstrong, willful, and fearless person. I was not that person yet and she was from the start. I remember the first time I held her and I thought, “Oh my God, I have no idea what I've gotten myself into!” [laughs] I had that feeling of loving somebody so deeply, that, at the same time, you could hate and couldn’t stand [laughs]. I mean, that is the story of siblings and definitely sisterhood, where people are complicated and you are connected by genetics and sometimes you like each other and sometimes you don’t. And that was part of our relationship. But I think at the core we really adored each other, and that was not going to change.

One of the things that your book I think does so well is weave together your personal stories with the larger policy and societal choices that were shaping Black Chicago at the time. You discuss issues like housing policy and redlining and the infamous “Willis Wagons” at overcrowded schools such as Doolittle Elementary.

Was that an intentional choice you made when writing the book to highlight issues of discrimination?

Absolutely. So this is a story about people, but it’s also a story about place. It was incredibly important for me to talk about how we lived in this brand new apartment complex, where it was very clear that the way property was kept and the upkeep on the property — that janitors chased down wayward pieces of paper with a religious fervor — was that everything was bright and shiny. The lobbies were incredibly clean, the elevator doors had a stainless steel shine. We had security guards who kind of doubled

ILLUSTRATION BY ISABELLA SCOTT

as doormen — but they were not doormen [laughs], but they would open the doors and we knew them.

That was in contrast with what was going on directly across the street in the public housing complex. As I said in the beginning, when my mother was growing up, the Ida B. Wells Homes was a bastion that offered so many opportunities. It conferred dignity on the residents. They deserved that. Everybody deserves to live in a nice, clean, well-kept place. But by the time we were growing up there, the City had abandoned it. So just across the street [in the Lawless Apartments], we had a bird's eye view to this. Nothing worked. So garbage pickup lagged over there. It didn't lag on our side of the street. When a light bulb blew out, the replacement of it took a long time. That didn't happen on our side of the street. Even the way the police responded; it was either over-policed or under-policed. We were all Black folks. But there was this idea that there were things that people or institutions could get away with in the public housing project.

Even as a kid we knew that there were differences because our complex built a fence around us. We became, in essence, a gated community. Initially it was just a wireless link fence, but there were several entrances that remained open. But as different things started to happen in our community, our fence became more fortified.

And the entrances were closed, so there was just a couple of ways in and a couple of ways out of the complex. So people who used to walk through Lawless Gardens to get to 35th Street or something couldn't do it anymore. I didn't understand that until I grew up.

What I did understand was that we remained at the elementary school. A lot of parents, including Debra’s parents, moved their kids out of Doolittle Elementary because, in part, the kids from the housing project went there. But my mother said, “we will not be afraid of our own, so we're going to stay right here.” And the teachers there were outstanding.

Housing is connected to larger effects, then.

It absolutely is. But the book is also about the different policies that deform the community and reconfigured it. And going back to when my grandmother was a little girl, when the City forced the new Black migrants to live in a single strip in the Black Belt—a narrow strip of land along the State Street corridor that began to expand eastward. But there were so many things that happened that put pressure on this community from very early on.

We didn’t understand the history of Ida B. Wells living in the community, Gwendolyn Brooks, Louis Armstrong, the birthplace of gospel music and Chicago blues, and all that talent from politics to arts. We didn't understand that fully growing JANUARY 13, 2022 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 17

LIT

“We lived not just in the same apartment tower, but that her apartment and her bedroom were directly above mine. That cemented our friendship. I would knock on my ceiling or she would knock on her bedroom floor, you know, just so that we could kind of communicate across the divide.”

— Dawn Turner

Five Chicago Women Ahead of Their Time

Elevating the stories of influential female artists in the first half of the twentieth century.

BY LAUREN BEARD

up. I certainly didn't. But later on I did. Talk about stitching together a world! It’s like a universe with not just so few amenities, but so few necessities. And you're able to create something that can change the world and change the country, and I think that’s huge.

The context of all this connects to what happens to Kim and Debra later in life. I don't want to reveal too much of that in this conversation, but obviously there are choices and institutions that have a huge impact on their future and that all started in their childhood.

Yes. There are so many young kids today that come into this world and they're at such a massive disadvantage because of so many different pressures. My heart always aches for those kids. But really, that was not Kim's or Debra’s story. I mean, they had amazing safety nets. Their families were not at all rich, but they did have resources. I'll put it this way: I think I had to forgive myself because I felt horrible that I wasn't able to save them. But I also had to forgive them for making it so hard for us to save them.

That was part of the challenge there as well. Because Debra's parents were willing to take out a second mortgage on their house when they realized how deep in the throes of addiction she was. This was just to get her into a long-term drug addiction program. And she kept telling them that she didn't want to do that. [Debra] said she could beat [the addiction]. And it turned out she couldn't. That would have been huge, just to take a second mortgage out…. But there are people who don't even have something like that as a resource or an opportunity. Your parents are going to take out a second mortgage just to try to save you?

I do think that choices are often based on conditions. A kid who lives in a beleaguered community is going to have fewer choices than a kid who lives in a wellresourced community. At the same time, race and institutions, all of that stuff, will complicate the picture. Dawn Turner, Three Girls from Bronzeville: A Uniquely American Memoir of Race, Fate, and Sisterhood. $26.99. Simon & Schuster. 336 pages.

Carr Harkrader is a writer and educator in Chicago. This is Harkrader’s first piece for the Weekly.

18 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY ¬ JANUARY 13, 2022

COURTESY OF THE AUTHORS

S

et in the decades between 1930 and 1960, Liesl Olson’s Chicago Avant-Garde: Five Women Ahead of Their Time shows us how five women— painter Gertrude Abercrombie, poet Gwendolyn Brooks, choreographers Katherine Dunham and Ruth Page, and curator Katharine Kuh—championed “the radical, experimental culture that emerged in Chicago across a range of artistic disciplines in the first half of the 20th century.”

The book, a catalog to accompany the exhibit of the same name, which

closed at the Newberry Library in December, demonstrates how these women significantly influenced poetry, dance, and visual art during the Great Depression, racialized violence, World War II, and the emergence of the Red scare, all before the major social and political transformations of the 1960s.

Chicago writer, scholar, and cultural organizer Eve Ewing Ewing joins Olson, the director of Chicago studies at the Newberry, in highlighting their lives and legacies through five poems, one dedicated to each woman and pivotal

LIT

COURTESY OF THE AUTHORS

moments in their lives.

In the book, Olson moves through the interconnected life experiences of each of these women, starting with Surrealist artist Abercrombie (1909-1977). Mainly a self-taught painter, Abercrombie was well-known for her commitment to Chicago and a specific Midwesterness in her paintings, often in combination with a sort of fantastical otherworldliness.

Living in Hyde Park from 1916 until her passing, Abercrombie was known by many as the “queen of the bohemian artists” and regularly hosted an arts salon open to queer and interracial audiences in an era where segregation remained the norm.

Abercrombie also lived not too far from Olson’s second key figure: Brooks (1917-2000). Possibly the most famous woman in the collection, Brooks was one of the twentieth century’s most influential poets and the first Black person to ever win the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. She was also deeply engaged in her local community, largely writing her debut collection of poetry, A Street in Bronzeville, in workshops at the South Side Community Art Center. She later

became a major figure in the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and also taught and mentored youth at Chicago State University, which ultimately founded the Gwendolyn Brooks Center for Black Literature and Creative Writing, located at 95th and South King Drive, in her honor.

W

hile Abercrombie and Brooks focused primarily on painting and poetry, two of Chicago Avant Garde’s featured women centered dance in their work. The first of the two, Dunham (1909-2006), was called the “Matriarch of Black Dance” and started out as an anthropologist. With her academic training, she initially studied the intersection of Caribbean-based African dance practices and the continuance of those creative forms in Chicago.

Shifting to a career in dance, Dunham ultimately drew from her studies to create her own “Dunham Technique”, which continues to be taught amongst her students. Her counterpart, Page (18991991), also followed an international career, starting out as a ballerina who traveled widely for her work. In Chicago,

she was known as one of the first dancers to perform in an integrated ballet and later ended up founding the Ruth Page Center for the Arts in 1971 located just behind the Newberry Library.

Olson lastly introduces Kuh (19041994), a gallerist, curator, and critic who worked as the first curator of Modern painting and sculpture at the Art Institute of Chicago. Prior to her work at the Art Institute, she also opened and ran her own Chicago-based gallery space, showing innovative and controversial arts pieces from both local artists and those from abroad. Like the others, Kuh experienced a great deal of pushback to her endeavors: one of Ewing’s poems recounts that the windows of her gallery were smashed, likely in protest of the non-traditional artistic work that she supported at her gallery.

In recognizing these five women’s achievements, Olson accounts for the ways that racialized norms and policies shaped their experiences in the city differently. For instance, Olson shows how Kuh, Page, and Abercrombie, all white women, were able to maintain connections to elite cultural spaces across

the city of Chicago, whereas Brooks and Dunham, both Black women, experienced discriminatory exclusion from various Chicago arts organizations, especially those on the North Side.

In response, Olson also highlights how Brooks and Dunham oriented their careers towards building and supporting spaces for Black artists, both in and beyond Chicago. In moving through the complexities of their lives, particularly during this historical era, Olson ultimately works to show how “by choice and necessity, these women navigate outside of traditional forms of female legacy” and were able to “build things up as much as they tore things down.” Olson makes known to us how the women, whose efforts often go unrecognized in canonical histories of arts and culture, brought “freedom and expansion in an era marked by discrimination and social division.”

Finally, by focusing on Chicago, Olson lingered on the uniqueness of the city in fueling these women’s unanticipated social experimentation and change. To Olson, unlike the “rarified art worlds of New York and Paris, the Chicago art world operated differently… independent, unfettered,” and these five women “crossed boundaries, built institutions, and supported one another in Chicago and well beyond.”

Their legacies continue to shape the contemporary Chicago cultural world, with artists such as Vershawn SandersWard, the artistic director and CEO of 63 Street’s Red Clay Dance Company, continuing to teach the Dunham Technique to their students. Lastly, Olson added that many others maintain this legacy of radical social change, with artists like Ewing continuing to work at the intersections of art and activism in a way that recognizes the limitations of the now and also holds to imagining beyond it. Lauren Beard is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago. This is her first story for the Weekly.

JANUARY 13, 2022 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 19

‘Above All’

A conversation with Milwaukee-born rapper Myquale.

BY LAUREN JOHNSON

M

yquale has always had an affinity for the arts. At a young age, he loved freestyling with his older cousins, writing poetry, playing the piano, creating beats on his laptop in class, and checking out as many books from the library as possible.

Growing up in Milwaukee, Myquale spent a lot of time with his uncle, who composed all types of music and played several instruments for his band. “I loved going through [my uncle’s] collections— he would throw house parties back in the day,” Myquale said. “He had every CD, and it made me want to know more about just rap in general. You would see Slick Rick, Tupac, Outkast, Organized Noize, stuff like that.” Myquale developed an early obsession with rap, jazz, and neo soul, and when he got a walkman for Christmas, he would constantly try to discover new tracks. His frustrated mother soon confiscated his walkman because she didn’t like him listening to Tupac, Biggie, and Eminem.

When Myquale was in the fifth grade, he had enough money to buy his first album—Kanye West’s Late Registration. The album currently makes him quite nostalgic since it is tied to so many memories during his childhood. As a class clown and free spirit, he remembers interrupting his fifth grade teacher often

PHOTO COURTESY OF MYQUALE

in order to rap “Gold Digger” in front of all his friends.

At fourteen, Myquale had a moment of realization. “I started just freestyling for fun when I was younger to pass the time. I assumed this was something that everyone could do,” he said. “Then I get to high school and the teachers ask us to write a poem for a class assignment and I’m the first one done. We are all presenting and I’m like, oh, there’s a disparity and a difference between what everybody else is able to do and what I can do. I think that really put things in perspective for me.”

Myquale left Milwaukee for New York before transferring to DePaul University in 2014, where, as he jokes, many of his college friends thought he was from Chicago. “I think it just speaks to the similarities between Milwaukee and Chicago. The South Side of Chicago reminds me so much of the North Side of Milwaukee, just Milwaukee is obviously a lot smaller. There was something very familiar and both are cities full of soul and full of genuine people.” Like Chicago, Myquale said that Milwaukee is also a major city that is racially segregated, as the north side of Milwaukee has a large black population while the rest of the city is primarily white.

Myquale admires the grit and the

20 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY ¬ JANUARY 13, 2022

DIY mentality seen in Chicago’s music scene. According to him, the city is a critical site where musicians can hunker down, learn about themselves, and develop and strengthen their craft before potentially moving elsewhere.

When Myquale arrived in Chicago, several local artists were gaining traction on SoundCloud—a golden age he says he felt lucky to have been present for. At DePaul, he immediately began attending open mics, and rapped at Wordplay, Young Chicago Authors’ writing workshop on Tuesdays.

Travel also greatly influences Myquale’s work. One of his first EP’s, Passport Package, was a direct nod to his trips to Kenya, Tanzania, France, Jamaica, Egypt, Germany and Canada.

The four tracks on the EP include “Butler,” “SNOOKY,” “LAST NIGHT WE PARTED WAYS,'' and “4 AM IN KENYA,” and are motivated by the international perspectives, the different grooves, and the hospitality he experienced.

This year, Myquale will share a new project called Above All. He completed the first track and nucleus of the project, “Never or Now,” last summer during a revelatory moment in Los Angeles.

Twelve hours before his flight back to Chicago, he was anxious about leaving

Los Angeles, since he had been incredibly productive meeting with and learning from other artists there. As the title of the song suggests, Myquale was faced with a now-or-never circumstance, since he was flying back the next morning.

That night, he rushed to the studio with his close friend Najeeb Jones, a producer and engineer whose stage name is godchild. The two did not come to the studio with a goal in mind, but ultimately they had a successful night.

Myquale still has a voice recording of the forty-three minute session where he and godchild created “Never or Now.” The experience was so transformative that Myquale scrapped all of his other tracks and decided that everything else he shares must either match or exceed the quality of “Never or Now.” Despite the stress leading up to creating “Never or Now,” the track has a peaceful and calming pace. Myquale takes advantage of his uniquely enchanting, raspy tone, and his production choices and tempo changes are subtle yet powerful. The distinctiveness of the track will leave fans eager to hear more from his new project, which Myquale plans to release later this year.

“I’m a bit of a perfectionist,” Myquale told me. “For this new project, I think I’ve gotten to a point where I know myself well enough and developed my skills enough to be confident to share things.

Obviously sharing art can be nervewracking, and it’s a pretty vulnerable experience, but I’ve gotten to a point now where I have something valuable to say. I’ve developed the vocabulary to express these things that I want, that I didn’t know how to articulate before.”

Myquale also hopes to produce, collaborate with his friends, and tour and travel in the near future if the pandemic allows it. “It’s all in God’s timing,” he said. “I heard someone say ‘I’m just in charge of the outfits.’ It’s that same energy. I’m just going with the flow.” Lauren Johnson is a recent college graduate currently living in Chicago. She last reviewed Looking for Lorraine by Imani Perry for the Weekly.

T

Our thoughts in exchange for yours.

h e Exchange is The Weekly’s poetry corner, where a poem or piece of writing is presented with a prompt. Readers are welcome to respond to the prompt with original poems, and pieces may be featured in the next issue of the Weekly. ¬

THIS WEEK'S PROMPT: “YOUR MIND AND YOUR BODY ARE YOUR HOUSE; HOW WILL YOU DECORATE AND CARE FOR THEM THIS YEAR SO THEY CAN FEEL LIKE HOME?”

This could be a poem, a stream-ofconsciousness piece, or a short story.

Submissions can be sent to bit.ly/ssw-exchange or via email to chima.ikoro@southsideweekly.com.

I’m Only Addressing What is Permanent or Pretends to be

by Chima “Naira” Ikoro

I have never lived in any of my apartments for longer than 15 months– my current place, with a sublease shorter than a full-term pregnancy; I have aborted and abandoned so many buildings.

I say i’m going home, and every time the earth completes a rotation that means a different place.

My mom and my sister visited me today, and when they pulled up she thought the address was wrong, I said “no, this is where i live now, but my lease ends in less than a month.”

It's hard to keep track— one time, I just moved buildings.

They were so close together, I moved all my stuff alone on foot.

I didn’t disassemble any furniture, I asked for help, but no one showed up.

You know I'm long acquainted with making shit move all by my lonesome, so much so I am an object in motion, staying in motion moving.

Tapping my feet, twiddling my thumbs, fleeing flats and friendships all the same.

Featured below is a reader response to a previous prompt.

Her.

by Yvette Marie She walks with a feeling of self-respect, Self-confidence, And self-determination.

Knowing her past.

Changing her present.

Controlling her future.

Let’s face it—she’s on top of her game.

She’s a sister that’s got it together.

What’s her name? What’s in a name?

That in which is her name is an essence that stands alone.

So what do I call her?

I call her Young Queen.

I call her my friend.

I call her...

Yvette Marie is a poet from Hyde Park.

JANUARY 13, 2022 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 21

ILLUSTRATION BY THUMY PHAN

BULLETIN Wooded Island Bird Walk

Wooded Island, Jackson Park, 59th St. and Cornell Drive, Saturday, January 15, 8:00am–10:00am. Free.

The Chicago Audubon Society hosts its weekly bird walk (weather permitting) at Wooded Island in Jackson Park. The walk will cover a distance of two miles across Wooded Island, the Bobolink Meadow, and the Lakefront. Meet on the west side of the Columbia Basin (north lagoon). Parking is available on Stony Island Ave. near 59th St. Bring binoculars and a field guide if you have them, and dress for the weather. ( Jim Daley)

American Warsaw: Polish Catholic Immigrants in Chicago

DePaul Student Center, 2250 N. Sheffield Ave., Sunday, January 18, 6:30pm– 8:00pm. Free. https://bit.ly/3n6ZDVR Award-winning author and historian Dominic A. Pacyga will be speaking about the Polish Catholic experience in Chicago, specifically on the impact of Polish immigration in the city, how it has shaped the city and how the Polish community has changed over the years.

A face mask and proof of COVID-19 vaccination (or negative test results received within 72 hours of the event) will be required for attendance.

(Alma Campos)

City Council Meeting

City Hall, 121 N. LaSalle St., Wednesday, January 26, 10:00am. Free. http://chicityclerk.com/ The Chicago City Council will meet

Scan to view the calendar online!

in person at City Hall. Agenda and instructions for public comment and online and in-person attendance will be posted on the City Clerk’s website. ( Jim Daley)

EDUCATION Olive-Harvey College New Student Orientation

Olive-Harvey College, 10001 S. Woodlawn Ave., Thursday, January 13, 5:00pm– 7:00pm. Free. https://bit.ly/3JW43IK The new student orientation will provide an introduction to Olive-Harvey College and its academic programs and support services. At orientation, prospective students can expect to: complete their enrollment and financial aid, learn about the requirements, discuss career goals with an advisor, learn about student clubs and more. (Alma Campos)

LSC 101

Virtual, Thursday, January 20, 6:00pm– 7:30pm. Free. https://bit.ly/3nc4WmG Raise Your Hand Illinois's virtual LSC 101 workshop for current and prospective Local School Council Members will discuss the basic power of LSCs and how they can strengthen communities. All parents, caregivers, community, staff, and high school youth are welcome. Register at bit. ly/3nc4WmG. (Maddie Parrish)

January School Board Meeting CPS Loop Office, 42 W. Madison St., Garden Level, Board Room, Wednesday, January 26, 10:30am–5:00pm. Free. https://bit.ly/31GyhOG Members of the public can register to

22 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY ¬ JANUARY 13, 2022

speak at the January Board Meeting starting Monday, January 24 at 10:30 a.m. at cpsboe.org or via phone at (773) 553-1600, and can participate in the meeting in-person or virtually. The public will have access to the meeting via live stream at cpsboe.org.

(Maddie Parrish)

ARTS Pilsen Vendor Market

Pilsen Art House, 1756 W. 19th St. Every Sunday, 12:00pm–5:00pm. Free. bit.ly/3m9yMID This family-friendly weekly market invites artists and vendors to sell their wares such as candles, jewelry, woodwork, apparel, handmade goods, and more. There are both indoor and outdoor space, and masks are required throughout the event. (Alma Campos)

An Unapologetic Dream: An MLK Day Celebration

Green Line Performing Arts Center, 329 E. Garfield Blvd., Monday, January, 17, 4:00pm PM–7:00pm. Free. https://bit.ly/3HJ9zMU Hyde Park Art Center, Arts + Public Life, and the South Side Community Art Center present this MLK Day screening of Unapologetic—a film from Chicago director Ashley O'Shay that delves into the Movement for Black Lives as told through the lens of two young activists—as well as a screening of the documentary film The Black Archive Project: Chicago Uprisings 2020 and a poetry reading from Leslé Honore. Stick around until the end of the program for a discussion with the featured artists.

(Isabel Nieves)

Third Fridays Open Studios at Bridgeport Art Center Bridgeport Art Center, 1200 W. 35th St., Friday, January 21, 7:00pm–10:00pm.

Free. https://bit.ly/3F9XA9E

Join us every third Friday at Bridgeport Art Center, located at 1200 W. 35th Street (35th and Racine). Meet the center's curator, painters, sculptors, photographers, fashion designers, ceramic artists, woodworkers and Project Onward artists. (Isabel Nieves)

Chinese New Year Arts and Crafts Show McKinley Park Field House, 2210 W. Pershing Road, Saturday, January 29, 10:00am–2:00pm. Free. https://bit.ly/3JYpl8D

Shop and celebrate the Year of the Tiger at the Chinese New Year Arts & Crafts Show, 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. on Saturday, January 29, 2022, at the McKinley Park fieldhouse, 2210 W. Pershing Road, Chicago. This family-friendly event offers free admission to the general public, with space for up to twenty-five vendors (and vendor tables available for $10 each). (Isabel Nieves)

Young Chicago Authors Wordplay Open Mic

Instagram Live, Every Tuesday, 6:00pm– 7:30pm. Free. instagram.com/youngchicagoauthors One of the longest-running youth open mics, Wordplay, is back every Tuesday on Instagram Live. The virtual open mic is hosted by DJ Ca$hera, and will feature music, spoken-word performances, and a featured artist. (Chima Ikoro)

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SPECIALIZING IN ARCHITECTURAL: METAL WORK:

• Cornices • Bay Windows • Ornaments • Gutters & Downspouts • Standing & Flat Seam Roofs ROOFING WORK: • Slate • Clay Tile • Cedar • Shingles • Flat/Energy Star Roof

(773) 286-6212

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Advertise in the Business & Service Directory Today!!

Let Us Help Build Your Business!

Advertise in the South Side Weekly Today!!

Ad copy deadline: 1:00 p.m. Friday before Wednesday publication date. To Place your ad, call: 1-773-358-3129 or email: malone@southsideweekly.com

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CHILDREN’S HOSPITALS

DON’T WAIT.

Schedule your child’s COVID-19 vaccine today. » COVID-19 vaccine is free for all children. » Appointments for kids ages 5 and older can be scheduled anytime. » Schedule your child’s first- and second-dose appointments with just one phone call. » Flu shots are available.

Call Comer Children’s COVID-19 Vaccine Clinic at 773-834-8221 to make an appointment for your child at an available location.