May 25, 2016 | The Nature Issue

SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY The South Side Weekly is an independent nonprofit newsprint magazine written for and about neighborhoods on the South Side of Chicago. We publish in-depth coverage of the arts and issues of public interest alongside oral histories, poetry, fiction, interviews, and artwork from local photographers and illustrators. The South Side Weekly is dedicated to supporting cultural and civic engagement on the South Side and to providing educational opportunities for developing journalists, writers, and artists.

Editor-in-Chief Jake Bittle Managing Editors Maha Ahmed, Christian Belanger Deputy Editor Olivia Stovicek Senior Editor Emeline Posner Education Editor Lit Editor Music Editor Stage & Screen Editor Visual Arts Editor

Hafsa Razi Sarah Claypoole Austin Brown Julia Aizuss Corinne Butta

Contributing Editors Joe Andrews, Eleonora Edreva, Andrew Koski,

Lewis Page, Sammie Spector, Carrie Smith Editors-at-Large Mari Cohen, Ellie Mejia Video Editor Lucia Ahrensdorf Radio Producer Maira Khwaja Social Media Editors Sierra Cheatham, Emily Lipstein, Sam Stecklow Visuals Editor Ellen Hao Layout Editor Baci Weiler Senior Writer: Stephen Urchick Staff Writers: Olivia Adams, Maddie Anderson, Sara Cohen, Christopher Good, Anne Li, Emiliano Burr di Mauro, Kristin Lin, Zoe Makoul, Sonia Schlesinger, Darren Wan Staff Photographers: Juliet Eldred, Finn Jubak, Alexander Pizzirani, Julie Wu Staff Illustrators: Javier Suarez, Addie Barron, Jean Cochrane, Lexi Drexelius, Wei Yi Ow, Amber Sollenberger, Teddy Watler, Julie Wu, Zelda Galewsky, Seonhyung Kim Editorial Interns

Gozie Nwachukwu, Kezie Nwachukwu, Bilal Othman

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Cover art by Zelda Galewsky

IN NATURE

A week’s worth of developing plants, odd animals, and signs of the weather, culled from the strolls, hikes, and wandering eyes of the editors

Coyotes: Wily or Friendly?

Do not fear the coyote, urged an expert testifying before a City Council committee Thursday. A panel was convened to weigh in on a proposal to protect coyotes from being collared by the city’s Department of Animal Care and Control. Many of the attendees saw the coyotes as a potential ally in the city’s turbulent ecosystem. Alderman Brian Hopkins of the 2nd Ward urged the city to instead shift its interspecies aggression to the recent “explosion of Norway rats” (see page 3) as well as the imminent possibility, if coyotes are exterminated, of a sudden surge in the Canada goose population. Stan Gehrt of Ohio State University and the local Urban Coyote Research program cited the white-tailed deer as another common enemy of the human and coyote. However, Gehrt warned, we must not become too close to our wily allies. Do not feed the coyotes, he warns, lest they become complacent, comfortable, and prone to violence. The panel, conflicted, took no action on the proposal.

A Fishy Situation There’s something in the water off the coast of Hyde Park, and no one knows what it is. Not because there’s some cover-up—it’s just not very well publicized that beneath a century-old shipwreck-turned-tourist attraction, there exists a wealth of marine wildlife. The shipwreck of the Silver Spray and the Morgan Shoal have both been there for more than a century, with the former bringing tourists hungry for a good old shipwreck story. But now the latter is finally getting a boost in publicity, as a group of Shedd Aquarium researchers prepare to present their findings on the shoal in the next few weeks to the Illinois Department of Natural Resources. The researchers, using a “Remotely Operated Vehicle” robot often used in other reef and shipwreck investigations (something akin to it was used in the Titanic’s), discovered a variety of sponges, fish, and crayfish, some of which are nearly impossible to find anywhere else in the lake near Chicago. But there’s more! Following their presentation, the researchers hope to continue exploring the underwater landscape of the Lake Michigan area. More power to them: the reef might not be as big of an attraction to bystanders as the shipwreck that still visibly pokes out from the shore, but it’s definitely host to more colorful characters—so to speak.

A Tall Tale Here at the Weekly, we never thought we’d be covering spiders on skyscrapers. Yet surprises come in all shapes, sizes, and numbers of legs. As the summer season approaches, arachnids known as bridge or gray cross spiders are migrating into Chicago and upwards, as they attach themselves to local high-rises. They can be found this time of year on almost any window, attracted to lights coming from inside. Baby spiders are spinning webs in the shape of balloons that carry them across the city; they might be spotted as high up as the tops of the Willis and Hancock towers. As the new tourists infiltrate, hotels have warned their guests to keep their windows closed. But who could blame Chicago’s newest citizens? Perhaps we’re all just jealous the spiders don’t have to pay $22 for a skyline view.

THE NATURE ISSUE i smell a rat

“There’s a lot of ways of killing them, and I’ve used them all.” jake bittle & emily lipstein...........3 a tale of two trails

The looming spectre of rising rents and property taxes. darren wan.......................................6 a dog meet dog world

“I’m the Wizard of Oz behind it all.” emeline posner.................................8 capturing calumet

The largest lake in Chicago is typically under lock, key, and a ring of security cameras. grace hauck.....................................10 behind the fence

The future of Wooded Island. michelle gan..................................12 divvy for everyone?

Hyde Park presents one of the most encouraging examples for Divvy expansion on the South Side. max bloom.......................................15 find, remove, repeat

The EPA is back for more. anne li.............................................17 al klinger

“He’s won the gamble of life. He’s bet on love.” bridget gamble...............................18 a hilarious comedy, an intricate drama

A play about double identities pushes the boundaries between humor and drama. lily zhou.........................................20

OUR WEBSITE S ON SOUTHSIDEWEEKLY.COM SSW Radio soundcloud.com/south-side-weekly-radio I Smell a Rat: 311 Timelapse bit.ly/311ratmap

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RATS

I Smell a Rat

The city’s losing battle against a rodent invasion

BY JAKE BITTLE & EMILY LIPSTEIN

R

ecent census reports show that Chicago’s population of humans decreased by almost 3,000 between 2014 and 2015; this data suggests that within a decade, Houston will replace Chicago as the third most populous city in the United States. But at the same time, Chicago is becoming more and more of a hotspot for another species—rats.

According to a recent article in USA Today, more than twice as many rat sightings have been reported in Chicago this year as have been reported in New York, which has more than three times as many humans as Chicago. Orkin, a nationwide pest control service, rated Chicago the country’s “rattiest” city based on the number of rodent treatments the company performed in 2013.

(Houston lagged far behind at number 13).

Over the past few years, the number of rodent complaints in Chicago has risen dramatically. The city’s 311 department logged about 7,500 rat-related calls in the first quarter of 2016, up from around 3,000 complaints in the first quarter of 2014. In an interview with Chicago Tonight earlier this year, Mayor Rahm Emanuel acknowledged that the growing rat population has become “a real problem.”

“I think it's a real problem because it impacts the quality of life of the people,” he added.

The Emanuel administration has made a number of efforts over the past year to address the city’s growing rat problem. These included hiring more technicians to hunt down rats, proposing fines for residents who don’t clean up garbage and animal waste, and encouraging developers to consider ratproof construction techniques.

But for Ronald Worthy, a twenty-five-

year veteran of the pest control industry, these measures aren’t enough. Worthy says the city of Chicago has “stopped being aggressive about [its] rodenticide program,” easing off on the use of “quick-kill” poisons in favor of poisons that only make rats temporarily sick. Until the city gets merciless, Worthy says, they won’t make any headway.

Worthy is the founder and CEO of Good Riddance Pest Management, a pest control operation with locations in Douglas Park and Riverdale. For him, the war on rats isn’t just a matter of numbers: he sees the battle from the trenches. Over the years, he’s seen up close and personal just how irritating and harmful rats can be: he says the animals can defecate up to fifty times a night, and they urinate everywhere they go so that they can follow the trail. Some rats have even been known to bite babies, seriously harming them.

Worthy estimates he’s killed thousands of rats personally, and baited many more than that. “There’s a lot of ways of killing them, and I’ve used them all,” he says. He believes that the proper approach to fighting rats is a holistic one that understands how rats work and what they need to survive.

“Really what you need is integrative pest management,” Worthy says. “You can’t just go in and kill them over and over, you need to take away what they need—protein-based foods and a harborage area.

There’s got to be a reason they’re there in a certain place. They don’t just say, ‘I’m going to set up at Joe Blow’s house.’ ” In an interview with USA Today, deputy commissioner of the Department of Streets and Sanitation Josie Cruz lamented the city’s inability to implement such an “integrative” approach. Cruz said the city’s

since 2015 107 - 446

JOHN PREYSNER

This map provides a visual representation of all calls made by Chicago residents to 311 about rodent-related issues from January 1, 2013 to May 8, 2016. The data visualized represent over 115,000 calls made during this time period, records of which were obtained using the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and the City of Chicago’s Data Portal. The pale blue areas represent wards with the lowest call volumes, while the dark purple areas represent wards with the highest call volumes. These high-volume wards are clustered on the North Side, while wards with lower call volumes are concentrated on the South and West Sides. Despite this trend, high-call volume wards are present outside of the North Side: the 13th and 11th Wards, both on the South Side, have call volumes in the thousands. Interestingly, the 42nd Ward, which contains parts of the Loop, River North, and the Gold Coast, is the only ward north of Roosevelt with the palest blue designation. attempts to poison rat burrows won’t be effective until residents stop leaving other food for rats to take instead. Comparing breadcrumbs to rodenticide, she said, is “like

steak to a hot dog.”

“The rats are there because they are feeding on something,” Cruz said. “They’re not there because they like the neighborMAY 25, 2016 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 3

dent. This year especially, Worthy says the outlook isn’t good: he says a mild winter meant there was nothing to hinder the city’s rats from breeding. Combs agrees with this assessment.

“A city doesn’t have a steady rat population, rats have such high mortality, the turnover rate is so high,” he said. “But if the winter is less harsh and more survive, then you’ll see more babies in the spring. After a couple of mild winters, you may see an increase in that.”

And boy, can these rats breed. A female rat can give birth to as many as six litters a year, and each litter can have as many as nine pups. Moreover, it only takes two or three months for female pups to become old enough to start breeding themselves. This means that over the course of a year, a single

had gotten so confident they would literally take food out of his hands.

When the projects came down in 2011 (though Dearborn Homes were renovated and are still standing), Worthy says the rats scattered across the city, looking for new homes. He believes the saving grace of these rats was the restaurant boom Chicago has seen over the past twenty years. Many restaurants dump leftover food without properly sealing their garbage cans, which provided the city’s rats with “harborage areas” and guaranteed food sources, and allowed them to spread across the whole city.

“How continuous is this population?”

Combs asked. “It’s pretty continuous, already [in big cities]. They’re pretty connected through the city.” Combs explained that many rats become “dispersers,” traveling

You can’t just go in and kill them over and over, you need to take away what they need... There’s got to be a reason they’re there in a certain place. They don’t just say, “I’m going to set up at Joe Blow’s house.”

—Ronald Worthy, pest exterminator

VANESSA BARAJAS

hood. They are there because of the food source. If you cut off that food source, they’re going to eat rodenticide, and you’re not going to have that problem.”

Removing such alternative food sources seems like a good place to start, but the logistics have run into some political roadblocks. On May 12, the City Council’s Health Committee approved a resolution that would fine residents who don’t clean up dog poop daily. In addition to reducing the amount of poop in city streets and yards, the resolution was aimed at taking away a principal food source for rats: poop. One of the resolution’s most vocal supporters was 20th Ward Alderman Willie Cochran, who claimed to have residents in his ward with backyards containing up to fifteen pounds of dog feces—a prime food source for rats, he said.

46th Ward Alderman James Cappelman disagreed, arguing that rats would 4 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

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much rather eat “berries, birdseed, or even baby rats” than eat dog poop. When the resolution was brought to the full Council last week, the Council chose to table it for a month, citing concerns about policing residents’ backyards.

But Matthew Combs, a doctoral student at Fordham University who studies the population genetics of rats, thinks even the dog poop theory might not add up to much.

“I’m not sure if it’s because of all the dog crap on the sidewalk,” he said. “Rats will eat disgusting things, but they much prefer to eat fresh food that’s high calorie.…

Sometimes I think that someone comes up with an idea, like, ‘Dog poop. That makes sense!’ and they just kind of run with it. And then we’re going to talk about dog poop for two years.”

As long as dog poop and other food sources abound in the city, even intense extermination efforts won’t make much of a

rat could have hundreds of descendants.

Moreover, since rats aren’t indigenous to America (they were brought over from Europe on boats), they have no natural predators: dogs don’t see them as a food source, cats “aren’t going to do it,” according to Worthy, and there aren’t nearly enough coyotes or wolves to bring down the rat population.

Worthy takes a historical view of this current surge in rat population, which he says has been in the works since long before the Emanuel administration. He believes the destruction of the city’s high-rise public housing projects deprived Chicago’s rats of what had been massive, centralized sources of food. Worthy recalls these high-rises, and public housing generally, as one of the toughest battlegrounds he’s fought on as an exterminator: he described entering the incinerator room at the Dearborn Homes and finding it had been taken over by rats who

from neighborhood to neighborhood. These migrations cause routine population booms in new areas, through what Combs calls— Lord help us—“invasion events.” Worthy, who claims he has responded to extermination calls in every neighborhood, agrees that the problem is citywide.

Seeking to find out whether the city’s rat population is more concentrated in some neighborhoods than others, the Weekly conducted a data analysis of all “rodent baiting” service requests made to 311 since the beginning of 2013 to May 8 of this year.

Wards on the North Side have a far higher volume of rodent baiting requests than do most wards on the South Side (see map), but that doesn't necessarily mean there are more rats on the North Side: it just means more people call 311 on the North Side.

The Weekly conducted a further analysis, considering rodent calls as a proportion of all the 311 service request data available

RATS

on the city’s data portal. This included some 12 different categories of request—pot holes, graffiti, street lights, etc. This analysis revealed that a far lower percentage of 311 service requests are rodent-related in South Side wards than in North Side wards.

In the 7th, 8th, and 9th ward, for example, less than 2% of calls were related to rodents, and in the 10th Ward only 1% of all calls were rodent baiting requests. On the North Side’s 44th Ward, by contrast, 18 percent of calls were rodent baiting calls, with the nearby 43rd and 46th Wards coming close at 16% and 12% respectively.

Worthy theorized that the greater number of vacant and abandoned buildings on the South and West Sides may mean there are huge numbers of rats that are going unseen because they aren’t being reported to the city or combatted by exterminators. He says rats are very territorial: when they can, they’ll try to establish control over areas of around one hundred square feet.

Vacant homes, then, provide ideal hideouts: the rats are close to food sources, but safe from meddling humans.

In the end, though, he thinks the disparity in 311 data is more likely related not to the number of rats, but to the way residents respond to rats.

“It’s my personal belief that they’re more tolerated on the South and West Sides,” said Worthy. “People will say, ‘Oh, it’s just a rat.’ On the North Side they say, ‘That’s a rat! Aah!’ but in poorer communities they’re more apt to deal with it, and, furthermore, the city is more apt to respond to people on the North Side.”

A study published in the Journal of Community Psychology concluded that among low-income residents of Baltimore, residents who reported daily rat sightings were less likely to believe that rats were a significant problem on their block. “In models controlling for significant demographic and neighborhood variables,” the study concluded, “those reporting frequent rat exposure… were less likely to know how to report rats to the city, and were less likely to believe the city would act if notified.” One thing residents in various neighborhoods didn’t differ on, though, was their attitude toward rats in general—nobody likes them.

But for Worthy, rats aren’t as devilish as humans make them out to be—they’re about as afraid of humans as a human would be of King Kong. After twenty-five years, he’s not afraid of rats anymore—indeed, he thinks most people’s hatred of the creatures is unjustified.

“The idea that they’re creepy, that’s just culture,” he says. “In some places, people do have rats as pets. In some places, they’re revered as gods. With our beliefs, traditions, we don’t like rats...you can go back to the 1800s, 1700s, whatever, when they had the plague. But it wasn’t a rat that carried the plague, it was the fleas on the rats. I’m not here to kill all the rats. What I am here to do is keep the rats out of people’s lives.” ¬

This graph visualizes the number of calls to 311 about rodents made every day from January 1, 2013 through May 8, 2016. From first glance, it’s easy to see that there’s a cyclical look to the graph: the number of calls peak during the spring and summer months and plummet during the fall and winter. According to Combs, this reflects rat mortality and reproduction rates, which increase in the winter and summer, respectively. Seasonal peaks 2013-2015 are pretty similar, with the 2013 and 2015 peaks looking slightly more similar. The valley that typically formed between November and April in the first three years was not as extreme during winter 2016.

This can be a result of the mild winter weather, says Combs.

DATA VISUALIZATION BY EMILY LIPSTEIN & HAFSA RAZI

Of the 1224 days worth of calls the Weekly analyzed, there was only one day, December 14, 2013, in which nobody in the city of Chicago called 311 about rats. In stark contrast, 490 calls were made on April 12, 2016, 311’s busiest rodent-related day since January 1, 2013. An average of 94.7 calls were made each day across the city for the period of time this dataset spans.

MAY 25, 2016 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 5

A Tale of Two Trails

What do bicycle and nature trails have to do with gentrification?

BY DARREN WAN

O

ver a hundred protesters, supported by the Logan Square Neighborhood Association, marched along the 606 Trail on May 17. An elevated bicycle trail built on an abandoned railway stretching from Humboldt Park to Logan Square, the 606 Trail is an integral piece of Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s “Building on Burnham” plan. “Building on Burnham,” implemented more than a century after the 1909 Burnham Plan of Chicago, is a wide-reaching project in urban renewal that purports to “bring the spirit and benefits of Burnham’s original plan to every resident of Chicago.” To many low- and middle-income Chicagoans living near the trail, however, Emanuel’s bold vision of revitalizing their neighborhoods has fallen short. After the steady rise of rent in Logan Square over the last few years, and the city’s record property tax hike last October, many residents feel forced to leave their neighborhood just after the trail—and the beautification and renewal it brought with it—came to the area this past June.

Similar fears of gentrification, among other pressing concerns, have plagued two ongoing projects on the South Side that seek to convert largely abandoned railways to bicycle and nature trails: the Paseo in Pilsen and Little Village, and the Englewood Line Nature Trail.

The Paseo, a trail slated to be four miles long, starting at the intersection of 16th Street and Sangamon Street and heading southwest to Central Park Avenue, was officially announced by Emanuel in March.

The Paseo will take the place of the disused Burlington Northern Santa Fe (BNSF) railway, which is, unlike the 606 Trail, at ground level. Besides separate walking and biking paths, the Paseo will be home to lush greenery, public art installations, and community gardens, with the first stretch of the trail along Sangamon to be completed by the end of this summer.

Many residents and community stakeholders, however, have voiced concerns over the Paseo’s potential for fueling gentrification, a problem that has beleaguered 6 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

¬ MAY 25, 2016

Pilsen in recent years. These fears are informed by the experience of residents living in the proximity of the 606 Trail—in Logan Square, where the median home sale price is $260,700 according to Zillow. Plans were announced this January for town houses one block south of the trail, priced at $929,000 each. While the Paseo is significantly cheaper, there are fears that it could accelerate the proliferation of highend housing and retail in Pilsen and launch gentrification in Little Village, a comparatively lower-income neighborhood.

Representatives from nonprofit organizations such as the Little Village Environmental Justice Organization, Latinos Progresando, and Openlands have expressed their belief in the importance of keeping property prices and rents affordable in the immediate vicinity of the Paseo.

These organizations, along with concerned residents, brought up the problem of gentrification in a community meeting on March 16, organized by the Chicago Department of Transportation, in an effort to involve homeowners and community stakeholders in the planning process.

In light of concerns about gentrification in Pilsen and Little Village, Juan Carlos Linares, director of Humboldt Park’s Latin United Community Housing Association, has suggested that lessons learned from the 606 Trail could be applied to the Paseo. For instance, Neighborhood Housing Services of Chicago has implemented a “forgivable” loan scheme for longtime residents of Humboldt Park and Logan Square living within two blocks of the 606 Trail, in which families may apply for up to $25,000 to cope with rising costs in the area.

Residents and organizers who participated in the aforementioned protests related to the 606 Trail, however, still consider these measures insufficient. Ordinances proposed by the Logan Square Neighborhood Association include determining property tax rebates based on income rather than home value, and the imposition of higher demolition fees to reduce the rate of construction in the affected areas. In

light of these problems with the 606 Trail, the city has yet to conclusively answer the questions posed by the community about the further gentrification of Pilsen and Little Village, even as further planning and construction on the first section of the trail is underway.

The Englewood Line Nature Trail, which used to be called the Englewood Remaking America Trail, seems to be facing

Initiatives identified the Norfolk Southern railway for potential recreational use in 2007, but the land is still in the process of being acquired by the city. In 2014, the mayor’s office formally submitted an ordinance proposing land exchange in Englewood with Norfolk Southern, but the present status of the deal remains ambiguous.

In 2013, the Chicago Plan Commis-

While the Paseo is significantly cheaper, there are fears that it could accelerate the proliferation of high-end housing and retail in Pilsen, and would launch gentrification in Little Village. a different problem: institutional inertia. A two-mile elevated trail to be constructed in place of the abandoned railway between 58th and 59th Streets from Wallace Avenue stretching west to Hoyne Avenue, the proposed Englewood trail is intended to be “a community landmark and signature destination that enhances Englewood’s image,” according to a 2009 proposal submitted by the Hitchcock Design Group to Openlands, the nonprofit also involved in conversations about the Paseo trail.

Progress on the project, however, has been limited. The Green Healthy Neighborhoods Plan of the city’s Department of Planning and Development recommended the conversion of the railway into a nature trail in 2005, and Sustainable Englewood

sion approved the city’s ceding of land in Englewood to Norfolk Southern to expand their rail yard in return for their derelict railway tracks. This deal will add eightyfour acres to the corporation’s current rail yard holdings and purports to bring four hundred jobs to Englewood. In the process of the deal, however, there has been substantial resistance from local homeowners. The Englewood Railway Coalition was formed in 2011 as a nonprofit organization to assist these homeowners, numbering twenty-two as of 2015, in resisting the massive buyout schemes and other measures taken by Norfolk Southern in a bid to expand their operations in Englewood.

Considering that this deal appears to be the linchpin of the entire Englewood

TRAILS

COURTESY OF OPENLANDS

Line Nature Trail enterprise, it seems unlikely that the trail will make much progress in the days ahead. In spite of this, several community organizations, including the Active Transportation Alliance, Grow Greater Englewood, and the urban planning firm Teska Associates have come together to conduct conversations with community stakeholders and residents. The coalition held its first meeting in January, and discussed issues ranging from the safety of an elevated trail to possible amenities on the trail.

There is much optimism about the possibilities that this new development would open for Englewood, especially in

its potential to “boost the local food system and economy,” as Sonya Harper, executive director of Grow Greater Englewood, put it during the January meeting.

This attitude, however, was less prevalent in the community meeting about the Paseo, especially with the looming specter of rising rents and property taxes. As tensions around gentrification continue simmering unabated in Logan Square and Humboldt Park, and as questions about the future of low- and middle-income Chicagoans in these neighborhoods are left unanswered, the ways in which the Paseo will shape the fabric of Pilsen and Little Village are uncertain at best. MAY 25, 2016 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 7

A Dog Meet Dog World The story behind the “pup paradise” in Jackson Park

BY EMELINE POSNER

R

ome wasn’t built in a day, and neither was Jackson Bark—this is often what Todd Agosto, the architect of the Jackson Park dog park, will say, only half-jokingly, when asked about his pet project.

To compare the construction of a dog park to the construction of one of the greatest cities in history may strike some as odd—irreverent, even. But if not taken too literally, and if adjusted for scale, the comparison isn’t entirely inappropriate.

Jackson Bark occupies two full tennis courts—long out of use, according to Agosto—that butt up against the Jackson Park Driving Range. It is the third-biggest dog park in all of Chicago and the biggest by far on the South Side. And it’s luxurious, as far as dog parks go: the grounds are spotless and full of agility obstacles like seesaws and A-frames. Creative signage, a first aid kit, and hydration corners (“pup pubs”) are to be found along each side.

But perhaps most impressive of all are the five-star Yelp ratings, the Facebook likes, and the Twitter and Instagram followers that Agosto’s dog park has amassed in the two years since opening its gates to the neighborhood’s dogs. If you go by Yelp ratings, Jackson Bark surpasses other popular spots, like Rockefeller Chapel and Valois, to clinch the title for best institution in the Hyde Park/Jackson Park area.

It’s a “pup paradise,” a “little piece of dog heaven,” and “unlike any other dog park you have been to.” According to Yelp member Kristal S., the agility features had her elderly dogs feeling the spark of puppyhood once again: “They were doing agility exercises they had never attempted before.”

I visited Jackson Bark on a chilly Friday afternoon to speak with Agosto about what it is that makes Jackson Bark so special and why there are so few dog parks on the South Side. Our conversation was punctuated by Agosto’s dog Charlie, who yapped anxiously—and at a higher pitch than one would expect to hear coming from a German Shepherd—as he herded an orange, globe-sized ball into various obstacles and 8 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

¬ MAY 25, 2016

EMELINE POSNER

pairs of legs.

“People come in here with the impression that the city funded this park, that this is [their] tax dollars at work,” Agosto said as he carried fresh jugs of water to the doggie bowls in the park corner. But there are no tax dollars here. “I’m the Wizard of Oz behind it all.”

The idea came to Agosto some five years ago, when he realized that all twenty-three of the park district-approved dog parks are situated in the Loop or on the North Side—a long haul from Woodlawn, where he and his two dogs live.

He decided that if he wanted to see a dog park in the neighborhood, he would have to be the one to make it happen. With limited time on his hands and an aversion

to “bureaucratic hoops,” Agosto decided to forgo the process of applying to the park district for official Dog Friendly Area status—a time-intensive process that requires a community council and an estimated $150,000, not a cent of which is shouldered by the park district.

Instead, Agosto took on the work of making the space dog-friendly himself. He cleared out the drains, the glass shards, and the decaying leaves, and began to deck out the court with features he had seen in some of the popular North Side dog parks: first a couple of hoops and jumps made from PVC piping, then ramps, then a tunnel and a seesaw, all made out of old street and construction signs, tires, and wood. He calls it the “Hazard Agility Course.”

He assembles everything himself, but insists on giving credit to his “Great Guru, Google” and the “Oracle of YouTube,” as he likes to refer to them. Sometimes he throws Pinterest into the mix, too.

Agosto picks up worn tires—useful for rounding off sharp edges and for decor—from Blackstone Bicycle Works, but scavenges most materials on his own. If he spots a wooden two-by-four or orange cones tucked away in an alley while he’s driving down the street, he’ll pull a U-turn and load them into the trunk of his car.

“You never know what you can make with this stuff, and I’m always trying to get creative with the park,” Agosto says. Up next on his agenda are a staircase-like obstacle for the dogs and a wheelchair-accessible en-

DOGS

trance for owners.

Five years later and some $600 out of pocket, by his estimate, his vision has come to fruition. But he’s quick to remind newcomers that despite the park’s popularity, they are still, as he puts it, “squatters” on the park district’s land and technically could be removed at any point.

“We need to keep the city doing what it’s been doing—that is, nothing. If they decide to embrace us as an official dog park, that’s great,” Agosto says. He hopes that Jackson Bark’s social media presence and Yelp ratings will dissuade the park district from interfering with a good thing. If things go in the opposite direction, however, he says that he’ll put up a fight by calling up his media connections.

But for now, the most he can do is keep the park clean and safe, and keep spreading the good word to dog owners in the area via social media and good old-fashioned conversation.

“I get so fed up with talking to people about the dog park sometimes,” Agosto said to me after giving the park’s history and etiquette spiel to a couple of newcomers. “It’s just exhausting.”

Agosto is primarily a web and product developer; it’s in his free time that he works on the dog park. These two jobs are actually more similar than one might think, he says.

“You’re always trying to build something up out of nothing.”

And it’s not always easy work. He’s there every day for an hour or two and, while Agosto will often talk about Jackson Bark as a community venture, there is no question that he has given the most for it.

Woofington and Wagsworth Dog Parks, two of his older projects, also unsanctioned, are evidence of the work it takes to maintain even the most informal of dog parks. The former is in a rundown tennis court without a net at the southwest corner of Washington Park. Agosto stocked the enclosure, but stopped his efforts when the park fell into disrepair, due in part to the weather, in part to repeated acts of vandalism. Wagsworth, meanwhile, will be gone

once the University of Chicago Woodlawn Charter School completes its planned campus expansion.

When I ask if support from the alderman would help Jackson Bark gain official dog park status, Agosto shakes his head and says, “If politicians were the solution, there would be dog parks across the South Side.”

He’s not alone in his cynicism. Marion Brown of South Shore spent some time jumping through the bureaucratic hoops for which Agosto has no patience. She wanted to turn an unused, rocky strip of Rainbow Beach—she calls it Rocky Ledge—into an official dog park.

Brown said that she spent a couple years going through the official process—forming a committee, collecting petitions, working with the park district—before being rejected because the location was “not suitable.”

“I’d heard that if you want to get something [like a dog park] done, you have to bring it through the alderman, not through the community,” Brown said. But even the support of the 7th Ward alderman at the time, Natashia Holmes, didn’t seem to make a difference, and Brown isn’t sure what it would have taken to get the park district’s approval.

Although there are currently no dog parks sanctioned by the park district south of 16th Street, there are efforts underway to open an official dog park in Calumet Park: the Southeast Chicago Dog Park Committee’s proposed dog park was voted first of various proposed projects in the 10th Ward participatory budgeting election and will be awarded $100,000 in funding. With any luck, they might be the first to get through the park district application process.

The South Side stands to benefit from the installation of dog parks south of 16th St. and west of Wabash Avenue. It remains to be seen whether any of those that crop up in the future, whether sanctioned by the park district or not, will match Agosto’s Jackson Bark in intricacy of design or creativity of setup—it’s a Rome, of sorts, for others to aspire to. ¬

EMELINE POSNER

Jackson Bark is open seven days a week, 6am– 11pm. Free entrance, free parking. Donations of plastic bags and used toys welcomed.

MAY 25, 2016 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 9

Capturing Calumet

A rare glimpse of Chicago’s other lake

BY GRACE HAUCK

C

hicago’s other lake welcomed visitors to venture inside its barbwire fences in late April for its fifth annual Earth Day hike. Under the jurisdiction of the Illinois International Port District, Lake Calumet—the largest lake in Chicago, located a twenty-four-minute drive south from the Loop—is typically under lock, key, and a ring of security cameras. Earth Day, however, provides a rare opportunity for visitors to access the hidden land.

“This is unlike any other area in the entire city of Chicago, and it’s still literally unknown by most of the region because the first impression you get of the Lake Calumet area is the expressway,” said Ders Anderson, Greenways Director at Openlands,

10 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

¬ MAY 25, 2016

an Illinois conservation organization.

Hikers gathered bright and early at Calumet’s Harborside International Golf Center—the only portion of the area open to the paying public. After stocking up on donuts, a couple dozen nature enthusiasts from as far as deep Indiana boarded the two yellow school buses that would slip beyond the property limits.

Although it was freezing, the huddled crew ranged the windy peninsulas for a twohour, half-mile educational hike. Anderson narrated the tour along with Tom Shepherd, member and former president of the Southeast Environmental Task Force (SETF), and several bird and tree experts. The guides relayed a history of failure and contamination.

“This was heavily industrialized around the 1880s up until the 1980s,” Anderson said. “It used to be a dumping ground with landfills—a lot of fly-by-night chemical companies that would leave their waste behind, go bankrupt, and disappear.”

The lake is now scattered with landfills that protrude into water three to four feet deep on average, the skeleton of a failed marina project. The lake can hardly accommodate life, let alone the ocean-going sea vessels once intended to dock there. The soil, groundwater, and sediment are toxic, and cleaning it up will take years.

Environmental groups like the Calumet Heritage Partnership, Openlands, and the SETF are fighting to get the Chicago Park

District and Cook County Forest Preserve District to officially recognize and preserve Lake Calumet. They foresee a one-hundredacre public peninsula that could host picnic areas, fishing, biking, and small boat and kayak access. The majority of the wetlands would be set off for birds in order to recolonize the species that have been driven from their habitats by chemical waste and to nurture the species already living there.

“Our endeavor is to get at least 282 acres of this property open to the public,” Shepherd said. “Our Lake Calumet vision is almost twenty years old. We’ve been trying to persuade the Port District to give this up.

This is something that should be enjoyed by all of us—not only golfers.” ¬

PARKS

GRACE HAUCK

MAY 25, 2016 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 11

Behind the Fence

Jackson Park's Wooded Island will be under construction for the next five years. The Weekly took a look at what's ahead.

BY MICHELLE GAN

J

ust over a thousand feet south of the Museum of Science and Industry sits Jackson Park’s Wooded Island. In April of 2015, the United States Army Corps of Engineers (USACE), in partnership with the Chicago Park District, began an $8.1 million restoration of Jackson Park. USACE falls under the purview of the Department of Defense, and builds military facilities, civil engineering projects, and other public works. This restoration project means Wooded Island could be closed for as long as five years until 2020—sad news, since the site is home to the popular Osaka Gardens and acts as both a birdwatcher’s paradise and local fishing spot.

Like many parts of Jackson Park, Wooded Island persists as a historical remnant of the fairgrounds at the 1893 World’s

1. Our tour guide was Lauren Umek, a

project manager with the Chicago Park District (CPD) working on the Wooded Island restoration. Umek is trained as a plant and soil ecologist, and is a PhD candidate at Northwestern. She calls the green fences that surround the entire lagoon “hideous.”

These temporary herbivory fences are part of contractor AES’s attempt to fulfill their contractual obligation to plant sustainable flora: about ninety percent of the plants AES plants have to survive, or else the or12 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

¬ MAY 25, 2016

Columbian Exposition. Before the renovation began in 2015, local residents could be seen fishing for catfish to take home and eat. As a part of the ongoing restoration, many trees have been removed and the lagoon has been drained, resulting in a dearth of birds to watch and fish to catch.

From January to April 2016, on the fourth Saturday of every month, the chain-link fence surrounding Wooded Island opened its south entrance to the public. In April, The Weekly took a guided tour of Wooded Island, learned about the work being done there, and met community members who shared memories of the old Wooded Island as well as criticisms over the Chicago Park District’s vision of Jackson Park as an urban dream.

ganization will have to pay to replace them.

While planting season ideally takes place during spring and fall, the contractors have been working year-round to meet their goals of approximately 70,000 plants. In order to do so, they have been pumping water from the lagoon via temporary irrigation pipes.

The native plants have deep roots, averaging six to twelve inches, so that once they establish themselves they can survive any number of droughts and floods.

2. Part

The city of Chicago is utilizing a cost-share model to fund the restoration. The nonprofit organization Project 120, notable for its desire to implement a music pavilion behind the Museum of Science and Industry, will cover sixty-five percent of the cost, while the park handles the remaining thirty-five percent. Applied Ecological Services (AES) is the contractor for the project, responsible for planting and implementing much of the restoration.

However, this plan is not without its critics: the Jackson Park Watch, an activist organization of community residents who want more community input in plans for the park, are critical of Project 120’s plans to build a concert pavilion behind MSI.

of the agreement between the Chicago Park District and AES included navigating the conflict between ecological restoration and design. That tension manifested in the contract’s mandate that all oaks—deemed a keystone species worthy of special protection by the Chicago Park District—larger than twenty-three inches in diameter be preserved. At the same time, the

contract demanded that all previous asphalt be replaced with concrete. Unfortunately, the heavy equipment that typically accompanies concretizing an area can do great damage to oaks, some of which are the oldest in the city. AES solved this problem by building a temporary path made of mulch running through most of Wooded Island.

PARKS

3. In an attempt to achieve a balance of aesthetic urban park design and flourishing ecosystems, much thought went into every dead tree left in Wooded Island. In the early stages of the restoration, they mapped the location of every dead tree, judging which ones could stay on the basis of aesthetic ap-

5. This overlook presents a view of the

back of the Museum of Science and Industry and the larger Columbia Basin behind it. Historical placement (as well as Frederick Law Olmsted’s intentions when he redesigned Jackson Park three times—before, during, and after the World’s Fair) in-

peal, safety, and ecological consequences. The contractors also conducted prescribed burns to rejuvenate and encourage a healthy ecosystem. These burns have altered the nature of the tree canopy on Wooded Island, but whether this has produced a significant effect on the plants that live there has yet to be seen.

fluenced the location of the nine overlooks throughout Wooded Island. This particular overlook speaks to Olmsted’s vision of open water, different textures, different heights of trees, and different colors all combining to create a specific experience for the nature-seeking city-dweller.

4. On our walk to the closest overlook to

the south bridge, we see that the path has not yet been paved with concrete. According to Umek, asphalt was rejected for this environmental restoration because it is a petro-

6. The restoration of Wooded Island is

slated to take a maximum of five years; the project is currently in its second year. The contract between the Park District and AES required that no planting be done on the island in the first year of restoration. During this time period, AES instead focused on

leum-based product, while gravel was difficult to maintain. Some gravel will be used minimally for trails and some overlooks, but concrete is allegedly more viable in the long term.

removing invasive species, including the mulberry, which is a good tree for migratory birds looking to nest. Even after the removal of dead trees, they were interested in how changes to the canopy would affect land plants’ ability to grow.

MAY 25, 2016 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 13

PARKS

7. The emerald ash borer, a green jew-

el beetle that feeds on ash tree species, is threatening trees all over North America.

Umek cites a study published last year by scientists at Ohio State that said that only one percent of ash trees survive the assault.

This concern prompted the park to implement a cautiously optimistic approach in their pruning of ash trees. Instead of erad-

9. The

current five-year project to restore Wooded Island is only Phase One of a multi-phase plan by the Chicago Park District to restore all of Jackson Park. For the foreseeable future, however, the park

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¬ MAY 25, 2016

icating all ash trees that appeared impacted by the emerald ash borer, they attempted to treat some and destroy others. One such surviving tree includes the left-leaning thin, twig-like tree. It seems the treatment being used on the trees to fight the beetle's effects works to at least some extent. In the foreground, the budding baby oak surrounded by a cage juxtaposes these sickly trees.

will not have funding to go beyond this first phase, and thus the Clarence Darrow Bridge is slated to sit in disrepair for at least another four years.

8. Volunteers led by Park Steward Jerry

Levy play a significant role on Wooded Island, which has had work-days every fourth Saturday of the month. Volunteer duties

10. Inside

Jackson Park’s famed Japanese gardens we encounter a whole host of non-native trees, as well as fish, particularly koi, that epitomize exactly the kind of organisms Umek and her team want to keep out of Wooded Island. Prior to the restoration, the lagoon was a popular fishing destination among locals, and while it seems that locals and park planners disagree about the kind of fish they want to see in the future, both agreed that carp were not partic-

include placing cages around baby oaks and pulling out weeds of non-native species, such as garlic mustard.

ularly welcome. The park drained the lagoon to kill the carp, with the hopes that their effort would keep those fish out of their lagoon permanently. A fish separator similar to a grate keeps the koi out of the rest of the lagoon, since the non-native koi could potentially pose harmful ecosystem effects to the lagoon-dwelling organisms. However, while the fish separator is large enough to prevent fish from swimming through, the same cannot be said of their eggs. ¬

BIKES

Divvy for Everyone?

Recent data shows that South Siders are still underserved by Divvy's network

BY MAX BLOOM

D

ivvy—North America’s largest bike-sharing service by number of stations and coverage area—operates 476 stations in Chicago. Since 2013, the stations have been a characteristic feature across the city, their rows of gleaming blue bikes marking street corners across the Loop and the North Side. For the last two years, Divvy has been moving to expand service to neighborhoods farther from downtown, particularly areas with less foot traffic on the South and Northwest Sides. This summer, Divvy plans to add at least forty stations in Englewood, Burnside, Chatham, Greater Grand Crossing, and Brighton Park. Although this investment is encouraging, an analysis of ridership data suggests that Divvy may need many more expansions on the South Side to replicate its successes in Lincoln Park, Lakeview, Uptown, and the Near North Side, where there is a much denser, more established network of Divvy stations.

Over the final three months of 2015— the most recent dates for which Divvy has released ridership data—the most used Divvy station in the city was Station #91, located on the Near West Side, with 9501 total rides, more than a hundred each day. Station #91 is located at the corner of Clinton and Washington, centrally located in the city, where it can capture a diverse array of traffic: commuters heading to office buildings in the Loop, workers heading home to apartments west on Ashland Avenue, and suburban visitors arriving at the Ogilvie Transportation Center on their way into the city. Although Station #91 is unusually successful, there were hundreds of stations boasting thousands of riders during the fourth quarter of 2015—the most successful of them concentrated in a small area of downtown Chicago.

That’s one side of Divvy. On the other hand, there are stations #384, #386, and #388, added during Divvy’s expansion last

DATA VISUALIZATION BY JEAN COCHRANE

MAY 25, 2016 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 15

BIKES

spring into previously unserved parts of the South Side. These three stations, all situated along Halsted Avenue in Back of the Yards and Englewood in a much less central and densely populated area than Station #91, collectively boasted over the same three months exactly twenty riders. They are, like Station #91, extreme examples, but not unusual. The average Divvy station in Englewood boasted seventeen riders, an average of one every five days or so. These numbers are very low not merely in comparison with the far denser and more tourist-inundated neighborhoods surrounding downtown but also in comparison with largely residential neighborhoods along the farther reaches of the North, Northwest, and West Sides: neighborhoods like Irving Park, Rogers Park, Avondale, and Logan Square, where Divvy also just recently arrived.

Divvy is currently much more of an established presence on the North Side than the South Side: its expansion into most of its coverage area on the South Side is scarcely a year old, and entire neighborhoods, particularly on the Far South Side and the Southwest Side, still lack a single station.

More than seventy percent of Divvy's ridership comes from the Near North Side, the Loop, the Near West Side, Lincoln Park, and Lakeview, where a little under half of its stations are located, even though these five neighborhoods comprise only about twelve percent of Chicago’s population. On the other hand, the enormous geographic space of the entire South Side—occupying just over half of the total area of the City of Chicago—accounts for only about a fifth of Divvy’s stations and less than one-twentieth of its total ridership. If Hyde Park is excluded, the latter number goes down to 2.7 percent. The South Side is underserved in terms of Divvy stations, and those stations are underused in terms of the number of riders per station—factors that might be directly related to each other, given the way in which Divvy riders likely take advantage of a dense network of stations to travel short distances.

Considering that Divvy aims to be an affordable, citywide service and expand into a vast and underserved portion of the city, the expansion makes a lot of sense: Burnside, Chatham, and Brighton Park are not at all served by Divvy as it currently stands, while Greater Grand Crossing and Englewood boast only seven stations to service a population of almost sixty-five thousand.

According to Mike Claffey, the Director of

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¬ MAY 25, 2016

Public Affairs for the Chicago Department of Transportation (CDOT), “We are continuing to push out the network in all directions as funding for new stations and bikes becomes available,” in order to achieve Divvy’s goal of “a citywide bike share program.”

As it currently stands, hundreds of thousands of residents on the South Side live outside of Divvy’s coverage area and tens of thousands more live in neighborhoods with only a few stations. In order for Divvy to function at a citywide level, it will need to vastly expand its coverage on the South Side. The question then, remains: what are

Park has even increased ridership in neighboring Woodlawn and Washington Park: about sixty percent of rides beginning in those neighborhoods end in Hyde Park, and stations in these neighborhoods have been substantially busier than stations in many other South Side neighborhoods. Hyde Park, then, may suggest that Divvy can catch on in the South Side, if given a bit of time and a denser network of stations: Hyde Park has thirteen stations, whereas Englewood, which is almost twice as large geographically, has only four.

But if the numbers in Hyde Park are

The South Side is underserved in terms of Divvy stations, and those stations are underused in terms of the number of riders per station— factors that might be directly related to each other. the factors motivating Divvy ridership? And what can the city do to successfully market the service to those regions that currently have low ridership?

Hyde Park ridership presents one of the most encouraging examples for Divvy expansion on the South Side. Divvy has more per-capita usage in Hyde Park than in Uptown or Logan Square—neighborhoods that are both substantially more densely populated and closer to downtown—and Hyde Park may soon surpass West Town, the bustling West Side neighborhood that contains Wicker Park. The busiest Divvy station on the South Side is #423 in Hyde Park, opposite the University of Chicago’s Regenstein Library on 57th Street. Moreover, ridership in Hyde Park is increasing—between the second and fourth quarter of 2015 it increased by more than ten percent—while ridership across the city decreased by about thirty percent (probably due to a seasonal decrease in ridership during the winter months). The popularity of Divvy in Hyde

an encouraging development for Divvy, the numbers in the neighborhoods surrounding Hyde Park suggest otherwise. Over the last quarter, Woodlawn and South Shore have seen much lower ridership than Hyde Park.

One possible factor may be the density of bike lanes: bike lane maps provided by the City of Chicago show that the network of bike lanes is far denser in Hyde Park than in surrounding neighborhoods on the South Side. Woodlawn and South Shore are both about as densely populated as Hyde Park but lack the presence of the UofC and the bike lanes and other cyclist-friendly infrastructure of the neighborhood.

The results from Woodlawn and South Shore are counterexamples to Divvy’s success in Hyde Park, but they should be taken with a bit of caution, too—Divvy’s network is less dense in these neighborhoods, and far less dense or nonexistent in the neighborhoods to the west and south of Woodlawn and South Shore. It may be that Divvy’s middling numbers in Woodlawn and South

Shore could be remedied with more stations in neighboring South Chicago and Washington Park and more bike lanes throughout.

I

n addition to increasing service coverage on the South Side, Divvy might be able to increase ridership and become an “affordable transportation option everywhere that it reaches,” according to Claffey, by further marketing their Divvy for Everyone (D4E) program. In order to address financial barriers and increase access to Divvy, CDOT offers a one-year membership for a one-time fee of five dollars to first time riders making under three hundred percent of the federal poverty level—about 60 percent higher than the Chicago minimum wage for a single person, and up to $72,750 for a family of four. And unlike the other Divvy membership options, riders can sign up in person without a credit or debit card. A huge portion of Chicago, in fact, is eligible for the D4E program: around forty-five percent of the city makes under two hundred percent of the federal poverty line, so the three-hundred-percent cutoff could almost certainly capture a majority of the city’s residents. Only “about eleven hundred people have signed up through D4E,” according to Claffey, however, which may suggest vast untapped potential for limited-income Divvy riders, who could be unaware that they are eligible for the program.

Divvy aims to be a program that serves the entire city of Chicago, but it is currently far from doing so, particularly on the South Side, where large stretches are either outside of Divvy’s coverage area or unserved by the system. Divvy’s proposed expansion may do a great deal to change this disparity, particularly if combined with further outreach to a greater number of limited-income residents through the D4E program. Currently Divvy is a nonentity for hundreds of thousands of Chicago residents across the South Side who are outside its coverage area and or in underserved Divvy neighborhoods such as Englewood, Greater Grand Crossing, and Back of the Yards. This summer’s expansion may be able to bring more of those residents into the program, but it is likely that many more expansions will be needed to create a dense network of Divvy stations on the South Side and make Divvy a viable transportation alternative. ¬

LEAD

Find, Remove, Repeat The campaign to rid Pilsen of lead contamination

BY ANNE LI

I

n 2004, concerns about foul-smelling smoke coming from the stacks of a Pilsen factory spurred an advisory referendum on lead contamination in the neighborhood, sponsored by the Pilsen/Southwest Side Green Party. The referendum passed by ninety-five percent, an overwhelming show of support that kickstarted an investigation into lead contamination in the Pilsen area conducted by the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency (IEPA) and the Chicago Department of Environment (CDOE).

Ten years and two cleanups later, the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is back for more, after recent tests found lead in the soil around the same H. Kramer & Company factory, located at the intersection of 21st Street and South Loomis Street.

The H. Kramer factory smelts scrap metal to produce bronze ingots, which are ten to twenty-five percent lead; the process produces fumes containing lead oxide. This was one reason that residents were worried about the smoke coming from the H. Kramer plant, especially given Pilsen’s industrial history. Lead is a common concern in Pilsen, along with the rest of the Southwest Side; Kimberly Wasserman, director of organizing and strategy for the Little Village Environmental Justice Organization, explained that the Southwest Side has “a historic legacy with lead in homes, as a pollutant and as a legacy issue from industry that left behind toxins.” In Pilsen, lead from the H. Kramer fumes blows over the neighborhood and settles in the soil.

The federal EPA estimates that 54,366 pounds of lead have been emitted by H. Kramer since 1987, resulting in dozens of complaints over the years. In 1997, the EPA ordered H. Kramer to take steps to reduce fugitive emissions, or emissions which come from outside the factory stacks. These steps included reconstructing two baghouses, which trap dust from the production process, and surveying ducts for leaks. H. Kramer abided with that investigation and a subsequent 1999 CDOE investigation by replacing aged furnaces and conducting ex-

tensive roof repairs, as well as replacing and repairing other aging equipment.

But continued concerns about the content of H. Kramer’s fumes resulted in the 2004 referendum, after which members of the Pilsen/Southwest Side Green Party formed the Pilsen Environmental Rights and Reform Organization (PERRO). PERRO has since spearheaded efforts to organize the community and educate them on the federal and state EPAs’ efforts to monitor and clean up the lead contamination.

In March 2005, they analyzed soil samples from around the factory and found that the concentrations of lead in eight of the twelve samples exceeded the EPA Removal Management Level (RML) standards of 400mg/ kg.

These high levels of lead are particularly dangerous for pregnant women, as well as children, who are more likely to ingest soil while playing outside. The presence of lead dust in the soil is made more concerning by the presence of two schools, the Manuel Perez Jr. Elementary School and the Benito Juarez Community Academy, near the H. Kramer factory. Exposure to lead can cause children to experience behavioral and learning difficulties and lower IQs. Following PERRO’s sampling and analysis, the IEPA undertook its own investigation in June 2005 and found that in fifteen of the seventeen samples taken, the amount of lead exceeded 1000mg/kg, more than twice the RML standards. The IEPA conducted a cleanup on September 7 of that year to remove around six cubic yards of contaminated soil and replace it with gravel.

Further cleanup efforts in 2011 decontaminated 2,769 cubic yards of soil. In March 2012, the IEPA officially released H. Kramer from further responsibilities related to the 2005 injunction.

But concerns about lead contamination continued, this time regarding the airborne pollution being released directly from the H. Kramer plant. To address this, an investigation requested by the federal EPA found in March 2011 that of two possible sources of the pollution, H. Kramer was the main

ELLEN HAO

contributor of airborne lead particles at sites near the two schools. H. Kramer did not respond to a request for comment.

The current EPA cleanup stems from yet another survey of lead contamination in Pilsen, conducted in May, July, and August of 2013. With the permission of residents, samples were taken from residential areas in Pilsen, as well as from two reference areas in Little Italy and Harrison Park. All the tested areas had at least one category in which lead concentrations exceeded the 400 mg/kg RML standard. Additional sampling took place in April 2016, the results of which have not yet been released.

The EPA’s latest monthly report, dated May 13, 2016, described the actions that have been taken with the spring 2016 samples and the progress of cleanup coordination. TRC Environmental Corporation, the company that the EPA has contracted to analyze the results, is currently testing the soil samples and flagging those with high lead concentrations; treatability tests are also being conducted. The next step is choosing a contractor to conduct the remediation process and treat the remaining lead-contaminated soil.

PERRO plans to knock on doors in the contaminated area every other Saturday. For residents to get their soil tested and replaced by the EPA on H. Kramer’s dime, they need to sign consent forms. But Rose Gomez, a PERRO organizer, explained to the Weekly that even potentially affected residents may need an extra nudge. “People are busy,

they might have missed the notice, and they might not know they’re eligible,” Gomez said.

The EPA has sent notices to the owners of the property, but if the property is rented, as many of the homes in the area are, the landlords are likely to be less invested in the cleanup than the tenants.

“There’s been some issues with getting property owners to agree, since a lot of them just don’t want to deal with it or are worried that it will scare people and that their property will get devalued,” Troy Hernandez, a PERRO member, said.

Additionally, many residents are undocumented, Hernandez said, and although the EPA does not engage with immigration, many undocumented residents are reluctant to get involved with a federal agency.

Because of these complications, so far only thirty of the 120 homeowners in the area have signed consent forms.

For Hernandez, however, the lead in the soil is only the beginning—there’s also the lead in the water service lines across the city, which can get disturbed when water mains are replaced.

“The city’s done a good job on playing down [lead contamination] as not being a problem, while at the same time they recognize it is a problem and are doing things to mitigate it,” Hernandez said. “They’re kind of playing both sides.” Baci Weiler contributed reporting.

MAY 25, 2016 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 17

How to Gamble and Win Al Klinger celebrates his 90th birthday party with all of Hyde Park

BY BRIDGET GAMBLE

“S

ome people and things know better how to gamble and win than to live or be ordinary.”

That’s the last line in an original short story that Al Klinger read at his 90th birthday party in Hyde Park. But on the afternoon of Sunday, May 15, it was just the beginning.

“You can take a deep breath,” Klinger said upon finishing the story, setting his papers down on the DJ’s turntable behind him.

“I know I can be overwhelming at times, but I have to say a few things.”

“Who are you?” a friend heckled from his seat in the audience, where he grazed from a plate of catered Mexican food.

“That’s exactly the point,” Klinger said.

“Who am I? I’m a [board] member of the Jane Addams Senior Caucus. But I didn’t get there just like that. I’m sort of like the Earth in the sense that it took me billions of years to figure it all out.”

In Hyde Park, it seems that everyone not

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¬ MAY 25, 2016

only knows Al Klinger, but they also know that he is far from ordinary. At ninety years old, he is spritely, sharp, smiling, and spirited, surrounded by people he loves and who love him right back.

A retired family physician who held a practice on the South Side for decades, Klinger invited the entire neighborhood to his birthday celebration via the Hyde Park Herald. At the party, held in the penthouse of the Regents Park Towers, he gathered with family, friends, and acquaintances who responded to the ad. In lieu of gifts, he asked for donations to the Jane Addams Senior Caucus, a grassroots organization led by Chicagoland senior citizens concerned with economic, social, and racial justice.

At the beginning of the party, Klinger stood on a step stool to steal the attention of the crowd and introduce each of his family members by name, ignoring pleas from loved ones to get down.

When he was done listing his loved ones, he addressed the remainder of the crowd. “I think it’s very important to know that you—from Hyde Park, South Shore, South Side—have been extremely important to me, wherever I have been, wherever I am going, and wherever I will go,” he said.

To kick off the festivities, Klinger, an avid writer, read one of his original short stories. He then launched into the story of his life: Born in 1926—before Charles Lindbergh flew the Spirit of Saint Louis across the Atlantic, he noted—he spent the next decade or so in Chicago’s Lawndale neighborhood with his mother, father, and three siblings.

“Then I went off to war because I wanted to save the United States from a madman,” he continued. “In the process, I almost got killed in a firefight. I somehow made it, although I had a bullet in my neck, but there

were two of my buddies, blue and not responsive. I had just been playing poker with them an hour before.”

Klinger’s comrades—natives of Tennessee and West Virginia—still haunt his dreams, he said. “I still think of why I survived and why they did not.”

This traumatic experience led him to a realization that would determine the course of his life. “I wanted, essentially, to save the world,” he said. With the help of the G.I. Bill, Klinger entered medical school at the University of Illinois, where he met his wife. He graduated in 1953. They had four children.

“At the same time I was trying to become a physician, I was also trying to become more convincing politically,” Klinger said of his early days as an activist. He mentioned the 1955 lynching of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till as a major catalyst for his passion

BIRTHDAY

BRIDGET GAMBLE

for activism. “I was furious, but I didn’t know what to do,” he said. In June of 1966, he found his way with the civil rights movement when he joined a march in Mississippi led by Martin Luther King Jr. Shortly thereafter, Klinger worked at voter registration offices in Chicago, oftentimes staying past midnight to register people “who didn’t dare go to a polling place because they might lose their lives,” he said.

Around the same time, Klinger opened an office in Hyde Park on 53rd Street and Woodlawn Avenue that he would maintain for several decades. At one point in his early career, Klinger was making 200 to 300 house calls a day and seeing firsthand how people in his community lived. “I often [found] in the last week of the month, many of them did not have food in their refrigerators or on their shelves,” he said.

Klinger devoted the bulk of his career as a physician and activist to learning the unique needs of Chicago’s South Side and advocating for the wellbeing of his community-at-large.

For decades, his op-eds have appeared in the Hyde Park Herald and Chicago Reader— and he continues to use the pen as a weapon.

Recently, he wrote about his disapproval of the Obama Library placement on public park property in Hyde Park.

“Park property is sacrosanct,” he wrote.

“Park property is for the people of Chicago to use unimpeded by any person who is to be honored. I do not care if it is George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, Martin Luther King or personalities of our religions such as Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, Mohammed or the Buddha.”

Today, alongside fellow members of the Jane Addams Senior Caucus, Klinger con-

tinues to advocate for affordable housing, a $15 minimum wage, and retirement security, among other causes.

At his 90th birthday party, a DJ was present, as well as a buffet of Mexican food, orange and yellow streamers, and two chocolate cakes. Klinger danced as the DJ spun Stevie Wonder’s “Happy Birthday.” His friend Sergio, who catered the party, helped him slice the cake. As if instinctively, and to the surprise of everyone, Sergio launched the first slice at Klinger’s face, sending the birthday boy into a fit of hysterical laughter. His daughter, Cecilia, came to the rescue with a handkerchief and helped him clean the frosting off of his glasses.

A quick scan around the Regents Park penthouse on that particular afternoon would suggest that Al Klinger is quite beloved. His children, grandchildren, cousins, old neigh-

bors, creative writing classmates, fellow activists, longtime friends, and their children were in attendance. At any given moment, if Klinger was not behind the microphone, he could be found in an embrace with a loved one, who showered him with kisses, handholds, and whispered well wishes.

He’s won the gamble of life. He’s bet on love.

Asked if the party’s various elements— the Mexican food, the orange streamers and balloons, the chocolate cake—were reflections of his favorite things, he said no.

“What’s your favorite part of all this then, Al?” “The dancing,” he said. “The dancing, and the people I’m dancing with.” ¬

MAY 25, 2016 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 19

STAGE & SCREEN

A Hilarious Comedy, an Intricate Drama "One Man, Two Guvnors" at Court Theatre

BY LILY ZHOU

A

servant with two masters is coming to Court Theatre, seeking to amuse the crowd with his hilarious story of life as a “double spy.” It is time to experience suspense, tension, and laughter, as the comedy, One Man, Two Guvnors, written

by Richard Beans and adapted from Carlo Goldoni’s 18th century comedy The Servant of Two Masters, will be showing at Court until June 12th. Directed by Charles Newell, the play features a group of experienced and exceptional Chicago artists and actors such as Erik Hellman (who returns to Court after appearing in The Good Book), Elizabeth Ledo, and Alex Goodrich, all of whom are incredibly attuned to the emotional registers and subtle demands of their roles. It is a splendid mixture of wildness, silliness, and joy that takes the audience through a journey of laughter, enjoyment, and contemplation, absorbing us into their creative drama.

An explosive narrative rife with buffoonery, tension, and love, the play aptly begins with the flurried activity of an engagement party. This scene is saturated with noise, action, and the expressive, over-exaggerated, almost campy performances by the actors. The festivities are interrupted by a revelation: Francis (Timothy Edward Kane) has been acting as a double agent; he’s been working as a minder for both Roscoe (Elizabeth Ledo) and Stanley (Eric Hellman).

This interruption marks a shift in the play’s tone from one of pure comedy to something darkened by more tension and drama. It is here that we see Charles Newell stretching his directorly vision, working to produce a form of theater whose genre boundaries haven’t yet been staked out. Timothy Kane’s Francis is crucial to Newell’s vision, shuttling between and challenging the boundaries of the comedic and dramatic modes. He is constantly craving and devouring food, even if its source is the trash bin or if its intended consumer is one of his masters. Even a letter can become a source of pleasure, and the audience watches him greedily devour a

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¬ MAY 25, 2016

COURTESY OF COURT THEATRE

sheet of paper piece by piece.

One of the more serious moments in the play comes when Dolly (Hollis Resnik)– Francis’s love interest—performs a monologue embodying feminist ideals, which is the first time the play explicitly takes up these themes. However, the connection between this speech and her romantic relationship with Francis is not quite clear, especially as their relationship becomes even more intimate after this feminist speech. Though this theoretical lens adds depth to the play, it is somewhat confusing why this part is included. This is a question worth bearing in mind, as it renders the play more serious and complicated than a pure comedy show.

Perhaps the setup of the play, with Rachel pretending to be her twin-brother, has some

deeper meaning with respect to the role of women.

One last feature of One Man, Two Guvnors worth noting is the central role of improvisation and the use of slight line variation in each performance. There is also a high level of interaction with the audience, manifested not only in the actors’ running to and from the aisles in the auditorium, but also the calling up of spectators onto the stage in a manner clearly not negotiated with the audience members beforehand.

The sense of humor that we have come to expect from the performance continues in the actors’ interaction with the volunteer. At the same time, though, this allows points of awkwardness, as when the volunteer sits on stage for five minutes and fails to say any-

thing when Francis asks a question. In the iteration of the play that I witnessed, audience participation made the scene less entertaining than it could’ve been, though this potential for failure could also be read as a marker of authenticity and originality in the play.

Ultimately, Court Theatre’s production of One Man, Two Guvnors manages to straddle the realms of comedy and drama such that it is simultaneously joyous, funny, wild, and reassuring, on the one hand, and thought-provoking, grounded in reality, and tense on the other. If you are looking for something that will make you laugh as well as learn from the comic life story of others, One Man, Two Guvnors is well worth it. ¬

EVENTS

BULLETIN A Dialogue on Police Accountability and Justice IIT Chicago-Kent College of Law, Morris Hall, 565 W. Adams St. Wednesday, May 25, 6pm–8pm. $46. (312) 564-5685. chicagojustice.org

An Update on Dyett

After the publication of “The New Dyett” by Olivia Adams in our May 18 issue, the Weekly received data from CPS in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. This data showed that as of May 20, 2016, CPS had received 423 applications for Dyett's 140 seats. Of those 423, 14 came from within the primary attendance boundary, and 44 more came from outside the primary boundary but inside the secondary boundary.

This equates to a total of 58 applications from within either boundary, and 365 applications from outside both boundaries. The map below indicates the boundaries for both attendance zones.

CHICAGO PUBLIC SCHOOLS

The CPD is currently under federal investigation, but many Chicagoans feel this is not enough. In an effort to fill voids left by the Department of Justice, community members and experts on police accountability will be discussing solutions for meaningful change in policing. ( Joe Andrews)

Healthy Chicago 2.0 Hamilton Park, 513 W. 72nd St. Wednesday, May 25, 6pm-7:30pm. Free. (312) 747-9884. cityofchicago.org/health Get outdoors before the rain this week and join 20th Ward Alderman Willie Cochran and other community leaders for a discussion on Healthy Chicago 2.0, the new and improved citywide plan for promoting health.

Refreshments will be served. (Corinne Butta)

First Lutheran Church of the Trinity, 643 W. 31st St. Thursday, May 26, 7pm–8pm. (312) 842-7390. firsttrinitychicago.blogspot.com For years, Bridgeport residents have advocated for the reinstatement of the much-needed 31st Street bus route. This month, the CTA announced a six-month “pilot” program, but its limited hours, service area, and program length have left many unsatisfied. Find out what’s next at this meeting. (Hafsa Razi)

Above and Beyond Viewing with Veterans Harold Washington Library Center, 400 S. State St. Saturday, May 28, 10am–5pm and Sunday, May 29, 1pm–5pm. Free. (312) 7474300. chipublib.org Join veteran docents this Memorial Day weekend for a viewing of the Above and Beyond memorial. Learn about the Vietnam War from the perspectives of these veterans, and recognize the sacrifices of countless others. (Corinne Butta)

VISUAL ARTS

Effects of 2016 Election Rhetoric on Minority Communities

Rise by Darling Shear

International House, 1414 E. 59th St. Thursday, May 26, 6pm–8:30pm. Free. (773) 7532270. ihouse.uchicago.edu

Gallery 400, 400 S. Peoria St. Wednesday, May 25, 6pm–8pm. Free. (312) 996-6114 gallery400.uic.edu

The negative effects of this year’s election rhetoric have undoubtedly contributed to America’s racial and religious polarization.

Join Rev. Dirk Ficca, Dr. Michael Dawson, and panelists Hind Makki, Juan Salgado, and Mark Baldwin as they discuss the dynamics of building positive relationships for a more inclusive society. ( Joe Andrews)

Gallery 400’s performance of Rise tells the complicated story of social justice in the transgender community through the story of Eisha Love, a transgender woman who served nearly four years in Cook County Jail—without a trial—after fleeing two men who attacked her at a gas station in 2012.

(Bridget Gamble)

UofC Woodlawn Construction Projects Meeting

Impossible Biology

AKArama Community Service Center, 6220 S. Ingleside Ave. Thursday, May 26, 6pm–7:30pm.

Free. Register online. (773) 834-1447. civicengagement.uchicago.edu Construction is slated to begin soon on UChicago Charter School’s new Woodlawn campus. Join the University to discuss the upcoming construction as well as other new projects on Campus South. A copy of the presentation will be available online after the meeting at news.uchicago.edu. (Carrie Smith)

Bridgeport Alliance Bus Meeting

The Archer Beach House, 3012 S. Archer Ave. Wednesday, May 25, 8pm. $5-$10 donation.

How does your garden grow? As if in conjunction with this week’s Nature Issue, the Her Environment media art series offers their third installment, focusing on myths and fables about the processes of body, earth, and nature—and the technology that interprets them. (Corinne Butta)

Art Party Hyde Park Art Center, 5020 S. Cornell Ave. Friday, May 27, 7pm–10pm. Free. (773) 324MAY 25, 2016 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 21

EVENTS 5520. hydeparkart.org Local artists Michelle Nordmeyer, Amina Ross, and Lyra Hill are kicking off the holiday weekend with zine and print-making activities at Hyde Park Art Center’s Art Party. The party will start with a bike ride from the UofC quad to the Art Center at 6:30pm.

(Bridget Gamble)

Future Timeless Workshop Mana Contemporary, 2233 S. Throop St. Saturday, May 28, 3pm–6pm. Free. (312) 850-0555. manacontemporarychicago.com Join costume designer Courtney Schum and artist Chad Kouri for an afternoon of conversation and creation that combats the feeling of “nothing to wear.” Bring an item or two from your own closet to kick start conversation; whether you drape it, knot it, belt it, or cut it, you’re sure to find new ways to wear it this Saturday. (Corinne Butta)

‘What is Movement?’ Workshops High Concept Labs at Mana Contemporary, 2233 S. Throop St. Sundays, May 22, 29, and June 5, 1:30pm–4:30pm. $10 per session. (312) 850-0555. highconceptlaboratories.org.

Spring into step this weekend and make your way to High Concept Labs to reflect on our human movement. No experience required; just the desire to learn how to use your body to create form and perform. (Corinne Butta)

MUSIC Taylor Bennett at Reggies Reggies Rock Club, 2105 S. State St. Saturday, May 28, 8pm. $15. (312) 949-0120. reggieslive.com A poet of Chicago, influence, and personal growth, 20-year-old emcee Taylor Bennett is counted among Chicago’s finest young musicians. He’s circumvented “Mainstream Music” and paid tribute to “Broad Shoulders,” opened for icons and sold out several shows back-to-back. Come to Reggie’s to see why this Bennett is a lot more than Chance’s little bro. (Neal Jochmann)

Pete Rock The Promontory, 5311 S. Lake Park Ave. Saturday, May 28, doors 9pm, show 10pm. $20 advance, $40 VIP. (312) 801-2100. promontorychicago.com 22 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

¬ MAY 25, 2016

Soul Brother #1 will be rocking the wheels

of steel at the Promontory next Saturday.

With twenty-five years of DJ work under his belt, expect to keep your head nodding as he spins the classic, the obscure, and everything in between. ( Joe Andrews)

Pedestrian Deposit and more at CUFF ACRE, 1345 W. 19th St. Friday, June 3, 10pm–2am. $10, cash bar. acreresidency.org, cuff.org Performances at the self-described “biggest party of the 23rd Annual Chicago Underground Film Festival” will include the experimental duo Pedestrian Deposit, known for their “highly composed, often abstract sound textures” as well as Hogg, a “Chicago-based post-punk industrial psycho-sexual abstraction.” There are three more DJs and artists on the lineup as well. Get ready for a night of fun…abstract fun! ( Jake Bittle)

Sunn O))) Thalia Hall, 1807 S. Allport St. Tuesday, June 7, doors 7pm, show 8pm. $25 online, $30 at door. 17+. (312) 526-3851. thaliahallchicago. com Together with Seattle’s Hissing and Montreal’s Big Brave, this foursome of cloaked avant-metal masterminds named after an Oregon amp brand (hence the three parentheses) will make sounds both wildly confounding and outrageously loud. (Neal Jochmann)

STAGE & SCREEN BCH@BING: Footwork in Focus BING Art Books, 307 E. Garfield Blvd. Thursday, May 26, 6–10pm. Free. Arrive early; space is limited. bingartbooks.com The culmination of a month-long series celebrating footwork, this evening has something for everyone who might be curious about Chicago’s homegrown dance: a screening featuring the creative directors of footwork supergroup The Era, a panel conversation with local artists including DJ Spinn, Traxman, RP Boo, and others, and finally, a short workshop and a party where you can show off your newfound juking skills. (Carrie Smith)

Parallel I-IV Logan Center for the Arts, 915 E. 60th St. Friday, May 27, 7pm. Free. (773) 702-8596. filmstudiescenter.uchicago.edu

EVENTS

Before German experimental documentarian Harun Farocki died in 2014, he was able to finish his four-part video series Parallel, a computer-generated graphic work in which questions of politics, aesthetics, ethics, and reality run rampant. All four parts, forty-three minutes in total, will be screened in Chicago for the first time. ( Julia Aizuss)

Student Videos: BCH Self + Otherness Film Workshop Stony Island Arts Bank, 6760 S. Stony Island Ave. Saturday, May 28, 2pm–4pm. Free. (312) 857-5561. rebuild-foundation.org Students of Rebuild Foundation’s weekly Self + Otherness film workshop will be screening their final video projects this Saturday at the Stony Island Arts Bank. Each student’s short project uses documentary, experimental, and video art techniques to confront the idea of identity through the exploration of time and space. ( Joe Andrews)

Open Dances: Vershawn Ward Dorchester Art + Housing Collaborative, 1456 E. 70th St. Saturday, May 28, 1pm–3pm.

(312) 857-5561. rebuild-foundation.org Vershawn Ward, the choreographer and dancer behind such recent works as “New World Afrikan,” “#SAYHERNAME,” and “Written on the Flesh,” which have been performed in cities ranging from New York to Kalamazoo to Kampala, Uganda, will next be taking her expertise to Rebuild’s weekly dance forum. ( Julia Aizuss)

One Man, Two Guvnors Court Theatre, 5535 S. Ellis Ave. Through Sunday, June 12. Full schedule available online. $38, discounts available for students and seniors.

(773) 753-4472. courttheatre.org With a comic title and a fondness for fish and chips, Two Guvnors—an adaption of Carlo Goldoni’s classic The Servant of Two Masters, retrofitted for 1963—all but Union hi-Jacks the source material’s hijinks. It’s fast-paced, farcical, and generally ridiculous: in short, quintessentially British humour.

(Christopher Good)

Migration eta Creative Arts Foundation, 7558 S. South Chicago Ave. Through Sunday, June 19. Fridays and Saturdays, 8pm; Sundays, 3pm. $35.(773) 752-3955. etacreativearts.org The history of the Great Migration can be overwhelming—a confluence of important

cultural strains, people, and institutions all loaded with historical import. Migration tries to capture the complicated interactions that brought thousands of African Americans to northern cities through music, dance, and dialogue. (Adam Thorp)

LIT Fried Speaks at the UofC University of Chicago Marty Center Library, Swift Hall, 1025 E. 58th St. Thursday, May 26, noon–1:30pm. Free. (773) 702-8200. divinity.uchicago.edu Gregory Fried, professor of philosophy at Suffolk University and UofC Committee on Social Thought graduate, comes back to the UofC to give a lecture entitled “Epochal Polemics: Thinking with and against Heidegger after the Black Notebooks.” Listen to the author of two books on Heidegger reflect on the philosopher’s later works. (Sarah Claypoole)

Indie City Writers at Seminary Co-op Seminary Co-op, 5751 S. Woodlawn Ave. Thursday, May 26, 6pm–8pm. Free. (773) 7524381. info@semcoop.com and indiecitywriters@ gmail.com An up-and-coming Hyde Park writers' group, profiled in the Weekly last year, will host another "live lit reading" featuring local authors of fiction, poetry, adventure stories, and more. This lineup of performances features the Weekly's own Alex Weiss and will be followed by light refreshments and a pop-up book sale. ( Jake Bittle)

Fennell’s Last Project Standing Seminary Co-op, 5751 S. Woodlawn Ave. Tuesday, June 7, 6pm. Free. (773) 752-4381. semcoop.com Columbia University professor Catherine Fennell and independent journalist Ben Austen will be at the Sem Co-op discussing Fennell’s book, Last Project Standing: Civics and Sympathy in Post-Welfare Chicago. The book takes a deep look into the 1995 razing and controversial redevelopment of the Henry Horner public housing projects on Chicago’s Near West Side. ( Joe Andrews)

MAY 25, 2016 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 23