Category: Neighborhood News

The boys and girls in the Chicago City Council are at it again–haggling and bickering over minute line items in the city’s $2.7 billion budget. It’s the annual budget battle. On one side of the fray, there’s that band of administration loyalists–those aldermen who swear up and down that Mayor Washington would never, ever, even […]

As a chilly wind blows in from the east, Souma Phosaraj fires a salvo in the war against waste, filth, and urban decay. He weighs a bag of green beer bottles. “That’s two cents a pound,” he tells a slumped-shouldered old man in a worn corduroy coat. “You’ve got 20 pounds here, that’s 40 cents. […]

When Robertico Medina dropped out of Roberto Clemente High School four years ago to escape the gang warfare and the teachers’ inattention, he nearly joined the Army. Only at his mother’s urging did he enroll in West Town’s Doctor Pedro Albizu Campos Puerto Rican High School. But he was still reluctant to get up and […]

Robert Teresko, president of the Beverly Bank, smiles stiffly and looks nervous as he walks into the conference room to face the public and sign the agreement. “This agreement establishes a good working relationship between community and bank,” Teresko begins. “Through our discussion, we’ve come up with unique products that will benefit the entire market […]

By the time the City Council’s Finance Committee got around to officially approving the so-called FJV deal–a $400 million Loop redevelopment project–almost all of the aldermen had gone home for the weekend. It was well after six on a Friday evening, and a handful of preservationists had just finished explaining to the committee why they […]

From the western edges of the Loop, the medical center complex along the Eisenhower Expressway looks awesome and foreboding. Its buildings stand as if in a separate, self-contained world of steel-and-concrete slabs, completely detached from the surrounding unvariegated urban sprawl. Even when viewed from the westbound lanes of the expressway, the complex seems remote–like an […]

The professors didn’t tell Marc Gaynes anything about crowbars and padlocks when he was a student in law school. Or maybe they did, and he wasn’t listening that day. Nonetheless, at the moment, Gaynes, a lawyer for the city, stands on North Sheridan Road, crowbar in hand, trying to break into the Granada theater. Behind […]

Joseph Kellman is a man with a seemingly paradoxical mission: to start a private school whose avowed goal is to improve public schools. Now his 20-year dream is nearing reality. January 1, 1988, marks the opening of the prototype school of the Corporate/Community Schools of America, a partnership between Chicago business, educators, and community groups. […]

Highwood was the little town just across the train tracks, but for Margot McMahon and the other kids growing up in Lake Forest, it might as well have been on the other side of the world. Working-class Italians lived there, that much McMahon knew, like the grandparents of Adria Bernardi, her grammar school classmate. And […]

On this morning in late July, in a far-south-side corner of Chicago, there’s a funny smell in the air. You’re passing Reds II, advertising “burgers-fries-chili,” but that’s not the source. Neither is it the Mount Greenwood Auto Body Shop, the Ford dealership, or the Saint Casimir Lithuanian Cemetery along the road to the north and […]

The usual picture of the west side is a desolate, empty one. It’s supposed to be an ugly, terrible place. If it’s not the stark black-and-white image of the bombed-out buildings in the aftermath of the riots after Martin Luther King Jr.’s murder almost 20 years ago, then there are scores of more common anecdotes […]

When the wrecking ball took down the Kellogg mansions at Oakdale and Commonwealth, Llani O’Connor felt not only a personal loss but a loss to the neighborhood. “I would walk by those three homes and they always made me feel good–they were really something,” O’Connor said with more than a touch of sadness in her […]

For 40 years, the Regal Theater was the most important entertainment showcase on the south side. Located at 47th and South Parkway (now Martin Luther King Drive), it was the Chicago venue for virtually every popular black performer who passed through town from the late 1920s to the late ’60s. Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Count […]

Warren Friedman, a bearded man with curly hair, reading glasses, and a gentle, easygoing manner, is on the front line in the war against crime. He’s no vigilante, that’s for sure, no clone of Charles Bronson, Dirty Harry, or even Bernhard Goetz. His chief weapon is a computer–Apple Macintosh, to be exact–which transposes onto maps, […]

Two donkeys, tied together at their tails, grace a series of pictures in the office at 2609 S. Lawndale. In the first picture, each donkey sees a large pile of hay in front of him. The second shows a vain struggle, as each tries to pull the other toward his pile. In the third, the […]