Detour

A Tragic Day in Chicago

While most people see the weekend after Thanksgiving as a time to begin preparations for the December holiday season, this time of year is a painful reminder to some as the anniversary of one of Chicago's deadliest fires. Ninety-two students and three nuns died in a December 1, 1958 blaze at Our Lady of the Angels school, which was located on the West Side at Hamlin and Iowa streets. A series of tragic and controversial errors — a fire safety code that legally allowed the school to have ineffective systems for preventing or reporting fires, a delay in alerting the Chicago Fire Department (which was initially sent to the wrong address), and an uncontrollable fire in a dangerously overcrowded and aging building — culminated in a tragic event that became known all over the world.

While many of the students in other parts of the school were safely evacuated, classrooms on the second floor of the building were wrapped in thick blankets of smoke and fire. Students desperate for air had few options in those rooms, most of which lacked viable fire exits: jump to the concrete sidewalk 25 feet below (most who jumped suffered broken bones; one later died from head injuries), or worse, wait for help. Survivors who were eventually rescued would later recount that as they were trapped in their classrooms and losing hope, they began praying at their desks. Dead children were later found stacked on top of each other, fighting for space beneath the high-placed windows. Many bodies could only be identified using dental records.

The fire lasted about two hours from discovery to being fully extinguished, but in that time the face of a close-knit community of Italian, German, Polish and Irish immigrants was forever changed as they all searched for answers as to why this tragedy happened, and how to go forward in their faith despite the huge loss of life and scores of injured children left in the fire's wake. A flurry of legislation to update fire safety codes in buildings followed; as a result, schools all over the country benefited from the Our Lady of the Angels fire, despite its horrific nature.

The cause of the Our Lady of the Angels fire remains undetermined to this day, although a former student admitted in 1962 to setting the fire. Despite the fact that his confession corroborated details privately known only to investigators, the student later recanted what he told police, and the case was dismissed by a Cicero judge. The community was outraged by the decision, concluding that the Chicago Archdiocese and Fire Department was involved in a cover-up to protect their reputations and to downplay liability.

Everyone blamed someone for causing the fire, but few could dispute the heroic measures of the teaching staff at Our Lady of the Angels, the majority of which were nuns from the Iowa-based Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary (BVM) order. Despite the quick thinking of many nuns who lead students to safety, three BVM nuns were in less fortunate circumstances in their second-floor classrooms. Sister Clare Therese Champagne, a 27-year-old New Orleans native (and rumored former Mardi Gras queen) who taught fifth grade, along with Sister Seraphica Kelley, a 43-year-old Chicago native who taught fourth grade, and Sister Mary St. Canice Lyng, 44, also a native Chicagoan who taught seventh grade, perished in the fire along with many of their students.

Suellen Hoy's moving article "Stunned with Sorrow" captures the experiences of the BVM nuns in the Our Lady of the Angels school on that fateful day, and how the tragedy changed their lives and their faith. You can download the article in its entirety here in PDF format.

For More Information:
Much has been written about the Our Lady of the Angels fire. David Cowan and John Kuenster's pivotal book "To Sleep with the Angels" (Ivan R. Dee, 1996) is a very informative account. Kuenster recently published a newer book on the fire, "Remembrances of the Angels: A 50th Anniversary Retrospective on the Fire No One Can Forget (Ivan R. Dee, 2008). "The Fire that Will Not Die" (ETC, 2004) was written by Michele McBride, a survivor who suffered permanent injuries. An online community of survivors, OLAFire.com, provides a wealth of information and archival photography and news articles, along with a message board that often serves as a support for those affected by the fire. WTTW's Chicago Stories series produced a documentary about the fire in 2003.

The Sun-Times and Tribune commemorated the 50th anniversary of the fire.

Photos courtesy of olafire.com. Special thanks to the Chicago History Museum for permission to republish Suellen Hoy's article.

Robyn Nisi is the editor of Gapers Block's Drive-Thru section.

The Social Life of Our Urban Spaces

What's your favorite place in your neighborhood? Chances are it's a place where your neighbors meet, children play, and friends share benches and coffee; where there are always things to do and people to see. It's a place where you always feel comfortable, happy and safe.

In a city-wide campaign to generate even more of these vibrant places in Chicago's neighborhoods, the Metropolitan Planning Council of Chicago (MPC) recently has paired up with New York City's Project for Public Spaces (PPS), an internationally recognized expert in community-based public space planning. To launch this project, leaders from Chicago's communities and public agencies converged at the King Center on Chicago's South Side in October to participate in two, day-long interactive workshops to learn "placemaking" techniques.

Placemaking is a strategy for "making places around the way people want to use them," explains Karin Sommer, MPC placemaking project manager. It's a "deceptively simple" approach, according to Fred Kent, president and founder of Project for Public Spaces. It starts with identifying what it is about a place that seems to generate comfort, peace and happiness. Then, it's about seeking out the highest and best use for that space and, working together as a neighborhood and with city agencies, making it happen.

Placemaking is a subtle but profound shift in the way we commonly think about planning and design, primarily because it inverts traditional "top-down" design mechanisms. "You have to begin by asking what people want to do in a space, and then ask how you can support that with design. The community is the expert," says Ethan Kent, vice president of PPS and Fred's son.

In other words, you don't design a place, explains Fred. "You grow a place."

The goal of these workshops and MPC's larger Chicago placemaking campaign is to "institutionalize this very organic approach, and make sure that these placemaking strategies operate de facto in communities and existing citywide planning processes," says Peter Skosey, MPC vice president of external relations.

Sharing the concept with Chicago's community and public sector leaders at the October workshops was the first step in making placemaking "standard operating procedure" from Roseland to Rogers Park. "The workshops mark the start of our effort to work with Project for Public Spaces to bring placemaking to Chicago on a large scale. This is phase one of a multi-year process," says Skosey.

Each workshop was tailored to meet the unique needs of the participants. The first session was geared toward Chicago's community group leaders, active residents, and Special Service Area (SSA) administrators. It centered on strategies for building consensus and seeking the outside (and sometimes unlikely) partnerships that make placemaking possible.

In the second group were representatives from Chicago's public sector, including staff from the Chicago Park District, Chicago Dept. of Transportation, Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning, Chicago aldermanic offices, and other agencies. Addressing this group, Ethan Kent said, "Your job is to inform community leaders and facilitate the placemaking process" - but not necessarily to direct it.

Both days began with presentations from senior PPS staff, including Renee Espiau, Fred and Ethan. Their talks introduced the 11 foundational principles of placemaking, using photographs of great places around the world to illustrate their points. Workshop participants interrupted regularly to discuss how these ideas would work in Chicago.

The afternoon sessions centered on the "Place Game:" attendees broke into small groups led by PPS staff and evaluated places along 43rd Street to practice assessing public space challenges - the first phase in PPS's "step-by-step guide" to implementing placemaking improvements.

At the end of the first day, community participants drafted a list of "obstacles" to collaboration with city agencies, which was then presented to public sector representatives on the second day.

Each participant arrived with a unique perspective and placemaking prospects. All seemed to leave enlivened and inspired with ways they could initiate placemaking strategies in their neighborhoods or agencies.

Sam Strain from Ald. Bob Fioretti's office attended the second workshop. He said the techniques he learned from this workshop will be applied to the 2nd Ward's massive undertaking to double the number of their public spaces over the next year-and-a-half. "Just in the past hour, listening to Fred and Ethan, I've gained more ideas about how to go about this project than ever before," said Strain. "I hope to start the community process based off models I'm learning right now."

For Joyce Fernandes, executive director of Architreasures, who attended the first workshop for community leaders, the day was a way to "find approaches to access existing resources within city agencies, within the CTA, within CDOT..." Sara Morton also came to the first workshop. She represented O-H Community Partners and said the workshop helped her think of concrete strategies for small, inexpensive steps she could take toward making a great place in her neighborhood.

Anna Barnes is an active resident of Logan Square and the coordinator of the El Yunque Community Garden. She says the placemaking workshop helped her envision a "kind of corridor between my garden and a nearby one" that would unite two great places within her community. She came to "find out about partnerships and funding and the community planning process" in order to move her ideas forward. The workshop gave her a way to think of the garden as a place to generate community. She hopes through placemaking, it will become a destination where residents who have made a home there for decades can mix with new arrivals to the neighborhood.

Kate Miller found the workshop useful for similar reasons. She came to the conference as a representative of the 61st Street Farmer's Market and wanted to learn to use placemaking strategies for encouraging stakeholder involvement, "to activate the market as a bridge among communities, between Hyde Park and Woodlawn, South Shore, and Washington Park."

Gina Caruso, who attended the conference from the Chicago Dept. of Planning and Development, said that the biggest thing she took away from this workshop is a fresh perspective. After PPS' presentations, she realized she needs to "ease back" in community meetings and concentrate first "not on funding or liability or loss, but on what we want in the community."

Pete Korzynski and Nick Kollias attended the first workshop from the Greater Southwest Chicago Development Corporation. As directors of this SSA, they are now engaged in a project of large-scale commercial revitalization. They want to transform vacant lots and empty storefronts into active, well-used places in their neighborhood. They came to the workshop to gather strategies for enacting placemaking principles in a low-income area of Chicago. For Korzynski, the conference was also "a way to connect to other SSA directors and see what they are doing," a way to speed up the placemaking process and get ideas about how to carry it through to completion.

During every short break, the room came alive when participants leaned over their chairs to talk quickly to their neighbors, sharing coffee, business cards and email addresses. Building connections like the kind Korzynski established to create an active network of "Placemakers" was important to both groups. At the workshop, Ethan Kent urged participants to consider "how we can start a broader coalition, a broader conversation. We have to do organizing at all scales. You are all engaged in doing pieces of this project but you need each other to make a larger change."

The networking that began at the conference will be continued on the website, PlacemakingChicago.com, where participants ultimately will be able to log their placemaking struggles and successes and connect with others to share ideas and stories. Visitors to the site also can read local stories of placemaking in action and download a free copy of "A Guide to Neighborhood placemaking in Chicago," a joint publication between MPC and PPS distributed to all participants.

"The workshop and the guidebook are meant to empower people in the community to come to consensus and undertake placemaking work themselves," says Cheri Heramb, MPC's placemaking Project chair.

Ethan Kent says these workshops and the larger placemaking campaign in Chicago are going to "create settings to change relationships that can generate placemaking processes throughout the city. This project is not just an alliance between MPC and PPS. It's about all of us together, working to make the city better."

Megan MacIver is a fourth year undergraduate at The University of Chicago, double-majoring in International Studies and Geography.

Images courtesy of PlacemakingChicago.

Don't '&' Me, OK?

SUNDAY, 8:37am
I woke up wondering about the ampersand, you guys. Seriously. Its etymology. Its proper usage. Its most agreed upon definition. To me — and I'm guessing to many of you — the ampersand has always been a quick symbol used to save on keystrokes when typing, or a shortcut when writing by hand. Shortcuts are a funny thing, though, making me wonder if I've missed out on the good stuff that only taking the long way might reveal. Have I been ampersanding life? Or even people?

9:45 de la Mañana
 We already know that "&" is a symbolic abbreviation for the word "and." But what I didn't know was that the symbolic abbreviation itself was once recognized as the 27th letter of the Latin alphabet, while the name ampersand comes from the words "and per se and." According to Encyclopedia Britannica, an eighth century rendition of the alphabet could have gone something like, "X, Y, Z and per se and." From what I gather, that last bit was routinely slurred into "ampersand."

Now, if you've got even a drop of xenophobia in your blood, stop now. You might get sick when you read that the symbolic interpretation of the ampersand is a stylized version of the French word et, meaning "and." Most importantly, European calligraphers were making extensive use of the ampersand because condensing or shortening the word into a single character made their work that much easier.

[Wenner's brain twists and turns, creating new synapses]

10:20am
 Here's where I started to think that this notion of being condensed or shortened into a single character to make things easier is not limited to the words 'and per se and.' It began to intrigue me as a possible metaphor for my own experience with race in the US; being forced to condense my character into a category, making it easier for someone else to identify me.

• American Indian or Alaska Native
 • Asian
 • Black or African American
 • Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander
 • White
 • Some Other Race

It turns out that these are the revised and approved racial categories of the 2000 US census survey as outlined by the United States Census Bureau (USCB) and the Federal Office of Management and Budget (OMB). In addition to these race or races, if completing the survey, respondents were asked to "categorize themselves by membership into one of two ethnicities: Hispanic or Latino, and Not Hispanic or Latino." Race and ethnicity are considered two separate concepts in this construct, and that's what most Americans accept and spread to the rest of world. Disconcerting, right? I kind of feel they too short and narrow a view of race for the world to adopt.

12:30pm
 I'm hungry, but I've sort of filled up on the idea that in order to talk about race and ethnicity, it's important that you and I have some official understanding of how they're being defined. However, I would like to caveat the possibility that the definition of race may differ among Adventurers/Explorers, Anthropologists, Biologists, Cartographers, Cultural sociologists/Sociologists, Economists, Ethnographers, Genealogists, Geographers, Historians, Humanitarians, Musicologists, Photographers, Political Scientists, Scientists and the U.S. Federal Government. For the purposes of this Ma Verité entry, let's stick to the U.S. Federal Government, i.e., the USCB, who define race and ethnicity as "self-identification data items in which residents choose the race or races with which they most closely identify."

That rather plucks my nerves, you guys. Why? Because the USCB's "chicken or the egg" definition seems to disregard the possibility (or insidiously rely on the possibility) that one's self-identification or race-based identity could be the result of what Salon.com Executive Editor Gary Kamiya calls "identity-distorting effects of dominance," especially if the dominant culture has historically discriminated against or treated a particular race as inferior (e.g. Blacks who were enslaved and American Indians who were massacred or displaced). And yes, this self-identification can be propagated within a racial group when they're forced to attribute certain characteristics, interests, and beliefs as proof and validation of identity. Which, consequently, leads to stereotypes (e.g. listening to black interest radio = being Black; above average performance in mathematics = Asian; Speaking proper English = White) and contributes to bigotry.

[Wenner's mind twists and turns s'more. another deep dig about "Asian, "Black," or "White" identity in America may have to be explored; take note of quotation marks, for now.]

I work in advertising and completely understand the need for racial and ethnic demographics to segment and target an audience. Perhaps there is nothing wrong with using race-based identities or ethno-geographic labels to designate people. It's sometimes helpful to be seen as a Haitian Black male between the age of 25 and 35 in McDonald's spreadsheets. But I'm in agreement with anthropologist Dr. George W. Gill, who is concerned that the continued use of racial/ethno-geographic labels in political or "social situations where people think they have some meaning" can be dangerous.

It's hovering around 2pm about now and I'm tired. But all this digging is good for me, and maybe for you, too. Remember what I said about taking shortcuts? Well, restricting humans to abbreviated categories means we're missing out on a whole lot of good stuff about people — Asian, Black, White or Some Other Race. Even if it means taking the long way to recognize them as individuals, I don't feel like ampersanding other humans — or myself — anymore.

Do you?

Wenner Exius believes voting booths should be open on weekends, thinks Santa Claus lives somewhere in the Midwest, and wishes Hollywood would remake bad movies — not good ones. This first-generation Haitian-American Pilsen resident is a copywriter, fipple flautist, and assistant gamekeeper.

Photo Essay: Transitions

Given the waxing of autumn, the advent of an election year and, of course, the general dynamism of everyday life, we asked GB flickr pool members to respond to the word "Transitions."

The following photo essay is a selection of their responses.

Click here to view the photo essay »

Photographers include:

People from the Rearview Archive

Rearview started as a simple rectangle in the center of the main page. The image wasn't a link to a larger version of itself. There was no archive.

Five years later, Rearview is now its own section with more than 1,000 archived images. This photo essay on people is our first of many forrays into those archives.

Click here to view the photo essay »

Photographers include:

Strolling 63rd Street

My project to walk the length of Chicago's major streets always takes me to tasty grub, interesting sights, cool taverns and interesting people. Having hiked the length of Western, Milwaukee, Halsted, Archer and Grand, it's time to walk another South Side thoroughfare, so why not 63rd Street?

At 11 miles, 63rd is basically Chicago's longest continuous east-west street. It definitely is if you add Hayes Drive, its 3/4-mile extension through Jackson Park to the 63rd Street Beach. It's a little less than halfway down the city's South Side and it provides a good sampling of some of the different cultures that have helped shape the region.

After puttering around the house and waiting for a friend to drop off my guitar, I don't wind up leaving Humboldt Park until well into the afternoon on Saturday, September 6. As I'd done on my Archer trek, I take the CTA Forest Park Line to Harlem, then catch the Pace 403 bus south, getting off around 3pm just a mile further south this time. But this walk would be pretty different, since Archer veers northeast from 55th Street, while 63rd heads due east from the suburb of Summit to Lake Michigan.

63rd and Harlem is a fairly insane intersection of two eight-lane arteries, which doesn't seem to bode well for the trip. I'd also read in the Tribune about a tragedy that happened two blocks west in Summit's Robert Allison housing project a few days earlier. A young mother had fallen asleep with a candle lit; she survived the resulting blaze by jumping out of a second-story window but her three young children perished.

At the southeast corner I see a truck with "SHRIMP - CREDIT CARDS WELCOME" painted in big red block letters on the side, parked outside Mr. Shrimp, a seedy seafood shack at 7157 W. 63rd. I choose an alligator nugget dinner from the menu, which also includes fried oysters, lobster and frogs' legs. An ancient, nearly toothless gentleman in a paper hat is the lone staffer - he says he's been working there 50 years. While I respect his staying power, the little man seems confused and shuffles slowly around the galley.

But the food appears faster than I'd expected. I ask for hot sauce and the man seems to ignore me and retreats to the kitchen. "Go ahead and ask again," says a female customer, "It's worth it." I repeat my request and the man angrily yells, "I heard you!" as he returns with the sauce. I take the box to nearby Nottingham Park and find the fries and breading are tasty, but the salty carnivore meat is almost too chewy to chaw. That's the last time I eat gator.

63rd is soon tamed down to a four-lane, lined with Eisenhower-era, two-story brick homes with stone accents which slowly give way to bungalows. The neighborhood, bordering Midway Airport, is called Clearing, because agricultural products were to be "cleared"(transported) via the airport and railroads.

I pass by Hale Park, 6300 West, where white and Latino kids are playing soccer and baseball. As I'm checking out the Touch of Class Lounge, 6058 West, a young woman with a Muslim headscarf drives by. Across the street, the Record Dugout, 6053 West, has a great selection of baseball memorabilia and vintage vinyl.

A copy of Male magazine, a '50s precursor to Men's Health, features a cover painting of a Hemingway stand-in shooting a tiger who's mauling a loin-clothed local. A story by a prominent psychologist asks, "Is There a Lesbian in Your Town?" Not wanting to leave empty-handed I randomly pick up a 45 of the song "Ting Ting Tong" by the doo-wap group the Charms, priced at $3. The owner, impressed by my taste, lets me have it for a buck less.

Intrigued by its vintage, hand-painted red door, I stop into Pete & Mary's, 5908 West, for a beer around 5pm. As usual in remote neighborhood bars the Polish-accented barmaid scrutinizes my drivers license, but this time she rejects it as expired, then apologizes when I prove her wrong. Sipping on a Highlife, I check out the tiny beer garden, a photo of the Pope John Paul II next to pictures of patrons with pumpkins, and a poster of a woman sitting at a bar with a sign reading "No shirt, no shoes, no service." She's wearing a shirt and shoes but she's not wearing any pants or underwear and the man at the next barstool is staring bug-eyed at her behind.

On the 5600 block, new Wrigleyville-style townhouses seem to be built as housing for flight crews based out of Midway, a stone's throw away. Crossing Central Avenue, I'm at the southeast corner of the one-mile square airport. A Southwest Airlines jumbo jet attempted to land on a snowy runway on December 8, 2005, and slid through a barrier fence, crushing a car on Central near 63rd, killing a 6-year-old boy.

Through a stretch of chain-link fence I can see the towers of the Loop on the other side of the empty expanse. I pass by an Illinois National Guard station at 5400 West, then see the Obama campaign's plane parked on a runway, emblazoned with the candidate's rising sun logo and the slogan, "Change we can believe in."

Crossing Cicero Avenue, 4800 West, a high-speed eight-lane, I'm in the community of West Lawn. My feet are already getting tired after only three miles; oxford shoes were definitely a bad choice of footwear. Next time I'll switch back to Sambas.

I come upon Winston's Sausages, 4701 West, an Irish-style butcher shop topped by a huge fiberglass steer. My friend T. C. O'Rourke buys bangers, soda bread and black and white puddings there each year for brunch before our annual bike ride to the South Side Irish Parade on the far Southwest Side.

By now it's around 6pm, rain looks like a possibility and the sun will be setting soon. It would be stupid for me, a not particularly streetwise outsider, to travel alone, on foot, after dark through the Englewood neighborhood a few miles down the road, with the highest crime rate in the city. I decide to bail for the day and take the nearby Orange Line downtown to catch Anna Biller's Viva, a hilarious homage to '70s sexploitation flicks, at the Gene Siskel Center downtown.

But before I hop on the train I stop for another brew at Mr. C's Midway Bar, 4654 West. It's probably the only tavern for many miles with Blue Moon and Stella Artois on tap, but that doesn't mean it's a highbrow joint. Vintage photos of the airport and a model plane made of Miller Lite cans attest to its proximity to the runways.

A sign behind the bar declares, "Sexual harassment will not be reported but it will be graded." Accordingly, a short, top-heavy woman is loudly teasing a male friend about the size of his genitals. "Rack 'em up," says a pool player. "I got a perfect rack already," the woman quips.

"I fell asleep on a booty call last night," reports a man at the bar. "I woke up on the couch holding a beer with the woman's kids laughing at me. I hadn't spilled a drop."

The following Tuesday I catch the California / Kedzie bus south to the Orange Line and resume my walk from Mr. C's at 1 pm in gorgeous weather. Tigress Coiffures, 4352 West, features an adorable cartoon of the eponymous feline on its sign while Midway Banquet Hall and Lounge, 4222 West, has classy vintage neon.

On the 4100 block a paleteria, a panaderia and a botanica (popsicle shop, bakery and herb-and-charm store, respectively) stand side by side. Most of 63rd is peppered with Latino businesses until the street becomes solidly African-American east of California, 2800 West.

At Pulaski, 4000 West, a huge statue of a bespectacled Native American, featured in the movie "Wayne's World," tops the Midwest Eye Clinic. Locals will tell you that if you approach from the west the brave's left thumb appears to be his penis hanging out of his pants. Sadly, someone has broken the eagle feather off his head since the last time I pedaled by.

To the southeast is Marquette Park, a historically Lithuanian neighborhood. I detour south two blocks to the Balzekas Museum of Lithuanian Culture, 6500 S. Pulaski, which seems to be staffed entirely by attractive, 40s-ish blondes. They invite me to sit alone in a small theater to watch a tourism film about their homeland, which makes Vilnius look like a pretty happening town.

The small museum is chock full of mildly interesting stuff: stone-age axes; crossbows and suits of armor; amber jewelry; dolls and mannequins in traditional costumes; ornate Easter eggs and a collection of vintage canned ham, sausage and luncheon meat. I make a note to return there with my 1/4-Lithuanian girlfriend when I have more time.

Back on 63rd, I enter a stretch from Pulaski to Kedzie, 3200 West, where many Arab-owned businesses opened during the late 20th Century. There seem to be fewer today, as large numbers of Muslims have settled in suburbs like Bridgeview and Oak Lawn. A couple of the Middle Eastern restaurants I'd read about in Sharon Woodhouse's A Native's Guide to Chicago are gone, but the Aladdin Club, 3831 West, is still there.

Although there's an image of a hookah on the storefront and a real one behind the counter, the owner tells me that the alcohol-free café is simply a place to drink coffee and socialize, now that the city has gone smokeless. "It's a private club, mostly for Arabian people," he says politely as three or four older guys look on. There are boxes of Middle Eastern candy on the counter and several video gambling machines at the front of the room.

Olive Mount Imported Food, 3526 West, features a well-organized selection of interesting Middle Eastern groceries like pickled labna cheese and halal meat, including bins of lamb kidneys, hearts and lungs. There are also long-handled metal coffee pots, bins of black tea and a wide variety of fruit-flavored hookah tobacco. A Palestinian flag hangs at the back of the store.

After buying some nuts and candies, I walk a little east for lunch at the hole-in-the-wall Nile Restaurant, 3259 West. I try the kalaya, a hearty, chili-like stew of diced beef, onions and tomatoes served over rice with a side of pickled cucumbers and carrots.

East of Kedzie, 3200 West, two teens on BMX bikes pedal past me on the sidewalk. The first boy smooches at a girl walking westbound; she smiles and swats at the head of the second one. I pass by the offices of 15th Ward Alderman Toni Foulkes, 3045 West, then stop to check out Nate's Leathers, 2950 West, specializing in gear for police officers like jackets, holsters and body armor.

There's no one in the shop, which smells strongly of dead cow. The young, cop-like owner soon returns from outside with a German shepherd with a spiked collar, eying me suspiciously. After I explain my mission he relaxes and tells me about his business, sewing everything from custom boat covers to bulletproof vests on the premises.

After I cross California into West Englewood, a well-dressed man approaches me as I'm checking out the stonework of St. Rita Parish church, 6243 S. Fairfield. "Excuse me sir, may I have a cigarette?" he asks. "I don't smoke, sorry," I apologize.

Soon liquor-food-lottery stores and fast food joints with bulletproof glass dominate the street. As I pass a group of teens outside a hoagie shop one of them spits at the ground near my feet. A man walks by with a shopping cart full of children's bicycles and car tires.

But there are signs of revitalization in what has long been one of Chicago's poorest communities. Garifuna Flava, 2516 West, is a spotless new Belizean restaurant with tasty-sounding dishes like conch fritters, cow foot soup and "boil-up": boiled cassava, sweet potatoes and plantains with stewed fish, pig tails and dumplings.

I drop into a new Chicago Public Library branch at 1745 West to use the bathroom and find the library to be a spacious, airy, state-of-the-art facility with a nice garden with seating next door. A child and family center next door features bold architecture, including a futuristic ribbon of stainless steel connecting one wing of the building to another.

Long Grove Cleaners, 1146 West, has jacket-length doors in the bulletproof Plexiglas through which patrons pass their clothes. A mural on the side of Neighborhood Food and Liquors, 1122 West, is a crash course in Chicago-style fast food with images of a loaded hotdog, an Italian sausage-beef combo sandwich, gyros and rib tips. When I stop to photograph it one of the employees invites me to tour the clean, orderly grocery store and lunch counter. A trained meat-cutter, years ago he slaughtered hogs in the stockyards for the Ampeg Meatpacking Co., and seems proud of his present workplace.

When Kevin Monahan and I walked Halsted, 800 West, last December we saw new Kennedy-King College buildings that had been constructed at 63rd, the former site of the Englewood Shopping Center, but there wasn't much open yet. Now there is a book store and a copy center; student radio and TV stations; and the Washburne Culinary Institute. Sikia, a student-run restaurant at 740 West, offers dishes from Africa and the black diaspora, from Moroccan tagine to Jamaican jerked chicken, Ethiopian curries to Louisiana gumbo.

A block east at 63rd and Wallace St., as detailed in The Devil in the White City, Dr. H. H. Holmes built his World's Fair Hotel in anticipation of the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Jackson Park. The 60-room building was a maze of hidden staircases, trapdoors, dungeons and gas chambers that later became known as the "Murder Castle." Holmes lured dozens, maybe hundreds of young men and women to their deaths there, selling their skeletons to medical schools. Nowadays the site is the Englewood Post Office.

At Englewood High, 400 West, "Home of the Mighty Eagles," the football team practices on a field in front of the school, their purple and white uniforms covered in grass stains. By 6pm I'm crossing the Dan Ryan Expressway, 200 West, which was recently enlarged to seven lanes in each direction. The southbound rush hour traffic is still moving slowly, proving the urban planning adage, "You can't build your way out of congestion."

The land between the interstate and the Green Line stop at King Dr., 400 East, is largely vacant lots. Near the station a flock of seagulls flying under the tracks reminds me I'm getting close to the lake. This area in the Woodlawn neighborhood is dense with businesses. I hear the crack of the pool balls as I pass a pool hall, note the Plexiglas shield in front of the neon sign for Rothschild's Liquors, and see the men hard at work at Turner's Professional Shoeshine, 438 East.

I like the slogan of the sign of the Kozy Korner tavern, 461 East, "Where old friends meet," so I venture inside. "How can we help you?" asks a dapper gentleman sitting near the door. "Oh, I was going to get a beer," I say. "Well, alright then, make yourself at home." I take a seat at the far end of the bar and introduce myself to Niecie the bartender, explaining what I'm up to. Sipping on a Highlife I check out the room. There's a large, old-fashioned streetlamp in the center and mirrors framed by plastic roses. A photo of Barack Obama hangs on the wall and Smokey Robinson's on the jukebox. The crowd of well-dressed middle-aged and older professional folks seems to be having a great time, laughing non-stop.

Cliff Pierce, the manager who'd greeted me, soon joins me at the bar and buys me my second beer. He used to write a gossip column for the Chicago Defender. "You're a rare bird, but not for long," he tells me. "It's only 10 minutes from my house to the Black House [Obama's home in Kenwood]. We're talking about where the next president lives. And then there are the Olympics in Washington Park. So in the next 10 years this neighborhood is going to become the hub. One day I'm gonna look out this window and see nothing but limousines."

Buzzed, I continue strolling toward the Cottage Grove stop as the sun is setting. Although it's only been a few hours since lunch, I'm ready to eat again so I stop for dinner at Daley's Restaurant, 809 East, a soul food diner highly recommended by the Chicago Reader's Mike Sula. The menu's illustrated with photos of the Columbian Exposition and there are photos of local politicians on the walls. My meal of chicken soup, salmon croquettes, mashed potatoes and greens is cheap and excellent. As I return to the counter to leave a tip the waitress takes the bills directly from my hand. "You have a blessed evening," she says with a smile.

A few years ago, the easternmost Green Line stop at Woodlawn, 1200 East, and four blocks of track were removed to make way for development, but I suspect the idea was to create a buffer zone between the rowdy commercial areas under the tracks and the new upscale townhouses. There's a half-mile of vacant lots between Cottage Grove and the homes, a few blocks of pleasant, but eerily quiet, residences.

I pass the Apostolic Church of God mega church at 6320 S. Dorchester; the headquarters of the Woodlawn Organization community group at 1508 E. 63rd; and Leon's on Six Tre restaurant, 1528 East, featuring ribs, tips and chicken. 63rd Street officially ends at Stony Island, 1600 East, the border of Jackson Park, but although it's getting late and I'm tired I decide to soldier on down Hayes St. to the 63rd Street Beach.

Walking through the park I hear a group of men hanging out by their cars, blasting dancehall reggae, speaking loudly in a Caribbean patois, possibly relaxing after playing soccer in the park. Halfway to Lake Shore I see the Statue of the Republic, AKA the Golden Lady, a 24-foot-tall gilded bronze sculpture of a robed woman holding aloft an eagle and a staff symbolizing national unity. It's actually a 1/3-scale reproduction of the Daniel Chester French original from the World's Fair.

As I approach the lake I can see moonlight glinting off Jackson Harbor, smell barbecue wafting up from a party at the boathouse and hear African drumming coming from just south of the beach. I take the recently built underpass below Lake Shore Drive and emerge to see the Romanesque arches of the grand beach house, which was rehabbed a decade ago. I make my way to the wide beach and stroll down the plastic wheelchair track to the edge of the rushing lake. Dipping my fingers in the cool water, my journey is done.

John Greenfield has spent his entire adult life in Chicago. He enjoys writing, biking and rocking.

A Day in the Life of Barry "Can Man" Woodson

It is over two hours before the first pitch, but the sidewalks surrounding Wrigley Field are already abuzz with activity. The St. Louis Cardinals are in town for an important weekend series with the Cubs. The infusion of rival fans lends a marked tint of red to the usual sea of blue-clad humanity that clogs the intersection of Clark and Addison Streets. More than anything, the scene resembles a bazaar as practiced cries arise from hawkers of wares that range from the old-fashioned to the obscene: peanuts, scorecards, tickets, car share services, contact lenses and t-shirts that graphically imply the visiting team's homosexuality.

The most distinctive element of a game day on the North Side is also present: Plastic cups filled with Old Style and Budweiser rest in the hands of hundreds of fans crammed into the neighborhood barrooms and beer gardens. In Wrigleyville, the Cubs are an obsession, but beer is king. Just ask Barry Woodson.

Sheffield Avenue is famous for being the landing spot for lengthy, right-field home-run balls, as well as the home to a row of popular rooftops. A mere Texas leaguer away from Sheffield, however, lays Woodson's small domain of dumpsters.

For the past seven baseball seasons, Woodson has been "canning" -- collecting and recycling aluminum cans -- in an alley half of a block east of Sheffield, underneath the elevated tracks of the red line. While his territory encompasses just four dumpsters, Woodson (better known as "Can Man") is the authority figure for the entire alley, prompting one policeman to dub him the "kingpin." "I asked him why he said that," Woodson says. "He said, 'Because everyone listens to you; you talk to everyone.' I guess I'll live with that."

Woodson, 50, is a small, African-American man. There does not appear to be an ounce of fat on him; it is as if the harsh elements in which he has worked for so long have worn away all unnecessary mass from his body. He wears a dark Wrigley Field hat pulled down over yellow, cloudy eyes. Grey hairs speckle his black goatee. He has large, rough hands. Woodson puts his soft, gravelly voice to frequent use by greeting almost everyone, friend and stranger alike, who crosses his path in the alley.

After being raised in western Tennessee by his grandparents, Woodson moved to Chicago when he was 17. His parents and siblings lived in the city, and he found handyman work through his godmother's real estate company. When he was a young man, Woodson fell from a porch and broke his neck in two places. (A sizable, vertical scar from this injury remains visible on his neck to this day.) Woodson began canning in the allies of Chicago at the age of 33. After ten years of this, a friend brought him to the canner's promised land: Wrigleyville. Seven years and two nicknames later, Woodson now runs what he calls a successful "family business" there.

For today's game, the "family" consists of Joiann, a young woman, and Ron, a friend of Woodson. Even though neither is related to Woodson, he refers to them, respectively, as his "niece" and "brother." Each of the three has his or her own dumpster; a fourth dumpster is used for glass, plastic, and trash that is separated from the cans. Large, black garbage bags hang from the corner of each dumpster. Woodson says that anywhere from 70 to 300 pounds of cans can be extracted from a single dumpster during the course of a Cubs game day. Their workday includes not only the two to three hours of baseball, but also the hours spent drinking by fans before and after the game. The work, though, is not constant. The "family" spends a good deal of time waiting for large dumps of cans and trash to be brought out from the bars and rooftops on Sheffield. They pass the time by sitting in the shade of the Red Line tracks smoking Newports, talking, eating, scratching lotto tickets, visiting with friends and passers-by and just waiting for the next dump.

~*~

During the fourth inning of the game, Woodson receives a large bag of cans from a nearby rooftop. He brings the bag to his dumpster and pours out its wet, metallic contents. After climbing onto his cracked plastic step-stool, Woodson bends over the front edge of his dumpster and sifts through the cans and trash. His hands work quickly and confidently. Unlike some of the other canners in the alley, Woodson does not wear gloves, aside from the padded weightlifter's glove on his right hand.

"No, I can't feel anything wearing gloves," he explains. "My fingers can't feel to crush the cans."

After throwing the trash into the dumpster to his right, Woodson drops the crushed cans into the bag hanging to his left. Barry, Joiann and Ron brought a total of 40 bags with them today; each bag can hold up to 30 pounds of cans. They are anticipating the Cardinals series bringing them a big haul this weekend.

The 2008 baseball season has presented a new challenge to Woodson's business: interlopers. For the first time in his years in the alley, he has had to ward off strangers trying to wedge themselves into Woodson's territory and profits. Often he has been able to repel their advances with words; there also have been violent confrontations this year. Woodson prides himself with keeping the alley quiet and free from violence, but he also refuses to back down.

"Tuesday, I had a guy come and say he wanted a dumpster," Woodson says. "I told him this is family back here. This is a family business. They come and say, "Cut me in or cut me out.' I say, 'Fine, you're out.'"

~*~

It is late afternoon and the Cubs have just pulled out an 11th-inning win over the Cardinals. Woodson knows, though, that there will be plenty of canning to do well into the evening. After the last dump of cans tonight, Woodson will spend the night under the train tracks. He lives with his aunt and sister in an apartment over a hundred blocks south of Wrigley. When the Cubs are in town, however, he is rarely home. Due to the threat of theft, Woodson and his fellow canners must stay overnight with their bags. "You can't leave the cans," he explains. "Someone'll come and take 'em. [The people driving junk trucks] are the biggest thieves you've got to watch out for."

A long night lies ahead for Woodson. After all the cans have been bagged, he must then pile them onto a shopping cart, or "buggy" as he calls it. He will use a system of long sticks, rope, and bungee cords to secure his load before he retires for a few hours of sleep with the red line rumbling overhead.

"The train doesn't bother me," Woodson says. "When I first started, yeah, it woke me up all the time. You be back here seven years, the train, the cars speeding through, the loud noises don't bother you."

~*~

The alley is dark, only lighted intermittently by dull yellow bulbs. It is 5am on Saturday and Woodson is ready for a nearly three-mile trek to a recycling plant on Kingsbury Street just north of Goose Island. His buggy supports a balanced load of "only" eight large garbage bags filled with cans. It is evident now why he wears the padded glove as he wraps around his right hand a thin rope, which he uses to pull the buggy down the alley. The trip will take nearly an hour, he says.

A major setback occurs before the journey even begins. Woodson follows his friend Keith to his alley in another part of Wrigleyville. While preparing his bags, Keith moves Woodson's buggy out of the way of a delivery truck. He moves the buggy up an incline and it topples over. Woodson is not happy. The collective weight of the bags on the buggy is too heavy to prop up, so he must remove the ropes and cords and reconstruct the load from scratch. In the ten minutes this work takes Woodson, Keith decides to sell his four bags to a man in a large pickup truck. Woodson refuses to do likewise and finally sets out southward on Seminary Avenue.

By the time Woodson reaches Lincoln Avenue, he is ready for a break. Even with his glove, the rope has been digging into his palm. He leaves the buggy in the street and sits on a nearby curb. While smoking a Newport, he recalls being caught out in a storm last summer. He and a friend had to duck wind-blown objects and even cars to make it back safely to the alley. He takes a long drag of his cigarette.

"We done been through a lot. We're survivors. We make this money to survive."

The sun has fully risen when Woodson arrives at City Scrap Metal. He is tired, but looking forward to putting some cash in his pocket. The eight bags weigh in at 151 pounds, which earns him $113. Outside, he meets up with Joiann and Ron, both of whom brought in well over 200 pounds earlier this morning. They rest before heading back to the alley for another big day. Because City Scrap is closed on Sundays, Woodson will bring two days' worth of cans here the following Monday morning. He's not worried, though -- he says he can fit 15 bags on his buggy.

"That's the mother lode," he says. "You should see that."

Click here to view the accompanying photo essay.

Jack Cantey is a freelance writer, artist and educator. While he rests his head in Logan Square, Jack's love for street photography takes him to a wide range of the city's neighborhoods. You can view his Chicago photography at http://jackpix2008.blogspot.com/.

Campaigning for Change in Logan Square

John Alexander Logan entered public life after his election to the Illinois State House of Representatives in 1852. Like all good Chicago politicians, Logan was a Democrat. Sure, he technically wasn't from Chicago and he later defected from the Party, but there was a war on — the Civil War — so we've forgiven him these minor trespasses. On the Northwest Side, not a block from the square bearing Logan's name, newcomer Green Party candidate Jeremy Karpen seeks the same office and acceptance.

The heart of the Logan Square neighborhood lies at the somewhat awkward intersection of Logan, Kedzie and Milwaukee. As the three streets dodge around the central square, the combination of ill-timed lights, lane mergers and potholes make accidents seem perpetually imminent. Accidents, however, are few, and the chaos is surprisingly orderly.

For a few months in 2005, Abril Mexican Restaurant and Dunlay's on the Square faced off across the traffic, potent symbols of the neighborhood's changing dynamics. Abril had been a neighborhood institution for decades (childhood trips to birthday piñata parties date it to at least 1985), serving up tasty and unpretentious Mexican food at reasonable prices. Opening across the square in January 2005, Lincoln Park spinoff Dunlay's offered burger specials and Rogue's Dead Guy Ale on tap.

The pairing didn't last long; Abril shut its doors for good the summer after Dunlay's opened. A series of changes in ownership culminated in the addition of grilled tilapia and tableside guacamole to the menu (despite years of delicious guacamole made kitchen-side). Customers left, the restaurant closed, and the massive space lies vacant today.

While Dunlay's is certainly not responsible for the demise of the Logan Square icon, the series of decisions that led to Abril's self-destruction seem to underline both the changes and continuities present in the neighborhood today. Someone at Abril apparently thought the future lay in grilled tilapia and "contemporary" Mexican food — it seems they were wrong.

But what does this have to do with the state House of Representatives? (And why do I suddenly have such a craving for guacamole?)

This November, Green Party candidate Jeremy Karpen will face off against incumbent Democrat Maria Antonia "Toni" Berrios for the 39th Illinois House District, which encompasses four neighborhoods: Logan Square, Hermosa, Avondale and Belmont-Cragin. It's a fairly large district, stretching from the Western El stop nearly to the Brickyard on the far West Side.

Logan Square, however, appears to be the key battleground in both candidates' campaigns. Berrios' office sits on the Logan Square/Wicker Park border, at southeastern tip of her district. Karpen's campaign, run mostly out of his apartment, is also some five miles from the district's northwestern edge.

The race promises to highlight many of the neighborhood's economic, social and political complexities.

To illustrate the changing economic demographics of the neighborhood, Paul Levin, long-time resident and Executive Director of the Logan Square Chamber of Commerce, also uses metaphors of food (at least I'm not alone):

"Logan Square was always a neighborhood that had a good mixture of economic classes. The illustration I usually use is the layer cake... Into the 1970s and the '80s, the middle [income bracket] got thinner and the top got thinner and the bottom [bracket] got bigger. But then in the '90s that started to change again slowly. And we're back now where the middle and top layer are at least two thirds, if not more, of the cake. The low income population is down again."

Logan Square has been steadily gentrifying in recent years. Condos have gone up, as have property values. Dunlay's is one of many establishments designed to cater to the cavalcade of hipsters and young professionals that have moved in over the last number of years.

Rents certainly seem reasonable to those coming from the Lakefront and neighborhoods like Wicker Park; Karpen, for instance, pays less for rent in Chicago than he did in his home state of Minnesota. Levin and housing activist Deborah McCoy, however, worry about the upward pressure on rents and the pricing out of long-time, lower income residents.

There are socio-cultural factors at play as well. Many of those who moved into the neighborhood in the 1970s and '80s were Latino families, mostly Puerto Rican. The economic resurgence of the last number of years (as well as the growing reputation of Logan Square as a trendy area) has attracted a demographic that tends to be younger, single and whiter.

Alderman Rey Colón, however, cautions against predictions of a Logan Square "white out." He points to the historical mixture of cultural and economic groups in the area. "Unlike... Lincoln Park, Bucktown, or Wicker Park, I believe the 35th Ward's community areas will continue to be dominated by working class people and will continue to maintain its cultural diversity," Colón said in an email.

On the surface, Representative Berrios and her opponent seem to embody two poles of today's Logan Square: Berrios is a long-time resident of Puerto Rican decent, Karpen a young, white professional who moved to the area four years ago.

But things in Chicago are rarely that simple, especially when politics is involved.

If Berrios' name doesn't sound familiar, it should: her father, Joseph Berrios, chairs the Cook County Democratic Party (CCDP). The elder Berrios is arguably one of the most powerful politicians in the city. And the CCDP is so synonymous with Chicago-style politics that a Wikipedia search for "Chicago Machine" simply redirects to the entry for the Party.

Representative Berrios is nearly inextricable from her father. Both supporters and detractors mention them in the same breath, and there is a strong sense of her as a cog in the well-oiled Machine. While this grants the neighborhood power via Berrios' connections, there are also concerns that her political will lacks independence.

Karpen, on the other hand, is a political newcomer, with little in the way of clout or well-heeled connections. "This is a grassroots campaign. My opponent has raised $200,000 in each of her last three elections, and she's never faced an actual opponent in the general election. Whereas, at most," he laughs, "I'll probably end up raising around $10,000."

While the Chicago Machine remains strong, there is growing frustration in Illinois with all levels of the state government. In Logan Square, resources controlled at the state level for necessities, such as education and infrastructure, have been stymied in the Springfield budget gridlock.

"The State Legislature in the last couple of years has just not been able to accomplish very much, unfortunately," says the Chamber of Commerce's Levin. "The Democrats control the legislature and the governorship. And all of the in-fighting that has gone on has not been helpful... [the] wrangling in the legislature has just been terribly embarrassing."

Discontent before the 2006 gubernatorial election led to a high point for Illinois' Green Party. Faced with the uninspiring choice between Governor Rod Blagojevich and Republican contender Judy Baar Topinka, a record 10 percent of Illinois voters pulled the lever (or touched the screen) for Green candidate Rich Whitney instead.

Two years later, and with next to nothing accomplished downstate, dissatisfaction with the Democratic Party runs rampant. Berrios' problem, if she has one, may not be her ties to Chicago politics, but her ties to Springfield.

The image of state legislators as out of touch is one Karpen certainly hopes to cultivate. A licensed professional counselor, he works full-time with at-risk youth at a residential facility and spends his Saturdays running a partner abuse intervention group in the community. He argues that this background and his working-class roots help him understand the issues affecting the majority of Logan Square residents in a way that Berrios, despite her extensive community ties, does not.

"I think one of the most important things I'm bringing is a different perspective," Karpen says. "I'm saying, 'why don't you try electing a clinician, putting someone who's working in social services, who's working on the front line with the people that are most affected, that are falling through the cracks? [Try] putting someone like that in office, who has the ability to look at policy through more of a human lens.'"

Community activist McCoy sees Berrios' record as symptomatic of politics in which careerism is placed above the issues affecting communities. "[Berrios] will support women's issues and that's great, but she's not a leader by any means," she says. "I don't see her developing other leaders. I don't see her having the courage to stick her neck out on controversial issues."

Logan Square also has examples of strong leaders and political change, says McCoy, a resident of 25 years. She singles out State Senator Iris Martinez as "pretty fearless" and notes the unusual circumstances that brought 35th Ward Alderman Rey Colón to power.

In 2003, Colón went up for a second time against then-Alderman Vilma Colom, protégé of 33rd Ward Alderman and Machine bigwig Richard Mell. Colom was also supported by Joseph Berrios. To the surprise of the press and the Machine, Colón won.

"Well, anybody that had been living in Logan Square knew that people had been working for years to get Vilma out," McCoy says, laughing. "So it was not a miracle. It was the result of hard work, of people knocking on doors."

Colón's election reflects Logan Square's politically independent streak, tied to a history of community activism. For Anna Barnes, now a board member with the Logan Square-based non-profit, The Neighbors Project, it was a major selling point of the area. "I was impressed with the organizing capacity of the neighborhood... and felt that I could better support local initiatives in a community that was well-organized," she said in an email.

In order to win, Karpen will need to turn his cadre of volunteers into the organized "critical mass" that elected Colón. He has drawn on some of his ties to neighborhood groups, such as the Logan Square Neighborhood Association, where discontent over issues such as affordable housing and support for lower-income residents run deep.

Development, particularly surrounding condominiums and the fate of the Mega Mall on Milwaukee Avenue, is a dividing issue in the community. The downturn in the economy has left numerous recently constructed or renovated condominiums standing empty. This troubles McCoy, who laments the resources put into condominium development at the expense of affordable housing.

The destiny of Mega Mall, seen as either a community hub for small vendors or a blight on the neighborhood depending on one's perspective, has similarly stalled. After fire ripped through it in 2007, Berrios proposed the site for the relocation of the Chicago Children's Museum.

Colón called that proposal "unrealistic", but McCoy's sentiment is a bit stronger. "The Mega Mall employs hundreds of vendors," she says. "They would displace a hundred people to employ a few people. I mean why don't we take out a couple of luxury condos to put the Children's Museum in?"

Alderman Colón believes the economic downturn has slowed development and lessened its impact as a political issue. "In fact, the lack of development has become more of an issue," he said. Karpen argues that housing and development are still major issue in the community, and he takes his opponent to task for what he sees as a disconnect between Berrios and the neighborhood.

"She hasn't actively supported the development of new affordable housing within our district," he says. "She's instead gone on the side of developers... as opposed to supporting legislation, or advancing legislation — which is the larger problem — that would help raise the economic conditions of the people that already live in the district."

The question, so often the case in politics, is whether the issues will feature at all. Berrios' voice is conspicuously absent here; she did not reply to requests for an interview. Why should she? Berrios' holds almost all the cards in this electoral deck, and interviews offer nothing but the public acknowledgement of her opponent and the possibility for slipups.

Plus, the political landscape in Logan Square has changed. Ironically, Alderman Colón represents at once the best hope and possibly the greatest threat to Karpen's candidacy.

While Berrios has never faced an opponent in a general election, rival Democrat Pedro DeJesus challenged her in the 2004 primary. Alderman Colón did not endorse Berrios, a quite perceptible display of the tensions that existed between Colón and the Joseph Berrios/Mell team following the bitter 2003 aldermanic election.

In 2007, the contentious rematch between Colón and Colom resulted in additional aldermanic circuses. A third candidate, Miguel Sotomayor, entered the fray, and his 20 percent take of the vote threw the Colón and Colom into a runoff.

Colón, however, has been twice elected Democratic Committeeman, and political imperatives, if not time, have healed the rifts between the alderman and Berrios/Mell. Colón says he has a "responsibility to support and promote qualified, Democratic candidates," and will endorse Representative Berrios.

There's a certain irony to the fact that the man who made his name as an anti-Machine candidate, will now be coordinating any Logan Square attack against Karpen. Ultimately, there is a difference between competitions within the Democratic Party and the desire to maintain Democratic hegemony over elected office.

Even Democrats unhappy with Berrios (or, more probably, the Dick Mell/Joseph Berrios team) are unlikely to break party ranks. A lack of endorsement of Berrios from someone like Senator Martinez — who did not endorse her in 2004 — is about the best Karpen could hope for out of the Democratic Party.

Ironically, Karpen hopes (unofficially) to ride the coattails of this year's most popular Democrat, presidential candidate Barack Obama. Despite Berrios' solid Democratic voting record, Karpen hopes that Obama's message of "change" will inspire voters to take a chance on someone new.

"Barack Obama is going to be bringing out a lot of [people who are] saying, 'No, I want to go in a new direction,'" argues Karpen. "That new direction might translate into some protest votes for me, in a city in which corruption is almost viewed as quaint."

McCoy thinks there might be an opening for the political newcomer. "I think he has a shot because there has been a lot of dissatisfaction." She hastens to add, however, that "no one sees [Berrios] really as a threat. She's not doing anything bad. She's not like some of the other people we took out."

Contentment with the status quo presents a serious problem for Karpen's campaign. "Unfortunately, it is extremely difficult to create excitement or momentum for elected offices like the State Representative or State Senate Races," notes Colón. "Most people just don't know what they do or how their votes in Springfield impact their daily lives back home."

Whether or not voters will connect the stagnation in Springfield with Berrios remains to be seen. We will also have to wait until November to see whether Logan Square voters will view Karpen as one more symptom of neighborhood gentrification.

Asked about the dynamics of race and cultural identification in the race, Colón argues that, "[t]here has been a significant influx of young, white residents move into Logan Square[,but.]... [u]nless something dramatically happens to gain Jeremy Karpen and the Green Party district-wide name recognition, there are just not enough Green Party loyalists to carry him."

McCoy disagrees with concept of whites uniting behind Karpen, Latinos behind Berrios. "I don't think a person has to be Puerto Rican to represent Puerto Ricans or white to represent whites. I feel that I'm well represented by Iris Martinez... I would like to see people give a little bit more attention to people's qualifications than their origins."

Karpen admits that one of his greatest challenges will be to change the conversation from one of carpetbagging and race identification to one about the issues facing the neighborhood. He says Berrios' record disputes the "notion that she will de facto represent the people of the community somehow better because she is Puerto Rican."

"I'm not new to the issues that are relevant in this community, because I myself am a working class kid coming into this neighborhood to work on the issues that are important here," he says. "We're talking about health care, we're talking about a living wage, we're talking about the graduated income tax, and affordable or supportive housing in the community."

Ultimately, the race mirrors today's Logan Square. The political, social and economic factors in the race are also present in the day-to-day life of the neighborhood.

In 2005, Logan Square residents appreciated the familiarity of Abril, even while making room for something new in Dunlay's. In 2008, the community remains a mixture of old and new, defying those who look at its changing demographics and make stark predictions.

Come November, Karpen is hoping that the neighborhood's politics match its dining preferences. He's hoping that Logan Square will take a chance on a candidate walking the line between community roots and change. Someone who, like the neighborhood's namesake, deviates from the Chicago norm.

Brienne Callahan studies media, elections and politics - currently from Melbourne, Australia. She rambles about those and other things at Completely Unnecessary.

All of No Man's Land is Ours

Joseph Consolatti finished his coffee, folded his napkin, and checked the bill that had been pressed unceremoniously underneath his breakfast plate. It was the third awful, really awful, thing that he had seen that day. The first was the WGN morning news, with their gratuitous overuse of the word "prostate." The second was his brother Sylvester clipping his toenails over a teacup. And now he'd gone and just about spent his whole goddamn social security on his goddamn huevos rancheros. It was a fine goddamn how-do-you-goddamn-do.

Joseph paid his bill and left the diner without getting his change. At home, a wide strip of cloth tape ran the length of the 100-year-old brick house where he and his brother Sylvester had lived since they were born. On one side of the tape, Joseph had carved a walkway past Sylvester's recliner, stacks of newspapers, overflowing ashtrays, and other organic miscellany. The path took him through the living room and gave passage to the bathroom and the entrance to the kitchen. On the other side of the tape, rooms were less distinct, covered as they were in a fairly homogeneous paste of rubble, dust, soiled bits of paper, and dirty pots and pans. Joseph moved through the house, using his foot to force the mass back when it threatened to encroach. The trench ended at the back door and a staircase that would take him into the basement, where he had retreated full-time from his brother's influence years ago.

When Joseph arrived home, in the early afternoon on this early summer day, Sylvester was fidgeting in his chair. "Wipe your goddamn feet — don't track the whole of goddamn Chicago in!" he yelled to Joseph, laughing gruffly. He mumbled something Joseph could not understand and used a wooden cane to swat at Joseph's legs as he moved like a sidewinder along the tape-bound path. Sylvester was dirty. Joseph had realized this when they were children and judged him for it ever since. As a baby, Sylvester's nose was caked with snot; as a child, his bed was full of picked scabs; as a teen, his desk was laden with wads of multicolored gum; and as an adult, Sylvester had always been and remained the sort of man that would blow his nose on a pair of dirty boxers and re-don them after a shower. Joseph tried to avoid the cane but suffered a last-minute swat to the shins about halfway between a mountain of overflowing laundry hampers and a crescent of dirty underwear.

"That's right, you," Sylvester continued clearing his throat of some very solid sounding matter, "Get out of my way, you. You're ruining my goddamn view." Sylvester was cranky. Joseph made it to the kitchen, poured a glass of water, and withdrew to the basement.

Even after the turn of the century, many of Chicago's streets were made of mud, and in the neighborhoods the effort to raise the landscape above sea level was slow. The Consolatti's brick cottage was in a low area of the Northwest Side, and their father could not afford to raise the house to bolster the foundation. So instead, their attic became street level and Joseph's family moved upstairs to meet the new sidewalks. The space between the old and the new entrances was walled off and fitted with a lock. The now-basement became half-way house to the aunts and uncles that immigrated every couple of years, and it seemed to Joseph that all of Italy must have at some point passed through their door on the way to their own apartments and bungalows. When their mother died, shortly after this migration stopped, their father moved into the basement himself, to better avoid his two sons.

In the middle of every afternoon, Sylvester took a nap. Around half past 2, he would sigh loudly, about five minutes later he would scratch his belly with both hands through his dirty undershirt, and about three minutes after that, he would lumber up from his chair and look for his bell. The bell, having been invariably dropped along the well-traveled route between Sylvester's chair and the front window the day before, would invariably present itself as he made his way back again from one point to the other with his palm outstretched. The bell would be in his hand by the time he reached the front of the house. Sylvester would then hoist the sash and, leaning farther out of a window than an old man should, he would swing the bell and yell, "Hey you cats! Are there any goddamn cats out there wanna take a nap?"

Joseph was conceived just after his parents' wedding and moments before his father left Chicago for the war. But when his father came home, there were two babies: Joseph, who had already turned one, and Sylvester, a newborn.

Their father spoke only when necessary. He asked the family to turn their goddamn radios down, to clean up goddamn messes left in the goddamn kitchen, to get the goddamn out of the goddamn bathroom, and to go goddamn back down to the goddamn basement. He ignored Joseph and he ignored Sylvester even more intensely. They learned where they each had come from one night on the front steps when they overheard their Aunt Rita tell the story to some cousins. Joseph was his father's. Sylvester was not. It had ruined everything. The whole thing was a goddamn mess. But no one said anything, and time in the house moved like continents, without the milestones of battlefields, a gradual shift making mountains so slowly, that it seemed like nothing at all.

When the cats heard the bell they came running. Most of them laid around the yard all day, but some came from under the house or tree branches hanging over the sidewalk. The only thing that distinguished Sylvester's naps from the rest of his day, was that during a nap Sylvester was covered in cats. And these cats, who busied themselves from sun-up to midday with the lounging off of Chicago alley exploits from the night before, all came at the ring of a bell that had sat for years untouched in Sylvester and Joseph's mother's curio cabinet.

Their mother accepted their father's silence as deserved, she was well aware that she deserved worse, and she tread carefully to avoid any landmines that may deliver her just deserts. When the relatives stopped coming, the silence in the house, the sight of her two stilted sons, and knowing that it all, all of it, was her fault, was too much.

She was sick for three days before she died. On the second day, her husband sat by her bed. On the third, he put his hand on top of hers through the blankets. Joseph and Sylvester peered in through the cracked door. He asked her something they could not make out. Their mother answered him.

"What did she say?" Sylvester asked Joseph.

"She said, 'The whole wide world seemed wreathed in clover,'" Joseph answered.

And then they saw their mother close her eyes. And she was gone.

Joseph heard the battalions of cats move across the floor above him, each four-footed leg of the run ending in an audible pounce up onto the gigantic dirty stomach of his brother. Sylvester launched the footrest of the recliner out and pushed back. Cats settled in the crook of his huge stubbly neck, in the gelatinous folds of each hairy armpit, all around the base of his mountainous stomach, and in the infertile valley that stretched from his thighs all the way down to his calloused feet. Joseph waited until he heard the snores and then used the handle of a broom to deliver several machine gun-style blasts to the ceiling under his Zepplinesque brother. From the sound of it, this had the desired effect of waking the cats claws first and initiating a frenzied feline retreat. Joseph smiled. But there was snoring again in a matter of minutes. Joseph took the bill, the one from the diner, out of his front shirt pocket and put it in a box of receipts. And then he took off his shoes and sat down on the edge of his bed.

Their father put all of her things in the space beneath the sidewalks, the walled off and locked up space, and bolted the outside. Years later, on his 21st birthday, Joseph opened the front door to get the mail and saw the door to the vault was open. His father's feet were extended just past the threshold. He was dead but still warm. He was holding their mother's bell.

They left the door to the storage vault open after that and let the seasons advanced on their mother's things. Sylvester's cats pushed their way into open drawers; snow fell, made piles, melted; and the leaves blew in, clustered, dried and disappeared.

Jill Summers' audio fiction has been featured internationally by Chicago Public Radio, the Third Coast International Audio Festival, and New Adventures in Sound Art. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Stop Smiling Magazine, Ninth Letter, The 2nd Hand, littleBANG, RAGAD, Annalemma, This 'Zine Will Change Your Life, and Please-Don't.

Jill has received the Weisman Grant and an IL Arts Council Literary Award; is a two time Caxton Club Fellow; and was recently awarded a CAAP grant to produce a new collection of audio shorts. Her first play, In the Curious Hold of the Demeter: Count Orlock at Sea, was awarded a Henson Grant to be produced by The Incurable Theater this fall at the Chicago Cultural Center. She runs Stray Dog Recording Co. in Chicago, and you can find her online at callingallmonkeys.com.

Pitchfork People

Click here to view the photo essay, "Pitchfork People," by George Aye. »

Were you the guy wearing the Native American headdress at the Bon Iver set? Oh, you were? You suck.

While on the whole, Pitchfork rocked in a quite figurative way, there were some terribly literal fashion faux pas. Headgear aside, one wonders just what the Midwestern hipster is thinking as of late.

On Day One, many of us were looking at the elfin gals strutting around in their useless galoshes and knee-high socks and wondering how bad that foot stank was going to be that eve. But on Day Two? And Three? Them galoshes made sense big time. Even though the grounds crews gave it an Ivy League try with that cedar mulch, Union Park was a giant slop pit. Don't believe us? Ask Les Savy Fav frontcrazy Tim Harrington, who rolled in it during the band's set.

And let's talk kaffiyehs. Time Out even mentioned the ubiquitous scarf in last week's Pitchfork hipster bingo article, but damned if that Urban Outfitters jazz didn't start to make complete sense during that blistering-as-hell Apples in Stereo set on Sunday. Those be-scarfed few will thank themselves in a few years when the rest of the pale bunch is getting squamous things removed in some dermatologist's office.

But perhaps the one trend that was most persistent, was most entertaining was the over-consumption of intoxicating substances. Like, could you have been more high, 15-year-old white girl at Public Enemy screaming "fight the power"? Or more drunk on that total bullshit Sparks, dude at Vampire Weekend? Especially seeing as how the Pitchfork bunch seemed to be a little older, and should definitely have been heaps wiser about the vile interplay of sun/booze/herbs/sleep, the crowd still offered up a fair amount of nonsense.

But did that explain the kids making lanyards? Um, no.

Click here to view the photo essay, "Pitchfork People," by George Aye. »

George Aye is a designer and photographer living in Chicago. He is also the founder of HUBwear.

Shylo Bisnett is a freelance writer and longtime contributor to Gapers Block, and blogs at Use Your Hands.

In Search of the Tamale Guy

When he enters the bar, couples in blue jeans stop their two-step. A crowd parts, and a patron calls out, "Hey, it's the Tamale Guy!"

I was tucked into a red vinyl booth at the California Clipper, just north of Augusta on California Avenue. A band I liked had on their best embroidered Western shirts and was playing country music — twangy steel guitar and bouncing upright bass.

I stood up in my seat to get a better look at the scene — and there he was. A stout Latino man with a mustache and red travel cooler peddling tamales between the tables.

I was having a lucky night, I thought. This was the second time I'd seen him. The first was hours earlier, a mile away at the Rainbo Club on Damen Avenue.

"Are you sure," a friend asked later, "that it was the same guy?"

That's when it hit me. Until that moment, the Tamale Guy was just the Tamale Guy, a man with hot food, a vaguely familiar face, and a name I never thought to ask. He roamed from bar to bar, through Ukrainian Village, Wicker Park, Bucktown and beyond, feeding the young, the hungry, the drunk. Could there be more than one? I set out in search of the answer.

"Tamales! Tamales!" A quiet, persistent cry cuts through the din at the Rainbo Club early the next Saturday night. Behind the beer taps, a stage with ornate, white, polished-wood columns and a black velvet curtain suggest the bar's former glory as a strip club — and favorite haunt of Nelson Algren. Across the dingy, checked linoleum floor, a young man in tight jeans, thick black glasses and a full beard scans the newspaper in impossibly dim light. A vintage punk record crackles over the sound system.

The Tamale Guy jaunts through the bar quickly, his head darting from side to side as he eyes every duct-taped booth and barstool in search of takers.

"Uno de queso," I request as he approaches me near the pinball machine. His mustache is thin and sparse, his hair matted but curly, his eyes dark brown. He's dressed in relaxed jeans, white sneakers and a parka. He draws a packet of cheese tamales from amid the parcels of pork and chicken in his cooler and stuffs a generous stack of napkins and salsa cups into a plastic shopping bag. I tell the Tamale Guy that I'd like to interview him sometime. His name, he says, is Claudio Lopez Velez. At Claudio's request, I do my best to speak in Spanish, but I'm rusty. Claudio ties the bag in a knot, and I hand him $5. He has to keep moving, he tells me, and work his way down Division Street as crowds peak. He's too busy to talk now, he says. He does not have a phone. "Miercoles, Miercoles." Wednesday, Wednesday. OK. "Gracias," I say. "Hasta luego."

I dig into the Ziploc bag marked queso and begin to peel and unroll the moist husk — the color of the wrapper fades from deep orange to buttery yellow, like a sunset. I can almost feel the steam hit my face as the husk falls away, and I bite into the rich, flavorful hunk of cornmeal, threaded with strips of green pepper, lodged with pockets of salty cheese.

Tamale preparation typically involves spreading textured corn dough called masa onto cornhusks that have been softened in water. Tamales can be filled with just about anything — in Mexico, you can find squash, fish or even pumpkin-seed tamales. Once filling is added, the husks are rolled and folded up, and the tamales are steamed in a double boiler for several hours. The original Nahuatl word, tamalli, means "steamed cornmeal."

There's a great deal of history packed into each little cornhusk. Warriors often carried tamales with them during battle because they were easy to pack and eat, an ancient form of fast food. Early methods of cooking involved crisping the tamales in hot ash. In later practices, they were steamed in underground pits. Indigenous people of Mexico frequently offered them to gods — and in the 1500s, to new visitors from Spain.

Do Tamale Guys know all that history? I'm not sure. But Tamale Guys are aware of one great, universal truth: Drunk people want food.

Photo by Oscar Arriola.

Later that night, in the dark back room of the Hideout, three sweaty, bearded guys play hard rock in the fog of a smoke machine. It is hard to see a face, or hear a word, but suddenly I can smell him. Steaming cornmeal and cheese.

Through the murk, I glimpse the exposed back and bare shoulders of a woman in a strappy dress. She would have looked more appropriate at a wedding, except that her elbows are up on a high table, her head down, her jaws working hard. She and her companion peel back damp cornhusks, dunking dense cornmeal logs into tiny cups of salsa.

I burst through the swinging door, into the main bar. Until that moment, I was just another drinker, another young woman with a slightly red face and a purse full of beer money. But when I lock eyes with Claudio, he chuckles and agrees to chat — I can't believe he remembers me, but I'm delighted he does. I find out he's from the state of Guerrero in southwest Mexico but has been in the United States for more than 10 years. He lives in Pilsen with his wife Maria. She cooks the tamales. He sells them via car. It's 12:20am, an early night for some, but Claudio tells me that this is his last bar. He has to be on his way.

"Miercoles?" I ask before we part. Miercoles he says, before he disappears into the crowd.

That Wednesday, I pull up a barstool at the Rainbo and begin my stakeout. Andy Mikonis, a tall, sturdy man with a well-kept beard and unruly, blown-back brown hair, pours pints for me and my friend Jen. Mikonis, dressed in a blue work-shirt, has tended bar at the Rainbo since 1994 — long enough to have witnessed the Tamale Wars.

"Red cooler versus blue cooler," Mikonis recalls. He says Claudio was "kind of a jerk at first," and remembers watching Claudio push out Chicago's preeminent Tamale Guy several years ago with aggressive territorialism. (The former Tamale' Guy's whereabouts are now unknown, although at least one bartender attests he occasionally comes to the Rainbo and holds a bag of tamales above his head in silence.)

"Once he came on the scene, he never left," Mikonis says of Claudio. "He was the one who really started this thing."

Today, Claudio still contends with at least one other Tamale Guy. He also is a relative newcomer to the scene, who sports a slightly thicker mustache and navy baseball cap. It was this man, who first introduced himself to me as Pedro, whom I spotted first that night. I would learn later that his name is actually Julio, and that the phone number he gave me didn't work.

Jen asks for a packet of queso tamales — like Claudio's, they're sold in packs of six. Julio says he doesn't have time to talk now. He is even more hurried than Claudio and has less tendency to smile. Once he's out the door, off to the nearby Inner Town Pub, Jen confirms that the queso is actually puerco.

Mikonis says the Tamale Guy — whether it's Claudio or Julio — can be "a slight nuisance," mostly because of the physical aftermath of eating tamales. As a bartender, Mikonis frequently has to pick spent husks out of the recycling bin and wipe salsa off the bar.

Not long after Jen and the bartender polish off Julio's pork tamales, I spot Claudio. I purchase a packet of queso tamales, and Claudio and I talk briefly in Spanish. He has a few more moments to spare since it's a Wednesday.

I go over some of the details from last time, and I learn that Claudio is 40 years old. I ask if he has children. Three, he says. They remain in Mexico. He answers the question politely but without emotion, as if I were taking a survey.

He says he began selling because he needed money. He used to work at a printing company on the Northwest Side, but now neither he nor his wife holds a day job.

Claudio sells at least three or four nights a week, from about 8 until after 1. Maria prepares 20 packets — 180 tamales — each night. Claudio fills the salsa cups. OK, he says. Is that enough? Tengo que irme. I regret that he has to get going, but I can't keep him from his work.

I had imagined myself riding shotgun with the Tamale Guy, shadowing him in each dark tavern, notebook in hand. Maybe I'd visit Maria's kitchen, I thought, or be asked to roll a few husks. I was too caught up in my fantasy to recognize the Tamale Guy's reservations about me. Unofficial food sales are illegal without a city permit. I might prod him about that, ask about his immigration status, or worse, slow him down.

I arrange our red and green salsas on the bar and open the lids. I unwrap the soft, ridged husk. The tamales are nice and hot — the perfect complement to crisp, cold beer. Claudio was the first vender to introduce cheese tamales, Mikonis says, making him a popular man among vegetarians like me.

"Nice texture," Jen says, munching on masa. "Subtly corn flavored. Lovely."

"Claudio's are better," Mikonis says after tasting the cheese tamale. The consensus is that Claudio's cornmeal is grainier than Julio's, and the tamales are not quite as dry. Claudio has a reputation for quality — one of the bartender's friends even had Claudio cater a private party. Last Halloween, I saw someone dress in costume as the Tamale Guy, pasting on a mustache and toting a Playmate cooler. Claudio also has two MySpace pages. On one, he is listed as "tamale guy" (age 43) and on the other, "Mr. Tamales" (age 47). There are two photos of the demure man, face shining, smiling nervously. A cartoonish loop of mariachi music blasts as soon as one page loads.

Beside us, a woman with wavy blonde hair leans back on her barstool and declares, "Claudio's tamales are better because they're made with love."

The next weekend, I round three bars determined to catch up with the Tamale Guy. Corner taps still abound in Ukrainian Village, so it's only a short walk from the cozy Inner Town, with its dangling stained glass lanterns and kitsch-coated walls, to the more austere Happy Village, where intense ping-pong rages in the back room and smokers clog a rainy beer garden. At Club Foot, my last stop of the night, knickknacks and rock memorabilia coexist with an old white tin ceiling and long wooden bar.

With his black hoodie, dark beard, and heavyset build, bouncer Rob Hanratty looks the part. Hanratty has a thin line drawing of a mustache tattooed onto his index finger. If he needs a disguise, he can simply hold his "fingerstache" beneath his nose.

Hanratty encounters his fair share of unofficial food vendors. The Pizza Guy is famous for arriving unannounced late at night, holding a hot, boxed pizza. "Hey, did someone order a pizza?" the Pizza Guy will ask. When nobody says yes, he offers the pizza for $10. Hanratty claims he's a disgruntled Domino's driver who was fired after a car accident.

The Muffin Lady, Shirley Peña, starting selling "special," pot-laced muffins at area bars in 1999. She was jailed for muffin sales in 2004 and later released, and today is no longer a presence on the unofficial bar food scene.

That night, Julio was the only food vendor I had seen. I wasn't hungry for tamales then, and perhaps since I wasn't buying, he wasn't interested in talking.

"Julio is the loud one," says Club Foot co-owner Chuck Uchida, as he fills and pours behind the bar. Uchida, a stout goateed man in a loose t-shirt and black-framed glasses, says that Julio's use of terms such as jefe or gringo prompted him to ask the Tamale Guy to tone down his language with patrons. (Julio called me mi amor when I saw him at the Inner Town. "Sorry my love," he said in Spanish, politely rebuffing a request to chat.)

As to the erstwhile Tamale Guy, the one who disappeared several years ago, Uchida heard he was "living well" in Mexico after his Chicago reign.

After one in the morning, I've emptied enough brown bottles of cheap beer that I'm starting to get to get hungry — but the Tamale Guy is nowhere to be found. Though it's spring, frozen rain pours on Chicago as my boyfriend and I step outside. We say goodbye to the bouncer, who's having a smoke outside, and begin our walk back to the Inner Town, where we've left our bicycles. I'm not looking forward to riding home in this mess, and I could really use something hot, portable, and delicious.

And just when I think it's over, I hear those words that tell me the Tamale Guy is near: "Hey man, you got pork?" asks a tall, gangly guy in skinny black pants and a sweatshirt, emerging from the Inner Town. Claudio's already opening his cooler as we run up.

"Can we have some cheese tamales?" my boyfriend asks Claudio. While he readies our bag, I ask him if he has time for a couple more questions.

Claudio smiles, sighs, and says he's already told me everything. I tell Claudio that I want to know more about how he came here, how his wife makes the tamales — more about his vida.

There were still so many unknowns. A writer online recorded a different last name and age for Claudio. Bar personnel have their own theories — Hanratty told me he believes Claudio lives near Club Foot, not on 21st Street, and that Claudio's sister, not his wife, makes the tamales. A Spanish language teacher in Logan Square heard that Claudio was once an "aquatic engineer" back in Mexico. If the Tamale Guy was secretive, if he didn't want me riding with him (there was no room for me with all those tamales, he had said), he had good reason. His trade was illegal, his legal status uncertain, his schedule tight.

"Mi vida?" Claudio says reluctantly, stretching his face out from his hoodie and looking up at the frozen rain.

He picks up his cooler and opens the door to an old, dark blue Toyota station wagon. We exchange goodbyes, and he tells us to be careful on our bicycles — especially in this weather.

"Es peligroso," he says. It's dangerous.

Watching him drive away down Thomas Street, a warm plastic bag crinkling in my hands, I had gotten my tamales for the night. But I still hadn't found the Tamale Guy.

The next time I saw him, back at the Rainbo, we hugged and exchanged kisses on both cheeks.

When I told him that I was almost done with my story about him, he lowered his head and rapidly made the sign of the cross. Even though I thought I had gotten closer to Claudio, what he prayed for at that moment in the darkness of the bar — that he sell enough tamales to make it back to Mexico, that no immigration official ever find him, that I shouldn't see him blush — I could never be sure.

Elizabeth Winkowski is an editor and writer in Chicago. She enjoys drawing cartoons, sewing western shirts, and riding her bicycle just about everywhere.

Walking for Public Enemies

Everyone is a Johnny Depp fan. That's what I've discovered. Everyone. Even if you don't really consider yourself a fan, you are. I came to this epiphanic conclusion after working as an extra for the just-wrapped filming of Michael Mann's Public Enemies. Tell someone you're an extra in a John Dillinger movie, and they say, oh, huh, neat. Tell them you're an extra with Johnny Depp and they want details: is he That Hot in person? How tall does he seem? (This one puzzles me. "Google says he's 5'10", but he feeeels more like a nice 5'8"...?") How close have you stood to him, in feet, rounded to the nearest inch? And is he nice? The answers are, yes, even with tan make-up and silver tooth; taller than me; about 3 feet; and yeah, totally. He's also very gracious when being screamed at by hordes of crazed women — another reason to love him, n'est-ce pas?

So anyway, this whole thing started on a complete whim. I saw an ad in the RedEye (I know, I know, don't make fun) for a casting call that Saturday morning. I can't act and harbor no dreams of trying, but I thought it would be really interesting to go to a real-live casting call, just to see the people and the process. And it would give me something to write about!

Off I went, arriving early where a short line of period-dressed gangsters and molls awaited me. It was a really mixed group of people — age-wise, race-wise and weirdness-wise. This one older man with a huge mustache seemed completely drunk, unless that somehow was his shtick, and he along with other seasoned extras spoke loudly about all the Chicago extra roles they'd already had. "'Prison Break,' man," said the perhaps-drunk guy. "Behind the walls of Joliet, man!" Then he spat on the ground. I'm not making this up.

Anyway, the casting company had us fill out little cards with our basic information — height, weight, measurements, etc. — "What color is my hair?" asked Perhaps-Drunk — and has us describe past stand-in or acting work that we'd done as well as list hobbies and interests we had that could potentially be of use in the filming. I wrote "dance." Perhaps-Drunk, who filled his out aloud, said, "Construction?"

Then we had our pictures taken, and still later, a two-woman team armed with camera phone came peering down the line, eyeing all of us up and down with what I came to be familiar with as the "prop gaze" — when the Movie People are looking at you as a prop, almost — what will you look like standing over in that corner, wearing that dress, holding that tommy gun, etc? These women pulled out a few people for additional pictures, and I was surprised when they picked me. Perhaps-Drunk also was chosen. "That means they like us the best," he said. Then we got a little pep talk from Joan Philo, the head of the casting company, and handed in our cards. Simple! So I was totally pleased when I received a phone call from casting only two weeks later asking my availability and giving me the low-down. They scheduled me at the end of May for a wardrobe fitting, and a week later, three night shoots to film a ballroom scene — how exciting! I called everyone and bragged. And then I waited.

About the time of the expected wardrobe fitting, a woman called and explained to me that they no longer needed me for the ballroom scene, thank-you-very-much, but that if I gave them permission, they wanted to submit my photo to The Mann himself to possibly be chosen for what they called a "featured extra" role. This particular role? "There's a character named Red," said the woman on the phone. "I don't know how else to say it, but you would be Red's whore." Jackpot! Of course I was interested. A featured whore-extra in a Johnny Depp movie? Dude, sign me up. She described it as a "very elegant and classy ballroom scene" in which I'd be dancing in what would possibly be a "revealing" costume. Badass.

Unfortunately, I didn't get the part — I admit it, I'm not too whore-lookin' — but I did get added to two more shoots.

Before the shoots, however, was my wardrobe fitting. I got to have some Top Model moments as the wardrobe ladies slipped me into various garments, eyed me up and down (again, with prop gaze!) and addressed each other with comments made around me, like, "She's got nice arms — they don't need to be hidden — let's tack this up x inches." My costume, then, for my day shoot was a mid-calf length plaid wool pencil skirt with kicky little pleats and acorn buttons(!), a reddish top, and a full-length coat with fur at the collar and shoulders. My night shoot wear was an amazing black satin cocktail dress, floor length and slightly off the shoulder. Nice.

The call time for my first shoot was 6 in the morning. I showed up to a parking lot in the River North area where there were two large tents housing wardrobe in one, hair and make-up in the other. We lined up and an assistant who looked like Chan Marshall sent us into the tents a few at a time to get into our '30s gear. After that, we went over to hair and make-up, where I experienced the supreme joy of sitting under an unbelievably hot bucket-style hair dryer, my hair full of large metal clamps that began to sizzle. When they were removed, 45 torturous minutes later, my hair was completely stiff, rising in little peaked points — voila, hardcore pincurls. It reminded me of the back of an ankylosaurus. I was underwhelmed.

Over at make-up, my lady slapped foundation on my still-red-from-the-hair-dryer skin. She penciled in my eyebrows, black and long, and reddened up my lips to neon-level brightness. In the mirror, with my ankylosaurus hair and my new 30s clown face, I didn't feel very cute. Outside, women were snapping each others' pictures in their cell phones, and my worst fears were confirmed — I was a ringer for David Gest. Oh God.

Then they led us a few blocks over to extras holding, which we later found out was a transgendered nightclub — sweet! We only cooled our heels for 20 minutes or so before the Second Second Assistant Director (seriously!) Eric came in and took us outside to space us out on the street.

The set itself was so amazing! They had changed the storefronts on a block between Illinois and Hubbard to look like old 1930s shops. There were ad posters up on the walls, antique cars driven in and parked, and even woodchips strewn over the streets to make them look, I don't know, more authentically old. Every hour or so, we'd all get out of the way while they sprayed down the streets and sidewalks with giant hoses. I don't know why, but we extras decided it was purely aesthetic. Who knows?

I was placed with fellow extra Jimmy, who had shot a few days before with the movie. He quickly filled me in on his acquired knowledge — he told me which assistant director was whom, pointed out the acting doubles for the main characters, and told me when Michael Mann (then Marion Cotillard, then Johnny Depp) came on set. The last was one cool moment — I followed Jimmy's finger and there he was, in a shirt and vest, guns strapped on his shoulders, hair slicked back — Johnny Depp himself! I have to admit I said, "holy shit!" and all the guys turned around and laughed at me. Like I said, even if you don't think of yourself as a fan? You're a fan. He's a superstar, man. He's a force of nature! And he's totally hot in person.

Meanwhile, we did what we were told for the street scene, which mainly involved us walking back and forth. A lot. It was pretty fun. I got to know the extras around me, all male, all looking really dapper in their suits and jackets and hats, carrying canes and such — and then you get to know who they are more, where they come from. Steve, in front to my right? Plays in a metal band. Big Greek Tom in front of me? Had long hair and a full beard which they shaved off for his role. He was a substitute teacher for CPS. Tom #2, part of the Steve-Greek-Tom group, told me several times he had had "hair down to [his] ass!" which seemed so incongruent with his current appearance that at first I thought he was kidding me. The other guys made fun of him getting it cut, and said he'd cried. He told me he'd show me his headshots to prove it. As the day wore on and I got to know them all better, I could totally see it: Tom #2's phantom long hair... "and not a mullet!" he assured me. It all started to fit.

The shoot stretched on. My feet, in their too-small but very stylin' shoes, felt like the bound golden lotus from Qing Dynasty China. They were replaced later (some other extras were crying!) with what looked like man-shoes that I slopped around in happily. We got tired. We got fed. I had a brief, tired conversation with David Wenham, without really knowing it was him. The shoot wrapped around 9pm. Whew.

The next shoot was a night shoot, and I showed up to holding at 3:45, went over to hair and makeup, where my hairdresser managed to burn large blisters into both sides of my face, which my make-up artist spackled painfully with concealer. At least this time, my pincurls looked soft and natural, and my make-up made me pretty rather than pretty ghastly. They drove us, all dolled up in our gorgeous vintage cocktail gowns, to the site of the indoor shoot, a fancy hotel restaurant.

In this scene, an assistant director placed me at a great seat at a key table, right next to the main actors' table. Then Michael Mann and his immediate crew came on and began switching and re-switching people's seats. There were a few repositioning for a key seat in which a blond woman sneers at Billie Frechette, and both of the blond women involved ended up in tears over it. Then my big moment: Michael Mann and Colleen Atwood, the costume designer, were hovering at my left shoulder, fixing me with prop gaze and talking above me about my dress, my posture, my face, while I sat as tall as I could and pretended not to listen. The Mann tapped me on the shoulder and said, "Honey, let's have you over here."

They placed me at an even better table — joy! — and an assistant director ran over to me and reminded me I was "very much on camera" and shot off directions at me — how to eat my salad, how to pantomime speaking, and when to look over at Marion. "Three beats," he said. Three beats! Like a real role!

Seated across from me was another Steve, a 30-year-old who installs faucets in schools when he's not pantomiming on movie sets. This guy was a master pantomime, which helped me a lot, so while I listened for my cues and painstakingly ate my salad and sipped my ginger ale "champagne," I was able to fake what I hope comes across as a charming and normal conversation. We could read each other's lips, and started out saying ordinary things to each other. Deep into the wee hours, we got punchy and began mouthing the lyrics to hair metal songs, which we'd then launch into singing between takes. If I'm lucky, the camera won't have captured me with metal face. At one point, I looked up rather sleepily and Mr. Johnny Depp, three feet away, was doing the same. We both smiled shyly at each other. My tired little heart went pitty-pat. They can bind my feet and burn my face and make my peers all cry, but this? Totally worth it. Johnny's got a brand new fan.

Jen Schalliol is a writer — and now a movie extra — living in Chicago.

Is This Grand?

When I was trying to decide which local thoroughfare to tackle next, Grand Avenue sprang to mind as an archetypal Chicago street. Years ago I hiked all of Western and Milwaukee Avenues. Recently I completed Halsted and Archer as part of a project to walk the length of all the city's major streets while seeing the sights, eating good, cheap food and visiting interesting dive bars.

Grand started out as a rough Indian trail, originally called Whisky Point Road, according to Streetwise Chicago by Don Hayner and Tom McNamee. Its name is believed to come from the city's first town president, Col. Thomas, J.V. Owen, who declared, "Chicago is a grand place to live."

Nowadays the avenue runs about 12 miles through town, heading southeast from the suburb of Elmwood Park, then due east from Western Avenue to Navy Pier. The street provides an overview of the city's architectural and transportation features. Ranging from old-fashioned, low-rise retail to the skyscraper canyons of River North, crossing Metra tracks, the Kennedy Expressway, the Chicago River, three CTA lines and Lake Shore Drive, ending at Lake Michigan, Grand represents the city's center of gravity.

On the warm, gray morning of Wednesday, June 4, I caught the #72 North Avenue bus west from Humboldt Park then transferred to the #65 Grand Avenue bus. After walking a couple blocks west from the terminal at 7030 W. Nordica St., I tagged the "Welcome to Elmwood Park" sign at Harlem Avenue, 7200 West, at 10am and backtracked into the Chicago community of Mont Clare.

The neighborhood's business strip was streetscaped a few years ago with Frank Lloyd Wright-inspired pylons and new signs on the streetlamps that say "City of Chicago / I Will / Grand Avenue." But Mont Clare still feels like a care-worn small town from the 1950s. I passed Grand Cycle, 7160 West, which specializes in BMX and lowrider bicycles and skateboards, then crossed the street to gawk at a huge model schooner in the window of Julie's furniture, 7163 West. "Nice ship, huh?" said a woman pedaling by on the sidewalk. "Beautiful."

I returned to the Terminal Snack Shop, 7030 West, next to the bus turnaround, and downed some coffee and a bacon, egg and cheese sandwich on white toast as I admired the orange walls and oil paintings of lush landscapes with waterfalls and snow-capped mountains. I continued on past the castle-like Galewood-Mont Clare branch of the Chicago Public Library and Bill & Michelle's Question Mark Bar, 6918 West.

Soon I was jolted back into the modern era as I hit a nasty stretch of car dealerships, chain restaurants and the Bricktown Square shopping plaza. So it was refreshing when I saw something unique: the World's Largest Wagon outside the Radio Flyer corporate headquarters, 6515 West. It's 27 feet long with 8-foot diameter wheels; it took 100 gallons of red paint to cover it. Inside the lobby I read about the company's founder, Italian immigrant Antonio Pasin, who eventually produced the wagons on an automobile-style assembly line, earning him the nickname "The Little Ford."

At Narragansett, 6400 West, small businesses appeared again, with many of the signs in Spanish. The menu at El Guanaco Salvadorian Restaurant, 6345 West, features pupusas — thick discs of corn or rice dough stuffed with various savory fillings — as well as platters of fried yucca and sweet plantains served with beans and sour cream. Paleteria Currucel, 6315 West, had a dozen or so Mexican ice cream carts parked inside. I tried on some cowboy shirts next door at Almacenes Western Wear but decided they were too flashy for me to pull off.

Soon afterwards the street became residential for the first time on my walk, with several evergreen trees — rare in this city — including a few beautiful blue spruce. At Melvina, 6200 West, I was reminded of an old off-color joke: "What three streets in Chicago rhyme with the name of a woman's sex organ?" Please ask someone else for the answer.

Supreme Frozen Products, 5813 West, is a wholesaler specializing in the kind of tamales sold at hot dog stands across Chicagoland. I recently read a piece in The Reader about a foodie who's researching the origin of the Mother-in-Law sandwich, a tamale in a hotdog bun, covered with chili. The man I talked to at Supreme said he had never heard of the Mother-in-Law. When I described it he said, "Oh, you mean a tamale boat?"

At busy Central Avenue, 5600 West, I saw Prosser Vocational High School and the vast green expanse of Hanson Park to my left. To my right were a Cook County Circuit Court building and the Chicago Police Area Five headquarters. In June of 1998, after a Bulls game, police officers and civilians partied late into the night in the parking lot behind the police station. Officer George Wilson drove home drunk in his pick-up that morning and struck Sophia Latuszkin, 66, as she tried to cross Harlem Avenue in Elmwood Park. She was killed; he fled the scene as bystanders wrote down his plate number. Wilson was sentenced to five years in prison and only wound up serving 20 months.

A few blocks later outside a firehouse at 5252 West, a tiny pond was sunk into the pavement with a fountain fashioned from a fire hydrant and goldfish swimming in the murky, green water. I stopped into Del Rey Tortilleria, 5201 West, to buy some buenelitos, pieces of crisp fried flour tortillas covered with cinnamon sugar. A large shrine in the otherwise stark room included images of Jesus, Our Lady of Guadalupe and Pope John Paul II, plus flowers and big multicolored Christmas balls.

At Lemke Screw Products, 4911 West, I peeked through the window bars of the low industrial building to see workers laboring at big, old-fashioned lathes to the whir of machine belts and large fans. Up the street at Las Islas Marias, 4750 West, a big fiberglass lobster was perched above a sign for various seafood dishes, touting their health benefits: "Bienvenidos a su vitamina" — welcome to your vitamin. A block later the scenery changed once again to chain retail and giant parking lots again and I saw the rear end of the city's only Wal-Mart, 4655 West.

Outside a school bus garage at 4253 West, a group of heavy-set, middle-aged ladies, one of them sitting on a hydrant, smoked and joked as they killed time between runs. It was getting really hot and I was ready for a beer. A man in a Puerto Rican flag t-shirt pedaled by on a BMX bike, riding one-handed while eating a long, cherry Flav-R-Ice.

At Pulaski Avenue, 4000 West, Jimmy's Hotdogs, in business since 1954, had a large sign for Supreme Tamales featuring the image of an alluring senorita. Just east Cedric's Auto service was topped by a bearded fiberglass giant, a dead ringer for Paul Bunyan, holding up a piece of bent pipe.

So far I had encountered mostly Latinos on the street with a smattering of Caucasians and African-Americans, but for the next few block I saw mainly the latter. Unfortunately I wasn't hungry enough yet for lunch at CJ's Diner, 3839 West, a soul food place recommended by a friend for its biscuits and gravy. The door of the C.O.G.I.C. church youth center, 3839 West, was flanked by paintings of graceful angels.

At Monticello, 3632 West, I could just make out the Sears Tower through the warm haze. I finally stopped for a cold one at the Lite Inn, 3614 West, the first open bar I'd noticed on the trip. A few patrons were conversing in Spanish with soft Caribbean accents as "The People's Court" played on TV. There wasn't much in the way of décor except for a few sombreros hanging from a wall. For some reason there was a whole row of Cook's Champagne bottles behind the bar.

The elderly, mustachioed bartender scrutinized my ID carefully before serving me an icy bottle of Corona with lime. Next to me a guy in a white apron, probably a cook from the Puerto Rican sandwich shop next door, sipped a Coronita, the 6.7-oz version. After all, it was still business hours.

A wonderful smell of pizza wafted out as I passed an industrial bakery at Spauding, 3300 West. Soon afterwards I spotted my first hipster of the day, a young white guy with long sideburns, a short-sleeve cowboy shirt and a Greek fisherman's cap, riding a yellow fixed-gear bike with a pad on the top tube emblazoned with a lightning bolt.

At an industrial building at 3100 West, I saw an odd sign for Nature House, "makers of the original aluminum purple martin bird feeder," so I rang the bell. Out came Larry Coffey, plant manager for Erva Tool & Manufacturing Co., which recently bought the birdhouse company.

A transplant from Griggsville, in west-central Illinois, Coffey speaks with a country twang. He explained that purple martins migrate from South America to the U.S. each year. West of the Rockies they live in woodpecker holes and cactuses and build mud nests under highway overpasses, but for unknown reasons the birds can't build nests in the East and rely on man-made shelters.

He brought me into a showroom filled with various lawn ornaments and plant hooks as well as the large, pagoda-like feeders. A vintage sign showed a cartoon of a smiling martin with the legend "2,000 mosquitoes per bird." "They claimed a purple martin could eat 2,000 mosquitoes a day," said Coffey. "I do know that in Griggsville, when the martins were in town you didn't have to worry about bugs but when they left it was time to bring out the citronella."

Moving on, I passed by Taco El Jalciense Mexican restaurant, squeezed into a narrow triangular lot at the southeast corner of Grand and Chicago Avenue, 800 North A block later I saw a hypodermic needle lying on the sidewalk, something I've never noticed before. I walked along the massive Metra yard near California Avenue, 2800 West, then passed the Chicago School of Ballet, 2635 West.

As I walked by Smith Park, 2550 West, I remembered a recent article from the Chicago Journal about a controversy over creating a new garden at the park which is dividing residents along ethnic lines. Some who feel the park is part of the Ukrainian Village community want the garden to be a memorial to the Ukrainian famine, called the Holodomor, which killed millions of people in 1933. Others, who call the area Smith Park and consider it an Italian-American neighborhood, want the garden to be dedicated to police officer Michael Ceriale who was shot during a narcotics stakeout in 1998.

Soon I reached the site where Grand flattens out at Western Avenue, 2400 West, marked by Josh Garber's sculpture "Episodic," powder-blue steel pipes that loop into the sky in a Mobius strip-like form. It was 2:15pm and a cool breeze was blowing in from the lake.

I decided to stop for lunch at Hound Dog's Burgers and Teriyaki, 2252 West, a greasy spoon that serves Asian dishes like Bulgogi (Korean BBQ) as well as hot dogs, tacos, pizza puffs and other fast food staples. I got a big bowl of bibimbap: rice topped with marinated beef, carrots, cucumbers, bean sprouts, spinach and a fried egg with a side of red chili sauce — delicious.

Down the street at 1924 West, I spotted an odd house I had passed many times before on my bicycle but had never really noticed. The second story has sort of a Wild West-style façade, and in addition to a large American flag and a few geese ornaments the place has year-round Christmas decorations: lights, snowmen and a dozen plastic candy canes attached to the railing of the balcony.

At Wood St., 1800 West, the downtown skyscrapers started to come into focus. I passed by Betty's Blue Star Lounge, 1600 West, formerly a dive bar and now a velvet rope dance club. Signs on the window said "Dress code strictly enforced" and "Notice: per Chicago ordinance this premises under 24-hour video surveillance."

I was entering the dense Near West Side business strip which includes many old-school Italian restaurants, grocery stores and bakeries, as well as trendy newer bars and cafes. Above the Twisted Spoke, 1226 West, a motorcycle-themed bar, a skeleton perched on an antique bike rotated in the sky. Next door a fluffy, gray cat snoozed in the window of an empty storefront.

The sun burst through the clouds as I crossed over the Kennedy Expressway around 900 West and the break in the buildings provided a panoramic view of the Loop above the canal of roaring traffic. At Halsted, 800 West, I passed a Blue Line station as well as Richard's Bar, an old man bar with a storefront painted red, white and green and photos of famous Italian-Americans hanging inside.

Just east of Halsted I ducked into the Salvation Army store at 509 North Union to continue my search for a summer shirt. Years ago, I'd gone there to shop for a mattress and was looking at single beds. The older lady who helped me said, "Young man, I suggest you buy a double bed because there may be some situations in the future where that may be useful." On this visit, as I went upstairs to the clothing department to find people assisting an elderly woman in a wheelchair who seemed to be having some kind of seizure. As I left, paramedics from the fire department were storming into the thrift shop.

As I approached the Chicago River I found many new residential high-rises sprouting up and the Kennedy's Ohio Street feeder was visible and audible to my left. I enjoyed the fine view of the Loop from the bridge, then went downstairs to check out a new fountain and river walk by Kingsbury Plaza, a tall, blue tower. Historically, Chicago's riverfront has been underutilized but nowadays the City requires developers to create sections of walkway when they build on its banks, so eventually you may be able to walk and bike along the entire length of the river.

I passed under a speeding Brown Line train at Franklin, 300 West, and Grand became one-way westbound a block later. The Anti-Cruelty Society animal shelter, 157 West, was adorned with Art Deco bas-reliefs of robed figures nurturing a cat, a dog and a horse. Looking south as I strolled, I spied the twin corn cobs of Marina City at State Street, 1 West, and then at Wabash, 30 East, the Trump Tower, whose looming, zig-zag structure echoes that of the Sear Tower. At Rush St., 130 East, all four corners of the intersection were occupied by beige, concrete boxes with chain restaurants or a Marriot lobby at ground level, topped by several stories of windowless parking garage. Pretty depressing.

After passing through the sketchy dimness of Lower Michigan Avenue for a block, I emerged into the sunlight to see that a strange, low-lying fog obscured Navy Pier, my finish line. I stopped into Boston Blackies, 162 East, a tavern I'd been meaning to check out for a while. The décor was a 1970s interpretation of the 1920s, with houseplants, lots of brass and a mural behind the bar showing a glamorous gangster scene: big city skyscrapers, a naked moll leaning on the back of a chair, and the large face of Blackie himself, a handsome, dark-eyed youth with slicked-back hair.

I ordered a Boston Blackies Amber, made by west-suburban Two Brothers Brewing Company, and listened to attorneys and other late-middle aged folks talk politics with the bartender and the owner, an elderly Greek immigrant. Local political fundraiser Tony Rezko had just been convicted of several counts of corruption. "I bet he'll be real popular in prison," said the barkeep. A news report on TV said Chicago was chosen as one of the top finalists to host the 2016 Olympics. "I wouldn't blame people if they'd rather go to Rio than Chicago," I conceded. "In Chicago you get handguns," countered the lawyer at the next stool. "In Rio it's machine guns."

With only a few blocks left I strolled past an old-fashioned neon parking sign and the rusty-looking Time-Life building at McClurg Court, 400 East, with its shiny, copper-colored windows. It grew chilly as I walked through a cloud of mist which almost completely concealed the monolithic Lake Point Tower condo building.

After I passed under the eight lanes of Lake Shore Drive, 600 East, and saw the pier entrance a couple blocks away, my cell phone rang. It was my high school classmate Chris O'Brien, now a D.C.-based "beer activist" and author of the book Fermenting Revolution: How to Drink Beer and Save the World. Chris' book is a manifesto on the social and environmental impact of choosing craft-brewed beverages over Big Beer. He's currently working on a similar book about coffee. You can read his beer blog at beeractivist.com.

Chris' day job involves advising corporations, schools and other institutions on how to buy "green." He was in town for a conference on ecologically responsible procurement practices and he wanted to know if I'd to meet up for a cold one. "Where are you?," I asked. "Navy Pier," he answered. In a moment we met up at the gate, beside the cool blue of Lake Michigan. We retreated a few blocks on Grand to meet up with his colleagues at D4, a nouveau-Irish bar at 345 East, where we toasted the coincidence with pints of stout.

John Greenfield has spent his entire adult life in Chicago. He enjoys writing, biking and rocking.

Pool Hall Memories

A couple Sundays ago my husband and I played pool, something I haven't done in years. I'd been invited to an appreciation party for volunteers of the Old Town School of Folk Music, a Chicago institution that recently celebrated it's 50th anniversary. I've never attended an OTSFM volunteer party, but this one took place about two blocks from my house, in an old pool hall named Marie's Golden Cue. I've been a volunteer at Old Town for about three years off and on, depending on how busy I am at work and how high my tolerance for crowds and strangers is. I'm a secret agorophobe, so having to help strangers find their seat in a concert hall or selling artist merchandise to crowds of people waving 20 dollar bills at me can sometimes be terrifying. On the other hand I'm also a secret extrovert; I sometimes like to pretend that I'm in a rock and roll band, and I enjoy the questionable authority that comes from wearing a name tag that says "Volunteer."

Volunteering at Old Town, besides being a nice thing to do for a great institution, has its benefits. If you volunteer at a concert, you get to see most of it for free. I was introduced to the music of Alejandro Escovedo through volunteering a couple years ago, and I got to see Tinariwen and Mamadou Diabate last fall, which was amazing. There's also a system of points that you earn through volunteering, and after accumulating enough you can register for a free class; I've taken a few guitar and dance classes this way.

Volunteering can be fun — if you're at the right concert, and work with a good group of volunteers, it's not a bad way to spend an evening. It can also be quite taxing, as I discovered when I made the mistake of volunteering for teen open mic night. I spent the evening sitting at a card table next to an angry, barrel shaped man who yelled at the kids like they were delinquents. I kept my nose in a book to avoid conversation, but he wanted to know what I was reading — The Story of French, a fascinating book by Jean Benoit Nadeau and Julie Barlow — but just knowing the title wasn't enough. The angry man gave me his opinion of the French judicial system, denounced the Napoleonic code as barbaric, and put me on the defensive for a civil code that was written 167 years before I was born, in a country I've never lived in. I went home exhausted. I'm pretty sure that was the last time I volunteered at Old Town.

My only experience of Marie's Golden Cue up to now had been as my polling place. I've cast my vote within its walls in every election since I moved to this neighborhood, and it tickles me that the site of my civic duty occasionally sports lettering on their 1950s era marquee sign spelling out things like, "We have the strongest shafts and the smoothest balls."

Marie's Golden Cue is located in a 1930s deco storefront with glossy white terra cotta tiles. Across the street is a funeral home, and one door over is the El Gallo Carniceria y Fruteria, and the Clothespin Laundromat bearing a sign that reads, "Open at 6am only for you." Gentrification hasn't quite made it to this block of Chicago, although it has touched just a few blocks north in the form of Starbucks, and in the countless condos that have sprung up in recent years. The picture window is hand painted with the words "Cue Stick Repair Shop, Professional Workmanship," and if pool isn't your game, there are a handful of video games and a coin operated claw machine at the front to keep you busy.

Although Chicago is now officially smoke free, there's plenty of evidence of Marie's smoky past — beneath the rails of each of her 20 Brunswick pool tables are dark burn marks from cigarettes smoked long ago. I took a moment to read the signage on the walls, and there was plenty of it; fading signs written in pre-Helvetica script with directives like "Masse shots are not allowed," "rule of the house — keep your butt and your butts off the table" and "I once gave up pool, it was the most terrifying weekend of my life."

The front desk featured a hot dog spit slowly spinning three wrinkled franks; it was the best lit object in the whole place. The spinning mechanism moved in starts, resting every few seconds, then soldiering on for another cycle. Behind the desk and out of reach on a back shelf were boxes of instant ramen noodles in Styrofoam bowls. Like the rest of the house, there was plenty of signage. A caricature of a chef beamed next to one that read "Snack Bar Special #1 — 2 Hot Dogs, Chips, Sm. Drink $4.50 plus tax." The price had been written in black marker on a sheet of 8x10 paper and taped over the original price. There was also a Snack Bar Special #2, which advertised "Polish Sausage, Chips, Sm. Drink $4.25 plus tax."

My fellow volunteers were scattered about the room, some huddled against the wall in observation, others enjoying a slice of free pizza and a dixie cup of soda near the video games, and some playing lighthearted games of pool with each other. My husband picked up a rack from the front desk, brought a couple of cue sticks down from the wall, and a switch was flipped to lit up our table.

My husband set up the balls and made the break. It had been a while since either of us had played, so it took a few turns before either of us sank one; he took stripes, I had solids. Leaning over the table to get my shot I was transported to a different game played years ago, in a pool hall on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn. I don't remember how old I was exactly — 19, maybe 20 — and I was home for the summer. It had been a few years since I'd lived in Brooklyn; my mother and I had moved to Pelham — a suburb just north of the Bronx — right after I finished junior high because my mother was engaged to a widowed Catholic man she met at work, and he lived in Pelham with his four children. We moved to a nondescript two bedroom apartment on the other side of town rather than move into his house — he didn't want to live with my mother before they were married. They broke it off before the end of the school year, but we couldn't move back right away because my mother had rented out our brownstone, so I went to boarding school in Poughkeepsie for the remainder of high school.

Ninth grade is a fragile time to move, and I lost touch with everyone I'd known in Brooklyn. We moved just a few miles away, but may as well have moved across the country. My mother recently sent me a few boxes of my old things, and I found an autograph book with signatures of classmates from the end of junior high at I.S. 88.

"To J," one begins, "I really had some fun with you, don't tell my mom. Do not allow weeds to grow on the road to friendship. I love you. Love, Gabby 24 E. 2nd St." Folded in half along the crease of the page is a late pass dated 6-20-85 for Gabriella Napolitano, she was late for Mr. Neilson's language arts class. Everything on the slip is written in pencil, in Gabby's handwriting, except for the time — 9:32 am, written in ink in Mr. Neilson's handwriting.

There are signatures of the popular girls I idolized — the two Francescas, Amanda, and Abby — whose real name was Almond. Someone named Simon wrote "I already wrote something in the other one," and Adam Ableman wrote "I hope you have a dandy time in Pelham with all them goyem."

My best friend Anna wrote "Dear J, Well it's been 4 years that we've known each other. God! Now we're both going to H.S. It's going to be hard for the both of us regardless of what town we're in. But look at the good side — no more Mr. Ashkar or Mme. Winkler! Yeah! So let's keep in touch. Love, Anna." In the corner in all caps she wrote "ONLY WIERDOS READ CORNERS." We'd first met in the fourth grade at the local temple's after-school gymnastics program; we were both latchkey kids and needed a place to go after school before our mothers came home from work.

By the seventh grade she'd blossomed into the most beautiful girl I'd ever seen in real life. While I had become more awkward over time — I'd gotten a pair of pink plastic-framed glasses in the fifth grade, and braces in the sixth — she'd become lithe and elegant. She went to modeling classes where an instructor taught her how to tweeze her eyebrows, started wearing makeup to school, and blow drying her dark blonde hair. I felt possessive of her, and intensely jealous as all the boys who'd previously ignored us flocked to her, almost helplessly, while I remained in the background with my mass of frizzy hair and lack of social skills. I wasn't with her when the photographer took pictures for her portfolio; I only saw the slides later. Here, a picture of Anna posing coyly on a park bench, there a picture of Anna leaning against a tree. When I saw her kissing Nico outside the candy store on 16th street where we played Pac-Man and hung out after school, it was as if I'd been stung by an electric eel. Nico was my lab science partner, and I'd developed a monster crush on him. With tears in my eyes I asked Anna why she'd kissed him — as if she could give me a reason that I'd find acceptable.

In the eighth grade she started dating Drew, a kid from the neighborhood. He was older than us, probably only by a couple years, but he seemed like a grown man to me. One night we all hung out in Prospect Park with two 40 ounce bottles of Olde English 800 that Anna and I had bought from a corner store, the clerk didn't even ask to see our I.D. Drew's friend Stan was there, and Anna had said that Stan liked me. Where Drew was tall and mysterious, a man of few words, Stan was a little thick around the middle, wore Cazal glasses like D.M.C., and talked a mile a minute. We drank too much, and Stan offered to walk me home. Anna took me aside and whispered, "Don't let him take advantage of you!" She was kidding, but I was terrified. I'd never gotten drunk before, and had heard about boys who took advantage of situations like this. I practically ran home, looking over my shoulder every few paces to make sure I wasn't being followed. When I got home I threw up, lay down on my bed, and watched the ceiling spin until I fell asleep. A few months later my mother and I moved to Pelham.

The summer when I came back, I ran into them again — Anna, Drew and Stan. Anna and Drew weren't dating anymore, and the four of us began spending evenings on the stoop of my mother's brownstone. It was deep summer, too hot to stay inside. My bedroom was on the top floor of the house, and at night I'd put a fan in each window — one facing out, the other facing in, for maximum air flow, and took a quick shower to cool off before trying to sleep through the sticky Brooklyn night. Gradually it became clear that Drew had become interested in me. My years away had given me the advantage of disappearing for most of my awkward phase, and I had returned appearing more comfortable in my own skin. I wore contact lenses, the braces had been removed from my teeth, and I had figured out how to tame my frizzy hair.

One evening someone suggested a game of pool, so we all headed for Brownstone Billiards on the corner of Flatbush and 7th Avenue. Drew was wearing a purple silk shirt that made his plum black skin look iridescent under the streetlamps, and when he looked at me I felt like I'd been hit in the chest with a bb gun.

It was a weeknight, and not many tables were in use. I didn't know how to play, so Drew taught me how to line up a shot, standing close to me and reaching around my waist to adjust the cue stick in my hand.

"You gotta line up the shot," he said, his breath tickling my ear, "and then follow through." I was entranced.

It was still early when we finished playing, so we walked back to my mother's house and sat in the kitchen, sipped ginger ale and traded stories. After a while Anna left, and then Stan, and it was just me and Drew. We talked, leaning forward on our elbows, faces getting ever closer.

"Can I kiss you?" Drew asked, looking right into my eyes. At 19 years old I had kissed exactly four boys: Dan, the Jewish kid from the suburbs of Philadelphia who I met at summer camp; Paul, the boy from Pelham High School who tricked me into kissing him one day when he walked me home — I avoided him for the rest of the school year; Mick, the troubled kid who I met in upstate New York at a Quaker youth retreat; and Mark, my high school sweetheart, who was the most non-threatening boy you could ever hope for. Nothing in my life had prepared me for this moment.

"No," I said, surprising us both. "But ask me again sometime."

After that I got a job, so I couldn't hang out as much. I remained awkward, Drew remained mysterious, and eventually the summer ended. The moment passed.

Back at Marie's, I won a game and lost two. There were cardboard boxes full of t-shirts that had a drawing of a guitar and a banjo leaning against each other, and the word "Volunteer" printed in capital letters underneath; if you won a game, you got to take a t-shirt. My husband didn't want one but I did, so I sifted through the pile until I found one in my size in a mustard orange color. We left the pool hall, walked home in the unseasonably cool weather, and settled in for the evening.

http://buttered-noodles.blogspot.com/J.H. Palmer is a secret writer who works an office job, and has lived in Chicago since 1992.

Photos by Paul Goyette.

Taking a Stand Against Guns

Gun violence in Chicago seems to rise as reliably as the thermometer's mercury every summer. While the Chicago Police Department makes headlines with amped-up, SWAT team assisted street patrols and increased fire power, a consensus on how best to fight the violence has taken shape outside of the law enforcement establishment. Academics, community organizers and former gang members all seem to highlight the rift between police and community, a rift that they say threatens the efficacy of any police strategy that fails to recognize and deal with it; their diagnostics tend to stand at odds with many police prescriptions.

Meet Tio Hardiman. Tio grew up in the Henry Horner housing projects on the West Side of Chicago. With tales of a subculture marginalized by the criminal justice system and defunct of a social network, he paints a chilling portrait of a city within a city where an anarchic system of violence fills the void of legitimate law and order.

"Violence is normal where I come from," says Hardiman. He recalls the feeling he had when, at the age of 16, his step-father caught up with and shot the man who had beaten Tio up on the street days before. "It made me feel damn good to see that guy get shot," he says, "I felt vindicated." Blurred by that vindication was the reality that Hardiman was doing little more than inheriting a long and futile cycle of violence that would take years and incarceration to break.

Hardiman now works as a director of Gang Mediation and Community Organizing for CeaseFire, a large non-profit street outreach program based out of UIC's School of Public Health. CeaseFire takes a decidedly different approach to reducing violence than most police departments. Rather than aiming to eradicate illegal activity altogether, CeaseFire's staff of outreach workers and violence interruptors are trying to change the "culture of violence" that is endemic in Chicago's poor, largely black and latino communities. "I'm not interested in stopping all the drug dealing. The drug problem is bigger than me and it's bigger than the brothers selling the drugs," says Hardiman. "We work to directly change the thinking and behavior of the young people, and to mediate conflicts that can become violent."

CeaseFire community organizers teach residents how to talk friends and relatives out of instigative and retaliatory violence they may be planning, create public protests against violence, and more generally try to "make every act of violence into a big deal in the community, to say to young people, 'this is unacceptable,'" says Hardiman. Violence interruptors speak directly with high risk individuals, those with a history of violence and involved in armed disputes. Largely former gang members and ex-convicts with earned respect on the street, violence interruptors have an unprecedented level of access to and influence over those most prone to shooting.

"These are infamous guys from the past — community icons that have transformed their lives," says Hardiman. "Most guys can go to the corner and tell people to stop shooting. The violence interruptors can go into the inner-circle meetings where shootings are plotted and say, 'Look bro, we're not gonna do this. Let this stuff go, it ain't worth it.'"

This is the right approach, says Dr. John Hagedorn, and something police need to be doing more of. Dr. Hagedorn is an associate professor of Criminology, Law and Justice and senior research fellow at the UIC's Great Cities Institute. He has written widely on violence and Chicago gangs, publishing articles in scholarly journals and newspapers and authoring several books on the topic. He says police need to be more involved face-to-face with gang members and those likely to commit acts of violence in order to be effective. Waging war on gangs with military tactics will only further marginalize those at risk, making them more prone to violence, he says. "Police need to work cooperatively with community leaders and gang members to alleviate violence. Isn't 40 years of war on gangs long enough?"

Police have always been deployed in greater numbers to high-risk areas with little success, says Hardiman. "The violence doesn't ever really come down, per se. It either stays where it's at or goes up." Many of the affected communities have lost their confidence in the police, he says; histories of police brutality, innocent men and women locked up or shot dead in the street, all remain fresh in the minds of many poor blacks in Chicago. "A lot of healing needs to be done (between police and communities)," he says.

It's an arduous task to be sure, but Hardiman is not pessimistic. "There used to be a time when the beat officer would know everybody on his beat. Everybody," he says. Back then, people respected the officers patrolling their beat; now, talking to police has become a taboo in most poor communities. Hardiman says that for policing to be effective again, this relationship needs to be restored. "The beat officer has to be reintegrated into the community."

At DePaul University, Dr. Greg Scott has come to similar conclusions. An associate professor of Crime and Delinquency, Community Studies and Street Gangs, Scott has spent the last decade-plus on the streets studying gangs and inner-city crime from within. He has interviewed hundreds of gang members and street criminals as well as ridden alongside police patrolmen and tactical officers, producing scholarly research and film and radio documentaries. He says police need to learn not to shame the people they are trying to protect. From what he has seen, most officers treat young people as criminals from the moment they suspect them as such.

Hardiman agrees. "In this country, they say you're innocent until proven guilty, but most brothers say, if you're black, you're guilty until proven innocent," he says with a forced, uneasy chuckle. "So we need to have police start treating brothers a little differently."

And so, says Scott, "we need to train police officers on how to treat everyone they've arrested, everyone they're considering arresting, everyone they've stopped on reasonable suspicion, as innocent, because they have not been proven guilty yet." Go on a police ride-along, he says, and chances are any citizen they stop is treated as guilty from the get-go. "That flies in the face of our constitution, our bill of rights — everything that this country's justice system is supposed to stand for."

Scott suggests an exercise in role reversal. In a CAPS-like forum throughout the city, he would like to see cops sit quietly and allow every citizen who has been arrested or approached on suspicion talk to and treat the officers the way in which they were treated. "If cops don't experience the effects of systematic shaming," he says, "they're not going to change their ways."

In 2004, CeaseFire worked with 900 high-risk individuals, "gang-bangers with long histories of violence," says Hardiman. "We got 35 percent of them into employment, another 30 percent set up back in school and the other 35 percent or so into counseling services," such as substance abuse counseling and job training programs.

In addition, Hardiman adds, CeaseFire mediated over 200 conflicts that could have likely led to homicides or shootings. "We went right there to the belly of the beast and worked with the brothers and sisters right there on the street corners," he says, "and that's why the homicides came down," referring to a 25 percent drop in homicides that year — numbers unheard of in the 40 years police have been systematically targeting gangs.

To learn more about CeaseFire and its programs and to find out how to get involved, visit CeaseFireChicago.org.

Arriving by bicycle from Detroit about two years ago, Danny Fenster has fallen in love with Chicago. Splitting his time between learning the finer points of Journalism at Columbia College and drinking cheap beer in seedy bars on the West Side, Dan lives in Logan Square with his girlfriend Megan, 22, and dog Nietzsche, 2 1/2. He is also a pretty big deal in Nova Scotia, where people know him.

Photos by Ben Gonzales.