WBEZ | Curious City

Casualties of history: What notable buildings has Chicago lost?

Fri, 24 May 2013 10:31:00 -0500

University of Chicago student Alice Ye couldn’t help but follow up on the flap over Prentice Women’s Hospital, a building that embroiled a major university, Chicago’s City Hall and preservationists over the past year.

If you haven’t paid much attention to the fate of Bertrand Goldberg’s paean to brutalism, here’s the skinny. Northwestern University has long maintained it needed to tear down the Prentice building to make way for a top-of-the-line medical research facility. Last year, the Commission on Chicago Landmarks declined to give the building landmark status, but only after it had granted preliminary landmark status during the same meeting. The strange about-face happened days after Mayor Rahm Emanuel gave his blessing to Northwestern.

Alice (who, incidentally, is answering a Curious City question as well) thought there should be some kind of accounting, so she asked:

Like Prentice Hospital, what are other historic Chicago buildings that have been demolished and why?

It just so happens that WBEZ’s architecture blogger Lee Bey says he’s got time to help out, and will give us a tour of other noteworthy Chicago demolitions during next Wednesday’s broadcast of the Afternoon Shift. But the conversation should start here and now: If you know of a notable (in your opinion or others’) building that has been lost to history, please name and describe that building in the comment section.

Here’s one entry to get us started.

The Chicago Stock Exchange: the grandaddy of controversial demolitions

The original Chicago Stock Exchange has been gone for over 40 years, but chances are you have seen its remnants. Its arched entrance lives on the corner of Columbus and Monroe outside the Art Institute; the original trading room is tucked into the museum’s interior. Designed by Louis Sullivan, along with his partner Dankmar Adler, the exchange, which showcased Sullivan’s flare for ornamentation, was completed in 1894 and torn down less than 100 years later. Mayor Richard J. Daley’s plans to demolish the building in the 1960s sparked a bitter struggle, at a time when little emphasis was placed on architectural preservation. No one did more to trumpet the preservationist cause than photographer Richard Nickel, a Sullivan enthusiast who gained local recognition for traveling the country documenting the Chicago architect’s body of work. Nickel died in 1972 while photographing the Stock Exchange’s destruction.

Becky Vlamis is a WBEZ producer. Follow her @bvlamis

Reporter’s Notebook: What are aldermen responsible for?

Thu, 23 May 2013 16:55:00 -0500

Curious City is a news-gathering experiment designed to satisfy the public's curiosity. People submit questions, vote for their favorites, and WBEZ reports out the winning questions in real time on Facebook, Twitter and the timeline above.

Curious Citizen Andrea Lee of Chicago’s Noble Square neighborhood reached out to her alderman about two problems: a lack of a recycling bin and basement flooding. No dice with either problem. Given an alderman’s vague job description, Lee wanted to know what aldermen actually can do.

Have you contacted your alderman or local politician about anything lately? If so, did City Hall help? And, what should local politicians be responsible for, anyway?

If you have leads or a point for us to consider, please comment below, or hit us at any of the social media outlets listed above!

The South Side before the Dan Ryan

Wed, 22 May 2013 14:42:00 -0500

Do you or your family members remember the South Side before the Dan Ryan Expressway was built? We want stories of what life was like on the ground in the neighborhoods surrounding the expressway changed the city forever. (Where exactly is the Dan Ryan? Check out page 10 of this traffic decoder map to see the span of it)

Please call and leave us a message with your memories: 1-888-789-7752. Your voice and story may end up on our airwaves!

Stumped about what to say? Here are a few suggestions to get your juices flowing, but feel free to share whatever story you’d like.

How did the Dan Ryan change your experience of your neighborhood?
Was it a convenience or inconvenience?
Did anything particularly good or bad result from its construction?
Do you recall any businesses razed or neighbors dislocated because of the construction? If so — what were they?
What do you remember thinking about the new highway at the time? Was it exciting or a pain?
Are there any places that are no longer around because of the construction that you particularly miss? How did your neighbors or friends feel about the Dan Ryan?

This story will air on Wednesday, June 5, during The Afternoon Shift. It’s part of a special collaboration between Curious City and the University of Chicago. We’re working with the students in a class called “Buildings as Evidence” to answer six questions about Chicago and this is one of them.

You can see how this group has been approaching their investigation and what they’ve found so far via their reporter’s notebook below:

Track the progress of the other investigations done by the University of Chicago class below:

Their findings will be posted on WBEZ.org in early June.

Keep up with all things Curious City via Twitter. Follow us @WBEZCuriousCity.

Being a breadwinner on $8.25 an hour

Tue, 21 May 2013 16:00:00 -0500

Listener Maggie Cassidy recently got a master’s degree in urban planning. She hasn’t found a job in her field yet, so she’s now working for about $10 an hour at two different part-time jobs. She said her own hustle has made her think seriously about people who hustle for even less. Little wonder, then, that she asked Curious City:

What is it like to live on a minimum-wage job in Chicago?

And Maggie got even more specific. She wanted to know who lives on Illinois’ state minimum wage of $8.25 an hour, and why.

“What is it like for people for whom this is their only option?” Maggie asked.

Well, it’s an opportune time for this question, because low-wage work is increasingly common in the Chicago area and nationwide. Since the 2008 recession, the majority of job growth has been in lower-wage positions, while middle class jobs have bounced back more slowly.

Recent debates at the national, state and local level about what the minimum wage should be, and whether raising that minimum wage is bad or good for business, have brought the issue to the forefront. Here I’m going to focus on Maggie's very personal question: What is it like to live here in Chicago on minimum wage, and who does it?

Someone who’s been waiting for us to ask

Krystal Maxie-Collins was 28 years old when I interviewed her for this story. Her last birthday (May 23), didn’t go as planned.

“Last year sucked,” said Maxie-Collins. She’s worked at Macy’s downtown for two years at minimum wage, with commissions on top of that. She has another part-time minimum wage job conducting phone interviews for a research center. Last May 23 she was expecting a decent deposit — nearly $500 — to drop into her account in the early evening.

She planned to do something fun, maybe get her hair done or go out.

“My check did not hit until 11:53 that night,” she said. “I’m like, it’s my birthday and all I did was sit around the house waiting on my money to hit my account.”

Maxie-Collins has four children (the oldest is nine, the youngest is three), a fiance who also works a minimum wage job downtown, and very little free time.

“I have been waiting for someone to ask me about how my day goes,” said Maxie-Collins, settling into a soft gray chair in her West Englewood home.

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A typical day for Maxie-Collins starts around 6 a.m. She gets dressed, makes breakfast, gets her kids ready for the day and flies out the door to a bus to get downtown. Selling shoes at Macy’s is a grind: She has to meet daily sales quotas in order to qualify for commissions. She takes few breaks, she says. After Macy’s, Maxie-Collins often hurries to her other job, where she sometimes stays until ten at night. She attends jobs several days a week, but her schedule varies.

Her brother-in-law cares for the kids while their parents are at work, and her two older children are with their father in Indiana for the year because Maxie-Collins didn’t want them to be in Chicago Public Schools, at least not while some schools are threatened with closure.

Despite constantly working, Maxie-Collins says she’s barely surviving.

“At the end of the week, I still don’t have enough money to put food on the table or clothes on my kids’ back, buy them shoes or school supplies,” she said. She buys a weekly CTA pass because she never has enough on hand for the month, and she and her fiance barely cover the household bills.

“It would just help if … what I’m doing was actually something that I could feed my family off of without having to be on public assistance,” Maxie-Collins said. She receives food stamps and Medicaid to supplement a budget that barely makes ends meet.

That domestic situation is belied by Maxie-Collins’ physical appearance. She invests in make-up, good clothes (she’s in a fine white sweater when I visit), and jewelry.

“At Macy’s they want you to have this image,” she said. “You have to look nice. But I can’t even afford to buy the clothes that would help me sell shoes for them.”

A growing, but disparate low-wage workforce

One of Maggie's follow-up questions had to do with paying bills. “How does a ComEd bill get paid on minimum wage?” she asked. “How does a CTA pass get purchased on minimum wage?”

The answer is — the bills barely get paid at all.

A 2009 study by policy research group Social IMPACT Research Center found that to independently meet basic needs (housing, child care, food, transportation and health care) in Illinois, a parent with a preschooler and a school-age kid would need to make $23.22 an hour working full-time. That calculation assumes the family receives neither public aid nor the help of family members, but it considers relevant tax credits. There’s no budget for leisure, travel or emergencies.

“It is such a bare-bones budget that if anything happens, anything unexpected, then that family is no longer economically self-sufficient,” said Jennifer Clary, the study’s author. Clary crunched numbers for 2012 to run a different scenario, one that includes modest savings for emergencies and retirement. With those accounted for, Clary says a worker with two children would need to make $34.29 per hour.

That’s more than four times what Maxie-Collins makes.

“Increasingly this is the situation that families are facing and will continue to face if low-wage jobs really do come to dominate our labor market,” Clary said.

There are an estimated 400,000 minimum-wage earners in Illinois. When it comes to low-wage work, however, one study suggests a troubling trend. At the request of minimum wage activist groups, University of Illinois researcher Marc Doussard looked at workers who make $12 or less in the greater Chicago area. In 2011, the study suggests, these workers represented nearly a third of the area’s employed adults. That’s up from a quarter of the adult employed workforce just a decade ago.

“You probably would have to go ask a few people on the street and you’d find somebody,” said Doussard. “It’s just that big a portion of the workforce at this point.”

Doussard’s research suggests there’s no such thing as a typical low-wage worker in the Chicago area; the numbers distribute across race, age and education level with few clear majorities, although the low-wage workforce is generally getting older, whiter and more educated. That said, women, African-Americans, Latinos and those with less than a college education are still disproportionately represented among low-wage workers. And a majority of Chicago’s adult low-wage workers live in households whose only income is from low-wage work.

There’s also no typical low-wage job. Chicago’s low-wage jobs are distributed between the retail, food service, administrative and transportation sectors, with smaller percentages in production, cleaning and maintenance, personal care, management, education, healthcare and protective services. Increasingly, low-wage jobs are part-time or use flexible scheduling that varies week-to-week.

Jose Luis Gallardo, a construction worker and day labor organizer with the Latino Union, sees that instability with the day labor population.

“In the morning they are day laborers and in the afternoon they work for restaurant or for a valet parking,” he said. “We don’t place our hopes only in construction as a source of work, because many times there’s nothing.”

Economic mobility on the decline

Maggie’s question about living on minimum wage raises a related question: If living on minimum wage is tough, how do minimum-wage earners see their future prospects?

We received some striking comments from Dale Mitchell, a retired 64-year-old who now works at a Target store in Chicago’s Uptown neighborhood. He devotes his minimum-wage earnings to his son’s college education. Although he feels he has a choice about the job (he retired from a lucrative career in advertising), he thinks his younger co-workers have a dramatically different outlook.

“I think what gets eroded is high expectations,” Mitchell said. “When we started out looking for jobs out of college we had all the expectations we were gonna be getting a job. ... And we were gonna be getting a job that was gonna be a salary, not punching a clock.”

A recent national study spearheaded by the Associated Press found workers making less than $35,000 a year are overwhelmingly pessimistic about their future opportunities for advancement. Satisfaction with the work lagged behind the rest of the working population, and 37 percent said they “feel like their employer treats them like they could be easily replaced.”

The prognosis was even more devastating when workers were asked about wages and benefits: Less than half said that their employers offer good benefits, and just a third think they are paid well for their jobs.

“What’s your future as far as wages are concerned?” Mitchell said of the young people at Target. “And if it’s uncertain, how do you plan your future? When you’re 22 years old and you’re holding down two jobs ... for what?”

Krystal Maxie-Collins knows those questions well. She wants to leave Chicago and return to Minneapolis, where she once lived for awhile with her children in a homeless shelter. She remembers it warmly, as a friendlier, safer place than Chicago. She had a job at Macy’s there, too. Here, she says it’s harder to get through the day.

“We put out this great image,” she said. “And then when we come home we’re coming home to bad neighborhoods, we come home to violence, gang activity.”

She came back to Chicago, pregnant, to take care of her mother, who died of breast cancer days before her youngest son was born.

It was a logical choice to go back to Macy’s. And after her recent involvement in a downtown low-wage workers’ strike, Maxie-Collins says her store raised the base wage for all employees from $8.25 to $8.50, and offered her full-time hours there. But that does little, she says, to get her closer to her goals.

“People who run the store, they’re driving off in Jags, they’re driving off in ‘Benzes,” Maxie-Collins said. She wants to go back to school, to save money for her kids’ college, and she wants a little freedom. “I would like to drive my kids to the zoo one day, or something.”

Lewis Wallace is a Pritzker Journalism Fellow at WBEZ. Follow him @lewispants.

So, what’s (still) made in the Chicago area?

Mon, 20 May 2013 17:31:00 -0500

Dozens of you have started our Curious City excursions with great questions. Some of those questions were subtle. Others were, um, less so. But few of these questions had an answer turn so much on one word.

Jessica Chronister of Chicago’s Logan Square neighborhood asked, “What’s still being manufactured in Chicago in terms of factory-made items?”

We didn’t notice how one word — “still” — could be taken, at least not until it popped up during an interview.

“Well, it’s interesting how you framed the question ‘What’s still being manufactured in the Chicago region,’ ” said Garett Ballard-Rosa, a policy analyst at the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning. “Manufacturing’s never left the Chicago region.”

Many of us may have assumed that Chicago’s evolved out of the industrial age. But then, there’s counterevidence: The South Side’s Ford plant makes cars; mills in Gary, Indiana, churn out steel; and one factory makes a Chicago neighborhood smell like chocolate brownies.

But these are operations you notice on your own, since they overwhelm your eyes or one of your other senses. (Again, just try forgetting a neighborhood that smells like brownies!)

There is, though, another side to the region’s manufacturing profile. It’s just not so easy to spot.

“Our manufacturing segment is composed of a lot of small and medium size manufacturers,” Ballard-Rosa said.

Ballard-Rosa explained how we stack up; Chicago, he said, is the second-largest manufacturing center in the nation, behind Los Angeles. And, unlike cities such as Detroit and Seattle — where one specific industry makes up more than half of the manufacturing scene — our manufacturers are diverse: We make Lava lamps, lollipops, leather, plastics, martial arts uniforms, trophies, etc.

That is, we make all sorts of things.

But Jessica and I put a face on this smaller side of manufacturing. We started small and then got a little bigger.

First stop: West Side granola

The Milk and Honey brand of granola is made at a West Side industrial kitchen that’s infused with the smell of honey and oats. Owners Carol Watson and Karen Skrainy gave me and producer Logan Jaffe the opportunity to see the making of flavors like Pumpkin Spice, Blueberry Pecan Mix and Rick Bayless’s Mexican Mix.

“It’s not a fancy, highly automated procedure whatsoever,” Skrainy told me. “We do it just like you would at home. In standard-sized sheet pans we mix all the ingredients by hand, bake them in hand, stir them by hand.”

The kitchen is big for Milk and Honey’s 10 workers, but Skrainy and Watson said they hope to expand without having to move locations again. On average, they churn out 330 bags of granola each day.

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Watson started the granola business out of the kitchen of her cafe, which bears the same name. They sold enough of the crunchy stuff that they had to grow into a new location. And more growth turned into yet another move.

Interestingly, Watson doubts expansion will lead them to turn this “mostly by hand” process into an automated one. Instead, she said, they’re likely to just add more hands.

Watson said though they’re small, they can also pull off a national contract with Whole Foods. Milk and Honey’s location helps with that.

“Chicago is centrally located for shipping because if we were on the East Coast or the West Coast. So it works out well for us,” she said.

Coffee (grinders) for the world

Location is key for another small manufacturer that Jessica and I visited together: a midsize firm called Modern Process Equipment, located in Chicago’s Little Village neighborhood.

If you drink Intelligentsia coffee, or if you ever drank Turkish coffee while in the Middle East, there’s a good chance those coffee beans were ground by an MPE grinder.

Company president Dan Ephraim said MPE ships between 30 and 35 percent of its product overseas.

“We’re the largest coffee grinder manufacturer in the world,” he said. “In the United States, we produce over 90 percent of the coffee grinders for industrial and commercial applications.”

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MPE employs about 100 workers, several of which were on hand to demonstrate their skills to Jessica and me. At one point, we passed by people who operate machines that cut metal with high-pressure streams of water. Others assembled or tested coffee grinding machines that are large enough to put your home or office version to shame.

Unlike the manually-driven processes at Milk and Honey, automation is key at MPE. At one point, we were introduced to a machine that uses lasers to count coffee grounds.

Ephraim and his brother bought the company 30 years ago. Back then the firm concentrated on reconditioning grinders. But the brothers innovated.

“Pretty much all our machines are computer-operated,” Ephraim said. “Anything that is accurate or repetitive, we try to computerize it.”

The future is lean, small

Innovation is something that experts at CMAP mentioned several times, and it’s a point that addresses a myth that Chicago no longer manufactures much.

CMAP’s Simone Weil said we make lots of stuff, but automation has thinned our manufacturing workforce.

“The flip side of that though and the kind of positive shift that we’re seeing the work force, since you need fewer people, they need higher skills,” she said.

CMAP says the region lost manufacturing jobs between 2000 and 2010, but automation wasn’t the only cause.

Weil says we sent manufacturing jobs overseas, and some employers turned full-time employees into part-timers. But she says we’ve recovered a bit, by adding 20,000 manufacturing jobs over the past few years.

She said upping recruitment for these jobs is important in growing the more skilled manufacturing workforce.

Weil’s colleague — Ballard Rosa — says innovation is Chicago’s key to a sustainable manufacturing center.

“The number one thing the region needs to do is re-establish itself as a center of manufacturing research that leads to new commercial products and processes and efficiencies,” he said.

That would make our region more competitive, more vibrant and, maybe — when it comes to manufacturing, anyway — a little more noticeable.

Chicago diners, side of extra crispy stories

Tue, 14 May 2013 18:12:00 -0500

The Slinger. The Jumpball. The Garbage Plate. The Deuces Wild RIP.

If you’re a regular at Chicago-area diners, you may know that these are the names of some legendary signature specials. And if you don’t yet, you’re in for a treat because Curious Citizen Rachel Kimura asked us:

"Where are the area's oldest diners and what are their stories?"

Rachel elaborated: "I love going to diners where it is evident that the waitresses and cooks have been around forever and probably have many stories to tell. I love that diners are a place where families, blue-collar workers, elderly couples, and hung-over twenty somethings can eat together."

Me too, Rachel. When Curious City creator and producer Jennifer Brandel asked if I’d investigate the question, I said (paraphrasing), Heck yeah.

I wrote, “I'm a lifelong fan of diners, thanks to the only grandfather I ever knew, the late, great Frank Hugh. I remember three of his diners vividly. One was an actual old railroad dining car parked just west of my great-grandfather's laundry on Grand Avenue.”

OK, so back to Rachel’s question(s): Old? Check. Thanks to domu’s terrific list of vintage Chicago restaurants.

But how do we define a diner? As I wrote previously, our friends at Chicagoist happened to have listed their favorite diners recently. With all due respect, not all their favorites are diners — at least not in my book.

After a Waffle Combo Meal with two eggs over easy, ham, hash browns and coffee at Cozy Corner Restaurant and Pancake House in Chicago (the Kelvyn Park location, not the 1977 original Logan Square location) I came to a decision. How will we define a diner?

I know it when I see it.

A detour, for the sake of comparison

But first, I had to go off to Asia for work, which actually helped further define our diner parameters.

In Shanghai, I went on a futile search for the Four Heavenly Kings: dabing (Chinese pancake), youtiao (Chinese fry bread), steamed sticky rice ball and soy milk. This was once the most common breakfast order on land first settled in the 5th century, in the most populous city in the world. But, I was told repeatedly, it’s old fashioned street food that they didn’t have. Would I like tea or caffè latte instead?

In Singapore I made my way to the original 1919 location of Killiney Kopitiam, the oldest coffee shop in the Southeast Asian city-state-island country. Their specialty is a thick crust version of the national breakfast: kaya toast with soft cooked eggs, and coffee.

So after a global diner race against a ticking clock, I further refined our diner parameters: They would be diners on an endangered species list. And perhaps they could represent us on the UNESCO intangible cultural heritage list. Some are more “endangered” than others, and one is, in fact, extinct.

1920s to 1950s Pullman Rail Journeys

But before we tell some of the stories of the area’s oldest diners, we need to visit the origin story. Luckily history had pulled into the station. At Chicago’s Amtrak yard we visited some of the original Pullman train cars, which date between the ‘20s and ‘50s. There, we spoke with executive chef Daniel Traynor and head steward Jason Makor as they prepared to depart for New Orleans. George Pullman established his eponymous company in 1862. Traynor has researched Pullman culinary history and explained that every line had a signature French toast. Pullman bread, the dense, crumbed white bread still baked in a lidded metal pan, was invented to fit in tight train galleys. Makor to this day recreates the meticulous table settings; in particular, he uses doilies for every compartmentalized dish, as Pullman himself dictated until his death in 1897. Traynor explained that dining cars once connected farmers, local food producers, diners, and chefs. These dining cars also contributed to a long-term trend; the cars were self-contained, meaning they could operate as free-standing restaurants. So when dining cars went out of commission, some became the diners we know today.

1926 Franks Diner in Kenosha, Wisconsin

Husband and wife owners Julie Rittmiller and Kevin Ervin clarified a common misconception about Franks: It is not, in fact, a repurposed railroad diner car. In 1926 Greek immigrant Anthony Franks bought the brand new restaurant from Jerry O'Mahony Inc., "Lunch Car Builders," in Bayonne, N.J. It was shipped on rail flat car (hence its design), and it was filled with dishware and flatware, too. Julie showed us the original bread box which will be refurbished and displayed. She said the diner is haunted by an unknown female ghost who — late one night — blew open a storeroom door. This, it turned out, was helpful, mostly because Julie’s hands happened to be full at the time. Franks special: the Garbage Plate.

1933 Moon’s Sandwich Shop, Chicago

Let’s address the elephant in the room. Moon’s opened in 1933 and was named for its former moonshiner owners. In its current building since 1947, you may notice most everyone in the room — in front of the counter, as well as behind it — is African-American. Except perhaps for a few longtime regulars and owner Jim Radek, who’s a cross between Bruce Willis and Al Pacino. Radek, a former regular due to his work as a neighborhood police officer, told us the harrowing tale of one rough day. Nearly two dozen locals chased a guy into Moon’s, or rather to its threshold. Radek told them they couldn’t continue the pursuit because Moon’s was a sanctuary. Like church. And so it was and remains to this day. Moon’s special: the Jumpball.

1937 Diner Grill, Chicago

Open 24 hours a day since 1937 (“March 15 8AM,” to be precise, according to the original framed black and white photo behind the counter). Managers Ricardo Hernandez (days) and Kenny Coster (nights) have been working the grill for 12 and 11 years, respectively. The restaurant is an old trolley car and sits at the end of its former trolley line. The busiest hours are between 3 a.m. and 6 a.m. Ricardo once worked the night shift himself and says he doesn’t know how Kenny still does it. Kenny says he’s had to talk would-be pole dancers down during their night of revelry. While passing out is not encouraged, they do let diners sleep it off, presumably if they can stay perched on the stools. Diner Grill’s special: the Slinger.

1960 Ohio House Coffee Shop, Chicago

While the coffee shop dated back 53 years, owner Cathy Roquemore was there about 30. Cathy served the last Deuces Wild on Sunday, April 28, 2013. After more than three decades behind the counter, she was given 30 days to vacate. Cathy started out as an employee — the only employee, actually. The former owner, a drinking buddy of her husband’s, came to her house and said, “Cathy, I need you!” She bought the place herself when her husband died. She said she was going to take a two-week break then decide what to do next. Regulars can find Cathy, former waitress Kim Jurgensen, and each other on their Facebook page, Save the Ohio House Coffee Shop. Ohio House Coffee Shop special: Deuces Wild RIP.

A big thanks to Chicago’s most notable diner owners and managers who also took the time to chat:

1923 Lou Mitchell’s manager Heleen Thanas
1938 Palace Grill owner George Lemperis
1939 White Palace Grill owner George Liakopoulos
1947 Silver Palm owner David Gevercer

When I started investigating Rachel’s diner question, I’d written, “I will be carrying my own personal bottle of real maple syrup, and my own thermally insulated whipped cream.”

I didn’t. Because that wouldn’t have been nice. And one of the rules at diners: Be nice or leave. Pass me the pancake syrup, because I’d like to stay and hear some more stories.

Follow Louisa Chu @louisachu.

Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated the name of the company that Anthony Franks bought his restaurant from. The company's name is Jerry O'Mahony Inc., "Lunch Car Builders," of Bayonne, N.J.

Reporter's Notebook: Life in public housing vs. the fanciest downtown apartment

Thu, 09 May 2013 13:45:00 -0500

Curious Citizen Heather Radke asked about the relationship between where we live and our everyday lives, and she wants the answer to be based on real experience. If you have leads or a point for us to consider, please comment below, or hit us at any of the social media outlets listed above!

What is the ultimate Chicago book?

Tue, 07 May 2013 14:15:00 -0500

Curious Citizen Pavel Gigov asked a question a few months ago that might have been answered in Rachel Shteir's recent New York Times Book Review article. Pavel wants to know which single book could teach him the most about Chicago. In Shteir's infamous review of three recent books about Chicago, she gave short shrift to the city's literary context, instead focusing on myriad problems plaguing "Poor Chicago." Nearly three weeks out and, with our collective ire down to simmering, now is as good a time as any to answer Pavel's question.

To start off, we reached out to someone who’s at least familiar with the theme: Annie Tully, who directs the One Book, One Chicago program at the Chicago Public Library. After huddling with library staff and consulting their master lists, she sent us a list of titles that could potentially fit the bill for Pavel. That list, produced below, includes fiction, non-fiction, poetry, children's literature and graphic novels. While The Encyclopedia of Chicago contains a lot of facts about the city, Chicago Poems by Carl Sandberg may convey more essential truths. Could Gwendolyn Brooks’ Bronzeville Boys and Girls be more instructive than Mike Royko's early columns?

Of course we can't settle on one book to define Chicago, because there are as many “Chicagos” as there are Chicagoans. Rachel Shteir would certainly have a different choice (possibly Sister Carrie) than Neil Steinberg. But that just means we get to have a conversation about our choices and hopefully understand more about the vast array of different Chicagos.

So please choose a book from this list that best explains Chicago as you understand it. If your choice isn't listed, please add it. Maybe Rick Kogan's Dr. Night Life should be included, who knows? We'll talk about the top five books next Monday on Morning Shift.

Andrew Gill is a WBEZ web producer. Follow him @andrewgill.

The Chicago accent and the Chicago ‘blaccent’

Mon, 06 May 2013 16:50:00 -0500

A few months ago, Curious City tackled the enigma known as the “Chicago accent” — its origins, who speaks with it, and how the accent is evolving today. One important qualification? Not all Chicagoans speak the dialect made famous by SNL’s superfans. Linguists say African-American Chicagoans are more likely to speak a dialect called AAE: African-American English.

In our first article on the Chicago accent, I characterized AAE this way:

“AAE is remarkable for being consistent across urban areas; that is, Boston AAE sounds like New York AAE sounds like L.A. AAE, etc.”

That description didn’t sit well with reader Amanda Hope, who left the following (unedited) comment on our website:

I'm an African-American woman who was born and raised on Chicago's Southside but I've lived in Los Angeles and Washington, DC. I've also spent a significant amount of time in the South. Let me be the first to tell you that AAE has a variety of accents. In fact, Washington,DC and Baltimore, MD are about a 45 minute car drive away from one another and there is a stark contrast between the accents of blacks from Baltimore and the accents of blacks from DC. To take my point even further, Black Chicagoans make fun of the accent of Black St. Louis residents all the time because of their "errrrrr" sound. I'm so tired of articles and studies suggesting that African Americans are comprised of some homogenous group. There's actually a lot of diversity among African Americans from religion to food to ACCENTS.

And, when I met Amanda in person, she elaborated. “I found myself a little offended by the statement about there being an overall African-American accent or dialect,” she said. “In my experience travelling around the country and living in different places, I have heard very different accents among African-American communities.”

The specificity of Amanda’s examples — e.g., the difference between D.C. and Baltimore AAE, as well as the St. Louis “errr” — stuck with both me and my editor, Shawn Allee. If AAE really were “consistent across urban areas,” how could Amanda have heard these things? Was it possible that we (not to mention all those other articles and studies driving Amanda up the wall) had missed something important? We had tried highlighting the diversity of accents within Chicago, but had we missed an opportunity to highlight what makes Chicago AAE unique?

Chicago is 33 percent African-American, meaning AAE might just be the second-most spoken dialect in this city. So we at Curious City decided to do some digging: Is AAE “consistent across urban areas,” or is it diverse?

Tag, You’re It

Dialects include a distinctive grammar, vocabulary, and pronunciation. But Amanda and I were concerned only with pronunciation — literally how AAE sounds and the extent to which that’s uniform. As we wrapped up our talk, Amanda suggested a place to start listening: YouTube.

In the videos she forwarded, African-American men and women, usually in their teens or twenties, read a list of words: aunt, roof, route, wash, oil, etc. This is an “accent tag.” Accent taggers rep their city’s local dialect by reading a word list. They compare notes, applaud the most local accents, and poke fun at funny pronunciations. You find out about the meme when someone else “tags” you, and once you complete the tag, you can tag others. Think of it as the schoolyard game turned high-tech — a kind of citizens linguistics project.

A YouTube user named miszjabre, for example, reads off the following: Aunt, Roof, Route, Wash, Oil, Theater, Iron, Salmon, Caramel, Fire, Water, Sure, Data, Ruin, Crayon, New Orleans, Pecan, Both, Again, Probably, Spitting image, Alabama, Lawyer, Coupon, Mayonnaise, Syrup, Pajamas, Caught, Naturally, Aluminium, Envelope.

None of the taggers I contacted could say just who drafted the original word list, but chances are it wasn’t a linguist. Professional linguists tend not to survey whether people say “care-a-mel” or “car-mel,” because those stereotypical pronunciations reveal little about a person’s linguistic roots. But there’s no question that accent tags accomplish what Amanda suggested; they show that while AAE around the country may share characteristics, it is not strictly uniform.

Just listen to how these three taggers, from Chicago, Philadelphia, and New York, pronounce “water.”

Accent tags also show that AAE speakers are thinking about regional variety. A lot, it turns out. Theopolus McGraw and Ashlee Nichols are just two of the taggers currently repping Chicago online, and their videos, combined, have more than 25,000 views. Both pronounce the word list in what they playfully term their Chicago “blaccents.” Theopolus tells me it’s a blend: a little bit typical Chicago, a little bit African-American English. He says it’s how people talked in Englewood and Chicago Heights, where he grew up.

Theopolus knows, for example, that like many of the people in his neighborhood, he drops his r’s (“You know, ‘you a hata,’ ‘I’m a playa,’ stuff like that,” he says). But he also knows he’s got those fronted Chicago vowels that make other people say he’s talking out of his nose. Ashlee acknowledges that she pronounces “towel” and “sausage” in the typical Chicago fashion (as “tahl” and “sahsage”). But she also stresses her elongated Southern vowels. She doesn’t go “in,” she says. She goes “einn.” She transforms the “i” sound in words like “nine” and “five” into an “ah.” So, she’ll say “nahne” and “fahve.”

Ashlee and Theopolus emphasize the “Chicago” in “Chicago blaccent,” because they know there are other blaccents out there. Both tell me they discovered them in college. Ashlee and Theopolus both attended historically Black universities in Florida and Washington, D.C., and they still crack up when they remember their college friends’ accents. “Floridians don’t usually put endings on their words,” Ashlee says, laughing. “They’d just change the word completely. Like the word ‘out.’ They may say ‘at’ or something like that.”

Theopolus remembers a roommate from Philadelphia who pronounced his l’s in the back in his throat. “He’d say ‘Fulladelphia’ or ‘the Iggles’ [instead of the Eagles],” he says. Theopolus drops the final “r” in a word like “car,” whereas his roommate pronounced it. Theopolus says he questioned his roommate’s practice of inserting r’s into some words. “Every time I talked to him, it was like ‘Teddy, hand me a cup of warter.’ I’m like, ‘A cup of what? What is warter?’ ”

After being immersed in blaccents from across the country at school, Theopolus has developed a theory: “In most cities, when they talk about the way people talk, that’s the standard accent. Then there’s another way, which is usually African-American, depending on the population of the city. There’s a Philadelphia accent, and then there’s a Philadelphia blaccent, because there’s a lot of Black people in Philadelphia. There’s a Baltimore accent, and then there’s a Baltimore blaccent. It’s not always going to quite sound the same.”

Listening to Ashlee and Theopolus, you might ask how the idea of AAE’s uniformity ever took hold. What, if anything, do blaccents have in common?

The origins of AAE ‘uniformity’

Last October, I talked with Richard Cameron, head of the department of linguistics at The University of Illinois at Chicago, about the city’s diverse accents. Cameron explained that AAE is a variety of English that’s often (but not always) spoken by African-Americans. There is “a great deal of uniformity and diversity within it,” he explained, “but by and large a curious aspect of AAE is its uniformity in such distant places as Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, [and] Detroit.”

Cameron wasn’t going out on a limb here. Linguists have been describing AAE as more or less “uniform” since they started studying it in Northern cities in the late 1960s. In 1972, William Labov, the father of sociolinguistics, described AAE as a “uniform dialect spoken by the majority of black young in most parts of the United States today.” But what exactly did he mean by “uniform?” As scientific language goes, it might strike you as a squishy term, but here’s what linguists seem to mean by it: AAE is “uniform” because speakers share certain core linguistic characteristics, regardless of geography.

The list of so-called core characteristics can run long, but here’s a sampling. Early AAE studies concluded that AAE speakers — regardless of geography — pronounced “west” as “wes,” “bath” as “baf,” and dropped the final r in words like “fear” and “car,” pronouncing them as “feah” and “cah.” (Theopolus remarked that dropped r’s were common among his college classmates. On the list of blaccent similarities, he says, “that’s the main one.”)

When I talk to Dennis Preston and John Baugh, Professors of linguistics at Oklahoma State University and Washington University in St. Louis, they add a few additional items to the list. AAE speakers, Baugh says, are likely to merge the “i” and “e” sounds in words like “pin” and “pen,” making them nearly indistinguishable (think straight “pens” and ink “pins”). Preston says they’re also likely to transform the “i” sounds in “time” and “night” into an “ah,” pronouncing them as “tahme” and “nahght.” (Another example would be Ashlee’s “nahne” and “fahve” for “nine” and “five.”) If these pronunciations strike you as Southern, you’re right.

“If we look back at the Great Migration, then the vast majority of African-Americans who ended up in New York, Buffalo, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles and places like that came from [the South],” Preston explains. “A cause for consistency is that origin. That’s the base. I mean, if it hadn’t been there, then we wouldn’t have an African-American English at all.”

Consider this: Prior to the Great Migration, African-Americans in the South tended to speak a dialect of Southern English similar to that of their white neighbors. When they migrated en masse to Northern and Western cities between 1910 and 1970, they brought those accents with them. In segregated cities such as Chicago, black migrants were forced to live together in ghettos where Southern dialects remained the local standard. Small wonder, then, that a mere two or three generations later, three African-Americans living in LA, Chicago, and Washington, D.C., might share speech features.

Challenging ‘uniformity’

But ask Walt Wolfram, an AAE pioneer and linguist based at North Carolina State University, and he’ll tell you that the uniformity narrative gets too much play. In fact, he’s gone so far as to call AAE’s uniformity a “sociolinguistic myth.” And perhaps he should know, since — by his own admission — he helped create it in the first place.

Wolfram was part of the first wave of linguists who researched AAE in Northern cities in the 1960s. (He performed his work in Detroit). At that time, he recalls, AAE was uncharted territory. “In a sense,” he explains, “it was sort of an exotic other. Most early researchers who did research on AAE, like Labov and myself, were white. And so we came into these communities as people who had grown up in segregated situations. I would say that that was reflected in some of the things [we noticed].”

As newcomers not yet attuned to AAE’s subtleties, Wolfram and his colleagues noticed uniformity. They were “totally impressed” he says, by the fact that African-American speech in New York, Philadelphia, Detroit, and LA shared features that differed from those of the surrounding white populations. Uniformity became his and other linguists’ “theme,” he says, and — wittingly or unwittingly — they perpetuated it. “I think we overlooked our own biases in terms of seeing regionality,” he says. Which doesn’t mean that African-Americans overlooked claims of uniformity. Wolfram remembers fielding hard questions from African-American attendees of his talks over the years — questions he now wishes he’d taken more seriously.

As it happened, Wolfram’s “aha moment” didn’t occur until the 1990s, when he began studying African-American speakers in long-standing, rural North Carolina communities. When he played tape of these older, rural African-Americans to study participants, he was surprised to find that 90 percent of listeners misidentified the speakers as white. After generations living alongside white Carolingians in isolated, rural communities, African-American Carolingians had started to sound like their neighbors. It’s an extreme example of what linguists sometimes call long-term accommodation: the process whereby accents take on features of surrounding dialects. Accommodation is the biggest source of regional difference within AAE, and it’s probably the root of most of the differences Ashlee and Theopolus observed in college. Remember Theopolus’ roommate, the Philadelphian who retained the final “r” in “car”? By not dropping his r’s, he stood out among his African-American classmates, but chances are he would have fit in with other Philadelphians. Like Theopolus and Ashlee, the roommate had a “blend”: part Philly, part AAE.

Everyone practices linguistic accommodation to some extent, usually unconsciously. But Ashlee and Theopolus suggest that African-Americans may feel greater pressure to do it. “We don’t speak the norm,” Ashlee says. “So if we speak differently than the norm, we’re looked down upon generally.” For her, African-American English is largely about pitch. She believes that African-Americans often speak at a lower register than their peers. (She could be right. In a forthcoming article on AAE prosody, North Carolina State University linguist Erik Thomas cites research suggesting that African-Americans may speak at a lower overall register than their peers, or, alternately, that they may employ a wider range of pitches in informal speech.) For Ashlee, accommodation means trying to speak at a higher register with people she doesn’t know, enunciating more clearly until she gets a sense of whether the person “seems cool and open-minded.” “I hate that. I hate having to do that,” she says.

Theopolus doesn’t think he consciously shifts his speech, but he’s equally aware of the consequences of speaking a certain way. A former girlfriend, he explains, was part African-American and part Irish. She spoke with a “typical Chicago” accent. His cousins called her “bougie,” and it riled him. “I’d say, she’s not bougie, she just grew up with a Chicago accent. Just because she talks like that doesn’t mean she talks white. Just because she’s black doesn’t mean she has to have a blaccent.” Theopolus probably isn’t alone when he says he sometimes feels “stuck in the middle.” “I’m in between,” he says. “I wouldn’t ever fit in, you know, on solid ground.”

But for better or worse, regional, long-term accommodation seems to be on the uptick. In ‘60s Detroit, Wolfram recalls, AAE still sounded Southern, having no trace of the fronted vowels that would have suggested Great Lakes influence. And there was a good reason for that lack of accommodation: social segregation. For accommodation to happen, accents need to mingle. But four decades later, Wolfram says, we’re in a very different linguistic and cultural landscape. “Already today African-American speakers who live in New York sound New York. African-American speakers who have fairly extensive contact with white communities in Chicago and Philadelphia take on more of the regional qualities of those dialect areas,” he says.

Assuming we continue to see our neighborhoods, workplaces, and schools become more and more diverse (we’ve got our fingers crossed), that accommodation will likely continue. Expect to hear AAE become a lot more regional.

Whose Ears?

Clearly AAE is not completely uniform. Even supposedly “core” features like those dropped r’s can turn out to be not so “core” in different parts of the country. But then just how diverse is it? John Baugh, the AAE scholar and Professor of linguistics at Washington University in St. Louis, is just one of the many African-Americans who’ve entered the (admittedly small) sociolinguistics field since the 1960s. He suggests that your view of AAE’s uniformity or diversity may ultimately say more about you than about AAE.

Baugh suggests that dialects have no unbiased listeners. “There’s a degree of linguistic relativity that comes into play based on your linguistic exposure,” he explains. “It really does matter how attuned you are to the dialects, and for obvious reasons people are attuned to the dialects in their local region, where they interact with those dialects on a day-to-day basis.”

People with extensive experience in African-American communities (think Ashlee Nichols, Theopolus McGraw, and our commenter, Amanda Hope) could be more attuned to regional difference. Pronounce “Boston” as “Bawstin” or “soft” as “sawft,” and they’ll probably notice. But as the history of AAE research demonstrates, outsiders fixate on AAE’s similarities: the dropped r’s, the merged i’s and e’s, and the conservative vowels. Frustratingly, AAE offers enough evidence to satisfy those looking for similarity or difference.

“So is AAE diverse? Is it consistent? Or does it just come down to who's listening?” I ask Baugh.

His response?

“Yes, yes, yes.”

Have an accent video of your own you’d like to share? Show us via Twitter. Mention @WBEZCuriousCity and use #CCAccents , #AccentTag

Annie Minoff is a production assistant for WBEZ's Sound Opinions. Follow her @annieminoff.

Would legal pot hit Chicago gangs’ pocketbooks?

Wed, 01 May 2013 14:54:00 -0500

Elmhurst resident Siva Iyer read Sudhir Venkatesh’s pop academic book Gang Leader for a Day, which got him thinking about the economics and industrial side of marijuana.

The culture around weed has changed over the years, enough that Colorado and Washington have legalized the drug. Is Illinois on the verge of putting legalization to a test? Not likely, but it’s worth contemplating. Earlier this year the Illinois House passed a medical marijuana act. And the city of Chicago has decriminalized possession, a policy designed to free up police hours. Officers can now ticket for possession of fewer than 15 grams.

Iyer, who works in the pharmaceutical industry, wondered how gangs would make up for any lost income if — one day — weed were sold on store shelves.

So Iyer asked Curious City:

If Illinois legalizes marijuana, how could that affect the economics of the drug trade among gangs?

The short answer is: not much.

Iyer and I went to visit Midwest drug czar Jack Riley in a downtown federal building. Riley is Special Agent in Charge of the Chicago Field Division for the Drug Enforcement Agency. The blunt-speaking agent described a “very toxic” and “profitable” relationship between Chicago street organizations and the Mexican cartels, but it doesn’t revolve around weed.

“If marijuana were to be legalized here,” Riley said, “it would in my opinion have virtually little or no effect on the income of gangs.”

Frankly, marijuana can be a logistical nightmare, Riley explained. It smells. It’s bulky. It’s hard to store. And it’s got a short shelf-life. That is, it’s the exact opposite of Chicago gangs’ and cartels’ actual drug of choice: heroin.

Here are the economics, according to Riley: A pound of decent-grade marijuana can run between $1,400-1,500. A kilo of cocaine sells for about $40,000. The real cash maker, Riley said, is the more compact heroin, which goes for $60,000 a kilo. He said it arrives from Mexico 90 percent pure and is sold at a purity of nine to 12 percent on the street after being cut and pumped with additives.

Riley said in the local drug trade, rival gangs collaborate these days over the dealing of heroin.

“They very seldom interacted with other gangs other than to fight. So their business relationships were siloed. If someone in that particular gang — we’ll talk about the Gangster Disciples — if somewhere in the GDs, [if] they didn’t have a connection to a Mexican source or supply, they simply couldn’t get the drugs,” Riley said. “Well now, as long as everyone’s making money from business, we do begin to see, for instance, the Gangster Disciples, the Latin Kings and other criminal organizations begin to work together.”

The Sinaloa Cartel uses Chicago as a hub to distribute throughout the Midwest. The cartel’s equivalent of a CEO is El Chapo Guzman and he’s Chicago’s Public Enemy No. 1. The last criminal bestowed with that title was Al Capone.

Riley said Mexican cartels still do the majority of trafficking of marijuana, but higher grades of marijuana arrive from the Pacific Northwest and Canada. At this point there’s reason to suspect that — even if Illinois tokers could buy legal weed from corner stores — these folks would still stay in business.

“Regardless of what we did on the legalization side, it would never eliminate the black market,” Riley said.

I interviewed a guy who sells weed in the Chicago area. (For obvious legal reasons, he didn’t want me to use his name.) He agrees with Riley and added, “If they legalize it, I feel they gonna take all the good sh*t off the market and make it super expensive and sell all the bad sh*t for the legal consumption. I like it the way it is now.”

He calls Mexican weed “regular weed,” lacking the potency of domestic marijuana. He said his weed comes from California and is known on the street as “loud,” which is a pun on the loud smell and signals that it was grown via hydroponics.

If Illinois legalizes marijuana, he said, the government would certainly tax the drug. But he explained that dealers already deal with a drug hierarchy and a tax of sorts: The weed connect sells to a middleman, who is charged a tax. That middleman might want to make $200 on the package, so he’ll “tax” the next dealer.

But as the marijuana dealer I interviewed said, “I can kind of deal with that than the government.”

Natalie Moore is a WBEZ reporter. Follow her @natalieymoore.