WBEZ | Dynamic Range

Architect’s Pilsen vision is green and fashion friendly

Fri, 17 May 2013 16:23:00 -0500

Architect Patricia Saldaña Natke grew up on the 4800 block of South Marshfield Avenue, in Chicago’s Back of the Yards neighborhood. Her parents, immigrants from Mexico, worked in the Stockyards.

Some days after school, Saldaña Natke would take the bus away from her aging, blue collar neighborhood with its bungalows and smoke stacks, up to the Loop, and marvel at the sparkling skyscrapers and expansive public parks in the city’s downtown.

“I would look at the beautiful buildings and wonder why those kinds of spaces weren’t in existence where I lived,” Saldaña Natke recalled. “That’s the reason I became an architect; I felt that public places should be the greatest in the area of most need.”

Saldaña Natke channeled those beliefs into UrbanWorks, the architecture and planning firm she founded, which specializes in socially and environmentally conscious planning and design work -- the kind she dreamed about as a kid. She’s set her sights on one Chicago hood in particular: Pilsen.

“[Pilsen] needs to be a place where people can move upward in mobility,” Saldaña Natke said. “The entire core of why I work in Pilsen comes to the fact that there are neighborhoods that need a lot of attention.”

UrbanWorks’ previous Pilsen projects include a college dormitory intended to help keep students from the neighborhood on the path to academic success, a high school designed to resemble the copper canyons of Mexico and Saldaña Natke’s most ambitious project: a master plan for Pilsen.

In architecture and planning circles, a master plan is a grand vision for the future development of a neighborhood.

“It’s much more than a wish list,” Saldaña Natke said. “It may be implemented slightly different than the plan shows, but the core of it should remain intact.”

This plan isn’t funded, but Saldaña Natke is working with 25th Ward Alderman Danny Solis and the Department of Housing and Economic Development to assemble funds to inch her vision along.

Saldaña Natke consulted with Pilsen residents in a series of community meetings, including a neighborhood-wide meeting at Providence of God Catholic Church in 2004. The resulting plan aims to build on Pilsen’s assets: its strong Mexican cultural heritage, its main commercial drag zoned for pedestrian use and its historic architecture.

“The community says church steeples are its high rises,” Saldaña Natke said.

The plan calls for greater access to the Chicago River and also addresses what Saldaña Natke says are the neighborhood’s challenges: While the west side of Pilsen is served by the CTA’s Pink, Green and Orange Lines, the east side has few transportation options, leaving the neighborhood disconnected.

And, there is a surprising lack of green space in Pilsen. According to Saldaña Natke, the city requires two acres of green space for every 1,000 Chicago residents.

“But the Park District just said to us that the recommended amount is four acres of green space,” she said. “[Pilsen] is over 18 acres short.”

So, UrbanWorks’ master plan starts there. Saldaña Natke envisions more green space along the neighborhood’s largely industrial waterfront, and the transformation of an abandoned, surface-level railway that runs along Sangamon Street into a stretch of park—something like New York’s High Line or the Northwest Side’s Bloomingdale Trail, only without the elevation. Then, she hopes to transform the abandoned buildings that line the railroad into a fashion and textile incubator.

A fashion incubator?

Yes, Saldaña Natke says.

“You shouldn’t need to go to 900 North Michigan or Michigan Avenue to see all the high-end fashion shows. Why can’t it be in the neighborhoods?”

You can hear Saldaña Natke describe her dream in more detail in the audio above.

Dynamic Range showcases hidden gems unearthed from Chicago Amplified’s vast archive of public events and appears on weekends. Patricia Saldana Natke spoke at an event presented by the Chicago Architecture Foundation in April of 2013. Click here to hear the event in its entirety.

Robin Amer is a producer on WBEZ’s digital team. Follow her on Twitter @rsamer.

Edward Hirsch: Poems for my father(s)

Sat, 11 May 2013 08:00:00 -0500

The poet Edward Hirsch was born in Chicago in 1950, and many of his poems are haunted by little glimpses back into that old city of his youth. In the 2008 poem “Cotton Candy,” for example, Hirsch is again a small boy, walking with his grandfather over one of Chicago’s many bascule bridges:

We walked on the bridge over the Chicago River
for what turned out to be the last time,
and I ate cotton candy, that sugery air,
that sweet blue light spun out of nothingness.
It was just a moment, really, nothing more,
but I remember marveling at the sturdy cables
of the bridge that held us up
and threading my fingers through the long
and slender fingers of my grandfather,
an old man from the Old World
who long ago disappeared into the nether regions.
And I remember that eight-year-old boy
who had tasted the sweetness of air,
which still clings to my mouth
and disappears when I breathe.

There is pain here, but also tenderness, and maybe even a little nostalgia -- a recognizable combination where the subject matter is childhood and family.

As an adult, Hirsch won the Lanvan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets and the prestigious Rome Prize, as well as fellowships from the MacArthur and Guggenheim foundations (the latter of which he now chairs) and the National Endowment for the Arts.

But Hirsch’s future success was not necessarily forecast by his Chicago childhood. Early on Hirsch was burdened by a biological father, his “first father” as he calls him in one poem, with poor boundaries and cruel attachments. In one poem, Hirsch depicts Harold, nicknamed “Ruby,” talking openly to his young children about his sexual preferences and his frustration with their mother’s “frigidity.” Ruby then left the family when Edward was a still a child, an event Hirsch writes about in “My Father’s Back”:

There's an early memory that I carry around
In my mind
like an old photography in my wallet,
little graying and faded, a picture
That I don't much like
but nonetheless keep,
Fingering it now and then like a sore tooth,
Knowing it there,
not needing to see it anymore....
The sun slants down on the shingled roof.
The wind breathes in the needled pines.
And I am lying in the grass on my third birthday,
Red-faced and watchful
but not squalling yet,
Not yet rashed or hived up
from eating the wrong food
Or touching the wrong plant,
my father's leaving.

And yet, Hirsch was also cared for by his “other father” – the man who raised him. He writes about this father with the great longing of a grown-up son who has just lost his parent in “Early Sunday Morning”:

Give me back my father walking the halls
of Wertheimer Box and Paper Company
with sawdust clinging to his shoes.
Give me back his tape measure and his keys,
his drafting pencil and his order forms;
give me his daydreams on lined paper.
I don’t understand this uncontainable grief.
Whatever you had that never fit,
whatever else you needed, believe me,
my father, who wanted your business,
would squat down at your side
and sketch you a container for it.

Of channeling these feelings and memories into his work Hirsch said, “I became, I’d say, addicted to this idea: That you could take the muck and mire of your own life, you could take the messy things in your own life, the difficult experiences you didn’t understand, and try to turn them into something.”

“And the idea that you could turn them into something that you thought was beautiful? That seemed noble to me. I aspired to that,” Hirsch added.

The poet gave a reading in Chicago in April, and read several poems that touched on these two men in his young life. You can hear his reading in the audio above.

Dynamic Range showcases hidden gems unearthed from Chicago Amplified’s vast archive of public events and appears on weekends. Edward Hirsch spoke at an event presented by the Society of Midland Authors in April of 2013. Click here to hear the event in its entirety.

Robin Amer is a producer on WBEZ’s digital team. Follow her on Twitter @rsamer.

Bioluminescent creatures keep predators at bay

Sat, 04 May 2013 08:00:00 -0500

When I was in my early 20s I traveled to Puerto Rico on vacation with some friends from high school. We sat on the beach and drank fruity drinks with tiny umbrellas, visited the colonial fort in old San Juan (a place that, with its rolling green meadows and stone turrets perched just above the ocean cliffs, looked to me like Narnia) and for several days we stayed in a rental in Vieques.

The diminutive island eight miles east of the mainland was for many years a U.S. naval base. Much of the heavily forested island was made into a wildlife preserve, which is now off-limits. But the rest of the island has retained a similar kind of rural, unspoiled beauty. There are white sand beaches and coral reefs, and even feral horses that trot around the pastel-colored houses. But Vieques’ most remarkable natural feature is its Bioluminescent Bay.

I went to the Bio Bay at night, on a bus that departed from the tiny town of Esperanza and wound its way east along the coast. It was perfectly dark when we arrived, and silent, except for the sound of insects and giggling tourists. Our tour guides produced canoes, and we filed in by twos and threes, paddling out to the center of the bay.

The water was black and glassy, but at the appointed time we jumped in to meet the creatures that give the Bio Bay its name. As we landed in the murk with one splash after another, the water around us flashed with a bright, milky blue glow, illuminating our limbs and reflecting up onto our faces. I swept my arm through the water and watched as it left a trail of blue stardust lit up behind it.

The Bio Bay, you see, is home to millions upon millions of tiny, one-celled microorganisms called dinoflagellates – in this case tiny marine plankton that are among the earth’s many bioluminescent creatures. They produce their eerie light when they’re disturbed, as they were when we decided to take a midnight swim in their home.

“What’s the point of that light?” J. Woodland “Woody” Hastings asked at a recent Chicago lecture. The Harvard professor of Natural Sciences studies bioluminescence in creatures across the spectrum of life, from simple, one-celled bacteria to angler fish that swim in the deepest, darkest depths of the ocean and carry their light around with them.

Hastings said this is the question he’s invariably asked at his talks. In the case of one such organism he’s studied, a luminous mushroom found in the Brazilian rain forest, Hastings posited that the glow of the fungi attracts insects, which will eat the mushroom and help disperse its spores. But in the case of the plankton in the Bio Bay, my tour guide had another explanation: supposedly, he said, the glow was meant to act like a “burglar alarm,” meant to attract a secondary predator that would threaten and scare away the primary predator bothering the dinoflagellates.

As my tour guide spoke, I felt a blindingly painful sting on my left calf. A jellyfish that I could not see – but which had clearly seen me – had wrapped its tentacle around my leg. I hauled myself out of the water and back into the boat, howling with pain. Nature at work!

In the audio above you can hear Hastings’ account of another mystical spot of bioluminescent water, this time in the Indian Ocean, known to generations of sailors as the “milky sea.” And, you can hear more about the spectrum of creatures that cause our waters to glow like a softly lit siren.

Dynamic Range showcases hidden gems unearthed from Chicago Amplified’s vast archive of public events and appears on weekends. Woody Hastings spoke at an event presented by the Chicago Council on Science and Technology in February of 2013. Click here to hear the event in its entirety.

Robin Amer is a producer on WBEZ’s digital team. Follow her on Twitter @rsamer.

Whatever, NYC. Here’s a letter to Chicago we can get behind

Sat, 27 Apr 2013 06:00:00 -0500

Rachel Shteir got you down? If you haven’t already, check out Neil Steinberg’s response (and his cabbie’s) to the drubbing he and the city of Chicago received in the review Shteir did for the New York Times Sunday Book Review last week. Or, you might want to consider this self-described “love letter” to Chicago from another writer, Michael Hainey.

Hainey’s story is in some ways the opposite of Shteir’s. While Shteir bemoaned her exile from New York to Chicago, Hainey, a hometown boy, settled in New York as an adult but never lost his connection to Chicago. He’s now a deputy editor at GQ, but his most recent book takes a deeply personal look back at the city of his birth, from the smell of boiling cabbage wafting through the doorways of every house on his block, to the sight of fall leaves blowing through the alleys.

“Even as a kid I felt these roots here,” Hainey said in a recent interview with Bill Savage, a professor of literature, history and culture at Northwestern. (Savage, by the way, also had words for Shteir.) In After Visiting Friends, Hainey refers to Chicago as “my old country,” a place that he “would always be pining for.”

Of course, loving Chicago and pining for it doesn’t mean you can’t also see its faults. His descriptions are as intimate as they’re grittily realistic.

Hainey’s had his own experience with the city’s sometimes disturbing underbelly. His father, Bob, was a rising star reporter at the Sun-Times in the ‘60s. But he turned up dead one night when Michael was just six, leaving a stunned and fractured family behind. Obituaries said the elder Hainey, just 35 then, died “after visiting friends,” but it was never clear to Michael what really happened. So he spent 10 years investigating his father’s death, and in the process, came to a new understanding of the city he loved.

Hainey’s been tight-lipped about what mysteries he solved in the process of his reporting – you’ll have to buy the book to find out what really happened to his dad. But in the audio above, you can hear him explain to Savage how – in the tradition of great Chicago memoirists before him – the city became a character in his book.

Dynamic Range showcases hidden gems unearthed from Chicago Amplified’s vast archive of public events and appears on weekends. Michael Hainey and Bill Savage spoke at an event presented by Chicago Public Library in February of 2013. Click here to hear the event in its entirety.

Robin Amer is a producer on WBEZ’s digital team. Follow her on Twitter @rsamer.

Maid’s memoir gives glimpse at real life ‘Downton Abbey’

Sat, 06 Apr 2013 08:00:00 -0500

You may have heard of Anna and Mr. Bates, O’Brien and Thomas, but have you heard of Margaret Powell? Her 1968 memoir about servants’ life below the stairs of a stately English house was a direct inspiration for Downton Abbey and its popular predecessor, Upstairs, Downstairs.

Powell, born Margaret Langley in 1907, grew up in Sussex extremely poor. Her father, a house painter, and her mother, a charwoman or house cleaner, could barely support Margaret and her six siblings.

“I remember when we hadn’t anything left to use for warmth and no money to get coal,” she wrote in Below Stairs. “I said to Mum, ‘Get all the wood down. Let’s have a fire with wood.’ She took every single shelf there was in the rooms and she even took the banisters from the stairs. Things like this make you hard.”

Perhaps predicting her future success as a writer, Margaret won a scholarship to grammar school at age 13. But her parents couldn’t spare her, and sent her to work in a laundry by the time she was 15.

A year later Margaret found work as a kitchen maid in a stately Regency-style mansion in the posh Adelaide Crescent section of Hove, a town on England’s south coast. She recalled the first time she set foot in the house, which was home to a minister and his family:

“When my mother and I arrived at this house for the interview we went to the front door. In all the time I worked there, that was the only time I ever went in the front door. . . We were ushered into the hall and I thought it was the last word in opulence. There was a lovely carpet on the floor, and tremendously wide stairs carpeted right across, not like the tiny little bit of lino in the middle we had on our stairs. There was a great mahogany table in the hall and a mahogany hall stand, and huge mirrors with gilt frames. The whole thing breathed an aura or wealth to me. I thought they must be millionaires. I’d never seen anything like it.”

Powell died in 1984, but her legacy has been preserved – and not just through her memoir or shows like Downton. Chicago historian and actress Leslie Goddard has developed something of a specialty inhabiting the lives of famous women of yore. In an appearance in February, she took on the role of Powell, performing an adaptation of Below Stairs as the author herself.

In the audio above, you can hear Goddard perform as Powell. She describes the astonishing workload typical of a pre-war kitchen maid, and explains how the stark contrast between Powell’s impoverished upbringing and her newly lush surroundings eventually radicalized her politics.

Dynamic Range showcases hidden gems unearthed from Chicago Amplified’s vast archive of public events and appears on weekends. Leslie Goddard performed at an event presented by Chicago Culinary Historians in February of 2013. Click here to hear the event in its entirety.

Robin Amer is a producer on WBEZ’s digital team. Follow her on Twitter @rsamer.

Minnie Minoso’s first game

Sat, 30 Mar 2013 08:00:00 -0500

Baseball returns to the Windy City this week, even if spring weather has been slow in coming. Monday the White Sox take on the Kansas City Royals at the Cell. The Cubs open April 8 against the Milwaukee Brewers.

In honor of the occasion, let’s revisit another important day of firsts in Chicago baseball.

The date was May 1, 1951, and on that day 26-year-old Cuban third baseman Orestes Arrieta made his Major League Baseball debut at Comiskey Park. You may know him better, of course, by his American nickname: Minnie Minoso. And when Minoso stepped up to the plate that day he was doing more than playing ball: He was also breaking the color barrier. Minoso was the first black man to play for the White Sox.

In 2006, Minoso sat down with former WBEZ host Steve Edwards to reminisce about his career. He offered this account of that fateful day. You can listen in the audio above, or check out the transcript below:

For me, [my favorite on-field moment] was May 1, 1951.
I lived in 6409 [S.] Maryland [Avenue]. We went [to the game] by streetcar. I didn’t have a car; I had no money for a car.
When I stepped at the plate, [White Sox first baseman] Eddie Robinson called me up. I hit third, he hit fourth.
He said, “Eh, Minoso, do you know this guy?” It was [pitcher] Vic Raschi, number 17 – rest in peace, he died – for the New York Yankees.
I said, “No, I don’t know [him]. I’ve never faced [him].”
[Robinson] said, “Good fastball, good curveball, and pretty good slider. And he’s fast.”
But you know, I’m a funny guy. I look around. I don’t know [Yankees catcher] Yogi [Berra]. And I said, “This ugly man -- can he see?” [Editor’s note: Among Berra’s many famous quotes is this gem: “So I’m ugly. So what? I never saw anyone hit with his face.”]
And now Yogi gets up. “Hey, Minoso! You don’t know me. Why you call me ugly? My wife, she says I’m nice looking.”
I said, “Well, you’re lucky you’re married. I’m not married. My grandmother used to say I’m a good Indian guy, nice looking, but she died. And now nobody calls me nice looking anymore.”
So anyway, the umpire said, “You two get out of here.”
I said OK. I step on the plate. I say, "Eddie! I’m going to swing three, no matter what happens. If I miss it, then next time. If I make contact, I have a chance.”
I get up there, the way I used to hit it.
“Ladies and gentlemen, the first pitch!” [says the announcer over the loudspeaker.]
I get prepared. I’m swinging! And I run like a deer to first base. And the umpire says like that [makes a gesture] but I don’t know whether [Yankees outfielder] Mickey Mantle had caught it.
And what I said I don’t want to repeat. I said, “Did this son-of-a-gun catch it?” [The umpire] said, “No, it’s a home run!”
I slow down. I’m passing second base. I come home. The people shake my hand.
That was a great day – and a beginning. Because I was the first black player in the city and the first one for the Sox. The first one! And the first pitch! I hit it in the bullpen – 439 feet.
I never dreamed it. I used to weigh 176 lbs.
I have this ball. This guy caught it, and I still have this ball at my house.

Dynamic Range showcases hidden gems unearthed from Chicago Amplified’s vast archive of public events and appears on weekends. Minnie Minoso spoke at an event presented by the Chicago History Museum in October of 2006. Click here to hear the event in its entirety.

Robin Amer is a producer on WBEZ’s digital team. Follow her on Twitter @rsamer.

'Push' author Sapphire revisits childhood abuse in second novel

Sat, 23 Mar 2013 08:00:00 -0500

[Trigger Warning]

Sapphire does not shy away from difficult subjects.

The author, who chose her pen name as a salute to strong black women, is known for penning devastatingly realized stories of childhood sexual abuse and trauma. Her 1996 novel Push tells the story of Claireece “Precious” Jones, an illiterate, obese, 16-year-old girl pregnant with a second child by her own father. The novel was adapted in 2009, and the resulting film, Precious, garnered many accolades, including two Academy Awards. But the film also stirred controversy with its graphic depictions of incest and domestic abuse.

Sapphire was herself the victim of childhood sexual assault. In 2010 she told the London Evening Standard that her father, a Korean War vet, had molested her at age eight. Her mother abandoned their family five years later.

“It was traumatic — but to be left with our crazy dad, doubly so," she told the paper.

She created the character precious from an amalgam of her own experiences and those of students she later mentored in Harlem.

Sapphire followed Push with a sequel, The Kid, in 2011. As the novel opens, we learn that Precious has died of AIDS, leaving her nine-year-old son Abdul alone in the world.

Abdul is sent to live in a Catholic orphanage, and what befalls him there is brutal and heartbreaking -- and all too familiar to anyone who follows the ever-unfolding story of sexual abuse within the Catholic Church. (A new wrinkle in that story unfolded just this week, as files released by the Diocese of Joliet revealed decades of abuse hidden by high-level clergy.)

Abdul is sexually assaulted by a priest during his time in the orphanage. And as sometimes happens to those who have been abused, he goes on in turn to become an abuser, raping younger, weaker boys living in the orphanage.

“While numerous heterosexual black male writers and critics have bemoaned the . . . one-dimensional portrait of black man as victimizer, few have been interested in or have had the courage to explore the obvious other end of the stick: the black male as victim of sexual abuse,” Sapphire said at a talk in Chicago last week, reading from a Q & A section published alongside her novel. “The Kid, among other things, begins an accurate portrayal of what happens to many young males who have been abused and their sometimes hideous response.”

The results for Abdul are devastating, as they were for his mother. And while Push addressed the failure of the nuclear family to protect its children, The Kid takes up the failure of institutions charged with their care.

“We’re really looking at the abandoning of the social contract in a way we didn’t see in Push,” Sapphire said. “That was something I really wanted to show: What happens when everything except the soul of the individuals fails?”

Sapphire read two passages from The Kid during her appearance at Chicago Public Library. We’ve included an excerpt of her talk here in audio form, but please be warned. . . .

TRIGGER WARNING: The book excerpt Sapphire reads here includes a graphic rape scene, in addition to a later scene which shows some redemption and healing for her main character.

Dynamic Range showcases hidden gems unearthed from Chicago Amplified’s vast archive of public events and appears on weekends. Sapphire spoke at an event presented by Chicago Public Library in March. Click here to hear the event in its entirety.

Chicago’s other Chagall

Sat, 16 Mar 2013 08:00:00 -0500

Visitors to the Art Institute of Chicago sometimes linger in front of the electric-blue stained glass windows cloistered at the eastern end of the building. They are Marc Chagall’s 1977 paean to America made just after the nation’s bicentennial – and, according to the museum’s website, in honor of Richard J. Daley, who had died the same year. They are also one of the Art Institute’s most recognizable works, and one of Chagall’s most famous.

But just a few floors away, you can see a work by Chagall that is less well-known, but equally affecting.

In the Chagall’s 1938 White Crucifixion, a jaundiced Jesus hangs suspended from the cross against a swirling grey backdrop. His waist is wrapped with a tallis, or Jewish prayer shawl, and floating all around him are scenes of Jewish destruction: A battalion of men, with sabers and red flags raised, storm a burning shtetl littered with debris; a red-faced figure rushes into a synagogue that's consumed by flames in order to save its Torah and other sacred artifacts; peasants and another figure, a rabbi perhaps, cover their faces and wail. A Hebrew inscription on the cross reads Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews.

Chagall, born Moishe Segal in White Russia in 1887, fled France for New York in 1938, barely escaping Vichy France and the Nazi concentration camps. The persecution of his people and the destruction of the world he had left behind were very much on his mind. He went on to process the horrors of the Holocaust through the lens of modernist painting.

“The way in which Chagall harnesses the lost world of the past and this incredibly revolutionary world of contemporary painting . . . I don’t know of anyone else straddles . . . those two worlds,” said Chagall biographer Jonathan Wilson. “We might think of Chagall as the kind of shtetl cow to the bull of the corrida, which is Picasso.”

Chagall was obsessed, as he wrote in his 1922 memoir My Life, with “the pale face of Jesus,” and painted dozens of crucifixion scenes during his years in America. Wilson explores why in the audio above.

Dynamic Range showcases hidden gems unearthed from Chicago Amplified’s vast archive of public events and appears on weekends. Jonathan Wilson spoke at an event presented by the Woman’s Club of Evanston in March of 2007. Click here to hear the event in its entirety.

Saving greystones with blood, sweat -- and branding

Sat, 09 Mar 2013 08:00:00 -0600

Greystones are to Chicago what brownstones are to Brooklyn. And while many of these stately, limestone-faceted beauties line the grassy boulevards of wealthy North Side neighborhoods, many others exist in a state of neglect, disrepair or abandonment.

These decrepit greystones are generally located in some South and West Side neighborhoods whose residents were historically deprived of mortgages and subject to redlining. They're struggling now with low rates of home ownership and high rates of vacancy that have only gotten worse thanks to the real estate collapse. Add to that the stigma that comes from poverty, and you have a recipe for neighborhood neglect.

The last few years have thus been quite troubling for preservationists and community developers who want to both help struggling neighborhoods and save an iconic part of Chicago’s native architecture. One affordable housing developer phrased the essential question this way: “How do we start potentially building a market to rebuild interest in greystones and get people into these vacant buildings?”

That developer is Matt Cole, who runs Neighborhood Housing Service’s Historic Chicago Greystone Initiative. The program is aimed at preserving, restoring and modernizing these buildings, and NHS offers both educational and financial resources to owners and potential buyers, whether it’s advice on how to remodel or affordable loans that make it possible to do a full gut rehab on a neglected two-flat.

But in addition to these traditional sorts of community development strategies, Cole and his colleagues have turned to a tactic more common in commercial real estate development: neighborhood branding.

Anyone who’s ever been offered an apartment in “West Bucktown” knows that developers will often rename a gentrifying neighborhood in order to lure a wealthier set of potential buyers. But in this case, Cole and his colleagues focused their efforts on giving stigmatized neighborhoods the kind of narrative that would make existing, long-time residents puff up their chests.

Their test case was K-Town, a 16-block portion of North Lawndale named for a number of streets – Karlov, Kildare, Keeler, Kostner, etc. – that start with the letter "K."

K-Town is traditionally lumped in with the rest of Chicago’s West Side – so often described as poor, downtrodden and crime-ridden.

But this portion of North Lawndale defies that stereotype: It's actually quite stable, according to Cole, and has a striking share of Chicago’s built history.

“It is this incredible microcosm of Chicago architecture that really can’t be found anywhere else in the city,” Cole said. “You have fantastic greystones on one side, then workers’ cottages in the middle. Then also these sort of Dutch gabled buildings on the front – these two-flats and three-flats that were built in the 1930s – then bungalows start coming in.”

Two years ago NHS worked with a number of state and local preservation agencies to get K-Town added to the National Register of Historic Places.

Charles Leeks, NHS’s neighborhood director for North Lawndale, says there have not been measurable financial results – in the form of rising property value or additional homes sold or rehabbed – since K-Town was added to the National Register. But he said he's seen a noticeable uptick in neighborhood pride and cohesion.

“The real tangible benefits from [the National Register] have to do with this question of image – how people began to think about the place and manage it themselves,” Leeks said. “Once there was this historic district designation, once it was clear, people celebrated that and rallied around that.”

K-Town residents formed what Leeks called a Historic District Committee, which has taken a highly active role in promoting the neighborhood. In addition to developing a strategic plan for K-Town’s revitalization, they’ve organized neighborhood walking tours – an unusual feature for an area often cited for its blight.

They’ve also started showing up in housing court. If a vacant building goes on a demolition list, the committee may ask the judge to stay demolition so they can preserve it and work toward finding a buyer.

Leeks said NHS hasn’t brought on any new K-Town buyers in the two years since the neighborhood was added to the National Register (although the organization is currently under contract with two buildings on nearby Douglas Boulevard).

Instead, the Historic District Committee is turning to what it only half-jokingly calls the “K-Town alumni association” – anyone with roots in the neighborhood. “They’re reaching out to try and get former friends and neighbors to look back – and move back,” Leeks said.

It’s not always easy to get people to see their own neighborhood in a different light, especially if they’ve been there – or been away – for decades. But Matt Cole said NHS has already helped more than 200 greystone owners buy, keep or repair their buildings since the program was launched in 2006 – an investment of more than $6 million. And they’re still hoping to use historic narratives to rebrand neighborhoods and encourage reinvestment. That’s why they're taking a similar approach to another stretch of North Lawndale, the 3300 block of West Flournoy Street.

“People are watching this – people in other parts of the neighborhood,” Leeks said. “They’ve seen what’s happening in K-Town and said, ‘Can we do that?’”

You can hear Matt Cole expound more on his group’s neighborhood branding strategy in the audio above.

Dynamic Range showcases hidden gems unearthed from Chicago Amplified’s vast archive of public events and appears on weekends. Matt Cole spoke at an event presented by the Chicago Architecture Foundation in January. Click here to hear the event in its entirety.

The cross-continental roots of American music

Sat, 02 Mar 2013 08:00:00 -0600

Mark Dvorak remembers the first time he saw a banjo. He was a child, maybe seven or eight years old, visiting a historical reenactment park with his family – the kind of place where they have log cabins and a mule farm – and he came across an old man strumming the classic five-stringed American instrument.

“This guy seemed ancient to me. He’s sitting there playing this thing – I’d never seen anything like it,” Dvorak recalled. “He called it an ‘old fashioned boom box.’ He told me that when he grew up he didn’t have electricity and so forth, so if he and his friends wanted to make music had to do it themselves.”

Dvorak channeled that ethos of communal music-making as he grew up, and now the multi-instrumentalist – who WFMT once called “Chicago’s official troubadour” – can be found doing regular gigs around the region and teaching at the Old Town School of Folk Music. He’s also developed a strong interest in the history of American folk music and instruments, especially when it comes to the old Appalachian mountain tunes common to the banjo.

“Historians pretty much agree that the banjo was brought over by Africans during the slave years,” Dvorak said. “Of course the banjos Africans were able to make were made from hollowed out gourds and animal skins.”

Then, Dvorak said, the common historical understanding is that an Irishman living in Virginia named Joe Sweeny adapted those early African instruments into what we would recognize as the banjo today.

Those duel African and Scotch/Irish influences are also present in much of early American folk music, according to Dvorak. In the audio above, he demonstrates the cross-continental currents of early American music by deconstructing the lineage of one particularly well-known song: “You get a line, I’ll get a pole” – also known as the crawdad song. His aural breakdown is both fascinating and tuneful.

Dynamic Range showcases hidden gems unearthed from Chicago Amplified’s vast archive of public events and appears on weekends. Mark Dvorak spoke at an event presented by the Illinois Humanities Council in April of 2006. Click here to hear the event in its entirety.