Just click your heels three times

I had that dream again last night -- the one where I end up moving to a house that in some mythic way is better, constellations better, than the house I live in now. Maybe it's bigger, maybe quieter, and in almost all cases has a secret room or passageway I didn't know existed. As this particular dream progresses, I come to find the flaws of the new living space--water in the basement, black mold, or someone else's bedroom at the end of that secret passage--and end up pining for my little green house, which I can't believe I abandoned in the first place. Sometimes the dream goes on long enough that I go back by cover of night to the little green house, and I spy on the new people living there as I ache with envy and regret.

This particular dream usually comes after a teeter-totter of real events: something truly terrible happening nearby, which makes me curse our ever having bought this house in the first place, followed by something unspeakably beautiful, which makes it tough for me to imagine ever living anywhere else.

This week started with a cyclist getting shot just two blocks away, riding home around 1am, something John and I are no strangers to. I haven't heard further details, but the circumstances alone were enough to make a neighbor say, "What's going on with this neighborhood?!" I couldn't agree more. It's unconscionable.

But then last night, as I was walking home from the grocery store, I passed the building where a bunch of unsupervised hellraisers play in the sidewalk day and night. Several of them were taking turns jumping off a giant rock on a pogo stick. An older girl was screaming at them to STOP IT!!! before somebody got hurt. A smaller girl watched the proceedings while sitting on a mighty agreeable rottweiler. And just then a particularly tough looking boy came out of the building and . . . get ready for it . . . sweetly and proudly started playing the flute.

Yes, I said the flute.

Breathy notes strung together in a song he didn't have down quite yet, but was dutifully practicing. Not because somebody was hounding him to do it, but because he loved that flute and didn't care if the whole neighborhood knew it. It was pretty clear, in fact, he wanted to be noticed.

If I were a betting woman, I'd put down money that this particular tableau wouldn't happen near any of those bigger, quieter, or more circuitous houses that huckster up my dreams. How unlucky to live in a place where such a thing isn't possible.

Snapshots from the Litter Detail

Yesterday was Chicago's annual Clean & Green Day, where the city provides resources to neighborhood groups who want to spruce up their blocks. We got a nice assortment of rakes, shovels, push-brooms, and gigantic plastic bags that looked alarmingly like body bags, but I digress.

We'd plastered the neighborhood with fliers promoting the event--not that our blocks were a disaster, but a little spring cleaning never hurts. I was shocked and honestly moved by the number of people who emerged from their houses at 10am. Neighbors on a simple 'hello' relationship were chatting together--it was such a beautiful day, wasn't it, or I'm worried about that vacant building on the corner, too--and putting together teams who would walk down the street: one holding the giant bag, the others gathering and discarding debris.

Every yard and parkway was mowed (thanks largely to nine-year-old Priscilla, who insisted on taking her father's mower and traveling from house to house), every piece of litter removed, and even a small garden got planted with the help of a handful of neighborhood kids. It may not look like much now, but trust me that it's a big improvement over the weed patch and soiled fabric flowers that dotted that corner for over a year. Our neighbor Willie even enlisted two elders from the Mormon Church (they'd come to his door to recruit him, so he recruited them instead) to help with the project. There they were in their white shirts and dark trousers, sweeping the street of thousands of maple-tree pinwheels.

When everything was done, some of those hard-working kids settled about the business of digging a hole in one of the greenways. I asked where they were digging to, and one especially bright-eyed girl paused for a second, put up her index finger, and said, "to the Earth's atmosphere."

There may be horrible and devastating things going on in the world, but it's a hopeful sign, to me, that kids don't dig to China anymore.

We had a nice rain overnight, and everything looked especially fresh and new this morning as I walked Inez. I hope we can keep it up over the course of the summer. Debris from 6-lane Fullerton Avenue just a block south is a constant challenge. So are the dandelions. But for now we can enjoy what we accomplished. Aside from the obvious child-labor violations, we managed to harness something lovely yesterday: a collective undertaking, and a true sense of place.

Give a Hoot

Sure, some are excited when a new bookstore or coffee shop breaks ground in the area . . . or their local park gets landscaped with native perennials . . . or a vacant building starts showing signs of life.

But nothing felt more like Christmas to us than this latest amenity, installed quietly on our block like something collectively wished into being.

Farewell to rogue Cheetos bags! To car-parts circulars! To carry-out menus! Good riddance to plastic grocery bags tangled up in shrubs! Godspeed you Budweiser bottles and motor-oil containers! True, we still find the occasional candy bar wrappers and tamale husks here and there, but everything you see in that wire-mesh can is something not rolling down the street, waiting to be trapped in someone's front yard. These are small mercies, and I'll take them.

Perfect Sunday

Today it was warm and sunny enough to blast some Stevie Wonder and plant this . . .

So afterwards I stopped this man . . .

And ended up with this magically delicious mango paleta.

Beat that, Monday.

Pouring

All this recent biking is making the city seem mighty small—and the boundaries between neighborhoods a whole lot less definitive. We’ve learned we can be downtown in just over 30 minutes, to Bridgeport in about 45, and deep in the heart of Evanston in less than an hour. That’s a whole lot quicker than the train, with better scenery and a built-in excuse for a hearty meal.

For this reason, a trek of just 15 minutes makes it feel we haven’t left the neighborhood at all, so we absorb whatever wonders we may stumble across as a borrowed extension of home. Take, for example, Chicago Hot Glass: a truly bad-ass art studio in an old brick manufacturing building about, say, 15 minutes away by bike. This is an area without a name, a district not yet appropriated by the real-estate industry or Chicago souvenir map-makers. It’s about halfway between us and West Garfield Park. Someone living to the east might call it halfway between them and Oak Park. That’s about as specific as it gets.

But this lack of spatial ‘governance’ sort of fits the glass-blowers, who seem pretty rootless and free-riding themselves. The studio has become a second home, where they make art and throw parties and generally and productively occupy space. Recently they added a metal-works initiative, which may be about the most punk rock thing I’ve ever actually seen in person (apologies to Nonagon, of course).

On a recent ride back from the Garfield Park Conservatory, John and I popped over to the side yard of the studio, where a guy named Marshall was readying the fire cans for a pour later that night. He saw us peering into the fence and came to say hello. His first question: “Are you guys from the neighborhood?”

From the neighborhood . . . This was clearly a guy after my own heart. Because there’s something about that whole idea—neighborhood—that’s familial and empathic in ways sometimes even bloodlines fail to be. It unites people who may have literally nothing in common besides the street they live on. In obsessives like myself, it’s a living, breathing organism: a thing unto itself, much prettier and grander than the sum of its parts. And for those who hold it dear, it’s positively kindred. For that split second, Marshall was our friend. He had our backs and we had his. We trusted each other, as we trusted the circumstances that had brought us together on exactly that same patch of concrete at exactly that moment, to talk about metal. In our own quiet ways, we wanted more.

So it was no surprise when he told us they’d be pouring some bronze later and invited us to come by if we were around. Almost tragically, we already had plans. But it’s not a huge stretch to think there might be a next time.

Sunday Potluck with the Block Group

Ok, here’s what you have to imagine: 50 or so people, ranging from a few months old to 75, filling up a Catholic church basement on a balmy Sunday evening. They migrate from table to table, catching up with friends, meeting new neighbors, indulging conversation about everything from the best taqueria in town to the overdue need for speed bumps. At first they’re segregated by language, but in time the Anglos get bold enough to call up what they remember from high-school Spanish, and Guty and Jaime playfully refuse their lapses back into English. Thirteen-year-old Pamela translates like a pro.

Plates are filled with Mike and Cindy’s guacamole, Carmen’s arroz con gandules, Emily and Devin’s corn muffins and chili, Sonja’s fruit salad, and Matt and Jen’s vegan chocolate chip cookies.

Kids run around like dervishes without a single fall, scrape, tear, or argument. One five-year-old, whose nametag reads “Rey, aka Juno,” announces himself a superhero, and when asked about his superpower pulls two small containers of hand sanitizer from his pockets and eagerly disinfects whoever offers a hand.

And the reason you have to imagine all of this is because for all the things I remembered—from the block-group sign-up sheet to important dates to local-police contact information—the one thing I forgot was my camera. So this photo of the last remaining spoonful of couscous with pistachios (my contribution to this fete) is the only tangible evidence that such an event even happened. Trust me that it was raucous fun.

Slippery Slope

Our neighborhood is rarely without its controversies. One of the most longstanding surrounds a building at a six-corner intersection that hums with activity much of the day. This flatiron-style building occupies a corner lot across from "Fireman's Park" and the Gap Outlet store that has long and somewhat problematically been credited for revitalizing economic activity on the strip.

The site in question has been known at various times as the Payless building (for its most recent ground-floor occupant) and the Morris B. Sachs building, its more official and longstanding name. The upper floors, a complicated arrangement of small units deemed unfit--some would say thankfully--for condo conversion, have been vacant for decades, and the city has wrestled for years over What to do about the Sachs building. It looked for a while like a new owner had big plans, but he was later murdered in a bizarre tenant dispute, and any hopes for the building were extinguished in the process.

Scroll ahead a couple of years. The City decided to buy the building and issue a request for proposals. In November of 2006 our alderman held a public meeting to take the community's pulse on what they might like to see there. At the time an idea to convert the building to supportive housing--affordable units to those making just 15-30% of area median income, along with social services to assist those with financial, job training, or substance abuse challenges--had been recommended. We joined with those who supported this vision, recognizing the increasingly prohibitive housing costs in our area and a growing need to accommodate disenfranchised populations. You might imagine that some local folks would feel discomfort with such a plan, and they rightfully showed up to the meeting as well -- some with very legitimate concerns, and others with unmistakeable NIMBYist leanings. This was actually one of the most fair and productive public meetings I've ever attended, and I left feeling that a solid public purpose would be realized for the Sachs building.

Well, two proposals were submitted in response to the rfp: one public development plan for supportive housing, and one private development plan for artists' lofts, with art-friendly retail at street level. I probably don't have to tell you which won the day.

True confession? I don't actually find the winning project that distasteful, on its face. Sure, artists' lofts are a dandy idea, and bringing human density to a vacant building is always a boon to a neighborhood. There's even an affordability component, and bravo for that. I suspect the people who move in will be good neighbors, too: making art, riding bikes or taking public transportation, and (because of course this is the whole idea, right?) putting money into the local economy.

But here's the rub: public moneys, to the tune of $10 million, are going to be invested in this building for a private developer's gain. This kind of investment is only justifiable, by both law and my own sense of ethics, when a public purpose is being served. Some would say the public purpose is revitalizing our economic corridor, but I'm sorry I can't join with those who'd call it a victory to see our community tax dollars entice a Blick's or a Border's to sidle into town.

At a rally last weekend to protest this decision, a young woman stood up and told her story of coming from a broken home, moving to Chicago, and finding her way to supportive housing. She was on her way to becoming another statistic, but with a roof over her head and some increased stability, she ended up graduating first in her university class. It's difficult not to be moved by a story like this, and to see it as a more critical and appropriate use for public funds than a Starbucks (or insert artsy chain store here), and a built-in customer base to support it.