A imaginative and prescient of the West Side that focuses on gangs, weapons and poverty is barely part of the image.
To see the complete image, take a tour of North Lawndale, as we did on a current Saturday, with some younger individuals who grew up there. Like Amari Bell, a scholar at Collins Academy High School, who instructed us, “Most people think negative. We want to show them the positive.”
On Saturday mornings all through this summer season, Chicagoans have a possibility to study from Amari and different good, participating younger folks as they information excursions organized by the nonprofit My Block, My Hood, My City.
The aim: To shatter preconceived notions concerning the risks of “life in the ‘hood” — and within the course of, carry folks collectively, throughout limitations of race and sophistication.
We tagged alongside on a tour with about two dozen people, a few of whom had by no means earlier than set foot in North Lawndale. Others had “driven through” on their approach to someplace else, like Little Italy or Pilsen.
But that sizzling, muggy morning, on a two-hour stroll up and down one aspect road after one other, they noticed the neighborhood up shut and private, simply as Amari and the remainder of the guides do day by day. There was loads of enthusiasm and curiosity.
Enough, the truth is, to make us assume that transcending limitations may not be a pipe dream in any case.
Maybe bridges might be constructed, one expertise at a time.
“It was great to be down here,” Anna Rider Harper, a Lake View resident, instructed us on the finish of the morning. “We live on the North Side, so there’s some stigma about what it’s going to be like down here. So I really enjoyed seeing that there’s a lot of pride here, and that things are changing for the good.”
Anna’s husband, Tom Harper, felt a lot the identical. “I enjoyed visiting the back streets and getting off the main drag,” he stated, “hearing the history of the neighborhood and how its evolved, seeing some fantastic architecture.”
Here’s a few of what we noticed.
The neighborhoods’ historical past is on show on the second tour cease, the Martin Luther King Jr. Legacy Apartments at 16th Street and Hamlin Avenue. They had been inbuilt 2011, on the location of the previous constructing the place King stayed when he introduced his civil rights marketing campaign to Chicago in the summertime of 1966.
My Block My Hood My City youth tour guides making a cease outdoors the King Legacy Apartments in North Lawndale. Annie Costabile/Sun-Times
Stretching again significantly additional, we discovered concerning the neighborhood’s Jewish roots at Stone Temple Baptist Church. King preached right here throughout his time in Chicago. But Stone Temple initially was a synagogue for Jewish immigrants from Romania, constructed within the 1920s. Guide Michael Bennet factors out to the group the Star of David within the high part of the church’s home windows.
The synagogue turned a church within the 1950s, as Jewish immigrants moved additional north and African Americans, fleeing Jim Crow segregation within the south for the possibility at a greater life in Chicago, moved in.
There’s proof of the neighborhood’s proud current, too.
Douglas Park, in fact, is without doubt one of the jewels in Chicago’s public park system, with its enormous, ornate subject home and a miniature golf course that, we discovered later, is being redesigned by scholar artists. Then there’s Collins Academy, a once-failing public highschool that’s skilled a renaissance lately, and the community of neighborhood gardens taking on once-vacant tons to beautify the realm and supply recent produce.
The final cease is the Farm on Ogden, a brand new city farm that opened final summer season and offers job coaching in city agriculture and meals companies. It additionally options an indoor produce market, a neighborhood kitchen, and gardening courses.
Take the tour and see all of the stops. We have touched on just a few right here. You can enroll at formyblock.org/excursions and browse extra in Manny Ramos’ story in right now’s Sun-Times.
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