It can be an unexpected pleasure when someone comes along that makes you to reevaluate a firmly-held…
Chicago
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Editor’s Note: This post first appeared March 16, 2011.
This post may be a little out of character, but there are things here that need to be said. It is regarding one of these projects I work on in my other life as a blunted academic, teaching an endless line of adolescents who think mommy and daddy will foot the bill forever. The rude awakening is coming. No wonder they call it “Commencement.” In any case, about four years ago, I met Dr. Carlos Azcoitia, the principal of a neighborhood school in Chicago. I was impressed by the guy. In 2003, he put his money where his mouth was and resigned from his position as Chicago Public School system’s Deputy Chief of Education to launch a new pre-K through high school program at John Spry Community Links Academy. This was the first time in memory that a member of Chicago’s Board of Education stepped down to take a position as a principal of a small school on Marshall Avenue in the Little Village section of the city.
I went to bed last Thursday night a citizen of Chicago’s 46th Ward. I rose the next…
It was August 1998. I’d been living in my “garden”-level apartment on the Far North Side of…
I have to say, I am kinda disappointed. This was only the third largest single snowstorm in Chicago’s history. It’s hard to justify the hype.
Barely underway for four hours now, the Insert-Hyperbolic-Name-Here Blizzard of 2011 is already having deleterious effects on both of Chicago’s baseball teams.
On the north side, the Tribune’s “Chicago Weather Center” page reports early damage to the Home of the Cubs:
A section Wrigley Field’s roof was blown off shortly after 6PM. Some of the debris landed in the intersection of Addison and Clark. Police are attempting to clean up the debris.
(To the tune of John Cooper Clarke’s classic, “Evidently Chickentown.”
Warning: Foul Language Ahead.)
On February 28, 2005, almost exactly two blocks from my apartment, two people, a man and a woman, were killed in the basement of a fine, century-old wood-frame house on the North Side of Chicago. Both had sustained .22-caliber bullet wounds to the head. The victims were the husband and the mother of a United States district court judge, who had discovered the bodies upon returning home from work.
It is a scientific fact that every other person under the age of 30 in Chicago (and…
Charlie Chaplin made just one motion picture in Chicago, but that was enough to get an auditorium…
