Life can be so doleful in Chicago’s Uptown neighborhood that genuine hope is actually found in young people spinning on their heads.
It happens Tuesday and Thursday evenings and Sunday afternoons at Alternatives Inc., on North Sheridan Road, where a social service agency’s success belies the area’s frustrating inability to turn itself around without turning a back on some of our neediest.
In midafternoon, dozens of people, mostly teenagers, arrive seeking shelter from gangs, drugs, tough homes and a tougher economy. Established in 2003, a program called Connect Force gives young people a safe place to engage in enriching activities and creative expression including hip-hop arts like dance, graffiti/mural arts, rap, poetry, music and education. Around 6 p.m., they take over a 6,000-square-foot space that once was the main floor of a 1920s movie theater.
With hip-hop music blaring, the participants hone break-dancing moves, straining wrists and ankles, and sometimes wearing knit caps as they twirl on their noggins. They focus on routines in an intense, high-decibel, two-hour mix of the self-absorbed and the collegial.
Justin Gray, a volunteer-turned-staff-member, said most of the people who showed up were members of minorities.
“They increase their self-esteem and communications skills,” Mr. Gray said. “The neighborhood is dangerous, with a lot of gangs, and this becomes a place to get away, do homework, learn cool hip-hop and follow dreams.”
One of the regulars is Freddie LeRoy, 17, a high school sophomore. “This frees my mind,” said Mr. LeRoy, who commutes to nearby Uplift Community High School from the South Side. “If I’m having a bad day, I can get all the bad energy out of me.”
Betty Torres, 19, a Wright College freshman, said: “It’s like family here. We get help with homework, and the break-dancing relieves stress. A lot of my high school friends were with gangs. This turned my life around.”
The hip-hop offers a structure and discipline not much different than those inculcated in previous generations through playing basketball or boxing after school. The dancers may stumble and sheepishly roll their eyes, but they pick themselves up, try again, help one another and come away feeling a bit taller.
On one night, I watched them transfixed by a 50-minute Spanish-language movie with subtitles on the teen-driven hip-hop culture in the Mexican state of Oaxaca, much of it inspired by bloody civil unrest there in 2006.
“The movie shows how you can use hip-hop to express what’s going on in a positive, nonviolent way,” said Judith Gall, the Alternatives executive director, who came to Chicago in the 1970s as a Vista volunteer from West Virginia and then stayed.
Ms. Gall has gained a strong reputation as she has built a $2.2 million organization — 40 percent of financing comes from the state — and a staff of 40 to help develop leadership, prevent violence and substance abuse and offer job and academic counseling.
She provides help to about 3,000 young people annually and does so in a city neighborhood as confounding and complex as it was when she arrived. Back then, her focus was on the Appalachia immigrants who arrived in Uptown amid the decline of the coal mines of West Virginia and Kentucky. Many figured Uptown would be a new Lincoln Park, by virtue of its location on Lake Michigan and with more economically vital communities to its north and south.
But investment and gentrification was often scared away by public housing, hustlers masquerading as social service groups and 1960s street-activists-turned-political-leaders. Neighborhood groups complained for years to Alderman Helen Shiller — by Chicago tradition, the warlord of zoning here — about the need to shut a bar near Truman College that some said was a drug-infested source of crime.
The alderman cited a need to be fair to a longtime local business and resisted closing it. Neighbors were infuriated, and seethed as their property values did not keep pace with appreciation elsewhere. Middle-class investors stayed away.
Ms. Shiller, the onetime City Hall-bashing independent, has become cozier with Mayor Richard M. Daley, which explains a project like a Target store being built at Montrose and Broadway Avenues. Her approval was tied to the construction of adjacent low-income housing.
You can debate the public policy, especially how we deal with the poor and mentally ill. It’s harder to dispute that in many ways — practical, ideological, atmospheric — the clock hasn’t moved in Uptown for decades.
But there’s solace in seeing some good kids doing homework, spinning on their heads and sweating through T-shirts on a chilly night. Now, as long ago, a few roses bloom amid the concrete and neon desolation.
by JAMES WARREN | Apr 2, 2010
Life can be so doleful in Chicago’s Uptown neighborhood that genuine hope is actually found in young people spinning on their heads.
It happens Tuesday and Thursday evenings and Sunday afternoons at Alternatives Inc., on North Sheridan Road, where a social service agency’s success belies the area’s frustrating inability to turn itself around without turning a back on some of our neediest.
In midafternoon, dozens of people, mostly teenagers, arrive seeking shelter from gangs, drugs, tough homes and a tougher economy. Established in 2003, a program called Connect Force gives young people a safe place to engage in enriching activities and creative expression including hip-hop arts like dance, graffiti/mural arts, rap, poetry, music and education. Around 6 p.m., they take over a 6,000-square-foot space that once was the main floor of a 1920s movie theater.
With hip-hop music blaring, the participants hone break-dancing moves, straining wrists and ankles, and sometimes wearing knit caps as they twirl on their noggins. They focus on routines in an intense, high-decibel, two-hour mix of the self-absorbed and the collegial.
Justin Gray, a volunteer-turned-staff-member, said most of the people who showed up were members of minorities.
“They increase their self-esteem and communications skills,” Mr. Gray said. “The neighborhood is dangerous, with a lot of gangs, and this becomes a place to get away, do homework, learn cool hip-hop and follow dreams.”
One of the regulars is Freddie LeRoy, 17, a high school sophomore. “This frees my mind,” said Mr. LeRoy, who commutes to nearby Uplift Community High School from the South Side. “If I’m having a bad day, I can get all the bad energy out of me.”
Betty Torres, 19, a Wright College freshman, said: “It’s like family here. We get help with homework, and the break-dancing relieves stress. A lot of my high school friends were with gangs. This turned my life around.”
The hip-hop offers a structure and discipline not much different than those inculcated in previous generations through playing basketball or boxing after school. The dancers may stumble and sheepishly roll their eyes, but they pick themselves up, try again, help one another and come away feeling a bit taller.
On one night, I watched them transfixed by a 50-minute Spanish-language movie with subtitles on the teen-driven hip-hop culture in the Mexican state of Oaxaca, much of it inspired by bloody civil unrest there in 2006.
“The movie shows how you can use hip-hop to express what’s going on in a positive, nonviolent way,” said Judith Gall, the Alternatives executive director, who came to Chicago in the 1970s as a Vista volunteer from West Virginia and then stayed.
Ms. Gall has gained a strong reputation as she has built a $2.2 million organization — 40 percent of financing comes from the state — and a staff of 40 to help develop leadership, prevent violence and substance abuse and offer job and academic counseling.
She provides help to about 3,000 young people annually and does so in a city neighborhood as confounding and complex as it was when she arrived. Back then, her focus was on the Appalachia immigrants who arrived in Uptown amid the decline of the coal mines of West Virginia and Kentucky. Many figured Uptown would be a new Lincoln Park, by virtue of its location on Lake Michigan and with more economically vital communities to its north and south.
But investment and gentrification was often scared away by public housing, hustlers masquerading as social service groups and 1960s street-activists-turned-political-leaders. Neighborhood groups complained for years to Alderman Helen Shiller — by Chicago tradition, the warlord of zoning here — about the need to shut a bar near Truman College that some said was a drug-infested source of crime.
The alderman cited a need to be fair to a longtime local business and resisted closing it. Neighbors were infuriated, and seethed as their property values did not keep pace with appreciation elsewhere. Middle-class investors stayed away.
Ms. Shiller, the onetime City Hall-bashing independent, has become cozier with Mayor Richard M. Daley, which explains a project like a Target store being built at Montrose and Broadway Avenues. Her approval was tied to the construction of adjacent low-income housing.
You can debate the public policy, especially how we deal with the poor and mentally ill. It’s harder to dispute that in many ways — practical, ideological, atmospheric — the clock hasn’t moved in Uptown for decades.
But there’s solace in seeing some good kids doing homework, spinning on their heads and sweating through T-shirts on a chilly night. Now, as long ago, a few roses bloom amid the concrete and neon desolation.