Author: Michael Wasney

Food Issue 2018

Mango and Maki on 26th Street

Japanese-Brazilian cuisine finds an audience in Little Village

by 7 months ago

Rami Kablawi

Little Village wasn’t known for its Japanese cuisine… until now. While there’s still a dearth of Asian food options in the area, the opening of Sora Temakeria four months ago has put this neighborhood on the map for any sushi-lovers sojourning to the best spots in the city. But Sora Temakeria isn’t your run-of-the-mill sashimi establishment; its menu is Japanese in inspiration, but with a Brazilian bent. In the Baja—available in both sushi burrito and bowl forms—crab salad and jalapeño come together in a fantastic fusion of these geographically distal but surprisingly complementary cuisines and cultures.

Features | Police | Politics

The Shots Heard Round the City

Are Chicago’s new shot detection and predictive policing technologies worth it?

by 11 months ago

Ellen Hao

A gunshot is fired. Depending on where in the city it is, the sound might not just be picked up by human ears. By early next year, almost 130 square miles of Chicago will be monitored for gunshots by mechanical ears as well, via a technology called ShotSpotter.

Stage & Screen

The Queen of Bronzeville

An evening with Marlow La Fantastique

by 12 months ago

milo bosh

Before An Evening at the Chez Nous had even begun, Bronzeville native Marlow La Fantastique—whose career the event was celebrating—was already in her element. She worked her way about the room, doling out hellos and bisous with the grace of someone very familiar with the spotlight. That, of course, is an understatement. For decades, her relationship to spotlights was like a fish’s to the sea: she basically lived in them, performing not only in the States, but all over the world. Hers was truly a star-studded career, one with too many high points to easily identify any single apogee. But if forced to, one might point to La Fantastique’s time performing at the Cabaret Chez Nous, the famous West Berlin nightclub known for featuring drag queens and trans women performers as well as its celebrity patronage.

Visual Arts

Logan Center for the Arts Turns Five in Style

by 1 year ago

Photos courtesy of the Logan Center for the Arts

By 9pm, the tent set up in the Logan Center for the Arts at the University of Chicago’s central courtyard was jostling with people. Outside it drizzled miserably, as it had all day, although this did nothing to deter the crowd. Emily Hooper Lansana, the Logan Center’s associate director of community arts engagement, must have been right when she introduced the next act as “magnetic.” A slice of Chicago was packed into that tent, ready to give some of their own a proper homecoming. After all, it’s a rare feat that the South Side-born and raised members of the Hypnotic Brass Ensemble—all of them children of the jazz legend Phil Cohran, and on the road to becoming legends in their own right—return to play a free set for their native city.

Features | History | Nature | Nature Issue 2017 | Parks

Greener Pastures

What the history of Jackson Park tells us about its uncertain future

by 1 year ago 2 Comments

Within a year of the World’s Columbian Exhibition’s closure, a large fire razed most of the buildings, which gave Olmsted the opportunity in 1895 to create this revised general plan for Jackson Park—a waterway system that would connect Jackson Park through a canal running down the Midway to Washington Park. (New York Public Library)

Parks are for people,” Frances Vandervoort told me. A board member and Committee Chairman of the Hyde Park Historical Society, she holds a similar position on the Jackson Park Advisory Council (JPAC), a watchdog organization for the South Side park of the same name. That’s what I’ve come to talk with Vandervoort about: the changes that will soon come to Jackson Park. The first signs of these changes are visible even today—a nonprofit called Project 120 Chicago, in partnership with the Chicago Park District and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE), has partially underwritten a series of revitalization projects taking place in the park since 2013. These are forerunners of more significant changes to come: the Obama Presidential Center (OPC) is slotted to open in Jackson Park in 2021, and the Tiger Woods–designed revitalization of the Jackson Park and South Shore Golf Courses—which will combine them into one PGA-grade course, and will be financed through a public-private partnership—is expected to be completed by 2020. Both projects have been sources of controversy.

Faith | Features | Food | Food Issue 2017

Cultivating Faith in Food

Religious institutions use urban agriculture to supplement food sources, social justice programs across the South Side

by 2 years ago 1 Comment

Jason Schumer

Two long, drip-irrigated plant beds run parallel to the southernmost wall of KAM Isaiah Israel, a Reform synagogue that straddles the border between Hyde Park and Kenwood. Some sections of the two beds bear different varieties of kale and collard greens. Others are filled with what appear to be weeds but are actually a cover crop, storing up carbon and nitrogen in the soil for produce that will be planted in weeks to come.