Reginald Rice

Stacks of shelves, repurposed. In the Hyde Park storefront at the intersection of 57th Street and Harper Avenue that formerly housed Southside Hub of Production, a cultural center, and before that O’Gara & Wilson—Chicago’s oldest bookstore before it moved to Indiana in 2013—now stands 57th Street Wines, the neighborhood’s newest small business: a specialty wine and liquor store. At the shop’s grand opening last Friday, distributors set up tasting tables on the store’s boldly checkered floor tiles (restored from the space’s bookstore days), while customers met and mingled, wine samples in hand. The trio behind the store, owner Steven Lucy and co-workers Bex Behlen and Derrick Westbrook, were present in their semi-formal best, directing customers to shelves not unlike the ones that held volumes of books less than four years ago. This time, their contents concerned neither genre nor author, but red and white .

Eric L. Kirkes

For more than thirty years prior to its departure, Edwardo’s served a lot of spinach and pesto deep dish pizzas in its spot on 57th Street. Then Packed: Dumplings Reimagined rolled in with much fanfare, but evaporated in less time than it takes to steam a dumpling stuffed with locally sourced, in-season produce and humanely raised proteins.