She was a great and terrible beauty. She was burned to the ground, rebuilt, elevated, stabilized. She was exposed, publicized, she was made of steel, she defied gravity. She changed the flow of water, she gave a home to workers. The blood of animals soaked into her soil. She was separated by neighborhoods speaking different tones and tongues, she tried to used the wind to scatter the segregation of her sections, but to no avail. She watched in horror as administrators advocated for the destruction of the needy, she predicted it, she watched her brainstorms torment into actuality, the cracks of gunpowder stronger than thunder. And through it all she keeps her neck so straight and poised and proud. The blood of men soak into her soil, she cries as her hands are stained red, five pointed stars caught between two water ways. She is patient, but disappointed.
It was not what I imagined, it did not have exposed brick walls, creaky hardwood floors, or a built in bookshelf, but my first apartment was perfection. I walked into the building, surveying the off-white carpet, drooping blinds, and dirt smudged walls, down a narrow hallway into a kitchen with linoleum floors, plastic tiles on the walls, and exposed plumbing lines. The rooms were small, there were three of them. One had a window facing the grey-blue back stairway leading to the other flats. That was the room I wanted. My parents tried to sell me on location, price, practicality, but I wasn’t hearing any of it. I had already begun to imagine how I would be spending my days and nights of freedom here. Now all I had to do was show it to Giuliana. As complimentary opposites go, Giuliana and I make, bake, and take the cake. I am a thinker, she is a doer. I am the risk-taker, she is the joint-gluer. We signed the lease to our apartment on the day of our senior prom, and got the keys on our graduation day. A week or so later, we went to work. While I would have been completely satisfied slumming it out with floor seating and no counter space, Giuliana took the reins on turning our humble house into a home. Because of her (and her genius mother), we had a house that had a place to set your shoes, a seating area in the kitchen, and a patio that belonged in a magazine. As thrifty and spirited as it was, this was not your typical first apartment. This apartment was the kickstart of my education as a community developer.
The thing that our apartment was able to achieve that so many other buildings do not, was a sense of community. As hard as an organization may try to create a space that meets the needs of their community, there must be heart over design, functionality over fashion, and brains over budget. Giuliana created a space not for herself as much as for the people she knew would be visiting. She cleaned the carpet before company because she knew how uncomfortable it was sitting on a dirty floor. She made a pound of pasta incase anyone hadn’t had a meal yet. She made a fire pit in the back yard so that people would be encouraged to spend cooler months outside instead of cooped up in the house. She created a space where people felt comfortable, so people returned time and time again. As important as the space is to house a community, establishing a community is just as important. In our case, the case of recently graduated high school students, our audience was teenagers around the Chicago who wanted a centrally located space to feel creative, safe, loved, and comfortable. At the time we were the only ones in our community with our own space, a space without parents and rules, but a place that still had the comfort and resources of home. Before we knew it, our apartment was no longer just an apartment, it was “the apartment”, the place of meeting before or after events, a place to relax after work or school, a place to eat, and occasionally a place to party. If you build a place that serves many functions, it will attract many kinds of people.
The reason I would call our community a success is because as time went on, it grew. And it did not grow upwards or longways, it grew in a circular fashion, attracting people that had nothing to do with our original community, but now found a strong connection to very different groups of people. How does this happen, and how does it happen in a way that attracts the kind of people who will benefit your community? For Giuliana and I, who were not in any way planning who came into our home, and had no community development intentions, it happened the way all good things happen: naturally. Friends came into our home and loved the experience. A close group of friends got a bit bigger, one friend invited another, and they came back as well. Our community was expanding simply because of our hospitality and ability to make people feel welcome and accepted. In this manner of growing through association, people who were not originally in our close group of friends began to come over even when our mutual friends weren’t there. As our community was growing, our relationships with individual members of the community grew as well.
Now this idea is not revolutionary or worthy of a news story, but in our case, the extreme case of Chicago youth, I feel blessed and proud to share our story. In the extreme case where kids run home from the train every night, praying they’re fast enough to outrun bullets, where kids have had to burry their friends, sometimes more than once, where black and brown kids don’t talk like that, I feel blessed. I feel blessed because on the nights where my friends are gathered in my apartment, late into the night, and they choose to sleep on the floor so they don’t have to travel home, I know I will see them the next morning. I feel blessed when my friends choose to party in my house instead of in some warehouse, because I know there won’t be knives thrown or bullets flying in between songs. I feel blessed because in the city of segregation, where kids can grow up never having a friend that’s not his race, I see blacks and browns and whites and girls and boys and atheists and christians and college goers and music makers and drug dealers and bus boys and track stars and businessmen sitting together, sharing time and space and love. And that just doesn’t happen all that often.
Chicago is a place of terror and terrible beauty, sorrow and strife that creates warriors of hardened stone. Chicago’s warriors have been cheated and manipulated, making them prideful and confused. Many years ago they began to fight each other, and they were good, violent warriors. They formed armies for the eyes, their skin tone was their coat of arms, enemies were made instantly. The armies each conquered land and defended the honor of dead warriors before them. They took revenge by taking children, at first it was a tragedy. Sometimes they even took their own warriors children, they just couldn’t make it stop. They took so many we forgot to cry, we forgot to shake our fists in rage. They took so many no one was left to scream for help, for justice, for peace. I wonder what they would want now, all those stolen children. Would it be vengeance? No, children know better. Children’s thoughts are much simpler than ours, they lack the pollution of money motivations and ego retentions. The answer is much simpler than us grown folks think it to be. We have bought into the lie that it’s better not to know each other, it’s better not to look each other in the eye. We use our lives to gain capital and success instead of self-worth and strong relationships. We live under the false assumption that if we make ourselves great we will have a great life. We are selfish, we are terrorized, we are brain dead, almost. It is easy to loose hope in this place. But if you look, it is just as easy to find it. I have seen the power of love between two people, and it is stronger than any weapons our warriors carry. As instant as the journey of a bullet to it’s prey, a smile passed between strangers is quicker.
When's The Last Time You Heard A Funky Academic? 