Curious City

Curious Citizen Kate Hannigan spends a lot time walking through Chicago’s parks and streets, and there’s something that really bugs her — it’s something that she doesn’t see. So she asked Curious City, “Where are all the statues of women?"

“We don't have an army of cats patrolling for rats,” she clarified, during a recent interview at the humane society’s cat café.

To understand how the confusion started, we have to go back to 2007, when Cook County passed an ordinance that legalized TNR and allowed residents to become “caretakers” of feral cat colonies.

Before the law passed, municipal departments were responsible for responding to calls about feral cats in the area.

An administrator from the Cook County Department of Animal and Rabies Control told WTTW that before the ordinance passed, the county was spending hundreds of thousands of dollars trapping and euthanizing feral cats — with little effect on their population.

“People were struggling with what to do, where to go, [the fact] that the cats just kept reproducing,” Houtz of Cats in Action said. “There weren't a lot of resources for people.”

But after the law passed, the responsibility of dealing with feral cats fell to TNR organizations: nonprofits like Cats in Action and Tree House that trap feral cats, neuter or spay them and return them to their communities. A huge benefit of the ordinance, according to Houtz, was that it reduced the number of feral cats being euthanized — while also reducing the overall feral cat population by sterilizing them.



There was also what TNR advocates call an ancillary benefit: rat control. Chicago was just named the “rattiest” city in the U.S. by Orkin for the ninth consecutive year. Cats, conveniently, love to hunt rats, and help keep them off people’s property. (Though there isn’t any scientific evidence that they reduce rat populations overall.)

Tree House started their “Cats at Work” program in 2012. This program and others like it were efforts by non-profit organizations to place cats that were not a good fit for adoption in areas that could use them, often because they were besieged by rats.

The ordinance made it possible for Tree House to start the Cats at Work program. But colonies that originate through programs like this one today make up just a fraction of Chicago’s feral cat colonies. (Most cat colonies develop "organically" because a group of cats is already hanging out in a certain area.)



Regardless of how a colony originates, according to the county ordinance, all feral cat caretakers must be vetted by non-profit “sponsors.” Caretakers agree to sterilize and vaccinate the cats and provide them with food, water and outdoor shelters, among other responsibilities.

By registering caretakers and providing them with resources, in line with the county ordinance, it aims to manage the number of feral cats through sterilization and ensure the cats that are there will be well looked after — while in some cases alleviating the frustration of residents who don’t want rodents in their yards.

Chicago’s feral cats and their caretakers

When Rob Crowder first moved to the Roscoe Village neighborhood, one of the first things he noticed was the rodent activity, in both his front yard and back. “There were rats everywhere,” he said.

Crowder wasn’t a cat person, but he knew about Tree House’s Cats at Work program and put his name on the waiting list.

Now Crowder has two feral cats, Washington and Drake. Like many colony caretakers, he has a cat shelter in his backyard made out of a large storage bin lined with insulation, and a warming mat inside. “It’s 72 degrees in there, even in the middle of winter,” he said.

The cats have proven to be good hunters, sometimes bringing him dead rats and leaving them on his back stairs. “We sometimes hear some sounds in the alley, and when we do, we know the cats are at work,” he said. “I’ve learned to love these cats.”





While Crowder sought the cats out to help with his rat problem, in Cook County, the vast majority of colonies get started because cats are already congregating in a particular area, according to Houtz and Roewade.

Take Belinda and Agustin Fuentes, who live on the far South Side near the Indiana border. They’ve cared for roughly 50 feral cats over the years, by Belinda’s estimate, and the cats just keep showing up.

Because their zip code is considered a priority area for TNR services, they receive a discount on spay and neuter surgeries through PAWS, the city’s largest no-kill shelter.

Ten cats have stayed with the Fuentes family in the last 10 years, either as indoor cats — if they could be socialized — or as feral cats that live outdoors and winter in their garage. Currently they’ve got five feral cats hanging out under their deck and in their garage, and roaming the neighborhood.

Agustin wakes up at 5:30 every morning to feed them, rain or shine, even on mornings when he just wants to stay in bed. “Our motto is, ‘It’s not their fault,’” he said.

For Emily Edelman, who lives in Tri-Taylor, one of the most surprising things about the feral cats that live in her backyard is how playful they are. Three-year-old Bernard loves to entertain himself with cat toys, and unconfined by walls or furniture, he runs all over. “I didn't expect them to be so much fun to watch,” Edelman said. “It’s like National Geographic.”



Before she got Scout and Bernard, Edelman says the rats in her yard were so big and so bold — scurrying right across her feet at night — that she was considering moving. “I couldn’t take it anymore,” she said.

Meanwhile, Scout and Bernard were on a euthanasia list because they were considered too feral to be adopted. For Edelman, it was a match made in heaven. When she went through cancer treatment and spent much of her time at home, getting up to feed the cats and watching them from her window was hugely comforting. “It gave me something to look forward to,” she said.



A “birdbath full of blood”

Judy Pollock loves birds. She started birding a few decades ago and has been president of the Chicago Bird Alliance since 2019. Today, there’s nothing she enjoys more than seeing migrating birds fill her backyard in the spring and fall.

But she also has firsthand experience with what she believes were feral cats that made use of her garden.

“I remember waking up one morning with my birdbath full of blood,” Pollock said. “... It's very upsetting to see these cats prowling around trying to [kill] the birds.”



The reality is cats are not native to Chicago — or even to the U.S. — while many birds are.

For the Chicago Bird Alliance and even national organizations like PETA, feral cats are a big deal because of the threat they pose to native wildlife including birds.

Crowder, the Roscoe Village resident with two feral cats, said he occasionally gets complaints from neighbors, but they’re usually from people who are concerned about the cats’ welfare and don’t want to see them outdoors. He sometimes shows them the cat shelter, with its temperature-controlled interior, and explains that in his view this is the best possible life for them.

“I have to remind people that these cats would have been put down if we didn't take them,” he said. “We’re grateful for them every single day.”

Editor’s note: Part of this story was originally reported for an episode of WBEZ’s The Rundown.

Justin Bull is a producer for WBEZ’s The Rundown. Follow him @justybull

Street artist Joos is perhaps best known for works that resemble ribbons of dissolving color, or paint that’s been pressure washed and left blooms of pigment behind.

“It's like, is it a shadow? Is it a silhouette? What is it? I think … he gets a kick out of tricking people, and making people take a second look at something,” said Robert Herguth, who profiled the artist last year.

The distinctive graffiti caught the eye of Curious City listener Judy Glaser, who spotted the sprays of color on utility boxes on Milwaukee Ave. She wanted to know who created them, and why.

Unlike many Chicago street artists, Joos came to the medium later in life, first picking up a spray paint can in his 30s. It wasn’t an easy journey to get where he is today — but it’s one that may have saved his life.





On a recent Friday afternoon, Joos got set up under the CTA Blue Line tracks at Milwaukee Ave. and Wolcott St. His backpack was full of spray paint cans and nozzles, and he also had a phone with a reference design. He was there to meet up with a street artist who goes by Stuck — a longtime friend of his. Each year, the two return to the same spot to collaborate on a piece.

Joos, who’s originally from central Illinois and is in his early 40s, started making street art less than a decade ago. He became a regular at Campus, a streetwear store and art space that served as a members-only supply shop for graffiti artists in Chicago.

There, he connected with other street artists for the first time and could purchase spray paint, which was — and still is — illegal to sell in the city. He also got to practice making large-scale pieces on a CTA train replica created out of plywood specifically for artists to practice on.





Though plenty of people consider graffiti to be an art form, the city considers it vandalism. Joos knows this well, having covertly created works in CTA stations, on utility boxes and across other city-owned infrastructure.

Joos scouts sites well in advance, paying attention to foot traffic and police presence in the area. “The street is unpredictable,” he said. “So you gotta study the street a lot.”

When he works on larger projects, Joos doesn’t have the advantage of working solely under the cover of darkness. In those cases he says the trick, for him, is to act like he’s not doing anything wrong. “You show up, six or seven in the morning, and … act like you're supposed to be there,” he explained.



Normally, paint comes out of a spray can in the shape of a cone. Joos holds his cans to the side, only allowing part of the paint spray to touch the surface. That technique, called “side spraying,” is what he uses to create his signature plumes that adorn utility boxes and wheat paste posters across the city.

“It creates a hard edge and then a fade on the other side,” Joos explained. “... You can use it to make shading. But by itself it looks awesome. And on black surfaces, it looks the best.”

If Chicago is an art museum, the Logan Square neighborhood is Joos’s gallery. His work can be seen all over the city but is particularly concentrated on the Northwest Side.



For Joos, street art was originally an outlet that helped him recover from drug addiction.

“Graffiti is full of broken people, myself included,” Joos said.

“It's like a harm-reduction type of technique for [avoiding] doing drugs,” he explained. “I get that same kind of rush. It's dopamine … a really alive feeling.”

Though he occasionally creates works for galleries or does commissioned pieces, Joos says he never wants graffiti to feel like a job. He needs that adrenaline.

One thing that sets Joos apart is that he’s colorblind. This has created some mix-ups for him in the past — like when he mistakenly ordered dozens of paint cans in the wrong color.



Unsanctioned street art, like Joos creates, is inherently ephemeral. Sometimes, if he creates a piece on an abandoned building or one whose owner couldn’t care less, it might stay up for years. But other times, if the building owner puts in a removal request, it’ll be “buffed” out by the city almost immediately.

“The next-day buff humbles you,” Joos said. “You spend all night working on something that's gone the next day.”

He tries not to let it bother him. “You can either get mad about it,” he said, “or you can go do something else.”

Joe DeCeault is a senior audio producer at WBEZ. Follow him @joedeceault

When you ask the students at Leo Catholic High School in Chicago’s Auburn Gresham neighborhood what they like most about Black History Month, they’re eager to answer.

“Every year during Black History Month, I find out something new that I never knew,” one student said.

Scott said Woodson folded this week into pre-existing celebrations to show Black people they were a part of something greater. Then, he said, this American story becomes much larger than the individual — bigger than Douglass and bigger than Lincoln.

“This story becomes a story in which Black people can see that they're a part of a big canvas of human history,” Scott said. “So the themes would be not the achievements of Frederick Douglass or the achievements of Sojourner Truth or anyone else. It's about the role of Black people in bringing democracy to America.”

“[Woodson] really believed that if the truth about Black people and their history was told to Black people and the public, it would transform how Black people saw themselves, how other people saw Black people, and how Black people would fit into American democracy and how Black people would fit into world history,” Scott said.



Negro History Week becomes Black History Month

Negro History Week continued to grow and expand in the second half of the 20th century.

Its organizers also made changes, often in response to feedback from young members: The ASALH moved from using “Negro” to “Black,” added links to Africa as part of the Black American past and, in 1976, extended the week to Black History Month.

Erica Griffin-Fabicon is the director of education at the Chicago History Museum, and in her role, she works to help people better understand history connections.

“Chicago at the time, and Chicago today, continues to be that beacon, a hub, an important city,” she said. “This has always been the case for Chicago.”

For example, Jean Baptiste DuSable as the first non-Native Chicagoan or the trailblazing work of journalist Ida B. Wells are just a couple of pieces of Chicago’s history.



Much of the archives of what happened in Chicago is also housed here. That’s thanks to Vivian Harsh, Chicago Public Library’s first Black branch head. She was an active member of the ASALH and created the Special Negro Collection which was a collection of African American history and literature at the George Cleveland Hall Branch in the city’s Bronzeville neighborhood. Among the first donations to the collection were about 200 books from the private library of Dr. Charles Bentley, a dentist and leader of the local NAACP. Today, it’s the largest collection of its kind in the Midwest and is now housed at the Carter G. Woodson Regional Library in the Washington Heights neighborhood.

“Vivian Harsh was also collecting images, materials, documents that all spoke about — and for — Black lives in Chicago and beyond,” Griffin-Fabicon said.

At the Hall Branch, famous Black Americans like Gwendolyn Brooks and Langston Hughes would gather, but it was also a place for the public. According to the Chicago Public Library, as more Black history clubs were created, teaching materials became high in demand. Harsh made those resources easily available, and she organized many Negro History Week programs at the library before she retired in 1958.



Griffin-Fabicon said Woodson hoped Black history would eventually be better integrated into American history as a whole.

“[Woodson] felt that … if we simply make those stories part of our curriculum, a part of our narrative, then we would not have to have this particular time where we're amplifying Black people within this month, it would be history writ large, 365 days of the year,” she said.

But, Black history is not completely recognized across the country in the way Woodson envisioned. Some state governments continue to debate the value of Black history curriculum. In the past few years, legislation has been introduced in several state legislatures to restrict education on racism and contributions of specific racial groups to U.S. history. Such legislation has been successful in states like Tennessee, Florida and Texas.

In Illinois, lawmakers have considered a bill that would require schools to post learning materials for parental review and another that would give parents the power to oppose material they find objectionable.

Griffin-Fabicon said Woodson’s defense of Black history can be applied to today. Woodson wrote in an editorial in 1932, “This celebration … is to be not so much a Negro history week as a history week,” and, “We have labeled the record of the Race as the history of this particular race because it has been omitted from the general histories.”

Arionne Nettles is a university lecturer, culture reporter, and audio aficionado. She is the author of We Are the Culture: Black Chicago’s Influence on Everything. Follow her @arionnenettles.

“So Black Americans had to think about, ‘Well, how could we co-op these spaces and use them for our own interest?’” Wilson said. “And that was true in the fair, in Chicago in 1893, with the Haiti Pavilion.”

Dozens of nations participated in the fair with cultural exhibits, including Haiti, an independent country. Its pavilion famously became the home base of activist and former U.S. minister to Haiti Frederick Douglass. He enlisted journalist Ida B. Wells, educator Irvine Garland Penn and attorney Ferdinand Lee Barnett to write and distribute their pamphlet The Reason Why the Colored American Is Not in the World's Columbian Exposition.

In it, Barnett wrote, “Theoretically open to all Americans, the Exposition practically is, literally and figuratively, a ‘White City,’ in the building of which the Colored American was allowed no helping hand, and in its glorious success he has no share.”



In response, the organizers of the fair created a so-called “Colored Day,” at which

Black people could speak. There, Douglass delivered a moving speech criticizing what was often referred to by white people at the time as “the Negro problem.”

“The problem is whether the American people have honesty enough, loyalty enough, honor enough, patriotism enough to live up to their own Constitution,” he said.

Yet, this unfair treatment continued. In 1933, when the city hosted the Century of Progress Exposition, Black folks were still largely ignored. While there was a replica of Haitian American John Baptiste DuSable’s cabin included in one exhibit, the majority of exhibits that included Black people made fun of them and pushed false and harmful stereotypes.

Real representation

The treatment of Black Americans at the city-hosted world’s fairs directly led to Black folks in Chicago creating their own grand exposition. They envisioned it as something that would draw people from across the country and would center on Black innovation and authentic representation of Black people.

James Washington was a Chicago real estate developer who got the Exposition started. According to the Chicago Defender, he devoted five years and traveled 100,000 miles around the country to promote the project. He lobbied to raise $150,000 in state and federal money to help fund the event.



“What was interesting about this particular exposition is that you start to see the rise of Black popular culture and mass culture,” Wilson said. “And you see this very interesting collaboration between a kind of Black business class, people who are running insurance companies and newspapers, people who had a certain kind of social standing in Black communities, and a group of intellectuals and artists who are much more radical.”

There had been smaller celebrations of Black achievement before, many of which were held in Chicago. But the American Negro Exposition of 1940 was billed as the “first real Negro World’s Fair in all history” to celebrate 75 years since the end of slavery.

Government officials of all levels supported it, from Chicago Mayor Edward Kelly all the way to President Franklin D. Roosevelt. President Roosevelt himself pressed a button from his home in New York to turn on the lights at the Chicago Coliseum, where the exposition was located, launching the start of the two-month event.

The American Negro Exposition ran from Independence Day to Labor Day 1940 at the Coliseum, an arena-sized venue that could hold several thousands of people.

The exposition’s guide book said the event would “promote racial understanding and good will; enlighten the world on the contributions of the Negro to civilization and make the Negro conscious of his dramatic progress since emancipation.”

There were performances like the “Tropics After Dark,” a musical revue the Chicago Defender said featured night club favorites and was written by famous Chicago and Harlem Renaissance period writers Arna Bontemps and Langston Hughes.



Artists like Archibald Motley, who was known as a jazz age modernist painter, were commissioned to create work that was specific to Black representation. The organizers’ goal was to create the most comprehensive collection of Black art that had ever been presented. And as a representative of Illinois, Motley’s contribution was a painting of Chicago’s Black Belt neighborhood.

A legacy on display

When attendees walked into the exposition at its central entrance, they were met with the Court of Dioramas. Thirty-three dioramas surrounded a replica of the Lincoln Memorial. Artist Charles Dawson designed the space and each individual diorama to “illustrate the Negro's large and valuable contributions to the progress of America and the world.”



The diorama’s themes ranged from significant historical achievements in Africa, such as the building of the Great Sphinx of Giza, to recent Black stories in America — for example, the Harlem Hellfighters in the early 1900s.

“[The dioramas] were really the capstone of that exhibition,” said LaStarsha McGarity, the conservator and co-director of the Legacy Museum at Tuskegee University. “And they represented the first time that Black people had control of their image at that type of event. So they decided to use this opportunity to highlight the global historical contributions of Black people.”

The Legacy Museum now has 20 dioramas on display. Dawson, along with exposition trustee Claude Barnett, were alumni of Tuskegee and gifted them to the university. However, they were in poor condition, and it took much work and care to restore each one. McGarity said it’s likely the remaining 13 are lost or destroyed.

“I think it's really important to know that [these dioramas] were created by an entire group of artists that were working in collaboration and that they were created specifically for that expo,” she said. “And that was very common for things created for an expo to not be kept. They were considered ephemeral. So after an expo, it was very common for them to be destroyed or thrown away.”

Even the beautiful murals, paintings and sculptures that were created by many of the most famous Black artists of the time had no formal place to go after the exposition. Art was given to churches, to schools and even to the homes of the artists’ friends to add to their private collections. Painter William Edouard Scott, for example, created large murals for the event. But much of these installation pieces are now in private homes.



“The Black events aren't as well documented, mostly because they didn't have the infrastructure to do that work,” Wilson, of Columbia, said. “Things that were being exhibited and collected weren't going to go into major museums … And because of that, it can make it very difficult to find the narratives.”

Even without the institutions at the time, Black celebrations through expositions around the country continued to be an important part of documenting Black life. But this would soon start to change. Artist Margaret Burroughs pulled together a collective of Black artists to create the South Side Community Arts Center in 1940 — the same year as the Negro Exposition.

She explained the artists came together because they had no place to exhibit their work. They opened the center’s doors that December, just months after the exposition wrapped, creating a space of their own that would no longer be temporary. Its inaugural exhibition included work from artists like Charles White, Archibald Motley, Jr., Margaret Burroughs herself and so many more.

This work was all part of celebrating and commemorating Black history, and Burroughs continued that mission when she co-founded the DuSable Museum in 1961. Perri Irmer, president and CEO of the DuSable Museum, says that’s something we can’t lose sight of today.

“We have a particular responsibility to advocate for Black history, when we have states in this country who are trying to limit what people can learn, to limit curricula, to censor and ban books about Black history and by Black authors,” Irmer said. “We can't be erased, we just can't be."

Arionne Nettles is a university lecturer, culture reporter, and audio aficionado. She is the author of We Are the Culture: Black Chicago’s Influence on Everything. Follow her @arionnenettles.

During the early 1900s, as silent film production was growing, Black film companies lined State Street in what would eventually be considered Bronzeville — the first of which was Foster Photoplay Company, owned by William Foster. Foster Photoplay is considered to be the first Black-owned film production company in the U.S. that featured an all-Black cast.

This week, we're revisiting that story.

Drive down Division St. in Chicago’s Austin neighborhood, and you’ll pass storefront after storefront with names like “Christ Resurrection Missionary Baptist Church” and “Old Rugged Cross Missionary Baptist Church.”

Storefront churches are defined by their location: They’re houses of worship tucked into strip malls or street-facing buildings that might otherwise serve commercial purposes. These churches are often sandwiched between all sorts of spaces, including barbershops, chicken-and-fish eateries and vacant properties.

This style of church became popular in Chicago in the early 20th century, when African Americans moved to the city to escape the Jim Crow South during the first wave of the Great Migration.

Today, you can still find storefront churches all over the city. But they’re particularly prevalent on the South and West Sides, in neighborhoods like Austin.

Storefront churches are generally closed most of the week, sometimes appearing abandoned. But for some residents, these churches are a lifeline. They can also offer opportunities to pastors without formal theological training to lead a church. When a Curious City listener asked what impact these churches have on communities they’re prevalent in, we talked to Austin pastors, business owners and residents to find out.





A new kind of house of worship

Starting in the 1910s, hundreds of thousands of African Americans came to northern cities like Chicago from the South. They set out to put down roots and get connected with local churches.

In the area surrounding J. Casualwear, where Israel sells hoodies, sweatpants and other loungewear, he’s seen more storefront churches come and go over the years than he can count on one hand.

“That was a church over there, this corner right here was a church,” he said. “You got a church on the corner, that’s three. You got another church three doors down from us, that’s four. The corner spot was a church, that’s five. They had the big church right here, that’s six.”



The proliferation of storefront churches on Division St. bothers Israel. He says it makes it hard for J. Casualwear to feel like part of a thriving business hub when so many buildings surrounding the store are closed most of the week.

“For six days out of the week, we look at this door, closed. It dries up the community,” he said. “It’s nothing generating wealth.”

Israel would love to see other types of businesses take over these spaces. “We don’t have a laundromat in the neighborhood. We don’t have an exercise gym in the neighborhood,” he said. “We don’t even have a lot of businesses in the neighborhood.”



City leaders recently made Austin a priority area for revitalization efforts to address these very concerns. And a few years ago, the Illinois legislature passed an amendment that made it easier for businesses that sell alcohol, like restaurants, to open near churches. But for Israel and other neighborhood business owners, it hasn’t been enough.

On the other hand, Dawn Guerrero, who volunteers at another storefront church on Division St., New Inspirational Missionary Baptist Church, says there’s no such thing as too many churches in one neighborhood.

“In this community, the pastor is the one that’s sitting there giving us the avenues,” she said. “Like, he knows where to reach out to, and how to help us get [what we need] without having to struggle.”



For Guerrero, the fact that storefront churches are physically embedded within their block, their neighborhood, makes it easier for the pastor and volunteers to connect with people who may need support.

Similarly, Ward Miller of Preservation Chicago says when many storefront churches closed at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, neighborhoods lost out on essential services. “We lose food pantries, we lose counseling services, we lose childcare services, we lose community dinners, we lose celebrations,” Miller said. “And we lose a network of friends and family that come together.”

Other Austin residents are neutral on the presence of storefront churches. Deonte Harris, who works at H-D Visions Barber Shop, says churches are better than what he sees as likely alternatives.

“If they weren’t churches, it’d probably be liquor stores on every corner,” he said.



Miller agrees that with vacant properties taking up large swathes of the South and West Sides, storefront churches would not necessarily be replaced with businesses like laundromats or gyms if they left. Liquor stores — or even vacant buildings — might be more likely possibilities.

Harris’ main complaint is that he’d like to see more local congregation members patronize his barbershop to get their hair cut or styled before church.

“That’d be great,” Harris said. “For the neighborhood, and the [church] services.”

Adora Namigadde is a metro reporter and the morning host of The Rundown for WBEZ. Follow @adorakn.

The podcast episode accompanying this article answers several traffic-related questions, including one about how city traffic lights are timed and another about why construction on I-90/I-94 happens the way it does. Click “listen” at the top of this page to hear the full story.

High school math teacher Connor Cameron cannot be late for work. “If I show up at 8:05 there are 30 students who are unsupervised,” Cameron said, “and I cannot afford to do that.”

Cameron teaches on Chicago’s Southwest Side but lives in the northern suburbs. “My journey starts on the Edens,” he said, “Then I’m on the Kennedy, the Dan Ryan for a split second, and then the Stevenson” before eventually making it to residential streets.

According to the 2020 Census, about 59% of city residents and more than 86% of people living in the surrounding suburbs commute by car. Like hundreds of thousands of his fellow drivers, Cameron relies on the morning traffic reports for his lengthy commute to work. It got him wondering what goes into making those reports he hears on WBEZ or WBBM. Where does the raw data come from? How do they calculate those time estimates for different roadways?

The traffic reports air daily with such frequency that they can feel commonplace. But behind the scenes, it’s chaotic putting together a single report. Often one traffic producer sifts through dozens of sources of information to create that 30-second report drivers hear on the radio.

We spoke with one longtime traffic reporter and producer to learn the ins and outs of putting a report together. He told us how he juggles listening to police scanners and checking live video feeds before sitting down to record a report that will be heard by thousands of drivers — and about some of the most harrowing moments on the job.



Chances are if you’ve heard a Chicago-area traffic report on the radio in the past twenty years, Mike Pries helped put it together.

He works for Total Traffic and Weather Network, which manages a traffic database used by nearly every local news outlet.

He works from a studio downtown, a small room outfitted with a few computer monitors, a mixing console with microphone and several police scanners blaring at once. At any given moment during his shift, Pries is listening to more than 20 police scanner dispatchers, pulling updates from countless state and county agency websites and fielding notifications from databases like Pulse Point, an app that tells him where first responders and other emergency services are headed. He’s also checking live video feeds of some roadways and monitoring hundreds of traffic-related Twitter accounts.

Pries’ day-to-day consists of tracking and translating all this data and turning it into traffic reports that he’ll record or broadcast. For shorter reports, Pries emphasizes only major incidents or slowdowns, while some of his lengthier broadcasts provide a thorough overview of Chicago-area traffic.

He also estimates travel times for navigating expressways and major avenues. Those times are in part based on passive cell phone data that tracks the average speed of drivers moving down an expressway, but also on Pries’ own analysis of how a certain incident may cause a backup for surrounding roads.



“It’s not just, ‘How many minutes is it going to take you to get from O’Hare to downtown?’” Pries said. “If you have a crash outbound on the Dan Ryan at 18th, you know that pretty soon that’s going to start backing up the Kennedy going into downtown. And if it stays there long enough it’s going to affect the Eisenhower, too.”

In addition to his own reports, Pries and his team also maintain a database called Traffic Net, where they input entries for things like crashes, construction and other incidents. Those entries then get pushed out to Total Traffic and Weather’s various clients, which include radio and TV stations that may have their own reporters or anchors who read the broadcast scripts.

It’s this ability to quickly process information that makes Pries’ reports valuable and thorough. In fact, some GPS systems use data from Total Traffic and Weather Network to generate their own travel time estimates. “You need someone to pull it all together, get it all in one place, so that it can go out to everyone as a cohesive product,” Pries explained.



Traffic reporting is generally a fast-paced and stressful job, but there are times when it is harrowing, especially when winter weather hits. Pries recalled a blizzard in 2011 that caused total pandemonium on the roads.

Pries said they were receiving reports of buses jackknifing and cars getting stranded and buried under snow on Lake Shore Drive. “And people are on [Lake Shore Drive], they're calling us. And they're saying there's no one out here,” Pries remembered. “And, you know, we're not emergency responders, we're not trained in that capacity. But people are calling us because it was chaos out there.” Pries did his best to reassure those callers, providing updates as he heard dispatchers being sent to their location.



A big part of the job, Pries said, is navigating the gravity of a serious incident while maintaining the fast-paced turn of the next report. However, despite it being hectic, Pries loves what he does. “Even when it’s incredibly stressful,” Pries said, “I can’t say that it feels much like work. It’s always interesting and keeps me on my toes.”

Andrew Meriwether is a reporter and producer based in Chicago. Keep up with his work at andrewmeriwether.com

Whether it’s your first winter in Chicago or your 40th, there’s no denying the season’s unforgiving weather. From below-freezing temperatures to blustering blizzards, navigating the Windy City in these months can be a challenge. Fortunately for Chicagoans, during a snowstorm, the Department of Streets and Sanitation has 300 city snow plow truck drivers per shift at the ready to keep the roads clear of snow and ice.

In this episode, Curious City’s Maggie Sivit and JP Swenson brave the first snowstorm of the season to try to flag down a snow plow driver. That’s because over the years so many listeners have written in asking us what it takes to keep Chicago’s streets plowed in the winter.

But what starts as a joyful effort goes south as the snow piles up and morale dips down. Especially when not a single driver will stop to talk with them. (They were, as you can imagine, busy plowing the streets.) Luckily, Mark Nichol, a Chicago snow plow driver of 40 years, shares what it’s like to be in his boots on a snowy day.

Plus, we revisit an especially unique winter storm — the Chicago Blizzard of 1967 — when it snowed for 29 hours straight. With nowhere left to dump the snow, the Department of Streets and Sanitation began shoveling the snow into freight trains heading south. Reporter Logan Jaffe welcomes you aboard the superb PR stunt that followed.

Answering these questions took the Curious City team on an epic journey (literally and figuratively) to an indoor doggie pool, the Neiman Marcus building on Michigan Ave. and all the way to the Gulf of Mexico. 

Click “listen” at the top of this page to understand why.

A visit to the Walnut Room is a long-standing holiday tradition for many Chicagoans. It first started in the Marshall Field’s department store on State Street. The store is now known as Macy’s, but the tradition of the Walnut Room continues with its glitzy Christmas tree and special visits from Santa Claus.

It got some listeners wondering how the Walnut Room got its start.

According to historian Sarah Sullivan, Marshall Field’s managers were always looking for ways to expand the shopping experience and draw more customers in. The Walnut Room was born from that effort in 1937.

While the store conjures warm holiday nostalgia for many in the region, for others, the Walnut Room and Marshall Field’s brings up painful memories. Many African-American shoppers during the 1950s and ’60s were treated poorly by staff, and a pattern of racism and discrimination seemed to be the general practice throughout the store during that time. Joyce Miller-Bean, who grew up on Chicago’s South Side, recounts a number of discriminatory incidents when she visited Marshall Field’s during her youth — which she didn’t experience at other Chicago-area department stores. She’s glad her now-adult children didn’t experience the same thing when they were growing up.

Monica Eng is a reporter for Axios Chicago.

When Kathryn Jackson-Jones moved from Scotland to Chicago in 2022, she was excited to see colorful newspaper boxes dotting the sidewalks in her neighborhood.

“We thought, great, this is a place where we can find a local newspaper that will tell us [about] local issues, [and] events that are happening,” she said. “And we can just get to know what it's like to live here.”

But she quickly realized the boxes were nearly always empty. Do any newspapers still use the boxes? she wondered. Is there any way to repurpose them, if they’re no longer useful?

And if not, why are they still here?

Not long ago, these boxes were piled high with print newspapers. Many of them operated like vending machines, where readers inserted quarters and tugged the door open to grab a copy off the top of the stack. (That’s why they were also known as “honor boxes,” because readers were on the honor system to take just one copy.)

Since then, the empty boxes have become a symbol of the demise of the print newspaper industry. Between 2005 and 2022, Illinois has lost about 40% of its local newspapers and 85% of its newspaper journalists, according to the Medill Local News Initiative.

But looking into the boxes still in use today offers a glimpse of how and why some local newspapers find them to be a valuable part of getting their stories to readers. And by following the decommissioned vending machines, we also learned about some of the most creative ways Chicagoans are upcycling these newsboxes and paying homage to a bygone era.



“No one was buying newspapers”

In the 1980s and early ’90s, most weekday papers sold for around 25 cents and could be purchased at newsstands or from coin-operated machines.

“It was easy for people to put their money in, take a paper out,” said Sheila Reidy, vice president of circulation with the Chicago Sun-Times. Reidy has worked in distribution for local newspapers — including the Chicago Tribune — for more than 40 years, and she’s seen a lot of changes. As the price of a newspaper went up to $1.50 or $2 a day, Reidy said it became harder to sell them out of the honor boxes. “Nobody had eight quarters,” she said.

The 2000s saw a sea change in the move to digital-first or digital-only news publications. In the past several years, even some of the most reliable Chicago weeklies have shut their doors: Hoy printed its final issue in 2019, and RedEye in 2020.

Reidy said it was around that time that both the Chicago Tribune and the Sun-Times began to decommission hundreds of coin-operated newspaper boxes across the city.



“We began to move those off the street, because no one was buying newspapers,” she said.

“[Today], there may be one or two in hospitals, but for the most part there are no street corner vending machines of any newspaper, with the exception of free papers.”

The many lives of newspaper boxes

As newspaper boxes fell out of use, they wound up in a variety of places.

Some, like those belonging to papers distributed by Tribune Publishing — including the Chicago Tribune, the Chicago Sun-Times and Hoy — were mostly removed from the sidewalks, and either scrapped or sold.

Others were removed by the city, which gets rid of newspaper boxes it deems abandoned or obstructing a public way, according to the municipal code.

Still others were simply abandoned.

And a resale market for honor boxes emerged.

Elliott Ramos, an investigative data journalist for CBS Chicago, found a Chicago Daily News box on Craigslist back in 2012. As a longtime Chicago journalism professional and self-described “news nerd,” Ramos was thrilled to come across the near-perfect-condition newspaper box from the Daily News, which published its final issue in 1978.

Ramos turned the honor box into a display case for his collection of archival newspapers documenting historic events.

Some Chicagoans have refashioned the boxes into Little Free Libraries and pantries.

But perhaps the most prolific upcycler of newspaper boxes in Chicago is Horace Nowell.

Nowell, who works as a clinical data analyst by day, started refurbishing newspaper boxes in 2019. As a lifelong Chicagoan, he remembers passing the boxes on just about every street corner as a kid. And as a practitioner of do-it-yourself projects, he loved the idea of giving the honor boxes a new life. “It was a way to preserve the memories I have of growing up in Chicago,” he said.

He scours Craigslist and Facebook Marketplace for the boxes, and has even reached out directly to news organizations when he’s noticed them removing boxes from the sidewalks. The process of refurbishing a newspaper box starts with taking it apart and sanding and repainting each piece. At first, Nowell took great pains to preserve the original lettering and logos on the boxes, but now he sources replica decals or creates custom lettering, depending on the client’s request.



Nowell has turned the boxes into everything from record player holders to bar carts, and worked with the Chicago Reader to upgrade several news boxes for the paper’s 50th anniversary. So far, he’s refurbished a couple dozen of them, and sells them at makers markets around the city.

“[People tell me], ‘I haven’t seen one of these in decades! I remember carrying a pocket full of change and getting the newspaper [from one] every day on my way to the train,’” Nowell said. “Some of the best conversations I’ve had with people are around the nostalgia factor.”



A persistent struggle

One person who knows a lot about nostalgia and appreciation for Chicago print newspapers is Nicole Marroquin, an interdisciplinary artist and professor at the University of Michigan.

A few years ago, she started visiting libraries and archives in the Chicago area, and creating a list of print newspapers that covered Chicago’s Latinx communities during the 20th century. Many of them were distributed through coin-operated and free newspaper boxes.

Marroquin looked at Spanish-language and bilingual papers, as well as newspapers in English that reported on majority-Latinx neighborhoods. “I also became interested in newspapers that had to shift,” she said. “In other words, they hadn’t been a Latinx newspaper, but then they had to [become one], because they were the community newspaper and then the population, the readership, shifted.”

One of these was the West Side Times, which she said provided critical coverage of Latinx communities particularly in the 1970s and ’80s, and adapted to include bilingual sections in its print editions.

Other types of publications she focused on included Mexican expat newspapers, which covered events happening in both Mexico and Chicago, so readers could keep up with news in both places; and newspapers and newsletters that covered schools.



“In a couple of newspapers, they had a youth column, where the youth could speak and express themselves,” Marroquin continued. “Or they’d have life advice columns.”

This is something she feels is largely absent from today’s news coverage: an openness to letting people, especially young people, decide what’s important about their own lives and giving them a space to share it.

After spending so much time with print newspaper issues from the 1920s through the 1990s, Marroquin said what stands out most to her is the continued striving to get important stories into the hands of people to whom they mattered. “They were reporting on schools, they were reporting on labor … they were reporting on the cultural organizing that was happening. … I wouldn’t say there was a Golden Age [of Latinx print news in Chicago] as much as there was a persistent struggle,” Marroquin said.

The enduring presence of — and desire for — newspaper boxes

Print newspapers and newspaper boxes are not strictly things of the past.

Many of the city’s free weeklies continue to make use of newspaper boxes, although the majority of the ones you see today are plastic.

Jesús Del Toro, who manages La Raza, said even as the paper has adapted to a digital news landscape, “boxes in streets in key points in our main Latino neighborhoods” remain an important part of their distribution strategy.



Recently, La Raza staff picked up old and damaged boxes and invested in more than 200 new boxes that they placed in areas like Cicero, Back of the Yards, Humboldt Park and Hermosa, Del Toro said.

Overall, however, news coverage in Chicago has shifted to favor digital formats. While Chicago is something of a journalistic oasis in Illinois, with dozens of independent outlets covering local issues, fewer and fewer have a consistent print presence.



And as the dependability and visibility of newspaper boxes is lost, some Chicagoans have a difficult time accessing information they need to navigate the world.

James, who asked Curious City not to use his last name, lives in a tent in Humboldt Park. He remembers using a few quarters to buy a copy of the Sun-Times from an honor box, or grabbing a free neighborhood paper. “We depended on that,” he said. “That’s how we got our news.”

With limited access to the internet, James said it’s been a challenge to stay informed about issues that affect him or to keep up with what’s going on locally and globally. “I don’t know what’s going on in the world anymore,” he said.

Similarly, Daniel Jackson said before 2020, he relied on print newspapers for notices about nearby churches distributing food and clothes. Now, the newspaper boxes he used to count on are always empty. “I’d be willing to pay for [the paper],” he said. “I’d even pay a dollar.”

Adriana Cardona-Maguigad is Curious City’s reporter. Follow her @AdrianaCardMag

Maggie Sivit is Curious City’s digital and engagement producer. She can be reached at msivit@wbez.org

This direct line between Black pilots continues from their work in aviation to the work Black Chicagoans would later do as astronauts and proponents of space exploration. In 1966, Robbins native Nichelle Nichols brought the character of Lieutenant Uhura to life in the show Star Trek — a role in which she became one of the first Black women with a lead role on TV, leading her to recruit women and astronauts of color for NASA. In 1967, Chicagoan Maj. Robert H. Lawrence Jr. became the first Black astronaut when NASA selected him to be an aerospace research pilot. And in 1992, Chicagoan and astronaut Mae Jemison became the first Black woman to travel into space, crediting Nichols’ portrayal as her inspiration.

Ultimately, all of these Black Chicagoans joined Bessie Coleman’s mission, and there are Black science innovators who are still yet to come.

Arionne Nettles is a university lecturer, culture reporter, and audio aficionado. She is the author of We Are the Culture: Black Chicago’s Influence on Everything. Follow her @arionnenettles.



‘Seasons Greetings from the CTA’

In 1992, rail maintenance workers on the Blue Line had an idea to deliver food to charities along the route. Jeannine Messina, senior manager of CTA’s infrastructure division, said they used an out-of-service O'Hare-bound train and put a sign out front that said "Seasons Greetings from the CTA." The workers delivered about 50 food boxes that year.

“Employees would raise money, collect money throughout the year. And then around Christmas we would get together and purchase food, make boxes and give them back to the community,” she said.

The holiday train still makes those deliveries, but now it’s grown to more than 600 boxes delivered seasonally to charities like the Phoenix Outreach of Chicago and Nourishing Hope.

Messina said over the years more decorations were added to the train, including tinsel and lights brought in by CTA employees.

She said it wasn’t until 1996 that this decorated train started picking up passengers.



“We had the train decorated, and it would sit up on the overpass and people would see it on the expressway and we started getting inquiries about it,” Messina said. “That’s how it ended up turning into the holiday train that you see today where we pick up riders.”

The holiday train has had corporate sponsorships since 2015 to help cover the cost of decorating and running it each year.

But there were a couple of times when the train was in danger of coming to a halt.

Back in December 2004, with a budget deficit and pending layoffs, then-CTA President Frank Kruesi proposed cutting the holiday train.

News stories ran with headlines like “Santa gets the ax as CTA cancels holiday train.” It caused an uproar, both internally at the agency and among riders. Then-board member Sue Leonis was quoted in the Chicago Tribune saying, “Board members are pissed. [Staff] made a mistake, and they better find a way to fix it.”



CTA President Kruesi was labeled a Grinch. And a couple of days later, the CTA reversed course, announcing the holiday train was back on track.

The train was nearly diverted again in 2020, during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Officials questioned whether the CTA could in good conscience jam a bunch of people together when health officials were discouraging large gatherings at grandma’s house. In the end, the CTA went for it, but without passengers.

Messina remembers riding the empty holiday train and seeing people waving from afar.



“They would be down in their alleyways or in front of their house, and they’d be excited to see the train pass,” she said. “It really meant something to them that we still ran the train.”

Employees on the “nice list”

There are a lot of questions about the person riding Santa’s sleigh on the flatbed car. In the early days of the holiday train, before it actually started picking up passengers, “Santa” was a CTA employee dressed the part.

But today, CTA officials insist it is the real Santa Claus from the North Pole riding the train.



Santa stays outside on the flatbed car for each run. He doesn’t get to go inside between station visits.

“There are a lot of cross winds that can happen between the buildings and sometimes Santa can lose his hat,” Santa said. “But the elves that are very helpful always have a spare hat for me.”

He’s endured the rain, snow, wind — everything Chicago weather likes to throw in December.

Fortunately, a foot heater was added to the flatbed as well as a hand-warming bar behind the sleigh.



CTA officials say working as a CTA elf is a much sought-after role. Jeannine Messina says the elves are fully vetted.

“They can’t have anything naughty on their record at all,” she said.

While Santa and the elves might be great at their normal jobs, they get extra training for this special commute.

“So they can understand the ins and outs of our train and just to make sure they know how to welcome the customers aboard and they interact with them when they’re riding the train with us,” Messina said.

The holiday train has between 10-17 elves working at a time. They pass out about 150,000 candy canes over the course of the season and do a lot of crowd control. They make sure people are folding up strollers and moving down the aisles, and are responsible for turning people away once cars reach capacity.

Santa says he’s seen some risky behavior over the years, like people jumping on the flatbed car to give him a hug. The CTA discourages that — especially if the train is in motion and the emergency break needs to be engaged. The sudden stop can cause injury to other passengers. Santa warns people not to get pushy on the platforms.





“There are certain naughty parents who push in front of children to get a picture with Santa,” he said. “The key is to be nice, polite and wait your turn. The elves are there to remind people to do that, and sometimes CPD shows up to help.”

Amid long delays and a rail operator shortage, commuters and employees have legitimate gripes with the CTA. But Santa says the holiday train offers a bit of joy that's hard for anyone to deny.

“There's nothing like watching somebody kind of grumpy getting on the train and then leaving the train and waving and yelling, ‘Merry Christmas, Santa,’” he said. “It makes my heart full.”



More about our question-asker

Kristina Bittorf is the director of finance at a Chicago-based tech company. She lives in the North Center neighborhood with her husband and two young sons.

She says her first encounter with the CTA holiday train was by coincidence when she was waiting for the Brown Line train after work more than a decade ago.

“I was greeted with this magical, brightly lit train, and you can just hear the buzz from the platform as it was approaching,” she recalled. “They trick it out with all the lights. There are CTA employees that are dressed up waiting by the doorways to greet you and hand out candy canes. I was just transported.”

Kristina says she’s been a fan of the holiday train ever since, but she sees it through different eyes since having children. It’s become an annual tradition to check the holiday train schedule for a chance to catch a ride and snap a photo with Santa.

Susie An is Curious City’s editor. Follow her @soosieon.

Treaty-making in Shikwaakwa in the 1800s

Long before European settlers arrived in Shikwaakwa — the area we know today as Chicago — the Anishinaabe people (including the Potawatomi, Ojibwe and Odawa) as well as many others made the area their home. The famous Scharf map, created by cartographer Albert F. Scharf, shows the area where Indian Boundary Park is today was made up of Native American camps and trails, and was connected to major villages along the Chicago River.



Between 1795 and 1833, several treaties concerning the Chicago area were negotiated between the U.S. government and Native Nations. Most of these treaties were signed under conditions of duress, designed to take the legal title to Native Americans’ most desirable lands.

One of these was the 1816 Treaty of St. Louis, the central goal of which was to pave the way for the European colonization of the lands including what would later become the city of Chicago. In doing so, the U.S. began to push the remaining Anishinaabe people living in the area north.

The line that separated Native Americans from the settlers, established by the treaty, was initially just a line on a map. Eventually a road was built along it known as Indian Boundary Road, which is now North Rogers Avenue. Europeans built settlements south of the road, and Indigenous people continued living north of it.



But the boundary line only existed for about 17 years, until the second Treaty of Chicago. That agreement between the Anishinaabe and the U.S. government ceded five million acres of land. The federal government removed the majority of Indigenous people living along Indian Boundary Road and sent them west of the Mississippi River.

However, some Native people continued to live and trade in the area. The location became an important trading post for settlers and Indigenous people. Around 1835, a settler named Philip Rogers built a log cabin at roughly the intersection of what is now W. Lunt and N. Western Avenues, a block from where Indian Boundary Park is today. Rogers established a trading post with Native people in the area that was situated near the park’s current fieldhouse. Eventually, the nearby neighborhood of Rogers Park was named after him.

“There was a business interest in maintaining Indians there for trade,” said Jojo Galvan, a historian at the Chicago History Museum. “But at the same time, this is a story we know all too well.”

The eroding boundary line at today’s North Rogers Avenue was just one example of a much larger policy of Native removal that was systematically carried out by the U.S. government during this period.



For example, under a subsequent treaty, Chief Shab-eh-nay of the Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation received about 12,000 acres in southern DeKalb County. The rest of his band was removed to Iowa, and from there, planned a move to a newly established reservation in Kansas.

But as soon as Chief Shab-eh-nay was gone — to check on members of the band who had been removed — the state government moved in, explained Joseph Rupnick, Chairman of the Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation and a direct descendant of Chief Shab-eh-nay.

“The General Land Office in the state of Illinois came back and said, ‘Well, you abandoned that land.’” In 1849, the government proceeded to sell the land in DeKalb County that had been granted by treaty to the Potawatomi.

“According to the United States’ own constitution, treaties are the supreme law of the land,” said Doug Kiel, associate professor of history at Northwestern University. But the U.S. government “has had a habit” of not upholding these agreements.

The 1900s: Indian Boundary Park and sanitized history

Native American removal continued throughout the 20th century, though policies changed in attempts to solve “the Indian problem.” Concurrently, on a local level, there were efforts to appropriate Indigenous imagery and symbolism into the city’s infrastructure, including through park names and monuments.

The early 1900s saw the development of many of Chicago’s neighborhood parks. In 1915, the Ridge Avenue Park District, a local neighborhood park commission, began buying up land to create what would be “the centerpiece” of the local park district, according to Jojo Galvan of the Chicago History Museum.



The Ridge Avenue Park District (which later merged with the Chicago Park District) officially established the park off N. Rockwell St. in 1916. They named it Indian Boundary Park, commemorating the Treaty of St. Louis’ centennial. While the name is a reference to the Indian Boundary Line established under the treaty, no one interviewed for this story knew exactly how the district decided on this name or the intention behind it.

Richard F. Gloede, a landscape architect from Evanston, was hired to design the park. Gloede’s plans included planting shrubs and poplar trees, and improving the natural pond by creating a lagoon that could be home to ducks, swans and native wildflowers.

The fieldhouse was erected in 1929, and was designed by prominent Chicago architect Clarence Hatzfeld. His design included a stoic relief carving of a Native American wearing a Plains-style headdress above the front entrance.

Elsewhere in Chicago, similar flawed depictions of Indigenous people were underway. U.S. post offices in the Chicago area commissioned murals based on the treaties that displaced Native people from the West Ridge area, using “noble savage” imagery to sanitize and justify their removal. And in 1928, the most recognizable representations of Native people in the city, the Bowman and the Spearman — two 17-foot statues of Indigenous people on horseback — were installed at S. Michigan Ave. and W. Ida B. Wells Dr. downtown. 

Like the relief carvings at Indian Boundary Park, these statues rely on romanticized and ahistorical depictions of Native people.

Kiel said monuments like the Bowman and Spearman and the relief carvings at Indian Boundary Park reinforce false narratives about Native people and their removal in the public consciousness by romanticizing these histories. They act as generic stand-ins for Chicago’s Indigenous history, according to Kiel.

By replacing Native people with literal cartoons, Kiel said the settler narrative of the so-called “vanishing Indian” lives on guilt free. It sanitizes the brutal history of removal, dispossession and assimilation.

The Land Back movement

In part because of its connection to the 1816 treaty, Indian Boundary Park continued to be a site for Native groups to remember and mourn the treaties broken by the U.S. government and the lives and land lost. In the 1980s and ’90s, for example, groups including the former Anawim Center of Chicago and the Indian Treaty Rights committee held vigils at Indian Boundary Park in opposition to the city’s recognition of Columbus Day.



John Low is an associate professor at Ohio State University and a citizen of the Pokagon band of Potawatomi Indians. He said from an early age he took note of Chicago’s various statues of colonizers and of the so-called “vanishing Indian.”

“Traveling around the city I was struck … by these monuments and memorials to settler colonialism that exist in Chicago,” he said, “and the stereotypes embedded in those monuments.”

Low said he often worried about the impact racist imagery, like the relief carvings at Indian Boundary Park, could have on urban Indians living in Chicago — especially the youth. “What do they think, how does this affect them?” he asked. “[What does it make them] think about themselves, their tribes, their families, their urban Indian community?”



At the same time, he thinks Indian Boundary Park can offer an occasion to teach people about a little-discussed aspect of the region’s history. “That gives an opportunity to talk about the whole treaty process — the legitimization of stealing Indian land,” Low said. “And what the country is founded on, the two original sins: Indian land and resources, and African slavery.”

Low hopes that in the future the city will give more thoughtful consideration to the Native imagery and symbols it uses in its statues, fieldhouses and park names. But in the meantime, he believes Indian Boundary Park gives people in-the-know the opportunity to share with others the history of Native removal in Illinois, as well as the continued presence Native people have with the city and the surrounding area.

Doug Kiel of Northwestern University said an accurate understanding of history is also an essential part of current Indigenous-led justice movements, particularly Land Back.

“Land Back is sometimes imagined as something that's pie-in-the-sky, like … it has no real potential,” Kiel said. “And that could not be further from the truth.”

Land Back is a multifaceted movement that is attempting to reestablish ownership and governance of former tribal lands. According to Kiel, this can take many forms, from co-management of public lands by Native Nations and U.S. agencies to restoring Tribal governance of former reservation lands that have since been sold to non-Native people.



Land Back includes Chairman Rupnick’s work fighting to regain the lands taken from Chief Shab-eh-nay. “[Shab-eh-nay] fought for many years until he passed away, trying to reclaim that land,” Rupnick said. “Here we are 180 years later, and we’re still fighting to get that land recognized and reaffirm that it is still an Indian reservation.”

The renewed push for the Land Back movement relies heavily on the 2020 Supreme Court ruling in McGirt v. Oklahoma, which holds that a reservation still exists unless it has been formally disestablished by Congress. Kiel said this decision has very real implications for Indian Country that could completely reshape the map.

Taking a closer look at Indian Boundary Park’s name offers insight into Chicago’s history of Native American removal, and sheds light on the continued relationship many Native Americans have with the city. The park also lends an opportunity to learn about the ongoing fight for recognition of Indigenous land in and around Chicago.

“Land Back is the future,” Kiel said. “And it’s happening.”

Kadin Mills is a freelance journalist covering Indigenous issues. Follow @krmilz.

Editor's note: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated Indian Boundary Park is in the Rogers Park neighborhood. The park is located in the West Ridge neighborhood.

In some neighborhoods in Chicago, you can stumble onto a bakery simply by following the scent. Take Pilsen, where you’ll find many bakeries clustered around 18th Street, sometimes just a few doors down from one another.

And this got one curious Chicagoan wondering:

In neighborhoods like Pilsen, how do Mexican bakeries stay in business with so much competition? 

It turns out the answer has a lot to do with culture and tradition. We dive into the answer this week.

Since last summer, more than 21,000 migrants, mostly from Venezuela, have been bussed from Texas to Chicago. New arrivals are staying at police stations, O’Hare Airport and city-run shelters.

With winter on the way, city officials are scrambling to find housing alternatives.

They’re considering converting a variety of buildings into living spaces and plan to build a tent encampment in Brighton Park on the Southwest Side.

But in the meantime, some asylum seekers are finding relief on a much smaller scale through semi-independent communal living.

Some of the more creative approaches include living with host families or in dorm-style spaces. Unlike city-run solutions, these communal living alternatives are not overseen by the federal or local government and instead rely on individual families and non-profit organizations to welcome migrants into their homes or buildings.

One Curious City listener wanted to know more about what life is like in these alternatives to shelters.

So we visited several families that have hosted migrants and checked out a shared living space in a mixed-use building. Advocates say both could be scaled to become sustainable models for housing migrants during this crisis.

Host families

Kevin Orozco, his wife, Michetlle, and their two children arrived in Chicago from Venezuela last winter. They didn’t know anyone in the city and had nowhere to go. So like many other migrants, they were taken to a police station where they were placed on a waitlist to get into a city shelter and receive rental assistance.

Kutzner Huzar said when the family first arrived, they slept for days. But the families soon got to know each other. They cooked and went grocery shopping together, celebrated birthdays and went sledding in the winter.

Kutzner Huzar provided the family with groceries, toiletries and took care of the increased utility bills. But she said she got a lot in return from hosting the family. Orozco is handy, she said, and would often fix things around the house. His kids, who are seven and nine years old, helped Kutzner Huzar’s youngest son with his Spanish.

Eventually, Orozco started picking up construction jobs, and was able to sign a lease on an apartment down the block. Kutzner Huzar led a fundraiser to help the family pay for the first eight months of rent.

The Orozco family had a good experience with their host family, but because it isn’t an official arrangement, there’s a lot that can go wrong with little help.

That’s what Ignacio Becerril and his wife Patricia Buenrostro found out when they invited people to stay in their finished basement in Garfield Park.

The couple had been helping migrants by giving them rides. They wanted to do more because Becerril knows what it’s like to start with nothing: he came to the U.S. from Mexico as an undocumented teenager.

“I know what it’s like not to have a place to live,” Becerril said in Spanish.

Five migrants stayed with them for five months. They all pitched in for expenses and went grocery shopping together. But eventually, the temporary living arrangement became tense when the guests stopped getting along. Becerril and Buenrostro didn’t know how to navigate that.

Becerril said he doesn’t regret helping, but it’s not something he recommends. Buenrostro, on the other hand, said she would do it again if she knew she had outside support from an organization or a government agency.

“It’s a lot safer for a person or a family to sponsor asylum seekers if the government formalizes a program,” Buenrostro said in Spanish.

Experts say the host family model can work. For example, official programs have matched refugees from Afghanistan and Ukraine with host families. But they also say expectations need to be clear from the beginning.

“It's really important to think about your house rules … for both your private space and your shared space, " said Holly Tseng, the regional director of volunteer engagement at World Relief, which facilitates a host-family program for refugees and helps find housing for asylum seekers.

Shared living spaces

As city officials look for solutions to housing migrants, a major challenge is the lack of affordable housing. The housing market has become more expensive, and large apartment complexes no longer have the vacancies they once had.

But some organizations that own large buildings in the city are converting them into shared living spaces for recently arrived migrants.

Margaret Gergen is involved with affordable housing initiatives across the city and sits on the board of a Chicago-based non-profit. Earlier this year, her organization was trying to figure out what to do with parts of a mixed-use building it owned in the Uptown neighborhood.

“We were thinking, how could we use this space? Should we redesign it and turn it into offices?” said Gergen.

Gergen connected with Park Community Church, which helps migrants find housing and other basic necessities. Together, the two organizations converted one of the floors of the building into a shared living space that could house 12 migrant families.



Because there’s been pushback in neighborhoods across Chicago in response to migrant shelters, Gergen’s organization has not publicly announced that the building is being used to house migrants. She spoke to Curious City on the condition we not name her organization or disclose the building’s location.

Most of the migrant families living in the building today waited in city shelters for months before being placed in the Uptown shared living space. They each have their own dorm-style rooms, and share two kitchens, dining spaces and bathrooms.

This housing alternative has been a relief for Cherri and her four-year-old son, Dominic. Curious City is not using their full names to protect their privacy.

Cherri said she’s grateful she had a place to stay at one of the city’s shelters when she arrived in Chicago, but living with so many people in one space was challenging. “It’s loud and children have a difficult time getting to sleep,” she said in Spanish.

The non-profit organization that owns the building charges families between $400 and $800 in rent per month, depending on the size of the family. Some families living in the shared living space receive rental assistance through the Illinois Housing Development Authority’s rental assistance program. Others receive rent assistance through independent donations.

Gergen said the non-profit organization allows families to stay in the shared living space for up to one year, with the hope that they’ll become financially independent and move out after that.

“We thought, perhaps it could be an answer to the migrant situation because people are wanting to get out of shelters. But they may not be ready to take on living independently in their own apartments [right away],” Gergen explained.

At the Uptown shared living space, the newcomers build a community and learn how to navigate life in their new city. Gergen’s organization and the church plan to offer free financial literacy and English classes, homework help for children and education on how to navigate tenant agreements.

It’s hard to quantify how many shared living spaces are currently operating in the city.

But Gergen said she hopes city officials move away from thinking about barracks-type housing and towards housing that is more family- and individual-oriented. She sees potential in unused dormitories, unused schools and other large buildings that can house multiple families while also offering them some privacy.

Adriana Cardona-Maguigad is Curious City’s reporter. Follow her on Twitter @WBEZCuriousCity and @AdrianaCardMag.

“La tierra de frío y trabajo”

Cubans started coming to Chicago as early as 1898.

That year, the first all-Black regiment of the National Guard went to Cuba following the Spanish-American War. In a letter from December 1898, a member of the Eighth Illinois Regiment wrote, “There is much marrying among American soldiers and Cuban women. Three of the boys of our company have taken unto themselves Cuban wives already.” Some of these soldiers returned with their new wives to Chicago, as writer Achy Obejas reported for the Chicago Tribune. These women became some of the earliest known Cubans to make their home in the city.

But the Cuban population in Chicago remained small through the mid-20th century.



That changed after the Cuban Revolution, which saw Fidel Castro’s rise to power in 1959. Several hundred thousand Cubans came to the U.S. from Cuba in the first decade after the revolution ended. My dad and his family were among them, which is what drew me to Rueda’s question about Chicago Cubans.

Carlos Eire, professor of religious studies at Yale University, was part of Operación Pedro Pan, or Operation Peter Pan, a program that brought thousands of unaccompanied Cuban children to the United States between 1960 and 1962. Once in the U.S., Eire and his brother were placed with foster families, like other Pedro Pan kids.



But when the Cuban Missile Crisis occurred, travel to the U.S. from Cuba abruptly ended. Many parents who’d sent their children over with Operación Pedro Pan, under the expectation they’d soon be reunited, had to wait several years to join them.

“My foster family — nice as they were, wonderful as they were — couldn't keep us,” said Eire, who chronicles his journey in Waiting for Snow in Havana, a book my dad had on his bookshelf when I was in middle school. “So they put us ‘temporarily’ in a foster home for juvenile delinquents,” he continued. “And they forgot about us.”



As more and more Cuban exiles settled in Miami in the 1960s, there was backlash — especially from the city’s white, non-Latino residents.

“Anglos in Miami, as Cubans started coming in, they got scared,” said María de los Ángeles Torres, distinguished university professor of Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of Illinois Chicago and the author of several books about Cuban exiles. “And they got even more scared when they figured out that we were not going back to Cuba.”

Torres said it became common to see pancartas, or placards, outside apartment buildings for rent in Miami that read, “No children, no pets, no Cubans.”



Facing mounting public pressure, the federal government led a series of relocation programs to get Cubans out of Miami and into other cities. “Chicago was one of the major areas of relocation,” Torres said.

As Torres documents in her book In the Land of Mirrors, about 20,000 Cubans were resettled in Illinois during the 1960s as part of these initiatives.

By 1970, there were about 15,000 Cubans living in Chicago, according to a report published by the Chicago Department of Planning and Development. Though their numbers were still relatively small, Cubans had grown to be the third-largest Latino group in Chicago, behind Mexicans and Puerto Ricans.

The Malecón of the Midwest

Once they arrived in Chicago, Cubans settled in lots of different neighborhoods. One of the most popular neighborhoods for Cubans was Edgewater on the far North Side. While it was a far cry from Cuba, Eire said there were certain ways in which the lakefront enclave felt familiar — or familiar enough.

“My mom kept saying, ‘Oh, this is just like Havana. You’ll feel at home here,’" he said. "Especially because we were only two blocks from the lake.”

Eire remembers the old Edgewater Beach Hotel, from a certain angle, even looked a bit like the Hotel Nacional in Havana.

Grocery stores owned by Cuban families like La Única and churches with large Cuban congregations like St. Ita became hubs of Cuban social life, which helped draw more Cubans to the area.

Plus, there was just good old-fashioned neighborhood magnetism: When one family moves in, their cousins or friends might decide to move there, too.

At Nicholas Senn High School, Eire remembers his principal had a giant world map on a wall, with pins marking cities and countries across the globe that students’ families had come from.

“You couldn’t even see [Cuba] on the map because of all the pins,” he said.

Political divisions

In the late 1960s and especially into the ’70s, political divisions among Cuban Americans became more pronounced and solidified, as María de los Ángeles Torres documents in In the Land of Mirrors. Against the backdrop of radical politics and upheaval present more broadly in the U.S. at the time, the Cuban American community was very politically polarized.

And that was especially true in places like New York City and Chicago.

In 1968, Cuban Power, a far-right organization, bombed a Mexican tourist office in downtown Chicago because Mexico had maintained diplomatic relations with Cuba.



And Chicago was home to a number of members of Abdala, a Cuban exile student group that used political writings and direct action to further their aim of replacing Fidel Castro.

On the other side, there was the Antonio Maceo Brigade, a political organization composed of Cuban Americans who wanted to build relationships with the Cuban government.

Torres, who was part of the group, said many of its members had been active in the Chicano movement, the Puerto Rican independence movement and other social and political movements in Chicago before deciding to turn their focus on Cuba.

“We all found ourselves really kind of being odd people, bichos raros, within these movements, because we weren't part of any of these communities but we were in solidarity with them,” she said.

The Antonio Maceo Brigade was an international organization, Torres explained, but they had a chapter in Chicago. And they ended up playing a large role in the changing travel policy between the U.S. and Cuba, which had made family visits impossible for years.

Some of the group’s members — whose attitudes towards the Cuban government eventually shifted — went on to become important figures in Chicago politics.

Torres, for example, became the first executive director of Mayor Harold Washington’s Advisory Council on Latino Affairs in the 1980s. Another Cuban American, Natalia Delgado, was nominated by Washington to become the first Latino member of the Chicago Transit Authority Board.

“So these super progressive Cubans became part of the government and became very influential,” said Achy Obejas, who worked as a journalist for the Chicago Tribune for more than two decades. “Even in Miami, the Cuban Left never achieved something like that. That happened in Chicago in a very unusual way because of the Washington campaign.”





Tania’s

The fact that Chicago’s Cuban community was so polarized made it all the more significant that there were neighborhoods — and particular places within them — where Cuban Americans from across the political spectrum intermingled.

Besides Edgewater, the other Chicago neighborhood that became a Cuban stronghold during the 1970s was Logan Square. And of all the Cuban businesses in the area, perhaps the best known was Tania’s: a bodega, restaurant and nightclub on Milwaukee Ave., across from the Logan Theatre.



“This place was kind of a demilitarized zone,” Obejas explained. “It was one of these places where everybody could go, regardless of their political opinions.”

Owner Elias Sanchez initially worked at a factory making staplers and other office supplies after he came to Chicago from Camagüey, Cuba.

But he had a knack for business, so he opened Tania’s with his wife, Martha, in 1976.

“The grocery, la bodega, it was a butcher shop — you could smell the blood,” said Obejas. “But once you opened the door to the back, it was a completely different universe.”

The menu was filled with Martha’s family recipes. Her black bean soup was apparently Mayor Harold Washington’s favorite; according to Martha, the mayor always ordered extra to take with him after his meal.

And Tania’s became known for its live music. “Elias would dig up these guys who had played in La Orquesta Siboney in 1943,” Obejas said. “They were all, like, on their last breath. But they would come in, they would play the weekend, and the music was incredible.”

“It was like getting into a [department store] elevator on Christmas Eve,” said Aldo Pedroso, Jr., who visited Tania’s with his family. “I’ve never been anywhere — not any club — that packed.”



And it wasn’t just Cuban Americans who flocked to Tania’s. The restaurant was extremely popular amongst the city’s Puerto Ricans, Mexicans, Ecuadorians — and of course non-Latino Americans.

Tania’s remained the epicenter of Cuban nightlife in Chicago up until it closed. The venue’s final night was a New Year’s Eve bash on December 31, 1998, which was attended by more than 500 people, according to Sanchez.



“Adiós, Chicago querido”

By the 1980s and ’90s, Chicago had lost a lot of its manufacturing jobs. And when the jobs disappeared, so did some of the people who had come to the city for them decades earlier.

Pedroso was the daughter of Juan Gualberto Gómez, one of the leaders in the Cuban War of Independence against Spain in the late 1800s. Gómez was a journalist and activist who fought not just for Cuban independence but also for racial equality. And he was a close friend of Jose Martí, the Cuban national hero after whom a section of Chicago’s Milwaukee Ave. gets its honorary street name.



Influenced by her father, Pedroso went to law school in Cuba. But when she arrived in Chicago in the late 1950s, she was no longer able to practice law. As she applied to jobs in the city, she faced discrimination on multiple fronts: as someone who was an immigrant, a woman and Black. Her son, Aldo Pedroso, Jr., remembers his mother returning from an early job interview. The hiring manager, who’d been cordial on the phone, took one look at Pedroso and knocked the documents she’d brought with her to the ground, saying, “Now pick them up and get out.”

When she got a job teaching Spanish at NEIU, Pedroso threw herself at it with gusto. According to Aldo, his mother was often the only person at department meetings who had read school handbooks and policy documents line for line, and knew them practically by heart. She used that to advocate on behalf of her students.

“She’d get to work at seven o’clock every morning, and there would be a line of students waiting to speak to her,” Aldo said, “and she’d speak to every one.” Today, NEIU’s Center for Inclusivity and Cultural Affairs is named after the late Pedroso.

Aldo, who still lives in Chicago, said despite not having a particularly visible Cuban community in the city today, he still feels strong ties to his Cuban identity.

“I feel Cuban more than American,” he said.



While many Cubans did move to Miami, the numbers that are available suggest the Cuban population in the Chicago area actually hasn’t changed all that much since the 1970s. As of 2021, there were around 18,000 Cubans living in the Chicago metro area, according to demographers at the Pew Research Center. 

As some people moved out, others moved in. 

What has changed is how concentrated Cubans are in particular Chicago neighborhoods, like Edgewater or Logan Square.

Some families moved to the suburbs: the Pedrosos, for example, moved from Hyde Park to Skokie. Others were dispersed into neighborhoods across the city. And the places they created — like Tania’s — went with them.

“There were physical places,” said Obejas. “They just were ephemeral. They didn’t last very long.”

Maggie Sivit is Curious City’s digital and engagement producer. She can be reached at msivit@wbez.org

Have you ever noticed that some of the most pivotal scenes in TV shows and movies take place in a drinking establishment? Liz Garibay with the Chicago Brewseum came to Curious City with this idea. Part of the Brewseum’s mission is to show the role bars and taverns have played in the history of our country, city and pop culture.



Last month, we partnered with the Brewseum for a live event called “Suds on Screen” at the Goose Island Barrelhouse. Curious City Senior Producer Jason Marck was joined by Liz Garibay and journalist Mark Caro. They discussed how bars are used as storytelling tools in TV and movies to establish a sense of community, create an environment where tense situations play out and lay the foundation for romantic connections — among other things. They also discussed Chicago’s place on the big and small screen.

Since then, Pilsen has been at the crosshairs of city efforts — and developers’ interest — to re-imagine the historic port of entry for immigrant families into a middle-class hub. At the time the Lozanos moved into a single-family home, in the 1990s, it felt like a longshot to own a house with a yard in the community where Margot was born and raised.

The Canalport home has since fostered cherished memories and rooted the family in an ever-changing neighborhood. But tucked among those fond recollections are unexplainable things — footsteps up the stairs at night, dogs barking into an empty hallway and shadows lingering behind closed doors — things the family has never openly talked about until now.



With every footstep they’ve heard move up their stairs, the Lozanos have grown increasingly curious for some answers. When WBEZ’s Curious City posted a callout online asking listeners to share scary, disturbing or mysterious encounters in the Chicago area, Estelle Lozano submitted her family’s story.

What follows is an excavation of the past through public records and personal recollections that have been buried; the family even ultimately agrees to open the door to the spiritual world and try to make contact with the other side.

“I never considered them to be ghosts,” Margot says. “I just consider them to be spirits.”

A house that is a magnet for spirits

The phrase “haunted house” often conjures a relic that has stood for centuries. But the Lozanos’s home with the paint-chipped front stairs dates back only to the early 1990s, when the family purchased the land for a dollar with the help of a community organization fighting displacement.

From the outside, it’s unassuming. A Halloween decoration on the front door simply says Boo.

Inside, the home is brimming with stories and strange occurrences: a CD player turning on and playing music on its own, a candle flying off a table. On a mid-September afternoon, Margot recounts some paranormal experiences she’s encountered over the last three decades, occasionally rubbing her arms to chase away her goosebumps.

As a mother with young children, sometimes she’d leave the light on in the hallway while the family slept. She recalls waking up late at night to comfort her youngest daughter — who at the time was a baby in a crib — and in many instances seeing the silhouette of a man's boot under the doorway.

It happened often enough that it didn’t scare her, it only made her curious. “I could see a shadow of boots, men’s boots, like he was leaned up against my hallway door, like he was guarding us,” she says.



Her daughter Estelle is now 33. Her most chilling recollection happened when she was eight or nine and playing hide-and-seek with her cousin, Johnny, throughout the two-story house.

From her hiding spot inside the first-floor bathroom, she could hold the door slightly ajar and peek through the gap to watch her cousin.

“I’m trying to see if I’m going to get caught,” Estelle said.

Standing in silence, Estelle remembers watching her cousin toggle with the unmoving knob on a door that led to the basement, pushing and shaking the door. “He can’t turn it,” Estelle recalled. “That door doesn’t have a lock. It’s never had a lock. There’s no way to lock it or anything like that.”



Finally, Johnny, standing at the threshold of the basement door, gave up and told Estelle to come out. Just as Estelle emerged from her hiding spot in the bathroom confused, the basement door slowly creaked open behind them.

The children freaked out and ran outside.

“I never understood why that happened,” Estelle said recently. “There was never any explanation or like reason why that door would have held like that unless, you know, it was literally somebody or something holding it.”



Estelle’s siblings had their own encounters. At nine, Jenna remembered being afraid of the rhythmic sound of someone making their way up the wooden staircase. “They would sometimes … come to my threshold or go in the other direction to my mother’s room,” Jenna recalled.

The sounds would prompt the family's dogs to jump from her bed to pace the hallway — Jenna can still describe their nails scratching the hardwood floors and her father telling them to knock it off.

Margot’s husband isn’t a believer. He thinks she’s simply trying to make “rhyme and reason” for everything or that she’s “hallucinating,” she says.

But Margot has accepted the spirits as a fact of life. “I heard the creaks last night,” the mother said just a few weeks ago. She first thought her eldest daughter had returned home for the night — but Margot and her husband were alone.

The search for clues

Recently, Estelle and her partner, Paul Alvarez, started talking about the paranormal and whether they believed in ghosts. The conversation jogged her memory, and it all came back: the hiding spot in the bathroom, the eerie game of hide-and-seek and the unease of hearing footsteps at night.

Intrigued by the story, Alvarez began searching online for what had been on the property before.



News clippings painted a picture of a working-class neighborhood that was home to Irish and German immigrant laborers who helped build the Illinois and Michigan Canal, as well as garment factories, lumber mills, railyards, meat processing plants, tanners, and a blossoming brewery scene.

Then, in a Chicago Tribune story, a clue. On an early Monday morning in June 1886, a fire ripped through several buildings on Canalport Avenue and 18th Street, suffocating nine people. Among the victims were Michael Murphy, his wife Anna Murphy, their three daughters — Nellie, Annie, and baby Aggie — and Anna’s sister Mary Durkins, along with her 4-year-old son Patrick

“From the first it was evident that the fire at Canalport Avenue and Eighteenth street … was of incendiary origin,” meaning arson had likely been the cause, according to the Tribune.

But who? Determining who set the fire became a story of its own, with Thomas Durkin, Mary’s quarrelsome husband, becoming a prime suspect after police found kerosene oil-soaked rags under the Durkin family's second-story window. Durkin would ultimately be cleared, as he appeared to be in suburban Joliet at the time of the fire.

No arsonist would ever be convicted of the crime.

The family’s funeral was a newsworthy affair in June 1886. Inside the Church of the Sacred Heart days after the fire, amid the coffins, sat a tiny coffin with the remains of 4-year-old Patrick.

Could this be Estelle’s ghostly hide-and-seek partner? After seeing the newspaper archives of the tragic fire, she felt relieved to potentially have an answer.

“Oh my God,” Estelle said. “That’s who was playing hide-and-seek with me all those years ago. We were playing hide-and-seek with a little boy like a little ghost.”

But the family still had questions. How to explain the boots and the creaking on the stairs? What caused the dogs to bark in the middle of the night? Who are these spirits? What was on the lot before?

Or, could all this be explained away as simple coincidences? A finicky door? A temperamental dog? Fluctuating temperatures that could cause floorboards to creak?

The questions required more digging through media archives, homeowner records and maps held by the Cook County Clerk and the Chicago Public Library.

Digging through the archives



Tracing the history of the Lozanos’s property proved challenging because of sparse record keeping and a systematic overhaul of the entire address system citywide at the turn of the century. WBEZ tracked down a list of owners for the Lozanos's property dating back to the 1870s, but there were no records of Durkin’s landlord, John Raleigh, or the Murphys.

Still, over the years, newspaper clippings show that the small East Pilsen neighborhood experienced outsized calamity, from a smallpox epidemic to shootings and homicides to the displacement of thousands of families as an expressway went up in the late 1950s.

By the 1970s, the Lozanos’s future property was a vacant lot filled with rubble and concrete, recalls a former neighbor. The lot sat vacant until Margot and her husband purchased it and built their home in the early 1990s.

Over time, the neighborhood experienced a wave of gentrification that displaced some of the longtime Mexican families, who were driven out by high property taxes, a lack of affordable housing and the proliferation of developers with deep pockets.

What scares Margot most these days, she said, aren’t the spirits she hears at night. It’s the idea of losing her two-story home in a rapidly changing area of Chicago.

The historical records didn’t offer a lot of concrete information about the connection between the spirits Margot and Estelle said they had felt and the lot where the home had been built.

So WBEZ asked the family if they would consider talking to spiritualists who study the other side.

The medium’s pendulum swings

On a fall evening in October, Margot and Estelle warmly welcome a neighborhood medium and spiritual healer Cristina Puzio to the family's home. Without knowing any details about the family’s experiences and with no knowledge of the fire, Puzio asks permission to roam the hallways and basement.

On the first floor, Puzio sweeps through the living room, bathroom and kitchen holding out a pendulum inscribed with symbols and hanging from a black thread. “My pendulum is reacting to energy here,” Puzio says in the kitchen. “But it’s not anything, like, overpowering.”



That changes when she begins to head toward the basement door where Estelle played hide-and-seek with her ghost boy decades ago. As she makes her way down the narrow basement steps, the noisy hum of Dan Ryan Expressway all but fades. In silence, the medium maneuvers downstairs around cherished mementos and storage boxes.

“There’s a strong presence of a little boy and a man,” Puzio says. “They could be related.”

Walking through the basement, she says a fire took place here many years ago leaving behind “a lot of death and sickness … and sadness.”

She stops and stares into the distance.

“That’s OK, I acknowledge you,” Puzio says. “I know you’re sad and you’re just trying to be playful too.”



After nearly an hour sweeping through the home, Puzio sits in the living room with Margot and Estelle, describing the spirit of a man, a playful child, a young woman who tries to communicate in an Eastern European language, and a strong energy roaming the second-floor hallway — all from different periods.

These spirits are respectful, they aren’t harmful or sinister, she says. Maybe the spirit of the little boy “wants to play.”

Margot feels validated. “So I do have some spirits here, right? See. I know I wasn’t crazy … They are living here rent free. That’s fine.”

Asked how spirits can linger in a place, even when a past building is long gone, Puzio explains a spirit unable to transition or a traumatic memory can cling to a piece of land even as the world around them changes.

In a home, a plot of land, and even a neighborhood, the spirits offer a window of the city’s past — echoes of its former life and the lives of those who came before.

“I have never ever been scared or spooked by any of this because I don’t find them to be offensive or hurtful or anything in that manner,” Margot says. Instead, she’s felt protected, even guarded by their presence.

“It’s OK,” Margot says of her spirits, “they’re more than welcome to stay.” In her home frozen in time, the matriarch plans to stay put, too.

Mauricio Pena is a Chicago-based journalist who has previously worked at Chalkbeat Chicago, Block Club Chicago, Chicago magazine, and DNAinfo. Adriana Cardona-Maguigad is a WBEZ reporter. Follow her on Twitter @WBEZCuriousCity and @AdrianaCardMag.