Indholdsfortegnelse for September 2024 i Chicago magazine

AS A STUDENT AT OAK PARK AND RIVER FOREST HIGH SCHOOL in the early 2000s, Michael Soffer would hear chatter about the discovery in the early 1980s of a Nazi — an actual Nazi, as in SS member and concentration camp guard—working as a custodian at the school. Later, after Soffer became an OPRF history teacher, he and his students researched the incident. One revelation: In Oak Park, a town that has long prided itself on its progressivism, there was a groundswell of support for retaining the custodian, Reinhold Kulle. Soffer began contacting those on both sides who had been vocal. Out of that came his new book, Our Nazi, excerpted in this month’s issue (page 74). Those who had pushed to have Kulle removed, Soffer says, were “beyond receptive” to…

1 Hyped Bears rookie Caleb Williams plays his first regular season game Sept. 8 against the Titans at Soldier Field. Will he be the first great Chicago QB since Sid Luckman or a bust like most of his predecessors? 2 Taste of Chicago will be held Sept. 6–8, the second straight year it’s been pushed from July by NASCAR. Last year, attendance dropped to 120,000 from the usual 150,000-plus. 3 The Red Stars won’t play their Sept. 21 game at SeatGeek Stadium in Bridgeview. They were bumped for Riot Fest, an example, they say, of “the vast discrepancies in the treatments” of women’s and men’s pro sports. 4 Larry Hoover, the 73-year-old Gangster Disciples founder, will be in federal court Sept. 26 to plead for a release from his life sentence.…

■ Before he was forced out as Chicago Public Schools CEO amid scandal, Forrest Claypool had a long run as a loyal bureaucrat in Mayor Richard M. Daley’s administration, serving two stints as chief of staff and three years as head of the park district. In his (mostly fawning) book, The Daley Show, he outlines his boss’s “transformative” achievements — and one disastrous failure. “For two decades, Daley had ridden out political firestorms, always retaining his popularity. This time, something was different. The parking-meter debacle became a symbol of an arrogant and unresponsive government, perhaps a sign Daley had stayed on too long.”…

A MIDLIFE CAREER CHANGE can mean serious adjustments to your wellness routine — especially when you’re switching from athlete to executive, as Suzanne Lopez recently learned. She spent 19 years as a dancer with the Joffrey Ballet, then transitioned to other roles with the company before being named director of its academy last year. “When I was a dancer, exercise was built into my routine. I didn’t have to think about it,” says the 53-year-old North Mayfair resident. “Going from being a dancer to a rehearsal director, where I still had to move around, to now sitting at a desk most of the day — I’m still figuring it all out.” MORNING MIX “Breakfast drags me down, so instead I drink green tea and take my dog, Skip, for a…

SHORTLY AFTER MY FAMILY moved to Bridgeport in 2019, I spotted a message scrawled on the window of a shuttered business: Halsted, you’ve really let yourself go. It was tough to argue. The main drag seemed characterized by absence. Lots of vacant storefronts. Few pedestrians. We were excited to start our family’s life here, but beyond our front door, the picture of what that would be like was a blank. The Halsted of Kevin Hickey’s childhood in the late ’70s and early ’80s was different. The Duck Inn chef and Bridgeport native remembers a thriving commercial district with a definitive anchor: the Ramova, a Spanish Revival–style movie house and diner central to local life until their respective closures in 1986 and 2012. “The closure of the theater started to slowly diminish…

CAIRO KEBAB 730 W. Maxwell St., Little Italy ■ Perfect order Hawawshi and koshary ■ To longtime Chicagoans, the mention of Maxwell Street triggers visions of Polish sausage and bone-in pork chop sandwiches. But a new wave of restaurants has set up shop on the historic street, including the city’s only Egyptian spot, which moved here last year after a stint in Lincoln Park. Run by Mohammed Saleh and his father, Ahmed, who moved to Chicago in 1990, Cairo Kebab is the family’s second restaurant: Amhed and his brother ran Oak Park’s King Tut Oasis for 15 years. Egyptian food is influenced by the Ottoman Empire, Lebanon, and Syria, which is apparent on this deep menu. You’ll find hummus, falafel, and kebabs, but zoom in on two beloved offerings. Koshary…

MIDDLE EASTERN Galit Sip Israeli, Lebanese, and Palestinian wines alongside chef-partner Zach Engel’s four-course menu, which melds the cuisines of the Levant. 2429 N. Lincoln Ave., Lincoln Park Drink at home: Dalton Levantina 2020 (1). “It’s food friendly, terroir focused, and chillable,” Engel says. “Pour a glass while you’re grilling.” $28 at Binny’s GREEK Andros Taverna The list from lead sommelier Amber Pike features an all-Greek collection of mostly indigenous grapes. 2542 N. Milwaukee Ave., Logan Square Drink at home: Skouras Moscofilero 2022 (2). “It is all apricots and dill on the nose,” Pike explains. “The texture is super bright, which makes it perfect with any food.” $14.79 at Vin Chicago, 1826 N. Elston Ave., Bucktown SOUTH AMERICAN El Che Steakhouse & Bar Beverage director Alex Cuper’s list, from Malbec to Pais,…

NATE YOUNG The UIC professor, who grew up near Philadelphia and moved to Chicago in 2016, has turned heads with creative exhibitions such as 2020’s The Transcendence of Time, in which he challenged the notion of linear time through religion-tinged sculpture. Young’s drawings, woodworks, and soundscapes grapple with race and history, often through a personal lens, such as exploring his great-grandfather’s horseback migration from the Jim Crow South. His work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. This fall, Young, 43, will mount a two-person exhibition with Tony Lewis at Anthony Gallery in the West Loop. His studio: Part of his Humboldt Park home, his workspace includes a woodshop (complete with jointer, planer, miter saw,…

NICOLE PICOU IS AN UNAPOLOGETIC AESTHETE. SO when the pandemic slowed her freelance art director and photographer business, she pursued a passion: herbs. Picou took tea courses at First Curve Apothecary. “Tea offers a certain slowness, a chance to pause and reflect while it steeps,” the St. Louis transplant explains. She soon launched her Feral Herbalist tea company, watched it outgrow her kitchen, and opened the Into the Feral store in Avondale in 2023. It is part gift shop, part apothecary, and all eye candy. “I’m a little fancy and a little feral, and the boutique is a combo of that,” Picou says. In the 900-square-foot space, your senses perk. A black floral statement wall draws the eye, gentle music piques the ear, upcycled furniture and jewelry beg to be touched.…

■ If you’re old and gay and in the public eye, sometimes people are like, “Oh, you’re an old fag.” And it’s like, “Yes, and that’s awesome.” I came out in 1980 and watched a lot of guys my age die pretty gruesomely in their 20s and 30s. I knew a lot of fags who didn’t get to be old, and so I’m never going to take it for granted. ■ My mom had been raised in a house where children were to be seen and not heard. She found it very oppressive, even traumatic. So she was like, “We’re going to hear our kids.” My parents encouraged us to have opinions, and also to be able to defend them. ■ My parents believed homosexuality was something a kid could…

CITY OF BIG QUESTIONS ANSWERED BY EDWARD Mc CLELLAND Chicago’s football team began its existence in 1919 as the Decatur Staleys, a semipro club sponsored by the A.E. Staley Manufacturing Company, a producer of cornstarch in the central Illinois town. Augustus Eugene Staley, the company’s founder, hired former University of Illinois star George Halas as coach and put the players on the business’s payroll, using them in his plant when they weren’t playing football. For Staley, the endeavor ended up to be a financial bust. Due to an economic downturn in 1921, he had to get the 25-man team off his books. So he gave Halas $5,000 to move it to Chicago. “All I ask is you continue to call the team the Staleys for one season,” he told Halas.…

RALPH MARTIRE HAS good news and bad news for Chicagoans whose heads fill with the sound of angry bees upon hearing the phrase “pension crisis.” The executive director of the Center for Tax and Budget Accountability, at Roosevelt University, says there is a path to the city funding the $34 billion shortfall in its pension systems. But it requires civic leaders to deliver a delicate message to taxpayers. The underfunding of the city’s pension systems throughout multiple mayoral administrations has resulted in a slow-building catastrophe. Today, Chicago’s four defined benefit plans for public employees have about $45 billion in liabilities, but only about $11 billion in assets, making the systems uniquely dysfunctional among American cities. In a recent report, the CTBA traced the origins of the underfunding to better understand it…

PLENTY OF PEOPLE START life coloring outside the lines. But sooner or later, the pressures of convention reel them in. It takes an unwavering self-assurance — or blind madness — to stick to one’s vision. Edgar Miller was neither a renegade nor an iconoclast, but this multitalented creative refused to be side-tracked by the expectations of others. A jack-of-all-trades and master of many, he was an accomplished architect, painter, graphic designer, and muralist. He sculpted in stone and plaster, carved wood, and worked in stained glass. Miller, who died in 1993, has never been forgotten in Chicago, but as with anyone who never fit neatly in a box, it doesn’t hurt to shine a light his way from time to time, as the DePaul Art Museum is with the exhibition Edgar…

LEIGH OMILINSKY’S RECIPE for crumble-topped buckle, an old-fashioned cake filled with fruit, is less a formula than an invitation to get creative with your late-summer farmers’ market haul. Peaches feature here, but the Daisies pastry chef and partner asserts that anything goes. “I love mixing it up in the summertime, when there are so many fruits that you just can’t decide, so you throw everything together,” she says. “This cake can be made with any fruit.” To fully channel the season, don’t skip Omilinsky’s basil-infused whipped cream topping: “People don’t always expect it, but it tastes like summer to me.” PEACH BUCKLE WITH BASIL WHIPPED CREAM Makes 10 to 12 servings Active time 30 minutes Total time 2 hours 2½ cups flour, divided1½ tsp. baking powder¼ tsp. ground cardamom1 tsp. salt,…

MINNEAPOLIS 1 Amtrak has doubled its Twin City service from Chicago. The rail operator’s new seven-and-a-half-hour Borealis line complements its existing Empire Builder service with a four-hour-earlier departure, at 11:05 a.m. For $41 each way, you get Wi-Fi, wide reclining seats, and daylit views of Midwestern farmland and the Mississippi River as you wind through Wisconsin. Once there: You’ll arrive at 6:30 p.m., early enough to grab a table at Hai Hai, the Southeast Asian street food restaurant helmed by Christina Nguyen, who won the James Beard Award for best chef in the Midwest this year. During the day, visit Lake of the Isles Park for biking, paddle-boarding, and exceptional leaf peeping. KOHLER, WISCONSIN 2 You can stay in a posh lakeside cabin designed by a trendy artist. This June,…

■ After exploring medicine as a career at a Case Western Reserve program during the social-justice summer of 2020, Oluwaseyi Adeleke returned to Chicago with a different calling: to design clothing focused on the Black experience. “I started researching the Black Panther Party and got to work,” says the UIC grad. His conversation-starting tees, jackets, and hoodies carry phrases like “Let Black Boys Be” and “Black Women Are the Future.” This spring, his Prgrssn brand landed a physical location inside the Garfield Green Line L station, in L1, a startup-accelerator store run by the University of Chicago. There you’ll find Adeleke’s homages to Black successes, like interpretations of bats and pennants celebrating baseball stars Ken Griffey Jr. and Sr. 319 E. Garfield Blvd., Washington Park…

Writer Rich Cohen recalls first hearing about the Morrison Hotel (“The Enchanted Life of a Hotel,” page 55) when his mom talked about her 1963 stay there upon her move to the area. “It always had a romantic place in my imagination as the beginning of my family’s story in Chicago,” says Cohen, who grew up in Glencoe. His research on city history, in part for his book Monsters: The 1985 Chicago Bears and the Wild Heart of Football, kept leading him back to the Morrison, as did imagining the likes of football great Red Grange wandering the hotel’s halls: “There was a lot of wheeling and dealing going on.”…

THE CHICAGO TEACHERS UNION HAS BEEN ON QUITE A WINNING STREAK. IN 2019, it secured a historic $1.5 billion contract following a strike. Last year, it got one of its own elected mayor in Brandon Johnson. Now, with Johnson and his progressive allies leading the city, the ultraprogressive union finds itself in a position of strength. But politics often resembles a pendulum. And it could start swinging in the other direction, ironically because of one of the CTU’s triumphs: the adoption of an elected school board. At least that’s the hope of the union’s critics. They see the November board election — Chicago’s first ever — as an opportunity to chip away at what they view as the CTU’s powerhold on the schools by getting their own ideological allies elected…

1 PEDAL POWER Thousands of cyclists take over a car-free DuSable Lake Shore Drive for Bike the Drive, the Active Transportation Alliance’s signature fundraiser. Sept. 1. bikethedrive.org 2 THAT’S ALL FOLK The Evanston music venue Space branches out for the Evanston Folk Festival, a new two-day, three-stage slate of singer-songwriter types at Dawes Park. Sept. 7–8. evanstonfolkfestival.com 3 COMEDY TONIGHT Steppenwolf isn’t exactly synonymous with farce. That makes Anna D. Shapiro’s staging of Noises Off, the gold standard of backstage buffoonery, all the more intriguing. Sept. 12–Oct. 27. steppenwolf.org 4 PEOPLES’ HISTORY The Newberry exhibition Indigenous Chicago explores the history and present of the city’s Native populations, from 17th-century artifacts to works by contemporary artists. Sept. 12–Jan. 4. newberry.org 5 ¡ VIVA MÉXICO! Celebrate Mexican Independence Day at El Grito Chicago, a new festival that…

LET ME EXTOL THE PLEASURES of a specific dining experience, which is eating alone at the bar. I love it. For starters, I can pretend to be immersed in my phone but eavesdrop shamelessly on the people around me. Because the barkeep is two feet away, I can get immediate service by just looking up. Best of all, I can order the food I want and not share it. Sharing a meal with good people may feed the soul as well as the body, and many dishes are ideal for this purpose, dishes like roast chicken, fried calamari, and Olive Garden’s bottomless salad. But others — small, exquisite creations — are not. You’ll find a lot of these pleasures for solo diners at the bar at La Serre, the latest West…

RICH LETHEBY, WHO PREVIOUSLY COOKED AT SUNDA, DREAMED OF applying his Japanese-Korean roots to a variety of East-meets-West mashups (think Asian-style Buffalo chicken) until his cousin Chris Yoo convinced him to focus on sandwiches. Wise choice. At Sando Street, the duo’s offerings look posh enough to be served at a royal tea party but taste like they were crafted at a family-run izakaya. “I make sandwiches with foods I liked as a kid,” Letheby says. Translation: panko-crusted pork tonkatsu stacked with cabbage, chile aïoli, and katsu sauce, or furikake egg salad bull’s-eyed with a runny soft-boiled egg. Our favorite: bulgogi-marinated rib eye with grilled onions, mozzarella, cabbage, and kimchi aïoli. The through line to these sammies is the bread. Don’t call it white bread, though. Letheby and Yoo use shokupan, a…

AS LONG AS I CAN REMEMBER, CHICAGO HAS BEEN besotted by the size of its monuments. Biggest. Tallest. Busiest. This makes the Morrison Hotel — the tallest iteration of which, if it still stood, would have turned 100 next year — twice blessed. At one point, it was the tallest hotel in the world. At another, it was the tallest building ever torn down in America. As always in Chicago, it starts with real estate. This is less the story of a tower than a marsh, a parcel of riverfront acreage that became a bustling street corner. In it, you have the history of the city condensed to concentrate. In the 1770s, when Chicago’s first and only resident, the free Black trader Jean Baptiste Point DuSable, was living in the house…

Jack Swanson walked into his second-floor office at Oak Park and River Forest High School. It was December 4, 1982, and this three-room suite next to the boardroom had been his for the last eight years, after he had beaten out 60 other administrators vying to run the storied west suburban school. The normally bustling building was quiet, the 3,400 students enjoying the unseasonably warm Saturday at home. Swanson exuded calm and professionalism. Deeply religious, he was in some ways a throwback to Oak Park’s more genteel past, when the village was informally known as Saints’ Rest. When he first took the reins at the school, Swanson had streamlined its administrative structure, and had told the local papers that he wanted to ensure that Oak Park was a “viable community”…

I ALWAYS WANTED TO DO something with fashion,” says Sebastian Malczewski. Raised in Poland by his mom and grandmother, he “went shopping with them, so that became my hobby.” He immigrated to the States in 1998 and manifested his dream 20 years later by starting the footwear brand Marc Nolan. Malczewski, whose flagship store is in the West Loop, collaborates with musicians, visual artists, and even Three Dots and a Dash beverage director Kevin Beary, with whom he designed an aqua loafer this summer. As a shopper, he’s a frequenter of “charming smaller spots where you can find something unique.” NOTRE 118 N. Peoria St., West Loop “I like the ambience here. I feel at home.” WISH LIST ● Visvim denim shirt (1) “I’m biased for denim shirts, which I can pair…

■ I don’t go to Racine to mass-consume kringles. I go for the artisan goods. When I visit this burgeoning art-centric destination 90 minutes north, I like to start downtown, where tattoo parlors buzz within Italianate buildings and old Pabst beer ads swathe Queen Anne–style saloons. There you’ll find three noteworthy stores on a single block (the 400s) of Main Street. The tall glass cases at Northern Lights Gallery house wooden kaleidoscopes, Venetian glass vases, and sculptural jewelry. I snapped up a gold-plated ring by Chicago artist Kristen Davis. At Artists Gallery, with 24 artists under one roof, you can bang out all your holiday shopping: handcrafted greeting cards, glazed ceramic bowls, reed baskets. And the gift shop at the Racine Art Museum is big on craft kits (think bookbinding…