Neighborhood Tourism, Here and in DC

Since Amadi pretty much said it all about the inauguration itself, I'll take a different tack on the recent festivities and how they might connect to the neighborhoods back here in Chicago. The picture above is a cellphone shot of Ben's Chili Bowl, an already-famous Washington eatery that experienced the "Check Please" effect on steroids in January, thanks to Barack Obama's visit shortly before taking office. I went by the day after the inauguration vaguely hoping to try the chili, but the crowd was so thick it was hopeless. Two policemen were out front warning tourists not to stand in the street to take photos.

Ben's is located in Washington's Shaw neighborhood, where the main drag, U Street, was known as "Black Broadway" back in the 50s, when Ben's first opened. Shaw predates New York's Harlem as a center of African-American life and culture. Originally settled by freed slaves during and after the Civil War, Shaw became the center of Washington's black community and was the largest African-American community in the nation until Harlem surpassed it in 1920. Nearby Howard University began to attract African-American intellectuals as early as the 1870s.

Although it's tempting to draw parallels between Shaw and Chicago's Bronzeville neighborhood, their trajectories diverged somewhat in the mid-20th century. Shaw survived the Great Depression and World War II relatively unscathed compared to Bronzeville, where the depression followed by the creation of the Ida B. Wells housing projects devastated the neighborhood. (See this Wikitravel article for more.)

Meanwhile, Shaw thrived until the 1968 riots following the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. For the first decade of Ben's Chili Bowl's history, everyone from Ella Fitzgerald to Bill Cosby to King himself could be found having a half-smoke at Ben's. (It's smoked sausage with chili sauce on a bun, but you should click the link and read the mouth-watering description they give on the menu.)

From there, Shaw's history looks like that of Bronzeville, North Lawndale, Woodlawn, and many other Chicago neighborhoods--a generation of crime and blight after the riots, followed by regeneration, which has come faster in some places than others. In Shaw's case, the rebirth has been fairly explosive in recent years, fueled by an influx of Ethiopian restaurants and businesses moving in from nearby Adams-Morgan. In a pattern familiar to community development folks, the neighborhoods took off (or fell, depending on your perspective) like a row of dominoes. First Dupont Circle got pricey, then Adams Morgan, then Shaw. Although to the naive out-of-towner the crowd in Shaw still seemed largely African-American, both on the street and in the storefronts, Wikipedia cites Census data showing the proportion of African-American residents in Shaw has declined from 92% in 1970 to 56% in 2000.

One thing Washington has in place is some cultural tourism infrastructure that extends beyond the most obvious neighborhood destinations to neighborhoods like Anacostia, which has both middle-class enclaves and a reputation for crime, drugs and violence. On this trip I got a first-hand look at the walking trails in both Adams Morgan and Shaw/U Street, more by accident than design. But I wasn't the only tourist reading the plaque explaining the area's history while taking a stroll or waiting for the bus. I definitely think Chicago has room to grow in this area.

For now, here's my favorite way to draw tourists to Chicago neighborhoods. Maybe someone can persuade President Obama to take a vacation from DC and stop by Chicago's Home of Chicken and Waffles!

Listening to voices of Curie High students

We've got an exciting new project brewing with Curie Youth Radio, a group of students at Curie Metro High School at Pulaski and Archer, near Midway Airport. The students in Sarah Levine's classroom have put together some terrific pieces about their own lives and their neighborhoods, and we're going to tap their talents and enthusiasm to create an insider's guide to neighborhood places, people or events.

Fellow scribe Maureen Kelleher and I sat down with Levine yesterday in Curie's busy English Department offices, where teacher desks are jammed one against another almost like the newsrooms of the old days. An inspiring place for me, especially as Levine hatched a plan to engage her 16 students in exploring their neighborhoods, finding suitable subjects and then doing the reporting, writing and audio-editing to bring those stories to others.

We envision podcasts and web-accessible vignettes that we will promote widely as a form of tourism material as well as a peek into the students' neighborhoods, which include Little Village, Pilsen, Brighton Park and South Shore. In the process we'll learn from the students about how audio production is done and how to spread their stories across the internet.

WBEZ ran one of the Curie pieces just this week and interviewed students Destiny Collazo and Mark Poore. It's worth a listen.

There's more where that came from on the Curie site, or you can subscribe to their podcasts by going to the iTunes store and searching for Curie Youth Radio. One piece is a son's story about his mother, titled "My Plate Full, Yours Empty" by Abdel Mutan. WBEZ featured that piece last year.

Neighborhood Tourism: Pilsen Main Street Tour

Attracting tourists is one of the oldest money-making schemes in the world, but urban neighborhoods haven't often invested the resources to attract visitors and then roll out the red carpet when they arrive. But that's changing.

"The time has come for us to toot our own horn, to tell people that we have a lot to offer," said The Resurrection Project's Álvaro Obregón at a panel discussion yesterday following a bus tour of his Pilsen neighborhood. He and about 20 participants from the tour had just finished a fine lunch at Fogata Village restaurant, 1820 S. Ashland. Obregón thinks there is plenty more opportunity for visitors to spend money at restaurants, bakeries and other stores while they are visiting Pilsen, where he has lived since he was one year old.

The tour was part of the National Trust for Historic Preservation's Main Street Conference in Chicago. It was hosted by Eighteenth Street Development Corporation, which is promoting the tax benefits of rehabilitating residential and commercial structures within the 4,000-building Pilsen historic district. Eighteenth Street's Kristy Menas and Hector Saldaña did a nice job, during the tour, of interweaving historic information about 120-year-old houses and vaulted sidewalks with more-current stories about new businesses going in (an Italian restaurant at Thalia Hall) and planned promotions like the Mole de Mayo cookoff on May 2, 2009.

More tours are on the way. Six Chicago neighborhoods including Pilsen are participating in the Burnham Plan Centennial's upcoming Bold Plans, Big Dreams Community Showcase. Community leaders are working with tour and history experts to prepare bus and walking tours that will kick off on May 16 and continue through the summer. The tours will cover South Chicago, Quad Communities (Bronzeville), Pilsen, Albany Park, Auburn Gresham and the Indian business strip in West Ridge. Stay tuned for details.