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Chicago West Side's Austin community area has the same reputation as South Side's Englewood - a place where businesses are few and crime and poverty are plentiful. In Austin's case, there has always been one exception - Galewood, a working class neighborhood in the northern part of Austin, north of North Avenue.

But as Chicago Tribune recently ( Read more... )

Yesterday, artist Nicki Minaj  (with Chicago rapper Lil Herb providing the guest verse) released a song called "Chiraq" - which, for those unaware, is a reference to Chicago's reputation for violence and crime. When the news of the song came up on my Twitter feed, I expected... I guess, looking back, I expected something dealing with the effects of ( Read more... )

For those who don't know, Vocalo is a sister radio station of WBEZ, Chicago's public radio station. WBEZ launched it back in 2007 to reach out to younger and, quite frankly, non-white listeners who don't usually listen to public radio. And every Friday, Vocalo airs the Barbershop Show - a talk show with a very distinct social justice bend. I've ( Read more... )

Gapers Block did a review of Alex Garel-Frantzen's "Gangsters & Organized Crime in Jewish Chicago", an account of crimes in Chicago's Jewish neighborhoods during the first three decades of the 20th century. By the looks of the review, it's a pretty informative account of a pretty obscure chapter in the city history. I'm definitely going to see if ( Read more... )

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Pitchfork is one of the most popular music festivals in Chicago. I've never actually attended one, but, thanks to an internship a local music magazine a few years ago, I got to spend a lot of time outside of it. As an intern, my duties included handing out copies of said magazine outside music festivals. Sometimes, we got concert passes.. but that' ( Read more... )

Over the years, I visited many parts of Chicago that, quite frankly, most white people avoid. Some of those places are actually fairly safe - or, at least, no more dangerous than North Side lower-income neighborhoods that white people pass through all the time. Others actually are a bit more dicey. During the course of my visits, I developed a set ( Read more... )

In 1968, the West Side of Chicago was ablaze. Martin Luther King Jr. was just assassinated, and the West Side's African American residents rioted. The riots also touched the African-American portions of the South Side, but not to the same extent as the West Side ( Read more... )

With the 2010 census results slowly trickling in, we are finally getting some sense of how the population changed in the Windy City over the past ten years. It's something I've been looking forward since... well, since before the census started, really. And so I has very happy to see the Tribune publishing a graphic about the the population changes ( Read more... )