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From the outside, 2109 N. Humbolt looks like a typical Logan Square home, with a handsome red brick exterior and a small patch of greenery to the side. While the address may seem ordinary, inside is a wealth of information—like manuscripts and serials—pertaining to women’s history. It is home to the Chicago Women’s History Center (CWHC), a nonprofit volunteer organization committed to educating the city on the women who came before them....

Throughout the summer of 2020, every cancelled street fest felt like a fresh punch in the gut. No more day drinking at Hot Dog Fest while dancing to Boy Band Review perform “Summer Girls” by LFO, an especially devastating blow. There was, however, a shining beacon of hope: farmers’ markets. Chicago deemed the outdoor collection of vendors as essential businesses, allowing them “to open across the city to increase neighborhood access to fresh and healthy food” as long as they followed certain safety protocols—given the circumstances, the 61st Street and the Oak Park farmers’ markets had successful seasons, and a bunch of markets around the city and state accepted Link payments, making them even more accessible....

The Reader‘s archive is vast and varied, going back to 1971. Every day in Archive Dive, we’ll dig through and bring up some finds In 2016, Reader contributor Steve Krakow explored the backstory of local preacher and gospel-funk musician Pastor T.L. Barrett for the Secret History of Chicago Music. Krakow’s account ends with Barrett’s conviction for operating a pyramid scheme that defrauded thousands. That wasn’t the first time the preacher’s crimes landed in the pages of the Reader....

South Side Projections concludes an ongoing series of films about undocumented immigrants with a free screening at 7 PM Saturday night at the U. of C. Logan Center for the Arts of the locally produced documentary Elvira (2009). The film, directed by Columbia College graduate Javier Solórzano Casarin, profiles Elvira Arellano, an undocumented Mexican immigrant who became an activist for immigrants’ rights after she was arrested in the early 2000s. Arellano, who will attend Saturday’s screening, had been working at O’Hare Airport when she was arrested by immigration authorities; after being released, she found sanctuary with her son (who was born in the U....

You don’t need to read Nonagon’s bio to understand that the Logan Square trio has a soft spot for the great posthardcore bands that shaped American underground rock in the 80s and early 90s. They make that evident with every note of their long-in-the-works debut album, They Birds (Controlled Burn): it’s wall-to-wall with twisting bursts of husky, half-harmonized vocals, vivifying guitar riffs that perfectly balance acerbic with sweet, and brawny rhythms that inject the melodies with locomotive force....

Lyric Opera creative consultant and iconic soprano Renee Fleming said she was watching The Voice a few years ago when she realized that there’s a mass conversation going on around vocal performance and that “we’ve been left out of this mainstream dialogue.” Starting now, Chicago Voices is seeking proposals from amateur groups for stories arising from their neighborhoods. With professional help and financial support, three winning groups will turn their proposals into polished musical-theater works that’ll have a public premiere next fall....

The backbone of Chicago’s illustrious history of improvised music is made up of a small handful of indefatigable players who endlessly explore and play gigs—sometimes for just a handful of folks—but few have been as long devoted to spontaneous experimentation as keyboardist Jim Baker and percussionist Michael Zerang. Each Tuesday this month at the Hideout they’ve been celebrating their musical relationship, which goes back 35 years. Baker is a jazz-trained master who’s long bridged the divide between Bill Evans and Cecil Taylor, while Zerang, who grew up playing in his father’s Assyrian band, Kismet, has crossed lines between Arabic traditions, free jazz, and theater music, and for decades has served a crucial role as a live music programmer....

Nine years ago, I published a blog entry that casually referred to a lunch I’d had in New York City with a college friend of mine. It was the tiny bread crumb that led the national media to my virtual door one morning last month. I woke up to a barrage of online messages from producers of outlets ranging from NBC News to CCTV (the English-language news channel run by Chinese state broadcaster China Central Television), who targeted my e-mail, Twitter, Facebook—even my LinkedIn account....

There are probably safer plays in the American theater canon than George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart’s Pulitzer Prize-winning chestnut about a family of eccentrics who do their thing while the rest of the world toils in quiet desperation—but I can’t think of any. First produced in 1936, in the middle of the Great Depression, the play is almost entirely shadow free: no money worries, no personal problems. Even the White Russian refugees fleeing Stalinist terror are happy....

The Obama Foundation, which in recent weeks has reaffirmed its plan to build an aboveground parking garage on parkland at the east end of the Midway Plaisance, did an about-face today, announcing that it “has heard” the voices of protest and will now put the Obama Presidential Center garage underground on land it has already acquired in Jackson Park. The foundation had argued that the aboveground garage would still be parkland because it was to have been covered with grass....

While much of the country was losing its collective mind over the prospect of a President Trump, Chicago’s City Council unanimously passed Mayor Emanuel’s budget. Because the Red Line project will be paid for in part with a TIF. And the city’s official line on TIFs is that they don’t raise property taxes. Even though they do. Having read somewhere that the universe is “constantly expanding,” young Alvy’s concluded that one day it will explode....

A few days after a fire killed 36 people at an Oakland warehouse space called the Ghost Ship in December 2016, Baltimore city officials quickly shut down and condemned the Bell Foundry, a two-story multidisciplinary arts space filled with recording studios and living areas; dozens of tenants were evicted with expedience. While these spaces were thrust into the spotlight as hazards run by the willfully ignorant, they’ve long had a history of importance in underground communities—they offer spaces to the kind of voices who are often barred from traditional venues....

This morning the North Coast Music Festival announced the lineup for its ninth year, headlined by self-described “future funk” outfit Jamiroquai. The British band played their first U.S. show since 2005 last month at Coachella, where they appeared on Friday’s bill a few notches below headliner the Weeknd. Jamiroquai booked a handful of stateside performances in support of their first album in nearly a decade (last year’s Automation), and their timing is great: boogie, modern funk, and other postdisco subgenres that overlap with Jamiroquai’s sound have recently emerged as vital underground forces on an international scale....

The pianist Paul Giallorenzo is an under-the-radar presence within Chicago’s deep improvised music scene, but over the years he’s become a significant force both on and off the bandstand. He’s a crucial figure behind Elastic Arts, the invaluable, diverse performing arts space at the northern end of Logan Square, as he was for its Humboldt Park predecessor 3030. He’s also built an increasingly impressive reputation as a musician, forging a distinctive strain of spaced-out post-Sun Ra grooves with the trio Hearts & Minds and writing brisk, angular postbop vehicles for his quintet GitGo....

This year’s Chicago Blues Festival has an autumnal feel, or least much of the Petrillo lineup does. To close the fest on Sunday night, the city has booked centennial tributes to departed legends Muddy Waters and Willie Dixon (though recent research has raised doubts about whether Muddy was born in 1915). Most of the other acts scheduled for the big stage are veterans whose glory days were decades ago or younger artists rooted in styles at least that old....

Attention S-Mart shoppers! Grab your Boomstick and journey to a cabin in the woods with a group of college kids who are in for a hell of a time in this enjoyable musical comedy homage. Few film franchises have spawned such a rabid cult following as Sam Raimi’s eminently quotable classic B-movie horror film Evil Dead and its subsequent sequels. Black Button Eyes’ production has everything an uberfan could expect, including inside jokes, over-the-top gore, campy dialogue taken straight from the films, 1980s political incorrectness, and a well-defined splatter zone....

Harvey rapper Ty Money dropped the sequel to last year’s fantastic Cinco de Money last week—it came out May 5, turning the first mixtape’s release date into a tradition. There wasn’t much premeditation behind the name or the date, at least not the first time around—in January, Money told me that he didn’t decide to riff on Cinco de Mayo till the day before he dropped Cinco de Money, when he was spitballing ideas at DJ Victoriouz’s house....

Illinois Supreme Court justice calls for a fifth star to be added to the city flag—in honor of her own charity At a Tuesday breakfast fund-raiser for Special Olympics that doubled as a roast for Mayor Rahm Emanuel on his 57th birthday, Illinois Supreme Court justice Anne Burke, a cofounder of the nonprofit organization, proposed that the city consider adding a fifth star to the Chicago flag in its honor, the Tribune reports....

After listening to Hillary Clinton’s recent chat with Howard Stern, I’ve come to the frightening conclusion that members of the centrist wing of my beloved Democratic Party would rather see Trump reelected than cast their lot with Bernie Sanders. I think we all agree that the worst Democrat is generally better than the best Republican on issues like judicial nominees, reproductive rights, environmental protections, etc. STERN: Bernie could have endorsed you quicker....

Michael Gebert Breaded steak sandwich at Johnny O’s A sportswriter named Ted Berg took a page in USA Today yesterday to tell the world that Chicago had the best sandwich in the world. Italian beef? An Edzo’s cheeseburger? Something from Publican Quality Meats? No, compared to those relatively celebrated items, this was a somewhat obscure ringer—the breaded steak sandwich at Ricobene’s, an old Italian sandwich spot on the edge of Chinatown in Bridgeport....