Today in Chicago

Scenes from the streets of the Windy City #todayinchicago

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April 1, 2016 - #ShutDownChi strike in the Loop

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May 6th - Pea soup.

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September 10th - City Hall

Mental health advocates gather to demand respect in response to Rahm Emanuel’s outburst last week. Read all about it. 

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March 9th - Little Village Morning view from the 7th floor of the Cook County criminal court building. Jail in the foreground

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January 27th - Cook County Jail

This is what lunch, exercise, hygiene, walking, and fun look like at the largest single-site jail in the country.

#ThisIsCookCountyJail

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December 13th - Lathrop Homes

Las Posadas is a pre-Christmas tradition in some Latin-American communities. Mary and Joseph search the neighborhood for shelter, knocking on doors until they are accepted into a home.  At Chicago's Lathrop Homes, (one of the two last public housing developments on the North Side of the city) this tradition has become a particularly poignant annual event. Mary and Joseph lead a procession of current and former residents around the shuttered complex. Local churches and community organizations join in to draw attention to the dire lack of affordable housing in this part of the city. The Chicago Housing Authority began moving people out of Lathrop fifteen years ago but no progress on rehabilitation or redevelopment of the site has been made. About 800 apartments sit empty as tens of thousands of Chicago families linger on the CHA's waiting lists every year.

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December 5th - Northwestern University School of Law

Law and medical students, faculty, and staff join for a solidarity action. Last image courtesy of NU BLSA.

#BlackLivesMatter

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November 11th - Loop

Over a thousand Chicagoans take to the streets to protest Mayor Rahm's exclusionary policies.

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October 26th - Oakland

View from the sky

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October 17th - Wicker Park

Ran into this on the street today

[iseo58]

Cairo

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I took this photo in Cairo in the fall of 2010 and everywhere that it exists online it is connected to my name. I even won a contest at my university with it.  Now some dude posted it without giving me credit and it's going viral.  #InternetRealities

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October 9th - Rogers Park Discovering the Mile of Murals

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October 7th - Daley Plaza

Community groups rally for more oversight of the CHA and raising the minimum wage to $15. Read more here. And here is one powerful story shared with the crowd:

"I am a mother, I am a worker, and I’ve been on the waiting list for CHA housing since 2008. I don’t have a doctorate or a master’s degree, but I get up every day and I live a productive life. I work at Walgreen’s. My supervisor has me working 38 hours every week. They keep me working less than 40 hours so they don’t have to provide benefits. I work the night shift and I get off at 12:30 am. I have a daughter…she is seven years old. When I get off work I pick up my daughter from a family member’s house and by the time we get to the place we stay now, it’s often 3:45 am. My daughter basically sleeps on the road. We don’t have a union at Walgreen’s and the pay is minimum wage. After taxes I take home $500 every two weeks. It’s just not enough to pay for housing of our own. From November of 2012 to March of 2014 we were homeless. Some nights I slept in my truck while my daughter stayed with a family member. We ended up finding a room to stay at a homeless shelter on the South Side. At least the shelter gave us a place to be a family and to be together even if it wasn’t a place of our own. Currently we stay at a room in a friend’s house after last spring our time ran out at the shelter. Even after waiting for six years there’s still no help from the CHA but I still dream of having a stable place of my own to raise my daughter. She deserves that.”

#ShatarasStory

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September 30th - Listening to jazz while waiting for the Green line.

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September 28th - Lincoln Park

Inside the Elks Memorial

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Photos from my last visit to the Lathrop Homes - May 24, 2014.

Check out my cover story about this community in The Reader this week! Read the addendum here, and tune in to WBEZ tomorrow morning at 10:15CST to hear myself and Lathrop LAC vice president Titus Kerby talk about the challenges and hopes of this endangered public housing project on the North Side.

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What happened?

Friends!

I'm in New York for the summer doing an internship at Harper's Magazine. This why I've been off the radar for the last couple of weeks. I want to keep shooting this summer but I'd like to somehow stay true to the title of the blog! Any ideas? What do you want to see?