In June a wall went up between a park in southwest Evanston and the Skokie Swift tracks, built and whitewashed by a group of neighbors who planned to paint a mural on it. For three weeks while they completed their preparations, the eight-foot-high, 350-foot-long wall stood bare, challenging taggers to defile it with their spray paint.
The mural is located in a small, unnamed park at Clyde Avenue and Brummel Street, two blocks north of Howard Street. The surrounding working-class community of walk-up apartment buildings, cut off by the train tracks from wealthier areas to the east, is one of the most racially diverse neighborhoods in the Chicago area. According to recent census figures, its residents include refugees and immigrants from the Caribbean, Central America, Europe, and Asia, as well as native-born African Americans, Jews, and Hispanics–many of whom moved there from Rogers Park, Uptown, Edgewater, and other far-north-side neighborhoods.
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In the days following the meeting, Chavers, Glass-Newman, and other activists, including Isabel Oviedo, president of the Evanston Latinamerican Association, went door to door encouraging residents to attend a follow-up meeting at the Oakton School. The nearly 150 residents who attended decided to set up a summer recreation program for kids. The city provided the money for counselors, and throughout the summer of 1992 there were arts and crafts, sports, and music activities in local parks every day from ten to six. “Those summer programs were a great success,” says Chavers. “But we didn’t want it to end there.”
But it wasn’t easy at first. “We didn’t have any trouble getting the little kids involved, but the older kids didn’t seem to like us coming around,” says Chavers. “There was one teenager, maybe 16 years old, and I asked if he would help me move a bench. He said: ‘You gonna pay me?’ It was a typical teenage thing: he kind of mumbled it and there was no eye contact. I said, ‘Does your mother pay you to help her?’ He didn’t say anything, but a few days later, after we had started painting the mural, he comes up and says, ‘This thing ain’t got nothin’ about us.’ He wanted us to put up something about the basketball court. I told him, ‘You have to participate if you want to have a say.’ He wound up washing the brushes, and we put a basketball scene in there. I see him all the time now. It is, after all, his park. I still don’t get any eye contact, but he grunts a hello. Hey, I’m not picky. I’ll take what I can get.”
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Marc Pokempner.
