“There is no soil on vacant lots in Chicago,” Elizabeth Tyler told a food conference last month at Northeastern Illinois University, speaking from her experience as supervisor of the Green Chicago community-garden program of the Chicago Botanic Garden. “Our lots grow rubble. We always have to haul in soil.” But once that is done, she says community gardeners in town have successfully grown crops as seemingly exotic as sorghum, peanuts, and cotton. She adds, “I hear of more vandalism problems from gardeners in the suburbs than in the city.”
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“Most attacks on [44th Ward Alderman] Bernie [Hansen] have a classist edge,” writes Jon-Henri Damski in Windy City Times (February 3). “Like Tonya Harding, Bernie didn’t come up our way–privileged–he came up the hard way. He does not come from a connected family….Twenty-three years ago Bernie was a bouncer in a gay bar, the original Annex on Clark Street–the same spot now where the Rodde Center, with Bernie’s help, is trying to sell us on their plans for a new lesbian and gay center. Bernie didn’t start out in a law office, with Gold Cards and access to social contacts. He made money hustling on the professional bowlers’ circuit. Later, he got a job in sanitation–garbage–and worked his way up in the 44th Ward organization.”
“I greet men who are dropping their kids off and picking them up from the center,” explains Michael Poe of the Children’s Home Aid Society of Illinois in the new booklet Getting Men Involved: Strategies for Early Childhood Programs. “At first, some of them thought I was gay, because they don’t really think a man’s place is working with little kids. But because I talk to them man-to-man, and let them see me out in the community, playing ball and hanging out, that makes them feel better about me as a man working in daycare.”
