Uptown Businesses Pull Together . . .
As part of the project “Working Together: Building Community Through the Arts,” the plan finds its roots in a survey conducted last winter in Uptown, Pilsen, West Town, and South Shore, as well as suburban Schaumburg. The survey asked artists, arts groups, and social service agencies to “assess their economic contributions to their communities,” says the foundation’s executive director, Alene Valkanas, “the moneys they’ve invested in upgrading their properties, the individuals they employ, the volunteers they bring into the community, and their audiences’ range of economic levels, which is really quite impressive.” The survey also examined “what issues they might begin to address in terms of improving their own positions and that of the community,” Valkanas says; chief among those issues in Uptown was “the perception of crime–not the reality, but the perception.”
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Like a lot of off-off-Loop theaters, Transient was formed by a core of college pals–Scot Casey, Bill Mann, and Tom Daniel, all alumni of the University of Illinois at Chicago. Itinerant for its first two years, the ambitious young company moved into its own place in 1990 when Uptown developer Randy Langer offered a generous five-year lease, charging for a run-down 5,000-square-foot space what many people pay for a studio or small one-bedroom apartment.
