In February a large pane glass window was shattered at Papa Jin, a newish white-tablecloth Chinese eatery on Milwaukee Avenue in Wicker Park. Keep Warm–Burn Out the Rich was spray-painted on the side of the building. This Way to Gentrification was stenciled on the sidewalk, with an arrow pointing to the restaurant’s door.
Roberto Lopez, a Flat Iron Building maintenance man, isn’t really loafing. He’s keeping an eye on things, keeping his ear to the ground. It’s part of his job. He stands just outside his building, a neighborhood landmark that rises at the intersection of North, Damen, and Milwaukee avenues, and he’s wearing his usual billed cap and bemused smirk. It’s a sunny Saturday afternoon in spring; Milwaukee Avenue is clogged with cars and the sidewalks surge with people: area denizens garbed in gritty chic or baggy hip hop, longtime Latino residents, homeless shopping-cart pushers, hiply genteel visitors. This stretch of Milwaukee, once dubbed “Lunchpail Avenue” for its working-class commuters, has long been known for its big, garishly commercial E-Z credit furniture stores. It still is. Except now there also are funky furniture stores. Vintage thrift shops. Ma-and-pa stands that sell cappuccino.
It’s a bohemia in the painful throes of gentrification. The Wicker Park/Bucktown arts district within mostly Latino West Town, hasn’t been totally tamed by the ruling class. But there’s no denying that a new city frontier is being staked out here. One need only recall how the visual arts industry created a real estate boom on Manhattan’s lower east side in the late 1970s and ’80s. Developers established successive beachheads that led eventually to the Tompkins Square antigentrification uprising of 1988.
To this day, no one’s sure who mailed a mysterious letter headlined Help Pound the Coyote to many area businesses and organizations late last year. The letter urged readers to Boycott Around the Coyote ’94 and listed guerrilla tactics “that have proven successful” in stopping gentrifiers. You could, for example, slash art canvases, spray-paint gentrafuck on businesses, glue locks shut, smash windows of “yuppie artist lofts.”
Andrews had seen the future, and the future–however gradually–was heading west. There had always been artists in Wicker Park. But in the late 70s creative types forced out of Old Town and Lincoln Park by gentrification began settling there in larger numbers. At the same time, recent fine arts majors also were attracted by the astonishing surplus of raw space at cheap rents. Artists occupied grungy converted storefronts and musty Milwaukee Avenue lofts by day–and descended on the Rainbo Club, an old hangout of famous son Nelson Algren, by night.
Wicker Park began playing out its gentrification script in earnest around ’86 or ’87. As artists transformed the neighborhood’s loft space into livable studios, storefronts became amenities catering to the burgeoning cultural scene: galleries, theaters, salons, coffeehouses, bars. This new bohemia attracted economic investment: brokers and speculators snapped up marginal housing and sold it at inflated prices; commercial landlords lured more affluent commercial artists into rehabbed lofts at the expense of financially unstable fine artists–painters and the like; some cutting-edge visual art was mainstreamed into a more marketable product; graffiti moved from CTA walls to galleries and restaurants; pockets of “yupper-income” housing sprouted practically overnight in lower-income, mixed-ethnic neighborhoods that had been Puerto Rican, Mexican, Polish, Ukrainian, and African American.
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The Northwest Tower Building appeared to be thriving, too. It has been described by Wes Andrews as “a whole different kind of animal” from the Flat Iron because its pricier leases cater more to “newly capitalized professionals”; start-up artists and community groups would have a harder go of it there. (And though Tower Coyote has less leasable space than the Flat Iron, it costs more to operate.) The Tower now houses 30-some entities, including social service organizations like Association House (their offices take up about a third of the building) and the Chicago Abused Women’s Coalition, film and video production companies, Pure magazine, a post office box facility, real estate firms, and lawyers’ offices. Half the offices continue to be minority run–which is what Andrews had intended.
