A first step toward traffic reform, biking between major West Side parks and other news and events
The Westside Weekly Review for the week of April 20 - April 26, 2025
Good evening, readers and subscribers.
On Saturday, I took part in the Chicago Independent Bookstore Day. I kept thinking about how the number of independent bookstores sure has increased over the past few years. For those unaware, the goal was to visit as many participating independently owned bookstores as possible. Visiting 10 bookstores gets you a 10% discount in the participating bookstores for the next 12 months (in other words, until April 26, 2026) and visiting 15 will get you a 15% discount. Before, it was all but impossible to visit 10 without going to the South Side, or the suburbs. Now, there’s enough independent bookstores that you can easy hit a 10-bookstore goal without ever heading south of Roosevelt Road. Which… I don’t know. I like seeing more independent bookstores opening up and staying in business, but I feel like having fewer bookstores forced participants to visit neighborhoods they might not normally visit, and now, there’s less incentive to do that.
I was also thinking about how, after all this time, where’s no West Side participating bookstore, at least west of Ashland Avenue. West Side does have a bookstore - an Open Books’ North Lawndale location - but it’s not participating (probably because it’s not a traditional bookstore per se). Plans for Semicolon Books to open in East Garfield Park fell through due to project delays and the owner’s financial struggles, and there’s nothing else on the horizon… Yet. I covered West Side long enough that I’ve seen things I never thought would happen happen. Maybe another bookstore, preferably a locally owned one, will be one of those things.
I suppose buying some books is an investment in the future. An expression of hope that I will still be around for a while. And that I’ll get a chance to give a few of them as presents.
Until (hopefully) next time.
Igor Studenkov
Editor, Westside Review
Traffic stops reform update
As we discussed last week, Community Commission for Public Safety and Accountability unveiled the proposed new traffic stop policy on Thursday, April 24, a few hours before their regularly scheduled April meeting.
Now, what we got wasn’t quite what I expected. CCPSA released the CPD proposal and their recommended changes to said proposal. I will get more into it in my article Cook County Chronicle, but as anybody who can read at this proposal can tell that CCPSA commissioners were divided on several issues. Most notably, they disagreed on whether to outright ban pretextual traffic stops - traffic stops where police officers use minor traffic law violation, like a tail light being out, as a pretext to stop a car so they can, for example, search it for drugs and/or weapons. Those disagreements came through at the meeting, and activists from Chicago Alliance Against Racism and Political Repression even almost got into a shouting match with commissioner Sandra Wortham. (CCPSA president Anthony Driver stopped it before things got too heated).
As someone who covered West Side for many, many years, and attended my share of CAPS meetings, CPD listening sessions, ward community meetings and district council meeting, I can safely say that Black community has all kinds of feelings about balancing public safety and respecting civil rights, and just how racist law enforcement practices actually are (in my experience, you’d be hard-pressed to find someone who thinks cops are never racist, but there’s a pretty broad spectrum of opinion beyond that). The fact that Wortham, who is Black, didn’t agree with a lot of changes the rest of the commission suggested, didn’t surprise me in the slightest.
11th Police District Council chair Bryan Ramson, who attended this meeting and the Uptown hearing a week earlier, told me that he was glad that Wortham emphasized that there was nuance. He said that the residents of communities like Garfield Park want to feel safe, but they don’t want to be racially profiled, either, so he would like to see some balance.
The release of the draft is just the first step in a long process (that the officials stubbornly refused to give a concrete timeline on). But there will be conversations with focus groups and more community meetings before the final draft is released. And bear in mind that the final draft would have to be something both CPD and majority of CCPSA agree on, so this will probably take a few twists and turns before it’s over.
Bike the Boulevards bike ride
We got a lot of events coming up this week, but I wanted to highlight one in particular. This Saturday, May 3, cyclists are invited to, as the name implies, bike the boulevards that connect major Chicago parks, ring-like, from Koz Park to Garfield Park, then to Douglass Park, then back north to Humboldt Park. Organizers said they wanted to encourage connections between the communities within those parks, and just to expand their horizons. See the flyer below for more information.
Last week in West Side news
The biggest story on the West Side, big enough that even non-West Side media outlets gave it plenty of coverage, was veteran Chicago firefighter, Captain David Meyer, dying in a fire that later turned out to be arson. The man who allegedly set the fire has been arrested. Block Club did its best to follow the process every step of the way - which also meant that some of the other stories got sidelined. But because there’s more than one media outlet covering the West Side, a lot of the stuff got covered anyway.
The big reason why I have included news round-ups in this newsletter is that, if you don’t follow multiple outlets, you miss the bigger picture.
With that in mind, here are some other newsworthy items published last week:
Block Club Chicago reported on the recently opened The Lawndale Christian Legal Center’s Dr. Dennis Deer Community Justice Center, the supportive housing for young men on probation. It is located inside a renovated parish school at 1449 S. Keeler Ave.
For some further context, I wrote about this development almost five years ago, back when it was still trying to get zoning approval from the city.
Here is The Triibe’s coverage of the opening.
Austin Weekly News profiled a recently launched Austin nonprofit and the after-school programs it organizes for local youth.
Speaking of local youth, Austin Weekly News covered a “Shark Tank” style competition for kids and teens who were enrolled in North Lawndale’s Sidney Epstein Youth Center, 3415 W. 13th Pl.
In Cook County Chronicle, I covered what turned out to be a pretty unusual process for selecting the replacement of the 8th District Cook County commissioner. The West Side angle is small - 8th District only makes up a few sections of 37th and 27th wards, so Alds. Walter Burnett (27th) and Emma Mitts (37th) won’t have anywhere near the deciding votes. But the candidate forum did take place on the West Side, at the large storefront at 4117 W. North Ave.used by the Puerto Rican Cultural Center and a few other organizations.
Usually, Democratic Party committeepersons just pick whoever they want. In this case, the more progressive-orientated committeepersons promised to vote however their local Independent Political Organizations vote for. The voting is limited to IPO members, but that’s still more of a public(ish) participation than we usually get.
Austin Weekly News also reported on five West Side chefs getting $9,000 grants from Austin Coming Together coalition’s Austin Eats initiative.
In Niles & Park Ridge Journal, your editor did a follow-up on the sexual abuse accusations against Rev. Mathew Foley from his time as a deacon at North Lawndale’s St. Agatha’s Church back in the late 1980s-early 1990s. The short version is that he was cleared of those allegations by the Archdiocese of Chicago’s investigative body.
Coming up on the West Side this week
On Monday, April 28, West Garfield Park’s Legler Regional Library, 115 S. Pulaski Rd., is hosting its monthly poetry workshop and open mic. The workshop is between 4 p.m. and 5 p.m., while the open mic is between 5:30 p.m. and 7:30 p.m.
On Tuesday, April 29, Chicago Department of Public Health will be holding a free training how to prevent suicide. The training will be held at the Douglass Park fieldhouse, 1401 S. Sacramento Dr., at 3:30 p.m. to 5 p.m.
Also on April 29, Credit Counseling Service of Northern Illinois is holding a free workshop on budgeting during retirement. The workshop will be held at North Lawndale’s Douglass branch library, 3353 W. 13th St., at 6:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m.
On Wednesday, April 30, at 6:30 p.m., CCPSA will he holding a virtual listening session to hear from the public of what they would like to see in the new chief of the Civilian Office of Police Accountability, which currently investigates police misconduct. One of CCPSA’s responsibilities is to pick COPA chief candidates, with the mayors making the final decision. Since this is a virtual hearing, registration is required.
On Saturday, May 3, Oak Park Regional Housing Center is holding the Austin Community Housing Forum and Fair. It will feature discussions of topics such as (much delayed) Laramie State Bank site redevelopment and the Austin land trust (which I’ve heard bits and pieces about, but nothing concrete). There will also be breakout workshops on housing-related topics. The event will take place at Michele Clark High School, 5101 W. Harrison St., at 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.