Westside Weekly Review - Aspire Center sneak peek, overview of West Side stories and heads up about cannabis businesses coming to the West Side
The review for the week December 8-15, 2024
It is cutting a big close, but here we are with another look back at last week and a look at the week ahead. This time, we’re featuring a sneak peek at the long-awaited Aspire Center in Austin, and sharing links to stories about some West Side 2024 election stats, news from East Garfield Park’s Carroll Avenue art corridor and a heads up about a meeting on Friday that could decided the fate of a pair of cannabis businesses seeking to open on the West Side.
As always, we welcome your feedback, your suggestions and your ideas for what should be included not just in Westside Weekly Review, but what we should post on this Substack. We are still very much experimenting with what works and what doesn’t, so we’re keeping a very open mind.
Aspire Center sneak peek
Westside Review editor Igor Studenkov wears many hats, at least for now, before the full-fledged magazine gets off the ground. One of those hats is reporting for the Cook County Chronicle newspaper. In that capacity, he was invited to an early November 2024 tour of Austin’s former Emmet School as the building gets converted into Aspire Center, a workforce development, financial literacy training and social services center. The article about the tour was eventually published in the Dec. 11 print issue of the Cook County Chronicle. The article isn’t online yet, but you should be able to pick up a physical copy at a distribution point near you.
Aspire Center is, admittedly, still a work in progress, but a lot of progress has been made. And here are a few photos that didn’t make it in the paper.
Last week in the news
Block Club Chicago looked at how the Territory, an Austin-based youth arts organization, turned a vacant lot at 557 N. Central Ave. into an outdoor art gallery and gathering space.
Austin Weekly News looked at how West Side wards (except, for some reason, 27th Ward) voted in the 2024 presidential election. Spoiler alert - more West Siders voted Republican compared to four years ago.
The Block Club also profiled former Chicago Bulls player Joakim Noah and his One City Basketball League. In addition to the whole playing basketball part, the league teaches youth how to better resolve conflicts and other life skills that come in handy to anyone trying to find work or launch a business. The story isn’t exclusively West Side focused, but there is a prominent West Side angle.
While Austin Weekly looks at By the Hand club’s latest Christmas presents giveaway.
Chicago YIMBY flagged a permit to renovate an art studio loft building in East Garfield Park, at 3144 W. Carroll Ave. Work reportedly includes “converting artist studios on the 2nd and 3rd floors into artist live/work units, which will involve adding new kitchens,” as well as “a new sprinkler system for the building.” The live-work development is a bit of a change of pace for the group of artist lofts along Union Pacific West Line Metra tracks - artists who talked to us over the years since that most people who rent spaces only come there to work, and don’t interact with the surrounding community much.
Speaking of the Carroll Avenue art lofts - Chicago Reader recently reviewed a new exhibit on display at Devening Project, at 3039 W. Carroll Ave. The exhibit closes next Saturday, Dec. 21, so stop by to check it out between noon and 5 p.m.
The Week Ahead
The fate of the City of Chicago 2025 budget is, obviously, dominating the political news, especially with the clock ticking. But there are two meetings that we wanted to flag that will have some West Side-related implications.
Chicago Zoning Board of Appeals will be looking at applications from several cannabis businesses on Friday, Dec. 20. That includes a cannabis dispensary and infuser business near East Garfield Park, at 3300 W. Franklin Blvd., and a cannabis craft grower in Austin, at 1830-32 N. Lamon Ave. The meeting starts at 9 a.m. and will take as long as they need to, but these applications are currently scheduled to be consider during the first half of the meeting.
And on Thursday, Dec 19, the Northwest Home Equity Assurance Program’s governing commission will have its final meeting of 2024. The meeting will be held at 6:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. at 3234 N. Central Ave.
NWHEAP is one of those entities that flies under the radar, even though it controls thousands in property tax revenue. Three equity assurance programs were set up throughout Chicago’s Bungalow Belt back in the 1980s to try to stop White Flight by guaranteeing that homeowners don’t lose money if they ever want to sell. Galewood is part of NWHEAP. Since, four decades later, White Flight isn’t a concern anymore, the programs have been expanding how they use the property tax revenue, creating programs to help with home repairs and (ironically) help homeowners pay off their property tax debt.
What we are reading
As we wrote before, at Westside Review, we want to cultivate and support West Side talent. The future of journalism, especially Black journalism, is important to us. So when the Editor & Publisher magazine profiled Howard University’s journalism school, we wanted to check it out - and, we must say, we learned a few things.