Common Sense for Chicago 2010

By Jeff McMahon

In the last decade, Bridgeport has emerged as one of Chicago’s most diverse neighborhoods. But the rainbow blossoming there has gone largely unacknowledged, and may even be threatened, by purported egalitarians who continue to stereotype Bridgeport as the racist backwater it once was.

In 2008, a DePaul University study listed Bridgeport as one of Chicago’s four most diverse neighborhoods, characterizing its demographics as “extreme diversity.” That promising designation arrived thanks not to the hipsters who have pushed the frontier of gentrification south from Pilsen but thanks to a spiral influx of people of varied race, class and orientation, who seem to have imported not only difference, but tolerance. Read the rest of this entry »

Visual artist Rebecca Schoenecker may insist that her “Rollervision” performance “started out as a joke,” but the end result is incredibly thought-provoking. Shoenecker, a former competitive roller skater, initially came up with the concept after a visit to Bridgeport’s spacious Archer Gallery.

Archer’s wood floors are oddly reminiscent of a roller rink floor, which sparked Schoenecker to lightheartedly tell her friend, Patrick Holbrook, that she wanted to skate in the space. He convinced her to go with it. “It’s kind of a subversion of the roller skating that she did when she was a kid,” Holbrook says. Read the rest of this entry »