2001-06-05 - 10:06 p.m.

ed: okay, it's time for me to wrap this part up so I can get on to the next part. And so everybody, without further ado, we bring you the season finale of "The Project!!!"

Extra-short version, for those of you with short attention spans.

I�m fiddling around at my computer, half-dressed, unshowered, when I hear a commotion outside. Out my window I see 20 or so people marching down the sidewalk, carrying signs. At the center of it is a woman with a megaphone, shouting into it, over and over again:

�We don�t need Starbucks or the Gap. Low-cost housing is where it�s at.�

Shit. Shit, shit. I need to be out there, experiencing this, quick before they get away. I throw on my sneakers, no time to think about anything else, and run downstairs after them, only they�ve disappeared.

�Did you see where those protestors went?� I ask a man who�s holding a yellow flier. He directs me around the corner, where I find them stopped, deciding whether to end their protest here or continue on to one more spot.

I take a flyer from a woman. The group is named COURAJ � Community of Uptown Residents for Affordability and Justice. I remember hearing from a few of them in City Hall.

Their flyer tells me that THERE�S A HOUSING CRISIS IN OUR COMMUNITY. It goes on to say that over 90 percent of the children who go to Uptown public schools qualify for the Federal free lunch program, meaning their families make under $22,000 per year. UPTOWN IS A COMMUNITY THAT NEEDS LOW-COST HOUSING, it adds.

These are the people who take the opposite stand to the Uptown Chicago Commission. They believe the city should buy all the land in the two Uptown areas that have been set aside for redevelopment and build low-income housing. As Lakefront property has become more expensive, condominium construction is growing quickly, pushing out the poor residents who have lived here for years. In the past ten years, Uptown has lost 1,000 units of affordable housing, most of it to high-end condo development, according to their figures.

They�re not just fighting the condominium developers. They�re fighting Starbucks and the Gap, the personification of corporate evil, or so I�m told. I haven�t done the research myself, so I rely on hearsay and second-hand accounts. The Gap makes its clothes in sweatshops, they tell me, which is bad, although it may be better than nothing to those who work there. And Starbucks� well, someone tells me that they burn their beans, though I�m not sure why I should care about that. My brother tells me the problem is they don�t provide an inviting atmosphere, though I�ve sat down for an hour at a time there, even eaten a sandwich I brought from elsewhere. My friend Jake tells me it�s their logos and branding that are evil. I�ve heard on the radio that they don�t brew fair trade coffee, which is designed to give poor Central American coffee farmers a fair price for their labor and the hope of a better life. Only they do sell fair trade coffee in bags, and even the manufacturers admit that it�s an inferior product because of all the steps that are bypassed to get that fair price. And do the mom-and-pop coffee shops use fair trade coffee?

Mostly, I think, it�s what these two companies have come to represent that people rail against; they represent the corporate monolith making us into robots, operating under the assumption that we all want to be branded, we all want to wear our khakis if that�s the thing to, we all want to get our brand-name coffee and sit in our brand-name shop and dribble our money away with $4 mocha grandes. The people with money will just march in here with their pretentious coffee shops and flaunt the fact that they have money to burn on coffee, spending on a drink what the poor man spends on a meal, as he sees his rents skyrocket and is forced to eventually move out.

But these protestors, they�re not taking it sitting down. They plan to end the encroachment of the machine on their little diverse patch of land.

I can go along with this, I suppose. I begin walking alongside them, not chanting because I�m not willing to commit that far, though I sometimes shout out along one of their lines.

�What do we want?�

�Low-cost housing!�

�Where do we want it?�

�Uptown!�

�When do we want it?�

�Now!�

I�m feeling a little self-conscious walking with this group, wondering if David Rowe, the guy from the Uptown Chicago Commission, will walk by and tell me he�s disappointed in me. I�m not sure I belong here. These people couldn�t know the whole story, because you can never know the whole story. But at some point in their lives they decided to take it on faith that what they were doing was right, and that�s something I just can�t seem to do.

I look down for a moment at what I�m wearing. Of course; it had to be. I was just sitting in my apartment minding my own business. I didn�t know I would be called out like this. And now here I am, walking down the streets of Uptown, chanting against Uptown and the Gap, and I�ve got on this nondescript sweatshirt that my mother gave me a while back, she didn�t know any better, and on the tiny little zipper are three letter � GAP.

I fiddle with the zipper; maybe I can tuck it inside the sweatshirt. But no, it just hangs there, obvious to anyone who will take a moment to notice. They should be protesting against me. I am the enemy in every way. I am the free-spending up-and-comer, willing to spend these exorbitant prices while others cannot. I am the encroachment of the evil, wearing my Gap shirt, even if I haven�t been to the Gap in years. But I will march here until the tour ends, wondering if these people are smirking at me and trying not to care.

---

It�s getting late in the afternoon and I�ve been meaning to get out to the park. Last night, when I was there, I saw all these tents set up out there, and a bunch of bales of hay, but I couldn�t find any signs or anybody who could tell me what was going on.

So I make it out there at around four and walk along the bike path. It�s sunny for the first time today, though it�s been pretty sunny all week. I walk over to the field where a bunch of people, mostly Hispanic, are playing soccer. I stop by the concessions stand and buy a mango, peeled and on a stick, with only a little chili powder because they can make them really hot.

I stand and watch the soccer game for a minute, and the goalie makes a great save, but I have to turn away because behind me, over the hill, are two huge circular tubes floating in the breeze, each held down by about a dozen strings. I gather that they are some sort of kites, because all over the hill people are flying kites, more than I thought at first glance, there must be hundreds of them of all sorts. Some of them are fancy ones that swoop and dive and are directed by multiple strings. Others are just paper things with drawings on them and a single string holding them up.

I get to the top of the hill and I see the tents down there, and see that this is Mayor Daley�s Kids and Kites festival. There�s a tent for people to buy kites, and another one for kids to make and decorate their own kites. At one tent there�s this crazy comedian/magician who�s really going all out to either make the kids laugh or cry, shouting and picking them up and running around like mad.

I want to go get Nate and tell him to come quick and bring the kites, this is great, you can make your own kite, it would be so great to fly our kites with all these people. Or maybe it�s too late for today, but we could come back tomorrow and fly our kites with the kids then.

I ask the lady at the concession stand how long this is going for and she tells me this is about it, it ends at 4:30, and in fact I see the information booth is already closed. But there must still be a few more minutes, maybe I could get over to the kite-making booth and make a kite, draw some appropriate drawing on it and send it up in the air with the rest of them, whatever - I want this experience!

The kite-making booth is closing up, too, I can tell, though a few stragglers are still working away. But maybe I can find a kite that somebody�s left behind and make it mine and fly it, but all I can find is this one ripped kite that wouldn�t fly anyway, so screw it. I�ll have to go home and see what�s going on over there, what kind of experience I can have there, so I start to leave the park.

But then I turn around and look back before I leave, and I think, what do I have to get back to? I don�t need to have any more great experiences, I can linger here for a few more minutes while the kites are still flying and the sun is still shining. So I sit down in the grass near the path, in a spot that you wouldn�t ever really choose to sit in because it�s too close to the path and there so much open space, but here I am so I�ll sit here. And I sit back and watch this one kite, which this lady is guiding with a string in each hand, making it swoop and dive, and then just float up as high as it can go and hang out way up there in the sky for a while, and swoop and dive and float some more, until it eventually comes crashing down to the ground due to an unruly gust of wind, like all kites do, and I get up and head home.

---

All right. That marks some arbitrary break-point where you can sit back and assess if you like, those of you who have slogged through (logosfiend, I know you're out there), tell me works and what doesn't work, what to do better, what you can't wait until next season to hear about and what you couldn't give a chicken noodle soup about. Not that I will necessarily heed your words, but I'm interested anyway. Email me or something.

And thanks for being you!

And get ready for next season, which begins in about a week!

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