Jesus People’s stretch of Wilson Avenue seems masterfully ill-fit for a luxury hotel, so one doesn’t expect to find a pervasively elegant décor in their oasis. Even though Friendly Towers’ entrance hall, with its marble floor tiles and bright-white arch ceiling, is an encouraging display, the low expectations return immediately upon entering the “grand lobby.” With tall columns supporting a dome wrapped in intricate molding, the decommissioned hotel’s original integrity is still visible, but ghostly. There to greet all visitors is none other than Jesus, or at least a fifteen-foot banner of him, but the spectacle is marred by ceiling-high metal scaffolding that partially obscures the good shepherd with its crossbars. Unoccupied and untooled, the scaffolding looks more like a semi-permanent lobby fixture than a practical device temporarily employed for construction. The full panorama of the lobby exposes this continued theme, an aesthetic that says, “We’ll get to that tomorrow.” The walls are a combination of white and teal, dusky and chipping, with unpainted drywall patches. The floors are sectioned by unwashed tile and entirely compressed, antiquarian carpeting. There are well-worn tracks in the carpet: a hallmark of aimless shuffling. To punctuate this look, a derelict old man meanders in circles and offers a cornucopia of rude aromas. These scents, of unwashed clothes, unwashed bodies, and sweat recalling an impoverished mess-hall cuisine, contribute to the commune’s population funk. Here, one breathes shallowly.

Embarrassing activities once practiced were exposed, such as exorcisms and adult spankings for punishment.

Unsurprisingly, JPUSA is no stranger to controversy; it carries the scars of the outer world’s suspicions. The original firestorm was sparked in 1994 by Dr. Ronald Enroth, an evangelical Christian author and Professor of Sociology at Westmont College, with a book called Recovering from Churches that Abuse. In the book, a section devoted to JPUSA explored the emotional abuse and psychological damage experienced by members of the commune. Despite JPUSA’s pleas to have the section edited from the book prior to its publication, Dr. Enroth proceeded. JPUSA’s response was a futile attempt to invalidate both the research methods and the interviewees used in the book. This controversy caused a portion of the commune to jump ship, but the passing of time allowed JPUSA to drop from the public gaze. The wounds were violently reopened in 2001, when a two-part Chicago Tribune article asked, “Where are they now?” and flicked a flashlight over the long shadow of the commune’s past. Embarrassing activities once practiced were exposed, such as exorcisms and adult spankings for punishment. JPUSA chalked these up to the “spiritual immaturity” of those times.

Much has changed since 2001, the commune says, but one wonders how much. I am greeted at the front desk with a glance up from a book held by a tattooed Christian. Body art and band shirts seem the preferred attire; a straight-edge, evangelical, punk culture abides. Jesus, despite the ancient scaffolding, is divine and bitchin’.

“Hey, this guy wants to know about Jah-poo-zah,” she calls to a passing teenager.

“I’m just a volunteer assistant-coordinator; I can’t do anything without an official coordinator,” he responds, uninterested in showing me around.

After several similar petitions I come to understand that there are no coordinators on site to meet with me, as they all are out cleaning up after the Cornerstone Music Festival from the previous week in Bushnell, Illinois. This heavily attended, annual Christian-music festival, thrown by JPUSA for twenty-six years, is extremely popular in its market. The need for staffing empties the commune, but the $155 ticket price floods the coffers. After I linger too long for comfort, however, the tattooed teenager grabs the nearest passerby and convinces him to handle me.

The guide is one of the colony’s cooks: a stout little man with a knit beanie, a tank top with torn sleaves, and eyelashes of a feminine exuberance. He walks me back to the cafeteria while giving me a sparse history on the commune. Everyone has their own job either in the building or with one of the businesses that is communally owned, but no one collects a check; all the money goes into the JPUSA fund, which buys everything that is needed for day-to-day, basic functioning. We pass a room where a handful of dazed-looking elderly people are eating; as I peek in he hastens to explain that this is the “special” dining hall reserved for the non-member, senior citizens whose families rent them housing on the top two floors of the building. The small nursing home is one of many streams of income for the colony. In addition to living space and three meals a day, the seniors are given the right to interact with the community. By the wasting looks in their eyes and the frequency of their words with one another, the zeal with which they seize this opportunity would appear to be negligible.

Chicago, both now and then, is a distinguished and productive literary city. In its sprawling frame and beyond, in those places like Oak Park and Evanston, places that consider themselves, perhaps rightly so, part of Chicago’s fabric, there are writers and readers (often the same animal) doing their best to sustain a literary life, for themselves and others. That best, at the highest levels, is on par with any city’s literary output, though Dublin and London, New York and San Francisco, perhaps Boston, might throw a few elbows at the claim.

Only a miniscule percentage will get a whiff of this rarified company’s intoxicating fame; but all of them contribute to Chicago as a dream city.

As a city, we’ve captured Nobels and Pulitzers, National Book Awards, been enshrined in The Best American Short Stories and the O. Henry Prize Stories, had MacArthurs and Guggenheims bestowed upon us. We boast acclaimed literary writers, beloved popular writers, stage and screen writers, poets, cartoonists—like Chicago itself, with all its separate realities contained within a larger framework, our writers represent a dazzlingly impressive variety.

Chicago Tribune reporter and WGN radio host Rick Kogan says that Chicago’s great historical writers and their books, “provide a constant shadow – and shelter – from various storms.”

As the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame gets set to induct its initial class at the Northeastern University Auditorium this November 20th, it’s clear there are plenty of deserving candidates to fill such a hallowed shrine. After Gwendolyn Brooks, Nelson Algren, Richard Wright, Studs Terkel, Lorraine Hansberry and Saul Bellow receive their just recognition, we’re left with a luminous list from which to choose the next class, and the one after that: from Sinclair and Dreiser, to Addams and Ferber, to Farrell and Anderson, to Royko and Hecht, words have helped us to be our best selves.

The Chicago Writers Association, under my guidance, launched the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame as a project intended to honor our greatest writers and serve as a centralized meeting place for Chicago’s past, present and future achievements. I, and many like me, take pride in Chicago’s literature—in the same way and maybe for some of the same reasons we’re devoted to our pizza or our sports heroes or our architecture. It’s ours, and day-to-day, month-to-month, year-to-year, we live it. I believe that what we write and how we write it – the huge outpouring of stories and the thoughts and vantage points contained within – not only reflect who we are as a city, but also shape it.

Of the thousands of Chicago writers, only a miniscule percentage will even get a whiff of this rarified company’s intoxicating fame; but all of them contribute to Chicago as a dream city: a reputation that was true when Mark Twain wrote about it in Life on the Mississippi and is true, I think, now. Everywhere, an expectant pulse: in industry, in society, in immigrant and intellectual enclaves, on trains and in airports, on the lake and river, in mansions and crack houses. Although I, like a lot of Chicagoans, have watched the steady and inexorable march of modernity – dying traditions and weakening values – intrud upon that character.

While this was my first encounter with their defining activity, I first stumbled on their name as a junior in high school, when reading Lars Eighner’s “On Dumpster Diving” for an English class. Years later, also in an English class but this time in college, I again happened on the term—then in the form of a real, live dumpster-diver who was sitting next to me, eating a muffin that she had recently rescued from the trash. Since this second encounter, I had become fascinated by the lifestyle and had decided to keep an eye peeled for the disciples of this underground practice, which is also known, variously, as “urban foraging,” “trash-picking,” “gleaning,” “scavenging,” “salvaging,” and “curb-crawling.”

“You just have to use your brain about nasty stuff,” she says. “If it’s a little beat up, cool; but if it’s leaking brown puss, probably not.”

Out back of Stanley’s, Samantha, a diver from the north side of Chicago who also frequents Dominick’s and Panera Bread, tells me that she can well afford to buy food but is often mistaken as a street urchin. While she admits that “there is a stigma about garbage,” and that many of a dumpster’s contents have been thrown away for a reason, she swears that there is a lot of “perfectly good food” to be had for free. “You just have to use your brain about nasty stuff,” she says. “If it’s a little beat up, cool; but if it’s leaking brown puss, probably not.” In the divers’ common judgment, the United States is a country filled with wasteful consumers who either don’t know enough or don’t care enough to consider whether something is actually bad before tossing it—a situation that the divers can and “should,” they say, capitalize on.

Supermarkets offer an obvious testimony in their favor. Bound by government health regulations, a market cannot sell its products in excess of their aptly named sell-by date; yet most food remains edible and nutritious for some time afterwards. I throw away milk because it’s noticeably turned: not because it’s “1 Dec.” and the little sticker told me to do so. Because of the obligatory shelf purge that the law necessitates, the dumpsters behind supermarkets are often filled with perfectly good food, usually still packaged. The same is true of bakeries, which usually tout some sort of freshness guarantee and, consequently, throw way mass quantities of day-old bread and baked goods nightly. Pizza joints are similar, and their dumpsters usually feature the results of botched and prank orders, boxed and often still hot.

So who is taking advantage of all of this waste? The seemingly obvious response would be the homeless, or persons of extremely low income, who simply cannot afford to eat. Yet a Google search will tell you otherwise. There are over 1,100,000 hits, ranging from blogs and live journals to news articles and not-for-profit organizations.

This Internet presence says a lot about the nuances of dumpster-diving. First of all, it clearly isn’t just a survival technique for the desperate; it’s a common practice among people with access to the Internet. That means people who have a home and a computer, can afford an Internet connection, and have time to write about themselves. Furthermore, the fact that there are blogs, email lists, and other interactive forums in place means that dumpster-diving isn’t just an action: It’s a culture.

The whistle signaling the commencement of the first MLS game sounded less than twenty-five years ago to a disappointing crowd; and at the World Cup two years later, the league’s lack of profitability was supplemented with disgrace when the US national team tripped and forgot its lines on the largest stage in international sport. Such failures triggered a coup in the league, and new leadership and financing led to the erection of soccer-specific venues like the arena in Bridgeview. Yet the foreign players who had held their noses and signed with American clubs started returning home. Home to England and Mexico and Spain and other places where striking a ball with one’s foot earns the game the sensible moniker “football.” As the new millennium rolled in, Major League Soccer was on its own. Like Toyota Park, where I’m sitting now.

My seat is in the standing section, but the less-than-capacity crowd allows me to move up five rows. I am fewer than ten yards from the back of the Chicago Fire’s net, and halfway between the action and me stands a raised platform upon which an official Crowd Rallier is beginning his shift. He wears a Fire jersey and scarf, and he leads the crowd in chanting the team’s canon of cheers, pausing every few minutes to take a sip of bottled water. His arms gesticulating, our official rallier is careful to exaggerate his oral motions so that the mostly English-speaking crowd can have a hope of pronouncing the mostly Spanish cheers. It is not enough for me, however, and I am forced to turn to a neighbor and ask for a translation, or at least a clear repetition. “Vamos Chicago, tenemos que ganar!” is supposed to be sonorously rising from the raucous cheering section, although to me, and probably to most of the crowd, it remains a jumbled cacophony . Behind us, two stadium employees, also swathed head-to-toe in Fire paraphernalia, abuse snare drums in an attempt to lend rhythm to the disorganized support.

My seat is in the standing section, but the less-than-capacity crowd allows me to move up five rows.

History now regards the initial flight of foreign players from US soccer as a blessing. The MLS was forced to develop and market itself upon home-grown talent. The seventeenth World Cup, staged in Korea and Japan in 2002, showed the football world that the US national team was no pushover. In the first round, the United States team stunned Portugal with three first-half goals and drew one-to-one with Korea five days later. The round of sixteen was also a surprise, as the United States buried Mexico with unanswered goals from Landon Donovan and Brian McBride (who is leading the attack in tonight’s match against the Dynamo). Yet America’s run for the World Cup was cut short in the quarter-finals, when a brilliant performance by Germany’s keeper kept the US in check while Michael Ballack scored the game’s only point in the thirty-ninth minute. The US national team was sent home, but they could finally hold their heads high.

Houston and Chicago handle the ball well, but the game is harsher than what one might see while watching Spain’s La Liga or England’s Premier League. The defense applies more pressure, contested balls elicit more elbows and shoulders, and the ball travels more slowly around the field, highlighting localized action instead of tracing out constellations of players and suggesting the next move. But the rough chaos births something beautiful in the forty-seventh minute, when the nimble Tim Ward avoids a tackle and rockets a left-footer shot from just over twenty-yards. Dynamo keeper Pat Onstad dives to deflect the ball, but Baggio Husidic materializes from between two orange shirts to head the ball and bury it into the back of the net. Red fireworks supplement the cheers of a meager eleven-thousand persons, and the rallier attempts to inspire a new song from atop his perch. Yet his flag-waving and exaggerated enunciation fail as the crowd is content to engage in more democratic yelling. The woman directly in front of me attempts to teach a song to a nearby child who would be woefully out of place in the cheering section of Spain or Mexico. Uninterested, the child returns to eating her popcorn, and the decibel level subsides as the half draws to a close. I leave my spot and head to the concession area after somehow rationalizing spending seven dollars on a Miller Lite.

This piece concludes our three-part series on Chicago fashion. Following an article on the history of the “Chicago look,” and an article on the Second City’s sartorial present, Mr. Rowley’s article finds us with the six new designers of Chicago’s Fashion Incubator.

Like fashion as a concept, fashion as a reality has always had its few constants: Paris, Milan, and New York. London probably makes the cut, and, as of late, Tokyo has shouldered its way to the front-lines. For those with their ears to the ground, however, the sneaking footsteps of consumers have pitter-pattered their way towards the smaller side of fashion, found in so-called “sleeper” labels and boutiques. (They wait, like the terrorist cells from which they get their name, to spring full-loaded onto the scene.) The trend, certainly a rebellion against the prescriptive tastes of department store fashion buyers, cannot be denied the almost 18th-century French overtures of bitter, blood-tinged revolution: Down with the aristocracy! The constants, it seems, are out.

There was consensus that while Chicago may be stylish, since no one has dictated its fashion trends in the past forty years, it is no longer fashionable.

Among the cities throwing elbows in this new fashion arena stands Chicago, whose most recent endeavor – the Chicago Fashion Incubator – seeks to provide six designers-in-residence with a comprehensive curriculum; the curriculum, while teaching the cut-and-dry aspects of clothing design, also offers more practical education in business planning, merchandising, and branding. The Incubator, sponsored in part by the City of Chicago and located in the top of the Macy’s building on State Street, also provides the designers with office space, mentoring, and – á la Project Runway – a large workspace, along the wide floors of which stand expansive tables, arrays of bins and boxes filled with surgical fashion tools, bolts of fabric, several dressmakers’ forms, and half a dozen different sewing machines. It was around these tables that these six designers took the time to sit down and discuss their brands’ particular artistic vision, the nature of Chicago style and fashion, and, of course, their and its future.  The class of 2010, announced in late February, are: Christina Fan of C/Fan; Donaldo Smith of Killian Gui; Jonnie Rettele of Nonnie Threads; Leah Fagan of PELOTON; Miriam Cecilia Carlson of m.c.c.; and Stephanie Kuhr of Dottie’s Delights. 

These six designers, along with those of the out-going class of 2009, are the leading edge of the Chicago fashion vanguard. Among the group, there was consensus on the dichotomy that while Chicago may be a stylish city, since no one that has dictated its fashion trends in the past forty years, it is not a particularly fashionable one. There is, of course, a difference: style is defined by how carefully people choose the clothes they buy off the rack; fashion is less direct. It is a synthesis of personally curated tastes, of prevailing trends, of the relatively static and the ephemeral movements of mode vestimentaire, which is not simply to say fashionable clothing, but the direction of fashionable clothing as a curated art.  If fashion as an art-form is influenced by the careful selection of particular styles, then the CFI designers-in-residence have been appropriately chosen.

CFI designer and C/Fan creatrix, Christian Fan

Art/Photography Credit: Taylor Burton

Chicago has the distinct advantage (and disadvantage) of lacking a design cliché under the weight of which it must flatten. Lacking this, we find genuine, unpretentious design, free from expectations of a certain “look” such that it can find comfortable haven in risk-taking. Yet, we also find that this free-form milieu produces both designers and designs that, unrestrained by defined curation, take risk for granted, and so Chicago fashion sometimes gives a knuckle-less punch. That said, the city offers all of the resources of a major metropolis with, as Fagan put it, Midwestern charm. It is, as Carlson described, a “sleek,” business-oriented city with the back-country rurality less than an hour’s drive away. “It’s interesting to see [the] two worlds come together.” Perhaps because of this, Chicago offers unique challenges to designers: “Think of the winters. You have to be really creative with outerwear,” Fan said. All nodded – groaned in fact – in agreement.

When asked as to where they saw fashion heading, how the playing field has changed and is changing, and how this relates to the city, the subject quickly turned to the recent economic downturn, from which most fashion labels are still trying to recover: “A recession forces people to look inward, to really look at where their dollar goes,” said Fan. “There’s been a real flight to quality.” Designers must cater to “a smarter consumer,” as Fagan put it, who doesn’t think “labels could get away with the unfair labor practices that they did in the past.” Economic crises tend to encourage protectionism, a certain drive to keep resources within a community, and people “now are much more conscious of locality, where and how their clothes are made. It’s been really great for local designers,” said Kuhr. “There are more designers in Chicago than you’d think,” she continued, “and it’s kind of romantic, all of those designers in their own studios, doing what they really care about.”

For at least the past forty years, as most American brands have moved their production to Asia, fashion has lost its personal touch and, as consequence, its individual flair. In their place we find an expectation in shipping dates and production numbers that would make Count Alfred von Schlieffen proud— and, make no mistake, the world of fashion is immersed in a battle. “You can’t find many tailors that will make a suit from scratch these days,” said Smith, whose current projects include the development of three-piece suits for his label.  This return to traditionalism is a recent trend in fashion, and how this new futurism, which looks remarkably classic, affects constantly changing notions of modernity has yet to be seen; however, in these six designers we see the future of Chicago fashion.

The world of fashion keeps spinning, the horizon constantly moving forward: “Fashion is spreading beyond Milan, Paris, and New York… it’s really exciting to carve out my part of Chicago, you know, before it becomes the next big thing.”

This is the second piece in our three-part series on Chicago fashion. Following an article on the history of the “Chicago look,” Mr. Chereskin’s essay covers the Second City’s sartorial present and is followed by an article on Chicago’s future designers.

Chicago fashion doesn’t mean much to the world at large. Old ideas of what Chicago wore might have been the three-piece suits of the The Sting—or the running shoes and baseball caps of the Big Ten stadiums and the dirt diamonds before them, carved out of cornfields. The Jungle certainly doesn’t say anything about couture. There are stereotypes about what Chicagoans wear, and ideas about what Chicagoans do. Some of them resonate – stereotypes come from somewhere – but none of them shares the whole truth. To understand the present state of Chicago fashion, you have to understand the present state of Chicago. You have to understand what it means to be the Second City and the Third Coast all at once. Each neighborhood has a look, but Chicago doesn’t. I’m going to tell you tell you why this place doesn’t make sense, and how that makes us – and our clothes – a perfect fit.

Jon Cotay, part of the trio that founded Akira – Chicago’s premier boutique retailer – told NBC in 2009 that New York fashion is edgier and that LA has its “Hollywood thing.” Kerouac informed us that Chicago is a mix of not quite Western and not quite Eastern folk. And according to Melissa Gamble, the Director of Fashion Arts in the City of Chicago’s Department of Cultural Affairs, Chicago presently doesn’t have a look. She’s been Chicago’s fashion czar since 2006, and she says the frumpy Midwestern stereotype started to erode five to ten years ago. A “free-form thing” has taken its place.

In [Gamble's] eyes, Chicago is not fending off the influences and allure of other cities but joining a global fashion community defined by an exchange of ideas, materials, and people.

In 2006, Mayor Daley hired Gamble to promote Chicago’s fashion industry. The New York Times and The Chicagoist reported that her job was to dissuade the graduates of Chicago’s four design schools from fleeing to the coasts. Yet her view is different. In an interview with this magazine, Gamble didn’t convey any preoccupation about who left and who stayed. Instead, the former corporate lawyer and fashion marketer spoke of expanding entrepreneurial activity within the city. In her eyes, Chicago is not fending off the influences and allure of other cities but joining a global fashion community defined by an exchange of ideas, materials, and people. She reported that native fashion wholesalers and retailers have picked up steam; business is operating at volumes unseen in Chicago since the 1980s.

Gamble is expanding this global exchange with initiatives like Chicago Fashion Week, the Chicago Fashion Council, and the Chicago Fashion Incubator (which, every year, provides six new local designers with the financial means and the marketing capital to establish their careers). Under her helm, this city is buttressing its fashion community with efforts as grand as shows and as quotidian as management consultancy.

If the city keeps up this high-wire act, fashion will flourish in Chicago. Yet it will not flourish in the way that it does in New York, London, Paris, or Milan. As Gamble suggests, fashion here may benefit from “exchange,” dialogue, and reflection, but it is at heart a uniquely “free-form thing.” We have three-million people of all different kinds. A retail market that large has to buy a correspondingly huge and diverse amount of clothes. People will come; they will sell things, and some will even dream things. But they will sell and dream quite different things. There are haute new trends coming into Chicago and arising out of Chicago all up and down the Magnificent Mile and in the ever-expanding list of boutiques across the city. Akira’s buyers are promoting new talent, and their fashion shows and parties give people a place to coalesce over clothes. But never the same clothes.

This article opens our three-part series on fashion in the Second City. Covering the history of Chicago fashion, this piece is followed by two more articles examining the city’s sartorial present and future.

As we launch our series on Chicago fashion, it is vital to start at the beginning. It is also sensible to ask, “What beginning?”—as the Chicago of history was hardly an Eden of original trends. Like most other American cities that blossomed after the turn of the twentieth century, its taste was imported. For the longest time, its trends were always from “out there.”

In the mid-seventies, however, Town & Country published a ten-page spread on what they deemed the emerging, unique “Chicago look.” This “look” was, to be polite, deeply overwrought: Chicago betties dolled up, jester-like, fancifully attending to the evening’s gaieties. Yet an excursion through the lounges of Chicago’s Gold Coast indicates a supreme lack of melodramatic pomp in les fringues of the modern Chicago woman. But this story, just one of our present stories, is for our next installment (and our future stories are for our last). Let us first retreat into the past and look at the looks we had before we had our own.

The Industrial Revolution altered the socioeconomic and cultural landscape of cities across the world. The American nouveau riche eagerly sought status, enlightenment, and beauty by means of traveling and bringing foreign delicacies back home. For Chicago women of wealth, that delicacy happened to be French couture, especially the dresses that British designer Charles Fredrick Worth was producing in Paris. Upon returning from their grand tour of Europe, the woman sauntered in and out of opera boxes, balls, and sitting rooms while decked out in fully loaded silk skirts, the breadth of which signaled social position.

The American nouveau riche eagerly sought status, enlightenment, and beauty by means of traveling and bringing foreign delicacies back home.

Not to be outdone, as the twentieth century approached and the growing middle class began to buy fashion for fashion’s sake, old-monied women started to adapt even more opulent and decorous fashions, which featured larger skirts of a velvet brocade with appliqués of cord, chenille, and needle lace. These rich fabrics, coupled with the accentuated S-shape created by the increased fullness of the skirt and swan-bill corset, allowed wealthy women to distinguish themselves from the middle-class and les demimondaines.

Yet by the outbreak of World War I, women had stopped wearing lavish clothing and jewelry. It was considered patriotic and in good taste to don more subtle and sober dress. In theaters and other venues, sartorial standards for both men and women began to break down, and classes started dressing in the same, more relaxed style. The wartime look entailed shorter, more liberating skirts (for lack of fabric) and militant influences that included belts with buckles. This gave way to the iconic “flapper” style, which abandoned the S-shape altogether and promoted the shapeless, draping, almost sexless shift-dress.

Consider the so-called “Chicago Arts District,” which tells the city to enjoy its art in a tiny section of Pilsen on the second Friday of every month. Think of Artropolis, an international event that attempts to make the city an artistic cosmopolis by piling Chicagoans into the Merchandise Mart once a year. Everything has its place, and everything has its time; and as nothing makes us look twice, few things make us look once.

An initiative called Pop-Up Art Loop wants to reduce the city’s debt to the expected and the familiar. A part of the Chicago Loop Alliance, the group takes advantage of the economic crisis by appropriating abandoned spaces as impromptu art galleries. Perhaps with more symbolism than he intends, Ty Tabing, executive director of the Alliance, says that their goal is to “activate vacant spaces [in order] to bring art to Chicago.” Their tactic is, as I’ve found out, at least a step in the right direction. (The dust of their blast seems still to be settling.)

Glancing at my hand-drawn map, I managed to find the first gallery at 220 S. Wabash fairly easily. The El shook the street as I spotted it across from me, an unassuming doorway dwarfed by the ornate gold entrance of the neighboring restaurant. Adorning the gallery’s limited window space, the initiative’s eye-catching green-and-white logo shined like a beacon in the gray blur of gray pedestrians under the afternoon’s gray sky. Yet when I came to the door, I grew wary. The fold-out sign placed on the sidewalk proclaimed that the gallery was ready for visitors, and in the window “OPEN” screamed like a plea for life; but, looking in, I saw only a narrow unfinished space, walls and floors bare. I was hesitant to believe the signs.

Farther down, the green rope disappeared, and a series of chairs sat neatly in a row. [...] They were not, it seemed, made for seating.

And then Freddy, sitting behind a thin podium of that characteristic green hue, a pair of glasses on his shaved bald head, an earnest smile pulling at the corners of his eyes, waved his hand at me and said, “Come in.” I tentatively opened the door and glanced around, still disbelieving; the area looked as if it were still in preparation, that more than anything it had the potential to be a gallery. The space was more a standalone hallway than a room, six or seven times as deep as it was wide, and was divided in two by a stretch of similarly green rope. On the other side of the rope was a large wooden worktable, a number of power tools, and various planks and boards leaning against the far wall.

Farther down, the green rope disappeared, and a series of chairs sat neatly in a row. Each chair stood roughly two feet tall, was constructed of unpainted, repurposed scrap wood, and was only vaguely geometric. They were not, it seemed, made for seating.

I had entered HallMfg, a temporary workspace for the artist Andy Hall, who allots one hour to designing and constructing each of these “experimental chairs.” Freddy gave me a little tour, pointing out the timer that Hall uses and the rolls of plans that are piled in a corner. Hall performs his process on site, generally creating four or five chairs during his weekly visits. “He was here yesterday,” Freddy told me. “That day was kind of fun. It’s kind of lonely in here, and that day went by pretty fast just looking at him.”

Like the once-gangly adolescent child who has undergone his last growth spurt, [Filter's] backbone has straightened and elevated the whole of its body.

After a two-and-a-half year period of quiescence, “Wicker Park’s living room” has not, at least at first glance, seemed to change in any substantial way. The lounge area remains a maze of vintage couches, hefty café tables, and bloated armchairs; the ground remains strewn with limp white cords connecting Apple computers to outlets; the teabags still come skewered on sticks, suspended above tall mugs of hot water; the bathroom walls are already primed for a new generation of chalk graffiti; and the menu remains a series of chalkboards with classic Filter fare neatly listed and priced in white (Popular menu items include “Hipster Hash,” “Sweet Potato Fries and Horseradish Dipping Sauce,” and “Tofu Reuben”). Most former regulars approve the attempt to re-create the Filter of lore.

Other welcome nuances include free access to the Internet along with a purchase (previously an hour-at-a-time luxury) and a fresh young staff, who, in contrast to their misanthropic predecessors, are almost friendly. On the whole, they seem as green as the space itself. Filter’s present iteration claims to be “the only coffee shop in Chicago with LEED-Gold certification.” According to the official blog of Moss, a small green-architecture firm that worked with Filter’s owner, Jeff Linnane, in reopening the coffee shop, Filter will be “saving 36.5% in water usage through efficient toilets, faucets, and urinals, 34% in lighting power usage, and Energy Star rated furnaces, condensing units, and appliances.”

The new Filter is a streamlined product—even the exposed brick has a sheen. Two illuminated, rectangular glass boxes frame a church pew positioned against the back wall at the center of the lounge area; they cast a hazy red glow over the faces of those chatting in the middle of the lounge area. A hodge-podge of vintage lamps, as eclectic as the customers, float throughout the room. Yet these and other small discrepancies begin to make an impact on the patrons of old, who knew Filter as a mildly grungy, disarmingly unvarnished place. Self-serve water now sprays from the spigot of an opulent glass jug, whereas it used to trickle from an orange plastic water cooler (the type spotted at tailgating events and construction sites). The menu that was once a scrawled mess of colored chalk is now neatly laid out in white-on-black, with bold colors preserved for the smoothie selections. Likewise, the bathroom mirrors seem shockingly immaculate to those who once searched for their faces in labyrinths of graffiti.

Although cleanliness is always expected of a freshly built space, Filter’s pristine condition appears unnatural. Yet after spending some time on the new epoxy floors and spotless couches, one can’t help renouncing the old cement floors and filthy sofas. Like the once-gangly adolescent child who has undergone his last growth spurt, here Filter’s face and limbs are largely the same, but its backbone has straightened and elevated the whole of its body. The era of self-consciousness and shamefulness has finally subsided, and a proud look of elegance is beginning to show.