EP 2: Cabrini-Green Dreams and Nightmares
Depending on who’s telling the tale, the Cabrini-Green housing projects on Chicago’s Near-North Side are either patient-zero for urban dysfunction and decay, or a humble high-rise utopia, Corbusier’s Radiant City with soul. But at the end of the day it was home to 15,000 people. Cabrini-Green was mostly demolished by 2011, but its legacy both haunts, or enriches, the city, depending on who you ask. Co-hosts Zach Mortice and Newcity Design Editor Ben Schulman asked two Chicagoans: Chicago filmmaker Ronit Bezalel, whose film 70 Acres in Chicago spent 20 years tracing the decline of of this community; and artist, designer, and educator Andres Hernandez, whose exhibit Vacancy: Urban Interruption and (Re)Generation at the Glass Curtain Gallery explored how the ghosts of Cabrini-Green still settle over our pop-culture landscape. Special thanks to recording studio engineer Tim Joyce.