Certain unwritten rules govern the panhandling scene along Chicago’s expressway exit ramps. These rules are not obvious– and they’re not universally observed. However, as these personal stories illustrate — they are there. Listen to the four stories I did for WBEZ and a related panel discussion HERE I met Bud about a year…
Listen to the story I did for WBEZ HERE. Tens of thousands of juveniles are arrested in Cook County each year. But many of them don’t understand that they now have an arrest record that can linger like a digital ghost for decades to come. Without question, there’s a lot of misinformation about what happens…
Couch surfing and a bicycle attachment help Ulysses Bonilla get through the bitter season. Listen to the story HERE. On the day I met Ulysses Bonilla the thermometer had dipped to negative three, snow blanketed the ground, and the wind was whipping in every direction. I’d come to this Chicago underpass looking for a guy…
John’s Live Poultry is one of the few places in Chicago where you can select a bird, they slaughter it for you, and you take your future dinner home in the car with you. Chicagoans who originated from all over the world come here because they have no appetite for food wrapped in cellophane packaging.…
I did several versions of this story. Listen to the NPR story HERE. Here’s the version of the story I did for Transom.org. Link is HERE. Take a look at this picture. Maybe you can figure out that the Civil War soldier on the right is a woman. But the guy sitting next to her…
If you live anywhere near Chicago, no doubt you’ve seen the statues of two formidable lions guarding the entrance to the Art Institute. But what you may not have noticed – or maybe you saw it, but didn’t know quite what to make of it – is another art installation of sorts, barely 200 feet…
Listen to the WBEZ story HERE. Just south of Chicago’s Lincoln Park Zoo, there’s a lovely promenade of trees, sometimes called an allee. This is a well-trafficked and noisy part of Lincoln Park, packed with joggers, soccer players and a perpetual stream of people walking their dogs. It seems like an unlikely spot to…
Altgeld Gardens is a sprawling public housing development, as far south as you can go and still be in Chicago. It’s surrounded by landfills, a sewage treatment plant and the polluted Little Calumet River. It’s home to nearly 4,000 people, and the place where Barack Obama honed his chops as a community organizer. Four years ago today,…
This is the first of what turned out to be 5 stories through the years (2008 – 2016) on the intersection between the Obama presidency and Altgeld Gardens, the Chicago public housing development where he did some of his early community organizing work. Author/photographer Richard Cahan & I arrived at ‘The Gardens’ shortly before dawn…
H Listen to my WBEZ story HERE. Your garden variety squirrel is different from other rodents. Rats live about three years. Squirrels live twice as long, and CAN survive for a dozen years or more. Nature may have intended them to eat berries and seeds, but city squirrels have a decided preference for pepperoni pizza…
Listen to the story I did for NPR HERE. Albert D.J. Cashier was the shortest soldier in the 95th Illinois Infantry. In one of the few existing photographs of Cashier during the Civil War, you can faintly detect the outline of breasts under his uniform. But that’s if you’re looking for it. And the military…
Listen to the NPR story HERE. It’s Valentine’s Day, a day you’d expect to be stumbling upon celebrations of love. But that wasn’t what producer Linda Paul was expecting on a quiet morning recently in her neighborhood on Chicago’s Northwest Side. But love was in the air that day, and Linda sent us this audio…
You can hear the story I did for WBEZ right HERE. All last week our Inside and Out series looked at what happens when young people land in Illinois’ youth prisons. But there are also kids who start on a path towards prison they take a peek and decide it’s not for them. Sometimes they have help…
Too many black kids in north suburban Evanston don’t keep up with white classmates. Some educators and parents say it’s time to try something new. Their plan could create whole classrooms of African-American students. As Linda Paul reports, that solution is hitting hard at the heart of a community that’s built its image on diversity…
This story was produced for WBEZ. You can listen right here. If you look at all the arrests of juveniles in the city of Chicago, you’ll see that about a quarter of them-and that’s almost 5,000 a year-take place on the grounds of Chicago Public Schools. Even when that arrest is the end of it,…
Stories by Linda Paul 