EP 1: Chicago Plays Itself

Explicit content warning

12/02/15 • 38 min

From the 80s to the 90s, movies set and filmed in Chicago showed a city cleaving itself in half. From John Hughes suburban-kid-in-the-city hijinks to the near apocalyptic urban horror of Candyman and Child's Play, these 20 years of film reflected the straining inequalities of the city that produced them. Newcity Design Editor Ben Schulman and Chicago architectural journalist Zach Mortice recount Billy Crystal and Gregory Hines as sociopath cops and that time Kentucky hillbillies took on the Chicago Outfit. With special guest Bill Hogan (dude was in Home Alone).

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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.