Peoples Housing's
Community Arts Program 1993-1995
II. PEOPLES HOUSING INITIATES A COMMUNITY ARTS PROGRAM
It is this context of a more complex view of community development that I enter the picture.
Peoples Housing purchased the Howard Theater Building in mid-1992. This building was built in 1918 and anchors the east Howard Street area. It is adjacent to the Howard Street CTA transit station and contains 30 apartments, 10 store fronts and the Howard Theater.
The Howard Theater consists of a 20,000 square foot single floor movie theater and several other spaces. The main auditorium is unsafe and contains water damage, decades of stored junk and debris and was even home for a while to an owl. The theater had not been used since 1977, when the last movie shown there was "Deliverance".
I was hired in March of 1993 to organize a community arts program that would restore life to the Howard Theater and advance Peoples Housing's goals of community development through grass roots cultural programs. I decided to concentrate on putting activities into the lobby of the theater, which is 4,000 square feet. We built a small stage and got over 100 chairs donated from people in the community. Eventually, we operated programs in the lobby, which we called the Lobby Theater, a large open room over the lobby (the Upstairs Space), and in a community arts studio on the first floor of our headquarters building.
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The first chairs for the Howard Theater lobby
space were donated by dozens of community residents and then a nunnery
in Wheeling called and I drove out in a truck to find these Brady Bunch
era chairs neatly arranged on a bright green lawn in front of the dining
hall. I also got sound equipment, speakers, ten pianos, several thousand used books and over $2,000 worth of percussion equipment donated to our community arts program! |
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Consistent with Peoples Housing's belief in bottom-up action, grass roots accountability and its success in bringing resources into a disinvested community, I tried to craft a cultural arts program that had three main goals. They were:
- create community unity by providing free, accessible and relevant cultural programs to the people of Howard Street;
- create positive youth development through after-school arts classes, leadership development, special events and other cultural programs; and
- create jobs and economic opportunities through cultural micro-enterprises. I will refer to the overall arts program at Peoples Housing as the Community Arts Program (CAP).
My title was Director of Cultural Development and I created this job to be a sort of cultural and creativity coach for the neighborhood. I spent the first 18 months listening and trying short term, low risk, no cost pilot projects. We made modest improvements to the spaces only as activities were developed that were popular and supportable.
I was determined not to plunge ahead with a grand rehab scheme and capital campaign before we knew what types of activities the community would support and help grow. We needed to build a solid base in order to guide our program development and also to show skeptical funders that residents of the Howard Street community wanted and would support a community cultural center. (This is a subject for a separate analysis -- funders place many more obstacles in the way of community based arts programs and facility development. It remains easier to raise $1,000,000 for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra than it is to raise $10,000 for a program like the one we created at Peoples Housing)
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I used a lot of street level tactics to get people's attention and find allies. Here a drummer performs in front of the Howard Theater. An ice cream vendor came by to watch and I started playing the cart's bells! We did things like this all the time. |
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I engaged in a wide variety of listening activities. I sat out in front of the Howard Theater with a model of what a "dream" vision of a rehabbed Howard Theater might look like and I signed people up who were interested in helping build the CAP. I visited local community service and youth service agencies, including the neighborhood school and parks, and sought out any artist or arts program operating in the area. I visited block clubs and various advisory councils and a number of local churches. I used my own extensive list of arts organizations and artists to search out those in the 60626 zip code (there were 24 arts organizations and 236 artists) and I visited the arts organizations and brought groups of artists together for open house meetings and other projects.
Performing arts program director, Oba William King worked with young people from the community from the beginning of the program. Our doors were always open to them!
We organized a number of committees to help guide our early efforts. There were artists and non-artists on these committees. There was a Teen Committee, which helped organize parties and dances; a Visual Arts Committee, which created a temporary art gallery and curated a "drop off" art exhibit; a Circus Arts Committee, which led to the one-time performance of a mini-circus; and a Performing Arts Committee, which created several of our cornerstone programs.
The most systematic listening effort I made in the early development of the community arts program at Peoples Housing was the undertaking of a community arts survey.
