Tim Frisbie

Motorists looking to park along Francisco Avenue on a recent Friday afternoon had to contend with Cholo, a rooster from Douglas Park who had temporarily taken up residence on the corner just south of Diversey Avenue.

The bird and his hen posse were part of pop-up park created by Moss Design (2855 W. Diversey Ave.) in celebration of PARK(ing) Day on Sept. 20, an annual “urbanist holiday” that encourages people to transform public parking spots into temporary parks to promote the need for more urban greenspace.

“We want more grass, more trees, and less concrete,” said Moss Design Principal Laura Cripe.

While PARK(ing) Day installations can range from simple to the elaborate, most typically include some combination of seating and shade, creating a welcome oasis for passersby while emphasizing the value of reclaiming street space for use by people instead of cars.

In addition to the chicken coop, the site on Francisco Avenue featured potted plants, lawn chairs, a bocce ball set, and even a wood-fired pizza oven courtesy of Logan Square restaurant Osteria Langhe.

Moss Design created its first temporary PARK(ing) Day installation in 2009, and has since developed several semi-permanent parklets around the city, including the pedestrian space outside the Logan Square Intelligentsia on Milwaukee Avenue.

However, this particular site—eight diagonal parking spaces located just outside Moss Design’s offices—is especially important to the firm, who would like to see it become a permanent greenspace.

“This used to be grocery store, so diagonal parking made sense at the time, but that was years and years ago,” Cripe said. “It’s more residential and mixed-use now [so] we want to convert this back into a parkway.”

According to her, re-instituting a parkway design would provide more greenspace and only result in the loss of three total parking spaces. The result, the firm said, would be a “permanent, sustainable, green, water-filtering, tree-filled linear park.”

Featured photo: Moss Design

Huddled beneath the awning of the Logan Square blue line stop, a group of demonstrators chanted, sang, and reenacted the story of Jesus entering the city of Jerusalem to bring attention to the need for affordable housing in Logan Square.

The Occupy Palm Sunday demonstration, now in its eighth year, was coordinated by the Logan Square Ecumenical Alliance (LSEA) in partnership with the Logan Square Neighborhood Association (LSNA) and several other community organizations.

While in past years the event has touched on issues such as mental health and raising the minimum wage, this weekend’s rally was focused squarely on the dearth of low-cost housing options and the issue of displacement in what the organizers called a “deeply gentrified part of Chicago.”

“When I see the new condominiums built across from my church, it makes me really sad because I feel like they’re trying to push all of us out,” said Logan Square resident Angelica Perez, who moved to the neighborhood from Mexico 18 years ago. “They make all of us Latinos look like criminals and we are just here working hard and making a better life for our families.”

Perez has had to move twice in recent years after the buildings she was living in were sold to real estate developers. She said she is worried about her ability to keep her young family in the neighborhood she sees as home.

Despite such concerns and a few barbed comments about private developers, however, the mood of the demonstrators was largely upbeat, with participants singing and waving signs and palm fronds, even as they tried their best to shelter from the fierce gusts of a late-spring snowstorm.

One reason for their optimism is the development being considered for the site of the adjacent Emmett Street parking lot, where nonprofit Bickerdike Redevelopment Corporation is proposing to build a 100-unit, 100 percent affordable housing complex. The building would feature a mix of one, two and three-bedroom units for families as well as commercial space for local businesses on the ground floor.

“For almost five years, our community has envisioned that… Emmett street parking lot, would be a place for people, not cars,” said Bruce Ray, pastor at Kimball Avenue United Church of Christ. “Now our dream is becoming a reality. We are here to say we support affordable housing at Emmett Street.”

The project has also been championed by 35th Ward Alderman Carlos Ramirez-Rosa, who spoke at the Palm Sunday demonstration. Incoming 1st Ward Alderman Daniel LaSpata was in attendance as well.

“We have been working on this proposal for many, many years,” said Ramirez-Rosa. “In the last ten years, 19,000 mostly Latinx residents have been pushed out by big developers and rising rents. And so, people in this community came together and they said we want to use publicly owned land, we want to use publicly owned dollars, to create affordable housing.”

Before it becomes a reality, the Emmett Street proposal must pass several regulatory hurdles, including a zoning change. The process is underway, and Ramirez-Rosa encouraged people to attend an upcoming community meeting on the issue, which will take place on April 24 at the Logandale Middle School (3212 W. George St.).

The hope is that, with more housing developments like the one being proposed by Bickerdike, Logan Square can continue to remain home to people from a diverse range of socioeconomic backgrounds.

“I just want to let you know when I look around and I see my neighbors who are American and maybe have lived in this country for many years, I also see God in you and feel loved by you, and I feel glad we are a community together,” Perez said. “God bless you. Let’s keep fighting so we can all live here in Logan Square.”

Featured photo: Tom Vlodek

You’ve Marie Kondo-ed your closet, vacuumed your air vents and replaced the batteries in all your smoke detectors. But could your home’s energy use a bit of spring cleaning, too?

Sara Gaines, owner of Red Bird Reiki (1309 N. Ashland Ave.), is a shamanic practitioner and master teacher of Reiki, an ancient energy healing technique that originated in Japan. She also performs space clearing ceremonies designed to transform and release dense, negative energy that can accumulate in homes and offices.

While everyone may not be familiar with the practice of space clearing, Gaines, who will be leading a demo at the Logan Square Wellness + Self-Care Fest on March 16, said that just about all of us have experienced the different energies that various places can give off.

“Think about when you walk into a space and how it feels,” said Gaines. For example, “walking into a Jewel Osco feels different from a Whole Foods, different from a Walgreens.”

To help you make a fresh start this spring, here are some insider tips from Gaines on how to clear out the old energy that may be cluttering up your home.

1. Think About How Your Home Feels Right Now

Gaines typically begins her space clearing sessions by asking her clients to write out a list of adjectives that they feel describe their home in its current state. Does it feel messy or orderly? Lively or worn out? Then she has her clients go back through the list and replace the word “home” with their name. It’s often an “aha” moment.

“Everything in our lives is really a mirror reflection of ourselves and our inner state,” said Gaines. “That goes for our homes, too. It’s really about you.”

She said a space clearing is especially helpful when undergoing a major transition in your life, or if you are feeling stuck. It’s also beneficial when moving into a new home or office, which Gaines says can sometimes carry energy imprints from previous owners.

“Especially in Chicago, a lot of these buildings are so old. Think about all the people there and all the energy that’s there,” said Gaines. “Some spaces used to be something else. A firehouse, a business. Or maybe something intense happened, someone passed away. It’s like, ‘Oh wow, what does that mean?’ That energy can kind of hang around.”

She was once clearing a new home for an acquaintance—an old two-flat in Logan Square that had a disused “widow’s unit” on the second floor—when they got trapped in a bathroom after the door slammed shut and locked unexpectedly.

Another home Gaines cleared had a lot of masks and artifacts from all over the world and was filled with what she called a kind of “trickster energy.” Things would move around inexplicably or go missing, and the owners would often hear voices when no one else was home.

2. Walk Through Your Home and Assess Its Flow

After the written assessment Gaines will usually take a tour of the home with the client, taking note of how furniture and objects are arranged and asking questions when certain things catch her attention. In one client’s home, she was struck by the dark, heavy furniture that seemed to loom over everything. It turned out it was all her ex-husband’s.

“It was his energy still in house,” Gaines said. “She got rid of it and felt better.

Sometimes adding things can help, too. Gaines recommends that every home has a space where that you feel is uniquely yours, a safe space where you can retreat to read, meditate or relax.

She also recommends paying close attention to any art or decorations you choose to hang above your bed, which can have an especially potent effect on the energy in your life.

3. Smudge Out Old Energy

Gaines uses a three-pronged approach—sound, smoke and fire—to clear a space. She walks through the home’s rooms with a smokeless fire in a stockpot, created using Epsom salt and rubbing alcohol, to flush out old energy. She uses the same amount of alcohol each time but says the fire can burn differently depending on the density of the room’s energy.

“Some look like lighting, some like roaring fires,” she said. “The more energy, the bigger the fire.”

She then beats a drum to further break up energy, followed by a “smudge” with incense. While many people use sage, Gaines prefers Palo Santo wood, which is believed to have medicinal and therapeutic healing powers. Pro tip: crack the windows to give that old energy a path of escape

4. Close the Ceremony with Good Intentions

After a space clearing, Gaines closes out with a blessing ceremony. She asks her clients to dip their fingers in a mixture of Florida water and sea salt and flick it into the air, blessing each room with their new intentions.

“The action is really a physical manifestation of your intention,” she said. “You’ve just created this empty space, now what are you going to fill it with? The more your heart is in it, the more shift and change you are going to see in your life.”

Gaines will be presenting a Space Clearing Demo at the Logan Square Wellness + Self-Care Fest on Mach 16 at Logan Square Pilates + Core Studio (2771 N. Milwaukee Ave.). Admission is free. More information about Gaines and her services is available on Red Bird Reiki’s website.

It’s late on a cold Sunday afternoon, the November sky edging from deep blue to black, and Samuel Feinstein is getting ready to work.

A cup of milky coffee in hand, he putters about his Logan Square garden unit that doubles as his bookbinding workshop, inventorying a variety of obscure and Medieval-looking tools—bone folders, wood-handled awls, a 1,300-pound cast iron press—that have been slowly acquired over the years, mostly from retiring bookbinders.

In an era of Skype, Slack and high-priority emails, Feinstein’s work is slow, deliberate and exquisite. It is solitary, a bit monastic, even. And it hasn’t changed much in the past 500 years. It could be done by candlelight, if needed.

Feinstein’s path to a career in bookbinding has been long and, at times, painful. He was riding his bike to class one day as an undergrad at the University of Wisconsin-Madison when he was hit by a car and suffered a traumatic brain injury. Plagued by severe headaches that still bother him, he was forced to abandon his studies and began the search for something else to do with his life.

While looking up some Latin manuscripts that he had studied as a Classics major, he found the website for the North Bennet Street School, one of the nation’s leading schools for training in the trades and fine craftsmanship. And it just clicked for Feinstein, who realized he could continue to work with books but by using his hands instead of his head. He works as a private-practice bookbinder today in Logan Square, specializing in fine and design binding.

LoganSquarist interviewed Feinstein about the inside world of bookbinding, his favorite books that he’s worked on and how the digital age has affected the craft. The conversation has been edited and condensed. 

What was your training like to become a bookbinder?

The North Bennet Street School program started with Coptic bookbinding and Italian long stich, non-adhesive binding structures from the 1300’s to the 1500’s. Then you move onto case bindings, which is pretty much the way any hardcover book at a bookstore is bound. You learn how to fold sections and sew through the folds, different cover materials. A lot of the program is focused on producing bindings and then making more and more and more of them until you get good.

What is it like to work as a bookbinder?

There are different career paths. Some people work at institutions as conservators and technicians. Others work as private-practice book binders, doing restorations and new bindings. Some do more artist books.

For me, I knew I wanted to do something that involved even just a tiny bit of working in leather and doing gold tooling. After I found out that bookbinding was a thing, I went to the Newberry Library every week or so so I could look at their collection and just kind of see what had been done, the structure and decoration. The same way an art student would go to an art museum and do sketches, that’s what I did with books—just going through their collection and seeing what had been done.

My favorite book there is a book of common prayer from 1642. It’s a small book, 8.5 inches by 5 inches or so, and it’s just covered in gold and different colored leather onlays. There are thousands of impressions on it. I went back and probably pulled that book 10 times. That book got me thinking… this would be really cool to work on.

“In the technological age we live in, there is a lot of beauty in making something with your hands.”

What’s your practice like today?

I do fine bindings and design bindings… new bindings that are meant to be luxurious and take your breath away. I work with private collectors and dealers as well as some institutions. I did a binding for the Newberry Library for their Shakespeare exhibit and worked on a book from 1505 on French provincial law for the University of Iowa Law Library. [That particular book] didn’t open without cracking, it was really in a poor state. I took the board and spine off and I put a binding on it that would be consistent with 1505 France. So, wooden boards, calf skin leather. I did a design that was keeping with the time and antiqued it.

I also worked on a set of Blackstone’s Commentaries that had been rebound in this gross fake purple leather with faux marbled paper. Those bindings had no place on that four-volume set—you don’t want a bright, flashy binding on a book from 1700’s. So, I put in bindings that were more harmonious. But, in general, if a book is in the original binding and has a lot of bibliographic value to it, I won’t [alter] it. I’m not trying to erase the history of a book.

In general, if a book is in the original binding and has a lot of bibliographic value to it, I won’t [alter] it. I’m not trying to erase the history of a book.

What are the different techniques you use in fine binding?

There are paste papers and marbling and onlays and inlays, which introduce different leathers onto the binding. There are also leather dyes, and you can incise the leather and paint the incision with gold or acrylics in a number of different ways. Some people will cut out parts of the board and play with the way light comes through and the shadows that form on the board. Recently, some people are even experimenting with things like pop-up engineering and embedding LED lights.

What are some of your favorite books you have worked on?

I have a few favorites. One was a book of the poem “Into This World” by Natalie Goldberg, which had been printed and illustrated in a really gorgeous text with a color palette of soft blues and pale pinks. The binding I ended up doing used a nice light blue leather, then I added the phases of the moon from the back cover to the front cover, with some lines with waves and the waves being pulled up by the moon.

Another favorite was a book on 12 centuries of bookbinding, from 1200 to 1600. My binding was a commentary on the history of bookbinding. I did a very elaborate bone tool design on both covers. But on the front cover, there is a stark line where I went from blind tooling (which does not have any kind of leaf) to gold, to show the impact of gold tooling, which came into fashion around 1300.

What are you working on today?

One thing I am really excited that I’m starting on is a first printing of Thomas Paine’s Public Good, since he is kind of relevant in the political atmosphere these days. I’m also working on a collection of letters from John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson and have a binding coming up for a pretty significant artist book that was printed in the early 1900s, which will go on a travelling show with 15 other books.

What’s the most interesting or unusual book you have ever bound?

There was one book I worked on from the 1700s. The title was in Latin, but the translation was something along the lines of “The Medical Uses of Flogging.”

Do you ever get nervous working on a rare or historically important book?

I did do some tooling on a second folio of Shakespeare once, although someone else had done the binding. But not really. I know I have the hand skills to do it.

What’s the book binding community like?

It’s a fun and rowdy crew [laughs]. It’s a small community, we’re all a little odd in our own ways. A lot of us work alone and that’s a perk for most of us. There is a conference every year that about 150 people attend where we get to see each other. One of my friends from the North Bennet Street School, Marianna Brotherton, also practices here in Chicago.

What do you say about doing bookbinding in a world that is increasingly digital?

When it comes to custom hand-bound books, there has been more demand for them in recent years. There are quite a few avid collectors, people who have made their money elsewhere and really love holding and appreciating a finely bound book. It’s art but it’s different than a painting. You are handling it—you can open it, it’s more interactive. I love the experience and being part of it.

In the technological age we live in, there is a lot of beauty in making something with your hands. It’s tangible, it’s not ethereal. It’s kind of nice to be able to sit back and look and what you did, and say ‘I like that. I enjoyed making it. I can do it better next time.’

See Samuel’s portfolio and services here.

Featured photo: Samuel Feinstein

I was waiting at the intersection of Logan Boulevard and Western Avenue several years ago when a car blew through the red light on Logan and clipped another car, sending it spinning into a pedestrian who was waiting at the corner to cross.

So, I wasn’t surprised to learn that the intersection, which also includes an exit ramp from the Kennedy Expressway, is notoriously dangerous for pedestrians, who must cross several lanes of traffic with limited lighting and poorly marked crosswalks.

The good news is that a coalition of local organizations, including the Active Transportation Alliance and the Logan Square Neighborhood Association, is looking to change that.

The group released a new report this week, Reimagining Logan Boulevard to Lathrop Homes, to help identify and advocate for priority biking and walking improvements throughout the corridor running along Logan Boulevard from Rockwell Street to the Lathrop Homes.

The report’s recommendations include removing a travel lane on a short segment of Logan from Western to the service drive to create more space for people walking and biking, adding protected bike lanes on Logan and the Diversey Avenue Bridge, and re-painting and adding crosswalks at the Logan/Western intersection.

“Residents use this part of Logan daily to take their kids to school and drop them off at daycare. For far too long it has been a high-stress, terrifying experience to walk, bike and drive on Logan to Lathrop Homes,” said Nancy Aardema, executive director of the Logan Square Neighborhood Association. “As the neighborhood’s population rapidly increases, we need active ways of getting around without relying solely on cars to do so.”

Improving this stretch of Logan also makes even more sense now, say advocates, since it connects to the new mixed-use development under construction on the site of the Lathrop Homes, which will include a public riverfront park that links to a network of safe biking and walking routes along the Chicago River.

“The growing network of riverfront trails is only useful if it’s safely and easily accessible to neighborhood residents,” said Ron Burke, executive director of the Active Transportation Alliance. “Dedicating more space to people walking and biking while calming car traffic would greatly improve safety for everyone.”

More information about the report is available on the Active Transportation Alliance’s website. Residents and community groups that are interested in joining the effort to improve the Logan-Western corridor can contact Active Transportation Alliance Trail Advocacy Manager Steve Simmons at [email protected] or (312) 216-0472.