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CPD hosting meetings on community policing
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FREE Vol. 36 No. 42
October 19, 2022
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Also serving Garfield Park
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Developer wants to bring housing, stores to West Side Black-owned 548 Development, already at work in North Lawndale, wants to build affordable housing, café and grocer in West Humboldt Park By IGOR STUDENKOV Staff Reporter
548 Development, a Black-owned developer currently working on turning the long-vacant “Silver Shovel” property in North Lawndale into an industrial campus, is looking to build a mixeduse development with a grocery store and a coffee shop further north, in West Humboldt Park. The Silver Shovel site was an illegal dumping ground. In the 1990s, the FBI “allowed the dumping in order to catch politicians being bribed into allowing the dumping. The site wasn’t only home to hazardous waste — it was home to corruption,” according to Block Club Chicago reporting. 548 Development CEO Robert ‘A.J.’ Patton said recently that he was lured into West Humboldt Park because he wants to “get ahead” of gentrification and build housing that current residents can afford and businesses that are in short supply in the community, namely a grocery store and a coffee shop. See 548 DEVELOPMENT on page 10
Discarded chairs take on new meaning at Austin nonprofit A Better Tomorrow for Today’s Teens partnered with Teena’s Legacy to teach women the art and therapy of reupholstering chairs By SHANEL ROMAIN Growing Community Media
Abri Bey, 33, said she’s always been into the idea of reupholstering furniture, but was never able to find a way into the practice. That
changed when she entered A Better Tomorrow for Today’s Teens, a youth empowerment nonprofit at 3441 W. Chicago Ave. in Austin. Earlier this year, Bey, an Austin native who See UPHOLSTERY on page 3
SHANEL ROMAIN/Staff
(From left to right) The Austin Project display their completed chairs: Abri Bey, “We are Cousins;” Monica Smith, “Joy;” Barbara Stewart, “Freedom;” King Kiba, “For the Community;” Frances Simmons-Ellis, “Prosperity;” Lushawn Rainer, “Hope;” and Anna Hernandez, “Community Garden.”