November 15, 2005

For years, the square at 18th and Paulina Streets has been little more than a patch of cracked concrete, a onetime drug haven within earshot of the clattering Blue Line train.

Pilsen community organizer Alvaro Obregon looks at the boarded windows, the burned church and the fading murals and sees a way to harness the changes sweeping through his Southwest Side neighborhood.

His group's vision: a $10 million zocalo, or Mexican-style plaza, filled with live theater, music and the smell of sizzling jalapeno--a place that, like nearby Chinatown's gate, would become a beacon for tourists as well as a meeting ground for protest, prayer and romance.

"This is an attempt to make this area known as the premiere place for Mexican culture in the Midwest," said Obregon, a senior organizer with the Resurrection Project, a nonprofit that mainly focuses on affordable housing. "There's a necessity for organizations like ours to be proactive about all the development in Pilsen. If we don't come up with a plan for the community, somebody else will."

Proponents see a zocalo ushering Pilsen toward a renaissance similar to that of Chinatown, where third-generation Chinese-American professionals live in new town homes near Chinese immigrants.

But others worry that the neighborhood would wind up like neighboring Greektown, where a strip of restaurants is all that is left of the original Greek community, or Humboldt Park on the West Side, where giant Puerto Rican flag sculptures stand sentinel as rising rents and home prices push out many Puerto Rican residents.

With scores of condominium conversions in Pilsen driving up property values and rents, fear of such displacement is intense. At the same time, an artists row, new restaurants and shops surrounding Halsted Street have generated excitement and hope that Pilsen is finally poised to emerge from years of poverty and crime.

The two dynamics have led to divisions within the community, with some groups fighting to preserve the neighborhood and others pushing for change.

The Resurrection Project straddles both sides. Formed in 1990 by six neighborhood Catholic parishes, the group has developed 140 houses for low-income families in Pilsen and nearby Little Village. It owns and manages 156 more low-income apartments in the area.

As space for affordable homes in the area grows scarce, the group recently decided to venture into economic development. It chose as its first big project an icon of Mexican culture.

For Mexicans and their descendents, a zocalo is more than a town square. It is a sort of communal living room found in few American cities, a place where families gather after supper, where commerce, faith, politics and art come together.

"I don't think there's anything in the community that doesn't go on there, they're so full of every activity you can imagine," said Fred Kent, president of the New York-based Project for Public Spaces, a nonprofit consultant group for urban development that has sought to duplicate Mexican zocalos in the U.S.

"People use them to entertain and engage and discuss and laugh and play and kiss and hug and watch," Kent said. "You feel like you have to go there, that you will miss everything about that community if you're not there. In our repressed culture, we just don't have those kinds of spaces."

The Resurrection Project hopes to generate that energy inside the desolate square that fronts its headquarters at 18th and Paulina.

The zocalo project is in the planning and fundraising stages. The site is currently framed by an empty commercial building and, directly opposite, the former St. Vitus Catholic Church which, after it was closed in 1990, was a drug hangout for a gang and then was gutted by fire in 2000.

The Resurrection Project, which owns the plaza and three surrounding buildings, wants to create a new cultural center in the old church and a music school and a bank or restaurant in old commercial buildings.

The group has been trying to get people to think of the empty spot as a new center of Pilsen life. The organization showed outdoor movies there in the summer and used it for basketball tournaments, large church masses and vigils for victims of gun violence. On Nov. 1, a Day of the Dead festival was held there.

What many residents remember about the place is that in 2002 guitarist Carlos Santana filmed a music video there.

So far, the Resurrection Project has raised about $1 million of the $10 million capital cost of the zocalo project, with help from the Local Initiative Support Corporation of Chicago, a community development group.

The Resurrection Project also is seeking loans and is in talks with possible tenants, including Sones de Mexico, a Chicago folkloric music troupe that wants to open a music and dance school there, Obregon said.

When the project is complete, the group plans to coordinate a calendar of neighborhood events for the space and eventually hire a zocalo director.

The zocalo, which would be near the popular Mexican Fine Arts Center, would be meant to spur economic activity near a struggling strip of mom-and-pop businesses along 18th, Obregon said. Just as important, it could help deter a steady exodus of residents who have left Pilsen for the suburbs, he said.

"If we're able to create a vibrant Pilsen with something the community can take ownership of, then that's a reason for people to stay," said Obregon, a lifelong resident. "And maybe instead of selling to the highest bidder, what people will do is say, You know what? I'm going to invest $20,000 in my home."

Community reaction to the project has been mixed, ranging from the hopes of nearby shop owners to the worries of residents that it would become overrun by tourists and lead to further displacement of the poor.

That specter looms over almost any new development in Pilsen, where some homeowners say they have seen their tax bills more than double in the last decade, while renters complain of absentee landlords who continually raise rents. State lawmakers are considering making Pilsen a historic district to fend off developers.

"Why don't they build more affordable housing?" said Jose Solis, who has lived in Pilsen since the 1950s. "My father and uncles came here 50 years ago because they had nowhere else to go. Now, the neighborhood is improving and the rich want to boot us out."

Atanacio Gonzalez, associate director of the University of Illinois at Chicago's Neighborhoods Initiative, which focuses on community revitalization, warned that other culturally themed developments in Chicago have led to runaway rents and property values. He pointed to Greektown and Taylor Street in Little Italy as examples that are near Pilsen's borders.

"And, I've argued this with Humboldt Park," where giant steel Puerto Rican flags bookend a strip of Puerto Rican restaurants on Division Street in that gentrifying neighborhood, Gonzalez said. "Yeah, you can have all the restaurants be Puerto Rican, but if you don't have a comprehensive plan for low-income housing, all your people will be gone."

David Betlejewski, executive director of the 18th St. Development Corporation, which supports the zocalo project, said his organization looks to Chinatown as a model for Pilsen.

"A lot of development has happened there, but it's maintained its identity and really kept its character," said Betlejewski, whose organization functions as Ald. Daniel Solis' (25th) unofficial arm for economic development in Pilsen.

"It's an area that serves not only the people that live there but people who come from all over the world."

That would be fine with Maria Diaz, whose second-hand clothing store on 18th Place sits behind the zocalo site.

As the late afternoon shadows grew long over the empty square recently, Diaz complained of poor business and occasional gunfire that has left two bullet holes in her store and keeps most neighbors indoors.

"In Mexico, in the afternoon, you go to the zocalo and it gives you confidence," Diaz said. "Here, I come out of the store and nobody talks to each other. If we had a cultural place to go to have a Popsicle or something, it would be easier to get to know your neighbors."

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