In late August, the Chicago Sun-Times calculated that more than 13,000 immigrants had arrived in Chicago since August 2022, when Texas governor Greg Abbott started his busing scheme. While our city is navigating the care and feeding of all our people, and not always getting it perfect, we’ve received an influx of even more people via Texas and elsewhere in this last year, mainly without any resources of their own. And unfortunately, a lot of the care work seems to be falling on all of us.
We’ve seen activists, mutual aid organizations, and beleaguered nonprofits challenged with everything from procuring food and supplies to finding families homes in a city where affordable housing can prove out of reach even for a renter with references and gainful employment. And still we have to keep going, because regardless of what we think about this situation, regardless of whether the city and county seem overwhelmed into a standstill, there are people in need—and we all need one another.
In 1884, when construction started on the Studebaker Building at 410 S. Michigan, Chicago was a 47-year-old growing city that had already been through an unthinkable tragedy. The Great Chicago Fire of 1871 killed 300 people and left a full third of the city’s population unhoused. Just 13 years later, the city had spent more than a decade entertaining a flurry of architects, builders, and craftsmen who worked to not just re-create but also improve the building stock. This resulted in triumphs such as the Studebaker, these days known as the Fine Arts Building, and the Home Insurance Building on LaSalle, considered the world’s first skyscraper. The Home Insurance Building was demolished in 1929 to make way for a corporate complex for Marshall Field’s, but the Fine Arts remains.
It’s rare and wonderful to commune with the 19th century when we can, and though the Fine Arts Building has enjoyed improvements over the years, a walk through its halls can still help you sense the presence of the hundreds of Chicagoans drawn to that section of Michigan Avenue to harness a piece of our culture. Countless piano students, dance troupes, and filmgoers moved through the Fine Arts during the 20th century, each looking for that special spark of recognition that flies when art and culture cease being just a spectacle outside us and become something we can do.
The Fall Arts and Theater Preview in this issue, combined with the World Music Festival preview that’s included as an insert, is a wellspring of hope and a reminder that humans are on this earth and in this city not only to exist, but to thrive. We create the essence of imagination with every video we shoot, every bon mot we devise, every new song we sing. We buoy each other in hard times through dreams and visions, and the arts are our key to imagining the world we wish to live in, where there’s plenty for all.
Artist and writer Seth Tobocman coined a phrase with the title of his 1990 graphic book: You Don’t Have to Fuck People Over to Survive. Let us inhabit these words as we move Chicago into the next part of the 21st century.
