I read a few more of the names into the recorder I brought with me that ride day in July, but I couldn’t find the good recorder that morning. What tape I have is minutes of crackling and wind. I make out odd words like “pine cones,” “birds,” “Symphony Shores” and “I ask why, but HUSBAND Harry Davies (1880-1949) won’t answer.”

I’m typing this in October and I can’t remember why I found the graveyard so loving.

If this weekslong ramble northward to wrap up the site has a purpose, it’s to find the city’s themes. I found labor and futility where the factories rot. I found community, home and hope in the neighborhoods older relatives have told me never to go to. And here, spurred by a graveyard at 71st and Cottage Grove, I found memory.

Or I found what I can’t remember.

I do remember the tree.

It was, and presumably still is, a large tree floofing out into hefty, weight-supporting branches only a foot or two off the ground. One long branch crooked horizontal for a length of close-enough parameters that a slightly chubbed middle-aged blogger wearing khaki cargo shorts over bike togs could sit in the tree, lay along the branch and stare at a pine cone-filtered sky.

I’m not saying I climbed a tree in a graveyard, Mom, but I’m not saying I didn’t.

As I sat in my tree, I talked into the bad recorder — not bad, per se, but so sensitive and un-windscreened whatever I said was lost between breeze and bird. I remember loving what I said into that recorder. I remember thinking this was good, solid, gave a sense of the Greater Grand Crossing neighborhood in a way both accurate and avoiding the white tourism this bike ride risked turning into.

It’s just scratches and wind now, and I think that’s somewhat appropriate.

We live in lost history, with HUSBAND Harry Davies’ entire life crammed in that dash between 1880 and 1949. If we’re lucky, a few words spring through the noise. A name, a date, a moment caught on tape forgetting the fancy word for trees with needles. (It’s “conifer,” I remembered later.)

What better place to remember memory than in a graveyard?

Later, I’d head north. Later, I’d run into the line of crosses a Jesus guy put along Halsted to mourn Englewood’s dead. I ran that story early as #961. Later I’d ring through construction zones, try and fail to find the end of Bubbly Creek (ran that one early too) and ended up playing ’90s video games at a retro-themed hipster coffee shop in Bridgeport. That’s where we’ll pick up on Monday.

I guess Ida B. Wells is buried in Oak Woods Cemetery, the internet tells me later. And Harold Washington, Enrico Fermi, Junior Wells and Kenesaw Mountain Landis. The internet’s a wonderful thing, although I almost fell down a Wikipedia wormhole just now looking up pathologist-poet Maud Slye, forever sharing Oak Woods with the activist and missionary Nancy Green, who funded her antipoverty work by appearing as Aunt Jemima.

But I didn’t know any of that in my tree. I just knew pine cones and conifer needles. Birds, cicadas, airplanes and the honks of both car and the Metra Electric in the distance.

It’s simple but sturdy. Screwed and nailed 2×4 but done by someone who has handled wood. The cross is freestanding, braced at the bottom by a four-way splay of board.

There’s a jigsawed heart about a foot radius screwed to the cross’ front. It was cut from particle board and spray painted the color of love and blood. The cross itself is untreated lumber. No paint, stain or other protections. The cross-top crackles from the elements.

Across the axis where spread the arms of Jesus, Spartacus and thousands of crucifixees no one cared to make movies about, someone wrote a name in as elegant a font as they could earn with Sharpie. Manuel Ramirez.

At 63rd, there’s another one.

This one’s name was Elliott Marshall.

61st, Brandon Young. 60th, Deantate Lejohn, although a news article about his death later tells me his last name was Littlejohn. Zachary Stoner and Ronald Crump at 58th.

I stop a woman along the route. She’s about 40, slightly heavy, slowly hoisting two cloth grocery bags laden with errands to the bus stop. I ask if she knows what the crosses are.

“Teenagers,” she said, although I later find out she was wrong. Littlejohn was 32. Elliott Marshall was 51.

Half a block south, two teen girls stand with a posterboard sign covered with marker scrawl. They’re trying to lure motorists to their school fundraiser across the street. Across the street, a group of kids sit at a folding table, laughing and being kids, but generally respectfully waiting with folded hands for people to come and buy their candy, magazines, wrapping paper or whatever the fundraiser goodies might be. A few adults monitor them, chatting themselves among the crosses of Halsted.

“Teenagers who were killed,” she clarified.

We talk a bit about the crosses. She didn’t know who put them there, although I later found out it’s a guy from Aurora who puts crosses up around the nation. A former boss wrote a column about him. He’s a Jesus guy who goes around the nation putting crosses up where people are killed. Mass-shooting sites mostly. Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. Northern Illinois University. And I guess the entire neighborhood of Englewood, although Marshall was killed in Longwood Manor and Littlejohn in Chicago Lawn.

The news stories about the dead are depressing in their brevity, each person’s demise lumped together in weekend tallies. The big newspapers in town give obituaries to white people and police blotter to black. No one even tries to tell me if the dead had kids.

I find so many more articles online about the man who made the crosses than about the people they memorialize. That’s not the crossmaker’s fault.

The woman and I talk about the crosses. She comes up and shows me the top of Littlejohn’s, a bit I had missed in my inspection. Each one is marked in Sharpie with the date of death.

The crosses stop at Garfield Boulevard. They’re Englewood’s mourning, not Back of the Yards’. Even if the mourner came from outside and sometimes had the names off.

North along Halsted the skins turn white, the streets get names instead of numbers and the wealth flows through. Halsted North is for theaters, gay bars and chic dining. This end’s for memorium, grocery runs and children’s fundraisers. The same road, but one has new construction. I wonder who has drawn the link between the financial investment and the lack of violence. I wonder who has noticed that the city’s northward focus is a cause, not a symptom.

I wondered what it would be like to be one of the ignored.

The woman and I smiled at each other. She asked if I was going to ride the bus. I said no, nodding at the bike I straddled.

“I’ve got a long way to go,” I said.

See an arts center trying to revive Englewood

A drunk in the North Side snow

And for a change of pace, when professional walking was a spectator sport

He wants noises and lights outside the faux portholes to create the sensation of a sea at motion. He wants creaks of timber and he wants the wax replicas of chained slaves to feel like human skin to the touch. He wants a fog machine to perfume the air with a light reek of feces, urine, vomit and the other human rot that brought millions of Africans to America in chains.

It’s not just any ship Sam Smith wants to build in the basement of a restored Englewood mansion. It’s the Zong, which provided one of the most horrifying stories of one of the most horrifying eras of human history.

“What would happen was the slavers were running insurance scams,” Smith said. “A lot of major insurance companies were insuring the passage of the slaves across the Atlantic. What they were doing is they were dumping cargo just to file insurance claims.”

The cargo was people. The crew of the Zong poured 132 humans into the Atlantic, claiming in court water supplies were low and the other option would have been the agony of death by thirst. 54 women and children were dumped into the sea the first day, 42 men the second day, 36 other slaves over the days that followed.

The “death by thirst” claims were a lie. The Zong had 505 gallons of drinking water on board when it pulled into Jamaica, plus there had been a rainstorm of fresh, collectable water the day they dumped the men. After weighing the evidence, a British appellate court found the insurance company did not have to pay out the policies. The court battle about the Zong was, after all, a matter of insurance liability, not murder.

The Zong massacre of 1781 did give fodder to Europe’s abolitionists, who spent the next few decades citing the case to get the transatlantic slave trade, and later slavery itself, abolished country by country.

“Slavery didn’t end in Europe because of some humanitarian effort, but because of legal reasons and money,” Smith said.

And it’s going in his basement.

Sam Smith of the Perry Mansion Cultural Center. Photo by A.J. Kane

The Perry Mansion Cultural Center is beautiful. I don’t want readers still caught on the description of noise and slave-ship vomit to believe anything else. Englewood residents take their lunch breaks across the street to look at the bright summertime flowers in a yard that once grew only mud.

Smith is currently changing over the arts center to a new exhibit. Amid scaffolds and ladders in the bright, airy main floor, a hand-painted mural entwines the top of the walls. A thick ribbon of drywall curved as far as 80 degrees runs through the rooms. The chimney has been converted to a wooden statue, brand-new boards artificially aged to vintage through a process of Smith’s own devising.

But the purpose isn’t prettiness. The mural is of the history of America, the slavers’ markets and human-bound ships that carried Africans in chains. The ribbon of drywall will act as canvas for a series of pieces drawing attention to Mauritania, which still has an open slave trade despite its government’s claims any talk of human rights abuse is the work of a worldwide Jewish conspiracy. The chimney statue is a sweatbox, where slaves were locked crouched in the heat as punishment.

Photo by A.J. Kane

The second floor will be an exhibit on the Flint water crisis and other sections of the world where environmental injustices keep the poor from the resources they need.

Each temporary exhibit hits a different social issue to spark conversation, action, thought, change. The basement Zong, which Smith estimates is five years away from completion and whose development you can support by contributing to the Perry Mansion Cultural Center GoFundMe campaign, will be the only permanent piece among a rotation of social justice themed artwork on the floors above.

“There are 15 artists from all around the world that are part of the collective of this space, not including me,” Smith said. “I’m the 16th artist.”

Photo by A.J. Kane

Sam Smith was born in Mississippi, but raised in the Henry Horner Homes projects on Chicago’s West Side. One of 15 children, he became his father’s informal assistant and apprentice early on. “My dad was a master carpenter and furniture maker, so I was always around the trades,” Smith said. “From the time that I was 5, I was his helper. So he made me go with him, taught me every trade except roofing and heating.”

Now a master carpenter himself, Smith, 47, has worked since age 11 when he made and sold greeting cards. He appeared in McDonald’s corporate training videos in high school. After college he started and ran a local newspaper, then a sports and entertainment magazine. Eventually, he landed on real estate development.

“I’m not doing it now but I was doing quite a few projects before the real estate market crashed,” the 16th artist said. “I would buy properties in middle class neighborhoods and impoverished neighborhoods all around the city, all around the country. And I really took pride in buying dilapidated properties and restoring them and making them breathtaking and then selling them at reasonable prices so people in those communities can have an opportunity to live in a really nice property at a price point they can afford.”

One of those sales took him to the house at 7042 S. Perry Ave. in Englewood.

Photo by A.J. Kane

A brief pause for some statistics.

The Englewood neighborhood running between West Garfield Boulevard to the north and West 76th Street at its southernmost comprises 3.07 square miles and 30,654 people.

Once an oak forest in Potawatomi land, the neighborhood saw its first non-native settlers among German and Irish “truck farmers” in the 1800s growing produce for the market. It stayed white. Once the U.S. Supreme Court made racially restrictive covenants — binding deeds promising a property would never be sold or rented to members of certain races and here’s a map of Chicago’s covenant areas in case you don’t believe this — illegal in 1948, residents of the “Black Belt” to the east started moving in.

Whites fled from their new neighbors. The neighborhood was 2 percent black in 1940 and 96 percent black by 1970. Processes such as redlining (denying loans and other financial services or charging higher interest rates in certain neighborhoods based on the racial makeup) ensured the black neighborhood was a poor black neighborhood.

Resources remain low today and drugs, violence and prostitution remain high. There are more crime-ridden neighborhoods in the city — as of the day I’m writing this, Englewood is tied for seventh place out of 77 community areas for violent crime over the last 30 days and 19th for property crimes — but the word “Englewood” has become shorthand for South Side crime the way “Chicago” is shorthand for violent cities. The stats don’t bear out either, but the reputation remains.

Photo by A.J. Kane

In 2006, Sam Smith had the opportunity to buy and restore the home on Perry Avenue from a little old grandmother who had lived there with her kids and grandkids for decades.

“After I bought the place and she moved out, I quickly realized that this was the drug and prostitution hub of this whole community. I had to evict the kids and the grandkids out of the house. The son came back two days after the eviction and burned the place up,” Smith said.

The second floor was a total loss, both from the flames and the firefighters’ hoses and axes. The interior would have to be entirely gutted, if he even wanted to keep the place.

“While I was sifting through the ash and trying to assess the damage of the space, one of the neighbors came down to talk to me. One of his questions was ‘Why would you buy in this neighborhood? Don’t you watch the news? There’s nothing out here but guns and drugs and violence.’

“And then he started kind of telling me about the history of Englewood, that it used to be a really thriving place full of businesses and great families. People don’t really communicate with each other over here anymore and he didn’t know what happened. So I went back home and, while I was sleeping, I had a dream that I should, instead of just selling this place, do something with the space that could help to revive Englewood.”

Photo by A.J. Kane

It wasn’t the first time a dream changed Smith’s course. The neighborhood newspaper he started was also spurred by a dream. He had pictured himself laying out pages and making ad sales then, when awake, made it happen. But a dream to revive this block would be harder.

“It was like a movie really, You would drive up and there would be heroin addicts nodding off in the middle of the street, stopping traffic. I had never really seen anything quite like it,” he said.

To do this right, he would have to do this himself. The Gurnee resident would start spending days, weeks at the burnt-out Englewood mansion, turning it into an arts space and becoming a face in the neighborhood.

“So it’s about 1 o’clock in the morning and I’m out welding pieces onto the front door. 1 o’clock in the morning. I turn around to take a sip of water and it’s about 13 young guys standing at the gate absolutely fascinated just watching me,” he said. ”A lot of them were the young drug dealers in the community. They had never really seen anybody who looked like them do anything like I was doing before with this space. It sparked a lot of questions for them.”

“I’m no different than them,” he said. “I probably have a tougher background than they do. And if I can do it, nobody can tell them they can’t.”

Once the arts center was open, Smith started hosting events. Open mic nights emceed by a poet-and-comedian team, open houses, high school reunions. He estimates that about 40 percent of Perry Mansion’s visitors over the years have come from the community, 60 percent from outside Englewood.

He has never had a single incident befall a visitor in eight years the mansion has been open, he said. No one has been robbed, assaulted, harassed, had their car broken into. Nothing, he says.

Photo by A.J. Kane

This isn’t a piece for a newspaper, so I don’t have to feign disinterest. I am biased and partisan here. I like Sam Smith. I want him to succeed and I want you to donate some Christmas charity to his GoFundMe to help him build the Zong.

One of the things I like the most is that this museum in Englewood isn’t utopian. He has foundation funding and is working with local bar groups to fund the Zong. The paperwork certifying his tax-exempt status is orderly. The Perry Mansion Cultural Center started with a dream, but it’s concrete and practical.

The tradesman artist is practical too. It’s art, but not for art’s sake. It’s art for the sake of a community.

“This was creating a safe space that could change the narrative of what this community was,” Smith said.

“What I realized is that most communities that are dilapidated are dilapidated because there is a pervasive narrative that is presented that the neighborhoods should not have anything there, that the people there are bad. And industry doesn’t want to come there. What it does is it draws natural foot traffic out of the areas, so that it is not economically feasible for businesses to come and take advantage of that foot traffic.

“What a space like this does — and what arts programming does period, if it’s strategically placed — it creates a natural flow of foot traffic to an area that would not necessarily have that foot traffic. So it’s a destination point. And when the people who come to the space, they get an opportunity to explore this particular area and see for themselves what the area is, what the people are like, developing relationships with those people.

“But when the people leave, they leave with dollars. they leave hungry, they leave thirsty, they leave looking to explore to see what else the area has to offer.”

See more photos of Perry Mansion

Read about another South Side arts center

See a previous collaboration with the same photographer

Visit Perry Mansion

Hire A.J. Kane

There’s a place along Illinois Route 1 — Halsted Street to Chicagoans — where the dollar stores just become dollar stores, no extra security needed in metal and mesh. Then there’s a place further north where they disappear entirely.

There’s a place on Halsted where the churches have their own separate buildings, where the name of the pastor is put on digital billboard across from chain fast-food restaurants and gas stations, not painted on the side of a brick storefront in as close to Old English font as they could get with a can of spraypaint.

And then the churches disappear too.

People walk up and down and across these streets no matter the latitude of wealth. Old ladies pull shopping trolleys behind them and grumpy-looking men check phones for whenever it is that damn bus is coming. Young men wander aimlessly for something to do, whether they’re in Roseland, Englewood or up-and-coming Bridgeport.

Their pace is faster in the wealthier area. Their skin is lighter, too.

The barricade between the wealth and poverty seems to be moving south — the Englewood Whole Foods is up and running, feeding both mouths and fears of displacement. But the true boundary seems to lie at the Union Stock Yard Gates in a neighborhood sociologists have tried to call “New City” since the ’30s, but really we all know it’s Back of the Yards.

It’s tucked off Halsted, down an industrial strip that kept just enough food processors and manufacturers to smell lightly of bacon in the rain. Kidnapped on its own island in the roadway, kept for history but isolated enough that the damn thing doesn’t block traffic, the stone gates thousands of men walked through each day stands silently. No one walks through anymore, at least not unless they’re trying for a photo opp or to get closer to the firefighter memorial for a disaster I’ve never heard of.

These men slaughtered countless cows, pigs, sheep — whatever ritual sacrifice it took to make a city of millions bloom. Now their gateway sits in a corridor of bacon smell and metal firemen, a barricade between poverty to the south and the new bars and restaurants to the north.

People try to say there are no barricades. People try to say there’s nothing stopping others from crossing the invisible lines between wealth and poverty, between classes and cultures. It’s just a matter of gumption, moxie, hard work and belief in God and free-market capitalism.

I believe people can better their lot. I believe work can pay dividends. But I see those barricades bright as a noonlit sun. There is a line between the supermarket and the bodega, between megachurch and the mini one.

There’s a line where the trendy bars start and another where the dollar stores have razor wire.

Can those lines be crossed? Yes. Sure. Maybe. To pretend those lines weren’t built, that’s a feat I’ve never quite managed.

Now a tour of the North Side

And a look at the city from above

And a text-based roleplaying game about riding the CTA

Born in St. Louis, E. Simms Campbell got his start in Chicago as an editorial cartoonist for Englewood High School’s student newspaper. He attended the University of Chicago at age 14, later studying at the Art Institute of Chicago.

After the Art Institute, he headed back to St. Louis looking for work.

“The next thing I knew I was waiting table on a dining car. It was a let-down, of course, but it was the making of me in this field,” he said. “Up to then my work had been shallow, but I learned from my fellow waiters how close man can be to his fellow men. After this discovery my character began to develop and I began to paint and draw people as they really looked. Oh, I could always draw, but I was a failure as an artist till I became a successful dining-car waiter.”

He started getting work at St. Louis ad agencies before heading to New York to try his hand at magazine illustration.

While some biographers recount Campbell having trouble as a black man getting his work past magazines’ receptionists, Campbell recalls that some timely introductions by working commercial artists he knew soon gave him regular, if low-paying, work.

But this isn’t a story about “Hey, a black guy did this too.” Black or white, Elmer Simms Campbell was, simply put, the best.

Take it from the words of Esquire founder Arnold Gingrich upon first seeing Campbell’s work at the latter’s Harlem apartment. Gingrich had been sent there by a white artist he had pursued, but couldn’t afford.

“I wanted to yell Eureka, because I saw at a glance that my troubles were over,” Gingrich said.

Gingrich was fond of saying that for the magazine’s first few decades, every issue contained a Campbell cartoon. Not true, but close. Campbell was selling work to magazines across the nation, but had particular sway in molding Esquire’s cartoon style.

His was the work Esquire showed applicants. His were the gags he sold to other cartoonists when he didn’t have time to draw up something funny he thought up. He even created the magazine mascot, Esky.

Back in Chicago, he was a regular illustrator for the jazz-age magazine The Chicagoan. It was a 1920s stab at the popularity and format of The New Yorker. It lasted from 1926 to 1935, still offering ads and articles aimed at the fur-and-fashion brigade even during the heights of the Depression.

The site of The Chicagoan’s original office is now a TGIFriday’s.

Campbell’s work for The Chicagoan was mostly full-page gag cartoons featuring The Chicagoan’s wealthy white target audience. He did occasionally delve into more challenging terrain, such as penning and illustrating an article on New York’s Harlem nightlife and Deco-influenced artwork celebrating Chicago’s less-fashionable neighborhoods.

In Harlem, he partied with Cab Calloway, frequented the night spots until dawn and never missed a deadline. He created a popular night club map of Harlem, another hit for the illustrator.

Campbell was part of the Harlem Renaissance crowd, illustrating a book of Sterling Brown’s poetry and a children’s book written by Arna Bontemps and Langston Hughes.

His biggest commercial success though was a syndicated comic called Cuties, which featured buxom white women in mildly tawdry situations. Cuties started in Esquire in 1933, but hit its stride during the 1940s, with the titular cuties dealing with servicemen boyfriends, rationing kisses and typical WWII-era man-catching gags. It was syndicated by King Features into the 1960s.

Although this makes Campbell, not Morrie Turner as I previously thought, the first black syndicated cartoonist*, a black man drawing half-nude white women was a queasy topic in mid-century America. His photo appeared in Blatz beer ads and he wrote openly about being black in America, so Campbell’s race wasn’t hidden. It wasn’t advertised either.

“[M]agazines weren’t wired for sound, so drawings would not carry any trace of any kind of accent,” Esquire’s Gingrich said of Campbell’s hiring in the ’30s.

Campbell’s work could be blatant or subtle, a slap-in-the-face gag with a half-naked harem girl in Playboy or a gut-punch Rockwell-esque look at a black woman at a salon picking from a book of blonde styles.

When Esquire switched over to photography in the ‘60s, Campbell hopped over to Playboy. By this time, he was living in Switzerland, telling Ebony in 1966 that he had the quiet life of “a little old winemaker.” (This claim is undercut a bit by parties with Cab Calloway and Dizzie Gillespie, but we’ll let Elmer have his rest.)

He moved back to the States after his wife died. He died in White Plains, New York, in 1971.

So that’s E. Simms Campbell, the Harlem Renaissance illustrator who made his fortune drawing gags about rich white people. The man who called Cab and Langston his friends and Esky and Cuties his creations.

“I’m a cat who came out of St. Louis, like to drink whisky, like to see my friends, and don’t like no stiff-ass people,” Campbell told the Ebony reporter visiting his Swiss home in 1966. “But since you’re an O.K. cat and I like you, go ahead and ask me anything you want to know.”

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Another cool lost historical figure

And another

* I should say “openly black syndicated cartoonist.” George Herriman, creator of Krazy Kat in 1913, hid his multi-racial heritage.

Followers of the sect known as Christianity celebrate a special day called “Christ-mas” in which trees are slaughtered, cookies are left for fat, flying elvish deer-herders and Irishmen receive massive amounts of birds.

In case you want to purchase a gift for this regional folk festival, here are some ideas that will support a few of the people and organizations I’ve written about in the 150 stories that have appeared on this site so far in 2015.

A Tactile Magic Act

For the past 19 years, 25-year-old Jeanette Andrews has only had one job. Stage magician. And yes, the math checks.

On Tuesday, Jan. 26, 2016, Andrews debuts her new show at the Museum of Contemporary Art. “Thresholds” will be an immersive magic experience by a woman who considers slight of hand a fine art. The tricks aren’t just designed to fool the eye, but to fool all five senses.

“Thresholds” is free with museum admission ($12 for adults, $7 for students and seniors), but cheapskates delight: The museum is free to Illinois residents on Tuesdays. If your loved ones ask, I’ll tell them it was really, really expensive.

If you like the illustration that accompanied my profile of Andrews, artist Marine Tempels takes commissions.

Psalm One’s Newest Album

She wasn’t mentioned by name, but rapper and Englewood native Psalm One was one of the readers at the “Welcome to the Neighborhood” reading I organized with Rachel Hyman at the MCA in January.

Psalm One’s newest album “P.O.L.Y.” or “Psalm One Loves You” was released in September of this year and can be purchased on iTunes. Psalm One’s smart, breezy style and lyrics have made her one of the freshest voices in hip-hop, pop and soul, not just out of Chicago, not just recently. Period.

If you want to learn where Psalm One gets it from, pair the album with a copy of the coming-of-age memoirs “Old School Adventures from Englewood–South Side of Chicago” by her mother, journalist Elaine Hegwood Bowen.

A Cambodian Sorcerer Hunt

What do you do when you find out your girlfriend’s dad is a sorcerer? If you’re Uptown-based journalist Ryun Patterson, you use the experience as inspiration for an interactive multimedia exploration of the changing world of traditional Cambodian magic.

“Vanishing Act: A Glimpse into Cambodia’s World of Magic” is available on print and Kindle at Amazon and downloadable for iStuff on iTunes for a holiday special of $9.99, down from $14.99.

It’s full of photographs, interviews, videos, interactive maps and pages and pages of nuanced writing detailing how the Southeast Asian nation’s traditional folk healing and fortune-telling is disappearing in some ways, going digital in others. I got it for my dad for his birthday, so I can vouch.

Oh, and Patterson married the sorcerer’s daughter.

Kink Lectures

Formed when museums wouldn’t take a dying man’s gay erotic paintings and interested collectors only wanted to hide them away, the Leather Archives & Museum in Rogers Park has become a home to all things kink and fetish.

There’s a prurient interest to a museum filled with butt plugs, whips, masks and sexy books, but the museum is an intentionally open and free space dedicated to preserving art, craft and writing that celebrates a part of life some see as shameful, dirty, to be tossed away or hidden. Whether it’s your sexuality or not, it’s someone’s.

Although tickets or a membership to the museum could be a fun thing for Santa to leave under the tree, depending on your tree and your Santa, there are also a few upcoming events of note, including lectures on kink and fetish culture and, in February, the museum’s first overnight lock-in.

Superhero Circus

More of a pre-Christmas extravaganza, but this Friday take your loved ones to Acrobatica Infiniti’s last planned show at the Uptown Underground.

Acrobatica Infiniti is a nerd circus, a celebration of all things geek and acrobatic. People tumble as superfolk, juggle as Jedi or cavort as cartoons.

My profile of the group became part of a series of circus performer profiles, with looks at Captain Hammer and his groupie, Mister Terrific and the circus’ resident Catwoman/Dark Phoenix/Breakdancing Yoshi.

And in case you liked that illustration of Dark Phoenix in action, artist Emily Torem takes commissions too.

A Night at the Turtle Races

Bowmanville bar Big Joe’s 2 & 6 has turtle racing. Take your friends.

A Really Good Photographer

OK, I don’t know what you would hire a photographer for. That’s your lookout. But AJ Kane, who did the photography for the interactive exploration of a hidden tunnel running through the downtown, is for hire.

He’s a good guy. Check out his stuff.

Little Stubby

Not to be confused with WWI hero bull terrier mutt Sergeant Stubby, Little Stubby is the nogoodnik kid brother of corrupt Chicago cop Johnny Kelly, who was competing for a tap-dancing stripper’s affections with a guy who pretends to be a robot in a nightclub’s storefront window in the 1953 insane nonsense film “City That Never Sleeps.”

You can rent that insane nonsense (seriously, the City of Chicago itself takes human form to narrate in the voice of Francis the Talking Mule) at Odd Obsession, a Bucktown video store and mecca for all things obscure and cinematic. See about a gift certificate, buy some merch or just drop by the store to check out the exhibit of Ghanaian movie posters.

Dropping my bouncy, light and frankly hilarious tone (that “regional folk festival” line was frickin’ gold), I want to support people who bring me the strange and unique ways people across the planet have expressed themselves.

Hip-hop, magic, journalism, acrobatics, movies, kink, even turtle racing — all these people and groups are the real deal. This “Christ-mas,” go beyond shopping locally. Shop exceptionally. Support the unique and beautiful.

The worst that could happen is you’ll experience something you’ll never see again.

Share your local shopping ideas

Listen to a CTA street band’s holiday song

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Englewood is a bitchy sit for a young, white, liberal and somewhat emotionally needy writer. I don’t want to excoriate a neighborhood for not having the opportunities I did. But I don’t want to praise down to it either.

I don’t want to talk about the human spirit when it’s just some dude going to work. I don’t want to talk about the joyous black culture when folks of all races tend to laugh when they’re hanging out with friends. I don’t want to use the word “vibrant” if I mean “noisy and a crackhead tried to hug me.”

So, for the record, the brief sliver of Englewood I saw is not hell on earth, but it’s also not a place I would want to live.

There are some nice stores and a whole bunch of boarded-up places too. There’s a city college and weed-covered city blocks where they only standing building is a three-flat with busted windows. There are sweet-ass murals and lead in the soil. It’s gang territory. Like bad gang territory. Some damn fine people live there too.

There are homes next to power transfer stations and garages that shake when the L rumbles above them. There was one of those big, creepy yellow-white spiders that crawled all over my windshield so I got an unencumbered look at its nasty underside and I always hate that.

But I was there for one reason: to mail my uncle a get-well card where a serial killer did some bad, bad stuff.

The Englewood Post Office, across 63rd from an Aldi and across Lowe from the Englewood Health Center, was built on the site of Dr. H.H. Holmes’ “murder castle.”

Dr. Holmes preyed during the late 19th century, offing tenants and at least one whole family using his house. That modifier’s not misplaced: His house was the murder weapon.

Some of the rooms in the death house — on the surface a hotel for Columbian Exhibition visitors — were “asphyxiation chambers” where the good doctor would gas his guests before robbing them. They would never leave the hotel, just switch over to one of the various dissection, crematory or acid-pit rooms where Holmes would make sure as little evidence as possible remained.

He confessed to 28 murders, although no expert believes it was that few.

Today, it’s a nice if scruffy post office down half a block from a tranny disco that offers a salad bar.

I saw no marker commemorating the world’s most trap-laden castle not owned by Bowser, but I could have missed it. The older folks coming in and out smiled and thanked me for holding open the door. The lady behind the counter had the most radiant grin I’ve ever seen on a government employee.

But she grinned at me through an inch-thick, bullet-proof window. An older man picking up a package had his gift buzzed through a two-doored counter-top airlock, each side matched by that same chunky Plexiglas. When I left, I noticed the block-long line at the free clinic across Lowe was gone. It was now 10:02, so they had opened the doors.

Here’s the part where I usually sum up, but I’ve got nothing. I’m not so arrogant as to think five minutes buying a book of Black Heritage stamps and mailing a card to my uncle gave me any special insight into Englewood. I’m not going to try to dissect it like Holmes did his victims.

Englewood to me seemed like a “mind your own business” sort of neighborhood, where thousands of people each day lead good, honorable lives without some North Sider poking his nose in.

The highest death tally that address has ever seen was some crazy white dude, but my biggest fears were that huge-ass spider followed by any unemployed person below 25.

I wish Englewood all the best. But, man, I’m still not going there at night. Sorry.

Written in April 2012

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