Mayor Daley tells architects what’s what. “Sometimes, when I’ve been shown a housing design for the first time and I see a design that has no green space or looks out onto concrete, then I tell the builders and architects: ‘You live in it.’ They usually respond with: ‘Oh, I live in Highland Park.’ That’s great; but why do you live there? Maybe because there’s green space there? When you look out of your house, do you want to see beautiful greenery or concrete?...

“Chicago lags far behind many other major cities in the reduction of violent crime,” states the Chicago Crime Commission’s “Action Alert” (Spring). “New York, for example, has reduced the number of murders since 1990 by 73%–Chicago by only 18%. Houston, Los Angeles, San Diego and other cities have also seen a remarkable drop in homicides, from 50% to 70% during the same time period.” Chicago’s homicide rate is now around 30 per 100,000 population; in Los Angeles the rate is 17, in New York 10....

By Nick Green Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Corwin wasn’t interested in joining the crowded pool of hopeful directors, and Wax Lips, the theater company he’d founded at Illinois State University with classmates Brendan Hunt and Carla DeLio, was on temporary hiatus while Hunt finished his degree. Soured on performing, Corwin was searching for other ways to satisfy his love of theater. So he started writing plays, though not particularly well....

Lake of Ire But he soon found himself face-to-face with two brawny beach bosses who threatened to have him arrested. What happened next has ignited a passionate debate in Rogers Park over how deep swimmers should be allowed to go in the water. “Believe me, I didn’t set out to make this my cause,” says Greenman, a 27-year-old graduate student in philosophy at Loyola University. “I just wanted to go swimming....

Canadian performer Rick Miller leads a double life. Half the time he’s a serious actor, declaiming the Bard’s poetry in parks and theaters across Canada and the United States with the Montreal-based Repercussion Theatre. The other half this phenomenal impressionist plays the fool, doing comic impersonations of actors and pop stars in stand-up clubs and presenting his own comic one-man shows at fringe festivals. MacHomer: The Simpsons Do Macbeth combines Miller’s two loves, Shakespeare and silliness: his somewhat shortened adaptation transforms the dark, murder-filled Scottish tragedy into an episode of The Simpsons....

Letter to the Editor: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Most of what Lundberg says is transparently self-serving. Miner did not bother to quote anyone who could have pointed out that Lundberg consistently allowed AMA honchos to dictate editorial content, including suppressing articles they didn’t like. One example is an investigative report I wrote about the Newt Gingrich-allied Golden Rule Insurance Co. in October of 1995 (a story that subsequently was reported by the CBS Evening News and the Indianapolis Star)....

Toward the end of his stint in the army, Mike North came back to Chicago on a weekend pass. North huffed. He walked directly to her counter and paused a moment, trying to figure out how to break the ice. He grabbed a 3 Musketeers bar off the rack and put it on the counter. It was late and there wasn’t a line so he hung around and chatted for a few minutes....

By Harold Henderson What more could you ask? As Lincoln Memorial Garden president Gretchen Bonfert says, “You don’t have to know anything to enjoy it.” The Kickapoo yielded the land only after more than a decade of unrelenting guerrilla resistance. Their final defeat–plus John Deere’s invention of a plow that would break up the prairie–allowed downstate Illinois to change from a frontier into a breadbasket for Chicago and the east coast....

ROBERT “BILBO” WALKER Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In the last few years Fat Possum, the punkish upstart label from Oxford, Mississippi, has aggressively chased a reputation as the last bastion for unadorned Delta blues, with a catalog that includes R.L. Burnside, Paul “Wine” Jones, T-Model Ford, and the late Junior Kimbrough. But long before Possum boss Matthew Johnson began romanticizing the violent tempers and poor education of his artists, Jim O’Neal had already established his Rooster Blues imprint in nearby Clarksdale as a source for uncut blues with records by artists like Jelly Roll Kings and the late Roosevelt “Booba” Barnes....

Exactly what occurs during the process of cremation? What exactly remains after the process is done? I hear all kinds of opinions on this, but I would really like to know the facts. –Lisa, via AOL Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In his book The Chemistry of Death Evans describes the cremation process with the detached air of the true scientist. The body is placed in a special gas-fired oven and burned at a temperature of 1,600 degrees Fahrenheit....

Visiting Mr. Green, Northlight Theatre, at North Shore Center for the Performing Arts in Skokie. Ross Gardiner is a young, gay executive ordered by the court to make weekly visits to Mr. Green–an 86-year-old Jewish widower–after he hit him with his car. And if you got a dollar for every familiar moment or line in Jeff Baron’s bittersweet two-character comedy, you’d recoup the ticket price before the end of the first act....

Crime and Punishment: A (Mis)Guided Environmental Tour With Literary Pretensions at the Neo-Futurarium, through April 11 Likewise Allen’s brainchild Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind broke all the rules when it first opened a little more than nine years ago. Devoted to delivering 30 performancelike plays in 60 minutes or die trying, the show is too playful, too unafraid of entertainment to qualify as performance art. Nor is it mere comedy, even though to the untrained eye Too Much Light looks a lot like a Second City revue: over the years it’s addressed such serious issues as homophobia and self-esteem....

By the time Spanish dramatist Federico Garcia Lorca, born a century ago this year, was murdered by Franco’s fascists in 1936, he’d written among other things a stack of well-regarded surrealist poetry and a trilogy of thematically related plays, Blood Wedding, Yerma, and The House of Bernarda Alba. The central play, Yerma, concerns a young Spanish farm wife who yearns for a child but hasn’t conceived, either because she or her husband is infertile or because her husband ignores her....

rader.qxd Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I want to bring readers up-to-date in regard to the lawsuit concerning bylaw 2.005, the bylaw authored by Aviva Patt that puts severe constraints on freedom of expression in IVI-IPO. The suit was brought by 13 members of IVI-IPO against the current leadership. It is indeed unfortunate that, after the article had been in the works for close to a year, Mr....

ELVIS COSTELLO & STEVE NIEVE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Elvis Costello’s 1998 collaboration with Burt Bacharach was neither the instant classic it’s been proclaimed by songcraft aficionados nor the artistic coffin nail it’s been declared by those who still resent Costello’s late-80s break with his new-wave band, the Attractions. The worst thing I can say about Painted From Memory (Universal) is that it’s stuffy, though compared to The Sweetest Punch, a recently released, mostly instrumental collection of the same material arranged by guitarist Bill Frisell, it sounds downright lively....

Kindertransport It is this sort of ambiguity that makes Kindertransport a compelling, thought-provoking evening of theater. Turning the ethos of most survivor dramas upside down, Samuels suggests that survival at any cost is not necessarily desirable. In her cogent if not entirely persuasive argument, many of the children saved from Nazi Germany by British Good Samaritans, who became their new families, could not overcome the damage inflicted by permanent separation from their earlier families and identities....

In the wee hours of November 24, 1996, Martha Bayne found herself shivering in the back of a paddy wagon on Lake Street, facing misdemeanor charges of serving alcohol without a license, serving alcohol to minors, and operating a business without a license. Earlier an army of patrolmen with flashlights had raided a loft party and fund-raiser for Maxine, the zine she publishes with Zoe Zolbrod and Anne Bruns. The police also confiscated a kitty that contained over $400 in at-the-door “donations” for the combination bake sale, raffle, beer bash, dance party, and concert....

History Repaints Itself By Albert Williams Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » What a sea change is reflected in these two sketches–and in the shows they’re from. Even the most caustic moments in the leisurely, laid-back 1961 revue are mitigated by a fundamentally optimistic view of life as worth saving, while even the merriest, most lighthearted skits in History Repaints Itself and its new main-stage counterpart, Second City 4....

To: The Reader Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As I have stated publicly, I take full responsibility and apologize for my role in the 1995 Steinmetz decathlon scandal. But what I find amazing is that in a piece which rails against my ethical lapses the reporter himself would engage in such questionable behavior in pursuit of a story. How objective can this reporter really be when he clearly has a close, prior relationship with Steve Grossman and Steve’s wife, Mary Valentin, two of the principals in his article whose viewpoints he unabashedly outlines, promulgates, and supports?...

By Sarah Downey Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Nor is it entirely finished. The 49-year-old composer made his first journey back to Vietnam last year, seeking inspiration to expand the piece. “All I know is I had this need to go back. It’s like facing the enemy finally. I’m able to look at my experience in Vietnam from many different perspectives. As a soldier in Vietnam, I always felt a camaraderie with its people....