When The Real World Came to Wicker Park

DURING THE 1990S, WICKER PARK WAS a nexus of art, theater, and music. Creative energy flowed through neighborhood institutions like the industrial record label Wax Trax and the communal coffeehouse Urbus Orbis. But by the summer of 2001, those spots, along with the popular Polish diner Busy Bee and others, had closed, leaving locals to bemoan what they saw as yet more signs of gentrification. Rising rents had been forcing out struggling artists and longtime residents, altering what had been a working-class pocket of Puerto Rican, Mexican, and Polish families.

Enter The Real World, MTV’s juggernaut of a reality show. Its premise: Throw seven 20-somethings of different backgrounds into a house together and tape them 24 hours a day during their four-month stay. Though that may seem like old hat now, the show was a pioneer in reality TV.

When Real World producers picked Wicker Park as the location of its 11th season, they didn’t realize their presence would prick insecurities about the neighborhood’s changing character. Local bohemian activists organized a series of protests that summer to disrupt the filming, which they saw as contributing to gentrification and symbolizing the outsized power of capitalism and the media. Their efforts peaked on July 21 with a large, frenzied demonstration in front of the cast’s house. Chicago police arrested 17 protesters, some of whom in turn sued the city and MTV.

This is the tale of that eventful summer of 2001 in Wicker Park, in the words of those at the center of the action.

I. “What’s next, the Gap?”

▪ Ed “Edmar” Marszewski, cofounder of the counterculture zine Lumpen: Wicker Park was known for having one of the highest concentrations of artists in the city. Lots of people who lived there in the ’90s, mostly musicians, had to move out due to high rent. But you still had a lot of independent art spaces, like the notorious Lubinski Furniture building, with four floors of artist-run space and a theater on top run by James Bond. You’d walk around and pick up various fliers people made at CopyMax on Milwaukee.

▪ Liz Mason, clerk at Quimby’s Bookstore: I started at Quimby’s in May of 2001. I got the job because I sold my zine here, and I always joke that I harassed the store until they hired me. I remember the bike shop, Rapid Transit, was across the street. They had that overhanging bike out front with a wheel that would spin. You round the corner on Milwaukee Avenue and you’d see the Double Door and Myopic Books.

▪ Cecil Baldwin, aspiring actor: I’d just graduated from Bradley University and had moved to Chicago to start working in the theater and got a job at the Daily Grind, which was this coffee shop at the corner of Milwaukee, Damen, and North in the Flat Iron Building. There was a drag queen artist who lived there. She was a doorman for one of the dance clubs around the corner on the weekends.

▪ Part of the gentrification was that Wicker Park gained a sort of celebrity status via various things, like [the 2000 movie] But the change steamrolled everything. You can’t just destroy what was there without making some people sad, angry, and disenchanted. I remember