[Landlord protest]

Documentation of attempts to maintain a block in Uptown Chicago.

00:14Copy video clip URL Footage taken out the front of a moving train, while folk music plays on the soundtrack. 

00:48Copy video clip URL Protestors march down a residential sidewalk carrying signs  reading “Save our buildings” and “No more vacant lots!”

01:39Copy video clip URL Chanting “No more vacant lots” the protestors confront “slumlord” Mr. Santani, who assures them that there is an explanation for each of their complaints but does not respond to any of them. The police stand by. Local news reporters record it. Santani gets aggressive, yelling about “the facts.”

04:18Copy video clip URL The channel 7 news reporter interviews one of the protestors who asserts that Santani has not cooperated with anyone to rehab or repair the building. He advocates not just for saving the building but for revoking Satani’s real estate license. 

05:48Copy video clip URL The chairman of the East Uptown Association, an organization of property owners on the 900 block of Windsor Ave, speaks to the videomakers about the situation and their attempts to rehab the building.

07:13Copy video clip URL Footage of the building’s exterior, followed by sandblasting the exterior to remove the graffiti that covers its walls. 

11:55Copy video clip URL One of the sandblasters discusses the financial, logistical, and aesthetic difficulties in cleaning the graffiti themselves. 

13:10Copy video clip URL More people try to remove graffiti from the front of their building while discussing the techniques they’re attempting.

14:40Copy video clip URL The videomaker discusses the graffiti removal with teenaged residents, who are ambivalent about it because the graffiti records the neighborhood’s history. 

15:33Copy video clip URL A white, mustachioed man discusses the process for developing and obtaining grants to fund the clean-up. 

16:39Copy video clip URL Image of a crumbling back porch, which we are told will be completely torn down and rebuilt. People explain the process for rebuilding back porches – which are dangerously dilapidated all over the city because of how they were constructed. 

18:14Copy video clip URL A young black woman who’s recently moved to the neighborhood discusses her problems with the area: vacant lots, trash, rats. She does love her apartment, however, and hopes to stay there for the rest of her life. 

20:05Copy video clip URL Exteriors of the neighborhood while someone observes the lack of landscaping in the front yards. One of the owners plants trees while discussing the ways in which the owners group and the tenants groups have been cooperating and the need for his fellow owners to maintain the outsides of their buildings to attract tenants.

23:18Copy video clip URL A meeting about Uptown Manor in which a man in a suit gives a speech about the need for “involvement” from owners and residents in Uptown. 

24:48Copy video clip URL A folk song: “If you don’t love your neighbor then you don’t love god.”

25:48Copy video clip URL A man wearing a “Wake’s Feed’ baseball cap discusses wages and his investment in his farm.