Eric Billups Memorial, Piping Plovers Return to Chicago

Dozens of balloons lifted over Woodlawn on April 16 as family and friends gathered to remember Eric Billups, a 16-year-old fatally shot the day before at a bus stop at 6300 S. Stony Island Ave., just steps from Hyde Park Academy High School.

Billups was the third Hyde Park Academy student killed in a single month. Three students dead in thirty days. The losses have shaken the South Side school community and drawn fresh attention to the dangers students face simply commuting to class, a routine act that has become anything but routine along certain stretches of Stony Island.

“This neighborhood has been hurting for a long time, and our kids keep paying the price,” one Woodlawn resident said at Thursday’s memorial gathering, according to Block Club Chicago’s coverage of the week’s events.

Grief isn’t the only thing moving through Chicago this week.

At Montrose Beach in Uptown, a pair of piping plovers named Pippin and Imani returned on April 14 and 15, their small wings carrying them back to one of the few freshwater nesting spots they consistently choose year after year. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service lists the Great Lakes population of piping plovers as endangered, with breeding pairs numbering in the dozens. Montrose has become one of the most watched stretches of lakefront in the country during nesting season, drawing birders from across the Midwest who camp out near the water’s edge with cameras and spotting scopes.

Pippin bathed in lake water the afternoon he arrived. Simple as that.

Meanwhile, a few miles south in Washington Park, something quieter but equally promising took shape at the Fossil Lab, where community members gathered April 14 for a Scitopia event surrounded by actual fossils. The lab is part of a broader push to bring a science center for teenagers to Washington Park, led by what organizers have called the “Indiana Jones of Paleontology.” The project aims to give South Side teens direct access to scientific inquiry and professional mentors, filling a gap that has long existed between the city’s resource-rich lakefront institutions and neighborhoods further west and south. The Chicago Park District oversees Washington Park, where 370 acres of green space have anchored the neighborhood since the 1870s.

On the Northwest Side, workers with Wheel Fun Rentals were spotted April 13 running maintenance checks on swan boats near the Humboldt Park lagoon, getting the fleet ready for spring rentals. It’s a small but reliable sign that warmer months are actually coming.

Not every scene from the week was quiet. In Broadview on April 11, protesters gathered outside the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement processing center and launched sex toys into the air as part of what organizers called “Operation Dildo Blitz.” Hundreds turned out. The protest drew a mix of immigration rights activists and residents from surrounding Cook County suburbs who said they wanted to make their opposition to federal enforcement actions visible in a way that couldn’t be ignored.

In the Lower West Side, the Chicago Animal Care and Control facility at 2741 S. Western Ave. hosted something far gentler. Jillian Pain, owner of Oracle + Alchemy, performed a sound bath for dogs on April 3, using resonant tones to calm animals that staff said show measurable signs of stress from shelter life. Pain told staff the technique works on the nervous system directly, cutting through the barking and anxiety that makes long shelter stays harder on animals and workers alike.

Over in Lakeview, Whitney LaMora and Zoe Schor posed for portraits at Fathom, a new queer cocktail bar at 1622 W. Belmont Ave. The bar, from the team behind Dorothy, opened its doors in early April. Belmont has long been a center of queer life on the North Side, and Fathom adds to a stretch of the street that has welcomed LGBTQ businesses for decades.

The week’s images together trace a city that doesn’t move in one direction at once. Balloons rising over Woodlawn. Plovers landing at Montrose. Fossils laid out for teenagers in Washington Park who don’t always get told that science belongs to them too. Chicago gave all of it in seven days.