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.

The Narrators


Cecil Baldwin

Suhail Butt

Anthony Dominici

Aneesa Ferreira

Justyna Frank

Theo Gantt

Kenny Hull

Jose Lopez

Josh MacPhee

Ed Marszewski

Liz Mason

Edward McClelland

Rich Moskal

“Mancow” Muller

Jon Murray

Melinda Power

Bill Savage

Nato Thompson

Peter Wilson
 

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.
Justyna Frank
cofounder of Rapid Transit Cycle Shop
Part of the gentrification was that Wicker Park gained a sort of celebrity status via various things, like [the 2000 movie] High Fidelity. But the change steamrolled everything. You can’t just destroy what was there without making some people sad, angry, and disenchanted. I remember when the homegrown coffee shops were starting to close and people were saying, “Oh, Starbucks is coming in. What’s next, the Gap?” That was kind of like the worst curse that you could imagine.
Local architect Suhail Butt was tasked with designing the interior of the house for the Chicago cast — or, as he puts it, “elevating the theater of what this could be.” Photography: (Cast) Courtesy Bunim-Murray Productions; (Bar) Suhail Design Studio
Nato Thompson
artist
By that time, people figured Wicker Park was already gentrified, but it had a lot further to go. It was the early years of the battles against gentrification in U.S. cities, and I don’t mean to be silly, but it seemed like a battle you could win at the time.
Frank
cofounder of Rapid Transit Cycle Shop
Until 2001, 2002, we were kicking hookers off our doorstep literally every Saturday morning, and we had people freebasing under our fire escape in the back of the building. So it wasn’t all warm and fuzzy.
Jose Lopez
executive director of the Puerto Rican Cultural Center
The gentrification in Wicker Park really began in the mid-1970s. The white artists moving into the community helped raise the rents. It used to be West Town, but that had a bad reputation — that was a “Puerto Rican community.” So then it starts to be called Wicker Park.
Thompson
artist
You know how artists are always telling you neighborhoods are over when they’re really fun? Everyone’s like, “Wicker Park’s over.” But I was like, “OK, guys, but we’re always in Wicker Park, for the record.”
 

II.
“They were looking for a safe bet”

After an exhaustive search in various parts of the city, the team at Bunim/Murray Productions, which produced The Real World for MTV, settled on a spot in Wicker Park that happened to be the former site of Urbus Orbis, the beloved coffeehouse that had closed four years earlier.

Kenny Hull
Real World director
We had just completed Real World: New Orleans the season before, and because New Orleans is such an artistic community — interesting, gritty, and beautiful — the visuals were amazing. We wanted to keep that going, and we didn’t want to be in some skyscraper or in some brownstone in Lincoln Park. We found the sweet spot right at that intersection of North Avenue [and Winchester Avenue].
Peter Wilson
Real World line producer
We had looked at probably 100 different locations. At one point, we looked at R. Kelly’s old house.
Jon Murray
cocreator of The Real World and cofounder of Bunim/Murray Productions
The show had always featured the vitality and excitement of living in a city neighborhood. To some extent, The Real World helped create a desire for young people to live in cities, to get out of small towns, to go to a place where there was more diversity, where they could invent themselves and not feel the pressure of their parents. Wicker Park had all of that.
Anthony Dominici
Real World producer
There are seven cast members in the show, and the city is the eighth cast member, right? It’s the landscape, it’s the backdrop that everything is set against.
Rich Moskal
director of the Chicago Film Office
They wanted a Chicago look and feel. MTV wasn’t looking to be edgy. They may have said they were looking for something cool and hip, but ultimately, they were looking for a safe bet.
Edward McClelland
(then known as Ted Kleine), writer for the Chicago Reader
There were fancy restaurants with valet parking just a step away from the Real World house. They weren’t going to do this in Humboldt Park in 2000, you know?
 

III.
“I had to build something in two months that should have taken six”

Hull
Real World director
The build-out is pretty extensive. You have an architect come on. We customize the entire interior. Our goal is to make it unique and different from the previous houses, but also on brand with MTV — what young people would want, kind of a dream house.
Suhail Butt
interior designer and architect
The producers of the show had dinner at MOD [a celebrated restaurant in Wicker Park] and asked who designed that space. So they contacted me [about creating the Real World house]. Why wouldn’t I want to do it? I met the producers, who said they were meeting with another Chicago designer. The one they really wanted was Nate Berkus, before he became Oprah’s interior designer for the masses. I remember the last interview we had, he showed up in his Mercedes-Benz, I showed up in my old pickup truck.
Wilson
Real World line producer
Suhail was an incredibly talented artist and designed an incredibly unusual space, filled with incredible artwork. The elevator that came up through the bathroom let you see through the aquarium. He had walls that not only curved but were slanted and translucent, so when the builders came, they were confounded.
Butt
interior designer and architect
I ended up getting the job because I could build everything, source everything. I was local and down the street and had all these resources available. I wasn’t interested in designing an interior space, I was interested in designing for a television show, elevating the theater of what this could be. When I designed the bathrooms, the producers said, “Can you get two showerheads in there?” “Well, yeah, why?” You knew they were planning on these kids showing up in this new place, seeing a shower with two showerheads and there’s going to be sexual activity.
Wilson
Real World line producer
The night before we started filming, Suhail had been up for like two nights straight working, and he was about to kill us. The chairs at the counter were a little too high, you couldn’t fit your leg underneath, so he had to reweld like 10 chairs. I felt horrible for him.
Left: Roughly 300 people protested outside the Real World house on July 21, 2001. Right: Activists created a phony MTV flier to draw people to a previous demonstration.Photography: Courtesy of Josh MacPhee
Butt
interior designer and architect
I had to build something in two months that should have taken six months. The project was two floors, 2,000 square feet each — 5,000 square feet total if you count the control room. I had to have furniture, lighting, artwork. And they had no money. They just kept saying, “You’re going to be a big shot.” Wallpaper, furniture, art — I tapped everybody I knew who was edgy and looking to do something cool. I told people there’s no budget, but there’s an opportunity to be associated with Real World.
Wilson
Real World line producer
We had that elevator we had to get a temporary permit for. We had a hot tub on the third floor that we had a temporary permit for. We had to get a blanket permit for filming, which was unusual. But the city conformed to our request.
Moskal
director of the Chicago Film Office
In terms of a reality show shooting its entire season in Chicago, that was new for us. What we learned in a hurry was that any production, regardless of size, with cast and crew all living under one roof for an extended stay, raises issues that other productions don’t. Zoning codes, building permit concerns, and, what was particularly true in this case, what the community thinks of their new neighbors.
 
As the set was being built, producers started approaching local businesses to let them know they would be filming in the neighborhood and to ask for permission to shoot in their shops.
Hull
Real World director
We’d go down and knock on the doors and explain what we’re doing with a big smile and a “Welcome to our world, we’re coming into yours.” We had a love-hate relationship for a while because people were cautious and wary of us.
Wilson
Real World line producer
We said a little bit about what we were filming. We didn’t directly say “Real World,” but we weren’t entirely secretive, so they could probably put the pieces together. We got one or two noes, but for the most part people were pretty open to having the film crew in their business.
Baldwin
aspiring actor
Our bosses at Daily Grind came to us and said, “Hey, you perhaps have noticed that they’re setting up. We are one of the few Wicker Park–Bucktown neighborhood businesses that have given them permission to film in our shop. So if you want a job here, here’s a piece of paper saying, yes, you agree to have your likeness presented on MTV.” And I was like, “Sure, why not?”
 

IV.
“The cherry on top of how shitty the neighborhood was becoming”

As July 11 — the first day of primary filming — approached, the producers geared up for the logistics of a 24/7 show, with shifts of camera operators following the cast throughout the house and the city. But the Real World crew quickly realized this season would present new challenges.

Wilson
Real World line producer
Before we bring the cast in the house, before the clock starts running, we do a rehearsal the night before. We do it with a stand-in cast. We work out the bugs, and we walk them through as if they’re being introduced to this location for the first time. After the dress rehearsal was completed, there was a murder in the neighborhood, and the bodies were dumped in front of the building. So that night, we couldn’t go out the front door, and it was all cordoned off. It was a crime scene for a day and a half or something.
Bill Savage
writer and professor of English at Northwestern University
Do you remember how people found out [the filming] was going on? Two people were shot in the Burger King parking lot on Milwaukee and Wood, which is now a Walgreens. And the police who responded were doing private security for the Real World cast. People were like, “Wait, The Real World is filming here?”
 
The incident happened just after midnight on July 10. Two men were shot in a car outside that Burger King, which was three blocks from the Real World house. A third passenger drove them to the police officers who were blocking traffic for exterior filming. The two men later died.
Marszewski
cofounder of the counterculture zine Lumpen
Rents are going up, now The Real World is here. I remember there was a lot of discussion in the air about them filming here, because it was right down the street from [the Lumpen office]. MTV was still relevant. With this program amplifying the neighborhood, you created a moment of possible oversaturation. The Real World was pretty much the cherry on top of how shitty the neighborhood was becoming, when the entire place is commodified. And it’s when people were fed up. A few of us who were pissed off about it, we started the Free the Real World 7 committee. We’d hang out in a coffee shop, Earwax, Myopic, or Quimby’s, talk about what we were doing, write these ridiculous texts, hang fliers, and print full-page advertorials in the magazine.
Wilson
Real World line producer
Mancow, the radio guy, he mobilized some of his fans to come down and protest MTV and our being there. They had attached a white-noise box to a parking meter right in front of the building. And the building was cordoned off after this murder scene investigation was going on, and we couldn’t get rid of the white-noise box because they wouldn’t let us in the area. It was an obnoxious little thing to deal with. You could beat it up as much as you wanted, that thing wouldn’t stop. We had it there for two nights, and then we cut the thing and threw it in the trash.
Erich “Mancow” Muller
shock jock at Q101
I started hearing reports about what a rude group of entitled punks they were. The cast treated locals like garbage, like extras in their life stories. While they’re filming in bars, my listeners are being pushed off to the side. It pissed me off, so I said, “Screw ’em, let’s start messing with them.” We called it Fake World on the air, and I said, “Come on, guys, let’s fight back.” I think we started the ball rolling.
Theo Gantt III
Real World cast member
I didn’t know a lot about Chicago. I remember hearing about Cabrini-Green from the movie Candyman growing up, right? So Wicker Park, I had no idea. That was an interesting first couple of nights after we moved in, because they didn’t really like us too much.
Marszewski
cofounder of the counterculture zine Lumpen
Stores were boycotting. They wouldn’t allow the Real World or Viacom [MTV’s parent company] team to come in and shoot. They’d say “No MTV” in windows on shops up and down Milwaukee.
Mason
clerk at Quimby’s Bookstore
It was the mark of coolness whether you said yes or no to filming. Of course we [at Quimby’s] said no.
Mancow
shock jock at Q101
MTV sent me some Real World swag, mugs and T-shirts and that kind of thing. I remember throwing them out on air.
During one demonstration, artist and activist Josh MacPhee threw red paint at the front door of the cast’s house. Much of it had been removed by the next day. Photography: (Door) Stephen J. Carrera/ap; (Paint) Courtesy of Josh MacPhee
 

V.
“It was a beautiful chaos”

The filming attracted a coalition of artists and activists who took to the streets in a series of performance protests.

Josh MacPhee
artist
Thirty years in, the development train wasn’t getting turned around. None of us had any illusions around that. But because of the public contentiousness around that struggle, there was all this mythic lore from the past, of young Puerto Rican kids jumping across rooftops and throwing bricks down on developers’ cars when they were showing buildings. There was a mythos around the resistance.
Thompson
artist
The Department of Space and Land Reclamation [a weekend of anticapitalism protest stunts in Chicago that April] had been this poetic and political project. We were two years past the anti-WTO protests in Seattle. And that moment, called the alter-globalization movement, was very much where we were coming out of — that protest culture.
MacPhee
artist
In France, a group of these activists influenced by anarchism and Marxism and art theory occupied a TV station during a reality TV show and became part of the show and used it as a platform to try and dismantle the imagery being projected. There was also a group from the UK trying to free the cast of Big Brother.
Marszewski
cofounder of the counterculture zine Lumpen
Making a protest a spectacle in its own right was part of the vibe at the time. There was lots of creativity, like the Tute Bianche in Italy, who would dress up in inflatable outfits and bounce off the police.
MacPhee
artist
I remember at a DSLR meeting that someone came in and said their friend was DJ’ing an opening party for the show. And within a week, we rushed out a flier that said “Real World opening party July 14. We want you to be there.” It was printed on a color copier, which at the time looked slick and not homemade, even though it totally was. We added on that 10 people will get chosen to be extras on the show. The goal was to bring out as many people as possible, directly in front of the shooting location of the show, and create an embodied spectacle that would be far more compelling than what was being prepared for TV.
MTV producers commemorated the incident with a T-shirt they gave cast members when production wrapped. Photography: Theo Gantt III
Marszewski
cofounder of the counterculture zine Lumpen
It wasn’t like, “We’re protesting The Real World this week.” It was like, “Holy shit, we saw a flier, that’s hilarious.” Dozens of people walked up to the rear door of the Real World house with fliers asking to get in.
MacPhee
artist
The first protest we staged [on July 14], we took over the entire block, and the police just left us alone. Maybe a couple people got arrested. People lit fireworks, these militant anarcho-punks from Pilsen came up, it was a bricolage of all these communities coming together. It was a beautiful chaos.
Marszewski
cofounder of the counterculture zine Lumpen
There’s a video of me on the first weekend issuing forth political demands: “Take the Blue Line home. Leave your equipment for us so we can make something real with it. We want to take over the means of production.”
Gantt
Real World cast member
The biggest thing, man, was them throwing paint on the door. I was just like, “Why did you throw paint?” I would have got it if you tagged it or something. But it was just a random splatter of paint on the door.
MacPhee
artist
I threw the paint on the door. The police had penned us in, as sort of a safety valve to let off steam, and a couple of us thought we should up the ante to see what would happen. Someone had brought this cabinet and put it in the middle of the street, and inside of it were a few gallons of paint. So I rushed to the house and threw it at the door. And then the bouncers — MTV security — started beating me up, and then 20 people jumped on them and pulled me out and dragged me away. I was pretty bruised up.
Thompson
artist
There were a lot of people who came just for a party. Summer’s the time these things happen, you know what I mean? People are out of school. It’s like, “What are we going to do tonight? That Real World thing seems to be fun.” The first night was just a kind of experiment, and it worked. People enjoyed it. Everyone came away the first night feeling really like a victory had happened.
 

VI.
“We didn’t choose to be in this place”

Scattered demonstrations continued to spring up in front of the cast’s house.

MacPhee
artist
We only organized the first protest. Many of the other ones were self-organized. People just wanted to hang out.
Marszewski
cofounder of the counterculture zine Lumpen
I was there frequently with megaphones talking shit.
Wilson
Real World line producer
They were writing graffiti on our door: “EMPTV,” like it’s a soulless corporate thing messing with our neighborhood.
Aneesa Ferreira
Real World cast member
We had bricks thrown at us, people screaming at us the first week. Wow. Our neighbors really hate us.
Wilson
Real World line producer
After that brick came through the window, we put chicken wire on the other windows on the ground floor, where the offices and film crew worked, because someone could have gotten hit pretty bad.
Ferreira
Real World cast member
They would just shout shit for, like, forever. We’d be in the Jacuzzi. And then you’d just hear it. When are you guys going to stop? Don’t you have anything else to do? Anything?
Marszewski
cofounder of the counterculture zine Lumpen
A lot of people would bum-rush the cameras. They would scream at the actors, who were really pissy about it, really angry at the people making fun of them. They’d say we were just jealous, envious we weren’t on the show. It was pretty funny. It’s a shame we didn’t have social media at the time.
Ferreira
Real World cast member
We didn’t choose to be in this place. We agreed to be on the show, but we didn’t ask for all of these other things that came with it. We had jobs, but they didn’t pay us a lot. I wish [the protesters] would’ve known. We were also kind of struggling.
Hull
Real World director
We had a CPD officer with every crew that left the house. That was new. We didn’t have to do that in any other city before. It was a little more tense, but we couldn’t stop either.
Gantt
Real World cast member
I actually never felt like any of the people out there really wanted to harm us, I really didn’t. Maybe that was me being naive, 19 years old, and just excited to be in a new city, but I never felt scared.
Ferreira
Real World cast member
It didn’t alter my ability to get to know the neighborhood. I went out on my own all the time. I went across the street to the Local Grind every day. I went to Subterranean. I went to Red Dog. That’s where I met Veronica [her girlfriend during the season].
Dominici
Real World producer
As a punk rock kid, I got the ethos of where they’re coming from. Like, “Hey, you’re messing up our neighborhood.” But wait, there’s a Starbucks a block from us. We can’t really be gentrifying a place with a Starbucks in 2001.
McClelland
(then known as Ted Kleine), writer for the Chicago Reader
They seemed like a lot of college-educated people playing anarchist in the city. I think they just wanted what the people on MTV wanted: They wanted attention for themselves. It was almost like one faction of young gentrifiers accusing another faction of young gentrifiers of being more responsible.
 

VII.
“A wonderfully stupid, brilliant thing to take on”

Protests hit a fever pitch on July 21 with a demonstration organized by a coalition of various groups. Some 300 clamoring protesters would spill across North Avenue to the front of the house.

Thompson
artist
We started getting some news coverage in July, and that really encouraged a kind of energy. I think it became a flash point for people, seeing this as an entertaining but also on-camera way to demonstrate their irritation with what was happening in the neighborhood.
Mason
clerk at Quimby’s Bookstore
I remember protesters had somehow blocked off traffic. It almost had the same spirit of Critical Mass, the bike ride thing that would happen on Fridays.
Thompson
artist
I was writing with chalk on the ground, “What is real?” Simultaneously, the cast was just losing their minds constantly, occasionally opening the door and yelling something frantic. They kept feeding the beast, and everyone was laughing. But it was kind of going from fun to intense. There were plenty of people there when the cops showed up who were not backing down.
Mason
clerk at Quimby’s Bookstore
I remember someone in the building, they must have been a cast member, standing at the window, clearly trying to shout something back. Of course, nobody could hear him. The window was closed, and who’s going to listen? Someone on the street — I thought this was hilarious — someone goes, “We’re going to be here every night!” Of course, they weren’t there every night. The hilarity of it was just, “Really? You’re going to keep this going?”
Thompson
artist
We didn’t anticipate the cast having so little personality. They really played into it wonderfully. They were so confused and baffled and hurt, which made it all the more fun. Edmar was screaming, “We are here to deprogram you from your unreality! We have a safe house we will take you to” — or something to that effect.
Marszewski
cofounder of the counterculture zine Lumpen
At one point, we tried to “levitate” the building, like the Pentagon in ’67. We clasped hands and encircled the building. There were hundreds of people there.
Hull
Real World director
They made a human chain around the house. I think they got tired of doing it.
Savage
writer and professor of English at Northwestern University
I went down there with my bicycle. I’m not going to protest, I didn’t give a shit, but to check it out. The DJs with the speakers, the fist shakers, were all on North Avenue. I took the alley, parallel to North, and there’s nobody. The cast and crew that [the demonstrators] think they’re blockading in the building are going out the back doors. My instinct was, This was a display, not strategically thought out.
Thompson
artist
I think the cops got the call to just shut it down. And then they leave it to this gang tactical unit. So they grabbed anybody doing anything interesting and arrested them. I was one of the first ones. I was just in shock. They had military-like dudes there. And that’s what kind of freaked me out. I got put in jail, which was fine. It was eight of us. And we were called the Real World 8. It was only overnight. But nothing like a night in jail with some friends to feel like you’re real radicals, you know?
 
Eric Oswald
Chicago police officer (from arrest records of various protesters)
Arrestee knowingly and intentionally obstructed traffic flow after being given previous verbal commands to disperse, in addition to shouting phrases to show displeasure with the complainant’s television show, and doing such actions in such a manner as to alarm and disturb Mr. [Peter] Wilson, thereby breaching the peace.
Thompson
artist
My friends all thought it was a waste of time. There was real work happening in neighborhoods, and this was a stupid thing to take on. No, it was a wonderfully stupid, brilliant thing to take on. And it became more clear that it was brilliant because the city’s reaction was so insane and overblown that we clearly touched a nerve.
Marszewski
cofounder of the counterculture zine Lumpen
[The demonstrations] definitely died down by the end of summer. It is weird: Who protests a TV show, right?
 

VIII.
“I hope they don’t have a problem with me having to go to trial against MTV”

The arrested protesters — there were 17 in total — faced misdemeanor charges such as disorderly conduct and obstructing a police officer.

Melinda Power
defense attorney at West Town Law Office
I’d heard about the show, but I never watched it. I didn’t pay too much attention until the people who got arrested contacted me.
Thompson
artist
I had gotten a job as an assistant curator at Mass MoCA [Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art] right after the summer. And I had to fly back for my trial. I’m thinking, I hope they don’t have a problem with me having to go to trial against MTV.
Power
defense attorney at West Town Law Office
They wanted to fight the case. Similar to a lot, but not all, protest cases, they weren’t going to face serious consequences, and didn’t have any substantial records. I figured the cases would get thrown out. To the extent there was a clever legal maneuver, it was to say we wanted to go to trial. I think the city simply didn’t want to go to trial. We went to court several times pretrial to talk to the city’s attorneys, and they basically were like, “We don’t want publicity here. Let’s get it over with.”
 
The charges were dismissed on May 29, 2002. Only one defendant, Ian Helmrich, who claimed the police threw him headfirst against a plexiglass display case and a door, saw his case go to trial. He was found not guilty. In July 2003, 10 of those who had been arrested collectively sued the City of Chicago, Viacom, and MTV, as well as producers Dominici and Wilson, claiming they had acted “both individually, jointly, and in conspiracy” to cause “false arrest, pretrial detention, and malicious prosecution.”
Power
defense attorney at West Town Law Office
During the civil suit, my clients were kind of goofy, nice, easygoing, and they had conferences with this formal federal judge. Some of the defendants spoke from the heart about why they did what they did. Unfortunately, one guy said, “Oh, I didn’t have anything to do, so I just went down there.” But the judge actually thought it was pretty funny. And the truth is, in a weird way, that helped the judge see these are not bad people. He said, “Well, I think you guys should get this amount of money.” The case was settled, giving them $50,000 total to split. I think somehow Viacom and MTV conveyed to the city that they didn’t want to go ahead with the case. They thought it would create bad publicity.
Thompson
artist
I think everybody at Bunim/Murray was like, “There’s nothing to gain here by continuing with this trial. Fifty thousand dollars to make this go away? No problem.”
 

IX.
“All those people who were mad at us then, look at it now”

The show finished shooting in early November and began airing in January. It made no mention of the protests. The finale, which aired July 9, 2002, just shy of a year after filming started, drew an audience of 5.5 million, the most viewed installment of any season up to that point.

Murray
cocreator of The Real World and cofounder of Bunim/Murray Productions
The protests were a local issue. If there had been someone in the cast who got caught up in it, then, yes, we would have shown it.
Hull
Real World director
It wasn’t something that we wanted to put forward, honestly. It wasn’t what we were there to show. I think we didn’t want to come off like we were doing anything wrong. When 9/11 happened, we had a whole episode about that because it really affected their lives.
Gantt
Real World cast member
They created a shirt for us all. I still have it in my closet. It’s a picture of our front door with the paint they threw.
Dominici
Real World producer
The shirt said “We Had a Riot.”
Marszewski
cofounder of the counterculture zine Lumpen
It’s kind of great that it happened in our neighborhood, that we were media-savvy enough to understand what it meant and were against this media colonization, corporatization, and surveillance of our lives.
Thompson
artist
After 9/11, suddenly it was war on protest culture. It was like the ice age of the Patriot Act came swooping in. A really different mood swept through the country that really put a chill on the activist culture, and the fear of terrorism just ripped through the paradigm around the conversation of gentrification or neoliberalism and everything else.
Butt
interior designer and architect
Ultimately, I don’t think I got anything out of it. The producers asked, “Are you interested in working in Las Vegas? That’s the next season.” “Fuck no, I’m not working with you guys anymore.” Funny enough, the lighting designer for the show was hired by Donald Trump for his new show, The Apprentice. He asked me to come to New York and talk to the producers, but I didn’t get the job, which was probably good in hindsight.
Ferreira
Real World cast member
I had friends who lived in Chicago. So I went back to Wicker Park a couple years ago, and, I mean, that area is so different. They just built everything up around there. So all those people who were mad at us then, look at it now.
Moskal
director of the Chicago Film Office
Whether The Real World did anything to enhance the reputation of Wicker Park, I doubt it. I never felt anything shot in Chicago was out to fully capture Chicago as it truly was. Like they were going to get the real Wicker Park? Man, I don’t even know if Wicker Park knows what the real Wicker Park is.