Outside the Arts Incubator in Washington Park, June 2013. (Photography by Bonnie Trafelet, courtesy UChicago Arts)
Meditations on a theme
Free yoga at the Arts Incubator in Washington Park.
I don’t know where the Arts Incubator is. I can’t find it. I know it’s at 301 E. Garfield Boulevard—an even two miles from my apartment, nine minutes by car—but like most Hyde Parkers, I rarely cross to the far side of Washington Park. I think I go visit my relatives in Colorado more often. I drive too far, turn around. The building, on the corner of Garfield and Prairie just past the Green Line tracks, is not as obvious as I had expected. It’s white terra cotta, two stories, and looks like innumerable other turn-of-the-century commercial buildings in Chicago. Next to the gleaming white Arts Incubator gallery is a shuttered currency exchange. Next to that is a shuttered Harold’s Chicken.

I’m not here to see art; I’m here to take yoga. In July Chaturanga Seeds—a collaborative program between Hyde Park’s Chaturanga Holistic Fitness and the Washington Park Consortium—started offering yoga and Pilates classes at three sites: the Arts Incubator, Coppin AME Church, and Coppin House Apartments. The classes, which last six weeks, are free; students are also welcome to make donations. “With a family poverty rate of 51 percent (the second highest in the city),” Chaturanga’s website explains, “Washington Park residents commonly lack access to the health-enhancing, stress-reducing, and self-empowering practices taught at Chaturanga.”

“Yoga is really expensive—prohibitively so for some people,” says teacher Julia Tobiska. “We wanted to bring the benefits of yoga to the communities surrounding Hyde Park who otherwise wouldn’t have access.” Tobiska, who has been teaching for a year and a half, recently completed a course in yoga for trauma survivors. She’s also the music performance programming coordinator for the music department. I wasn’t sure how many people would be in a yoga class held at 10 a.m. on a Tuesday. The answer, surprisingly, is 20: 15 women, four men, and a preteen girl whose manicure is better than mine. One of the men comes into the room singing. It’s avery r. young, performance poet; a 2012-13 artist in residence, he has a studio on the ground floor. (He sings all the time, Dara Epison of the University’s Office of Civic Engagement explains later; her office is in the building, so she would know.) I unroll my mat. The view from the second-floor space is open and peaceful. Across the street, a vacant lot is reverting to prairie. A few blocks away, you can see the neighborhood’s most beautiful and famous building, the Schulze Baking Company plant, listed on the National Register of Historic Places. It closed in 2004. Tobiska begins the class with gentle neck stretches. Pull your neck to the right with your right hand, then massage your neck with your left, she says: “Give your neck some love.” She leads us through a series of Sun Salutations, equally gentle and slow, in the room’s pleasantly arctic air conditioning. The windows face west; the sun is in the east, behind us, but it’s overcast anyway. We extend our arms outward in Warrior Two. I look more closely at the apartment building just past the empty lot. Originally each floor had a grand, arched picture window; at some point someone bricked them up and put in tiny vinyl windows instead. For security? To conserve heat? Out of sheer contempt for both the tenants and aesthetics? I can’t even remember the last time I took yoga. Yoga shouldn’t be a luxury, but it is. At Chaturanga, drop-in classes cost $18, which is typical. You also have to have time, or yet more money: in my case, an additional $10 an hour for babysitting. I live three blocks from Chaturanga, on the corner of 55th and Lake Park. And I don’t go. The class ends. My neck feels loved; indeed, so does my entire body and spirit. I walk out of the shiny, perfect Arts Incubator onto the hot street. I walk past the currency exchange and the Harold’s. I drive back to Hyde Park.