Through his “#BlackChicagoBeLike” YouTube series, Korporate highlights Black-owned businesses and changes attitudes as a social media influencer.

Chicago rapper Korporate’s DIY strategy to boost his exposure created a lane that has led to a variety of opportunities.

But there’s more to his popular “#BlackChicagoBeLike” videos than surface-level information — he’s speaking on a part of Chicago that isn’t glamorous by any means.

Korporate acts in, narrates and produces the videos where many of the actors are friends of his. They portray the South Sider going about his business when a plot twist sets him up for an adventure, and some have reached over a million views.

“Originally, the concept of producing content came about as a result of trying to execute a marketing strategy from my music; I pretty much started doing music first. And that came about for me starting with spoken word in high school,” said Donovan Price, who performs as Korporate. “I didn’t expect [the success]; it was just a concept that I was experimenting with as a result of having friends out of town. They always had difficulty with understanding me when we were in casual conversation. So that is when I realized that Chicago really does have its own dictionary.

“When I say Black Chicago, it’s actually not in regard to ethnicity, but more so in regard to the other side of Chicago like the black market. The Chicago that’s opposite of the Bean [Cloud Gate], the Magnificent Mile and the North Side.”

Korporate is as proficient at monetizing social media as the best of them — including the Kardashians and other Instagram models. Between YouTube (1.7 million subscribers), Twitter (22,000 followers), and Instagram (1.1 million followers), Korporate appears to move the needle at will.

“The influence is definitely a blessing,” said Korporate, a Corliss High School alumnus. “I understand that I have to influence; so you know every available opportunity that I have, I use it to put something on people’s minds. Even with narrated stories that I do, though they may be very entertaining and humorous, the most important part of those videos for me is the moral of the story.

“At the end of the day after all the fun and games, I want you to be able to take something away from the videos. … It’s more of a blessing when I take that influence and actually use it effectively.”

Korporate’s influence goes far beyond social media. In fact, he believes the message — on mental health, relationships, family — in his videos changes attitudes.

“Black men who are deep in the streets come up to me and say: ‘Man, you really influenced me to reevaluate how I operate on a day-to-day basis,’ ” said Korporate. “… I originally produced these videos for the sake of trying to push my music to another level, but I never would have thought it would come to the point where [the videos] actually saved lives.”

Anthony Vazquez/Sun-Times

Due to Jerk 48, Cloudz Smoke Shop and Chicago’s Home of Chicken & Waffles often being the backdrop in the videos, those Black-owned businesses say they’ve seen a bump in business due to their association with Korporate.

Korporate’s partnership with Jerk 48 and Cloudz Smoke Shop co-owners Jairus and Jamaya Brunner could land him in the ownership group when the husband-wife team opens another location.

“Me and Korporate have a relationship that has stretched over a five-, six-year term,” said Jairus Brunner. “Generally, we do four to five commercials with Korporate a year. Every quarter, we use social media as an outlet because a lot of kids don’t listen to the radio or watch TV anymore; everyone’s more YouTube- and social media-based.

“If you want to get your product out there, it’s a good way for good exposure, being synonymous with him. And now he has advertised for other businesses, [but] I think that [Jerk 48] is probably the one that’s most recognizable with Korporate himself.”

Anthony Vazquez/Sun-Times

And what’s next for Korporate? He recently released a new album and he plans to add an interactive component to his videos.

“For example, at the end of the video, there may be a scenario where I’m being interrogated by the police about a situation,” said Korporate. “And at the end of the video what’s going to make it interactive is that, let’s say I have the detectives at the table, and then I’m going to stop and look into the camera and be like: ‘What y’all want me to do? Y’all want me to keep it ‘100’ [honest] or keep my mouth closed? …. Drop in the comments what you want me to do.’ And whatever the majority of the comments say, that’s how the next video is going to be, and that’s the direction and it’s gonna go.”

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Police consent decree monitor Maggie Hickey and chef Kevin Hickey are dealing with their late father’s losses from Washington Federal Bank for Savings’s shutdown.

When federal regulators shut down Washington Federal Bank for Savings more than three years ago, it created financial headaches for two prominent Chicagoans whose late father lost about $800,000 when the Bridgeport bank collapsed.

Maggie Hickey is one of them. She’s a former federal prosecutor who’s now overseeing a consent decree for reforming the Chicago Police Department.

The other is her brother Kevin Hickey, a Bridgeport restaurant operator and award-winning chef.

The Hickeys — who haven’t been implicated in any wrongdoing — are handling the estate of John “Jack” Hickey, their late father. He was a longtime customer of and shareholder in the bank that held mortgages on his home and on The Duck Inn, his son’s critically acclaimed Bridgeport restaurant.

The father died in August 2019.

That was about 20 months after federal regulators closed Washington Federal and embarked on an investigation to unravel a “massive fraud scheme” at the clout-heavy bank.

Among those implicated: the late John F. Gembara, who was president and chief executive officer of the bank, which prosecutors say handed out loans to some people without any collateral or, in some cases, any expectation of being repaid. In December 2017, Gembara was found dead in a seated position, with his glasses on and a rope wrapped around his neck and the railing of a spiral staircase in the master bedroom of longtime bank customer Marek Matczuk’s $1 million home in Park Ridge. Days later, the bank was shut down. Gembara’s death was ruled a suicide.

Matczuk recently was charged with embezzling more than $6 million from Washington Federal.

The continuing investigation into the bank’s collapse has resulted so far in federal charges against 11 people, including Ald. Patrick Daley Thompson (11th), who represents Bridgeport and is charged with income-tax fraud and lying to federal regulators regarding loans he received from the bank.

And prosecutors say more people will be charged.

Among those who’ve been charged is a contractor who was a longtime bank customer and bought three properties from Hickey 25 years ago with loans from the bank.

After retiring from working at a paper company, Hickey dabbled in real estate. Between 1986 and 2013, he got 37 loans from the bank totaling about $1.85 million on 19 properties, including his home. That’s according to documents on file with the Cook County clerk’s office.

There’s been no indication that Hickey or his children had any role in the fraud scheme that toppled Washington Federal, whose string of bad loans prompted its shutdown and forced the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. to cover about $90 million in losses for the bank’s depositors.

Nader Issa / Sun-Times file

Asked about the bank and her father, Maggie Hickey responded by email: “You are correct that my dad lost money in the bank. I know that my dad was heartbroken when he learned of what went on at the bank.”

She declined to comment further.

Her brother pegged their father’s losses at $800,000, including money he said the elder Hickey invested as a shareholder. Kevin Hickey said they don’t expect to recover that money.

Aside from that loss to their father’s estate, Kevin Hickey said he has had to refinance two mortgages from Washington Federal that he got for his restaurant, which he operates in a building that was home to the Gembara family’s former tavern.

The Gembara and Hickey families share a long history. For generations, both families have operated prominent businesses in the tiny section of Bridgeport that’s tucked between the south branch of the Chicago River and busy Archer Avenue.

Joseph Gembara was 23 when he immigrated to Chicago from Poland in 1911. By around 1920, he had opened a corner bar at 2701 S. Eleanor St. — the building that’s now Kevin Hickey’s restaurant.

Cook County assessor’s office

The bar — called the Gem Bar Lounge — served food and drink to people who worked along the river. And the bar kept operating during Prohibition.

Gembara and his wife raised their seven children in an apartment behind the lounge.

At some point, Gembara became an investor in a building and loan association that had been founded in 1913 to serve Polish immigrants. The institution grew, ultimately evolving into Washington Federal Bank for Savings, which was run by Gembara’s son Emil Gembara and finally his grandson John Gembara.

Gembara’s bank set up shop at 2869 S. Archer Ave., a block north of the JJ Hickey Funeral Home, which already had been in the Hickey family for three generations by the time Jack Hickey ran it.

In 1963, Jack Hickey bought a small home on Eleanor Street where he and his wife raised their two children a block south of the Gem Bar.

In interviews about his restaurant, Kevin Hickey has warmly recalled playing video games inside the tavern when it was owned by one of the founder’s sons, Eugene “Herman” Gembara, who also served on the Washington Federal board of directors.

Pat Nabong / Sun-Times file

After John Hickey and his wife got divorced in the early 1980s, he began buying and selling property near his home. These deals all were financed with Washington Federal loans signed by Emil Gembara and his children — John Gembara and Janice Gembara Weston.

Hickey sold two of those properties to Miroslaw Krejza, a contractor, on Nov. 4, 1996, and a third one on July 1, 1997, for a total of $95,000. Krejza also obtained loans from Washington Federal. He then flipped the homes, selling them to new buyers.

Like Hickey, Krejza was a longtime customer of the Gembara bank. A federal grand jury indicted Krejza earlier this year, charging him with helping embezzle about $2.8 million from the bank between 2004 and the time of the bank’s collapse in December 2017.

The grand jury also indicted Krejza’s brother-in-law. Boguslaw Kasprowicz was charged with helping embezzle more than $14 million from the bank.

Pat Nabong and Ashlee Rezin Garcia / Sun-Times

Gembara’s bank financed homes Kasprowicz built in Wicker Park. Kasprowicz sold the homes, but federal officials have said the loans from Washington Federal never were repaid.

Kasprowicz once worked as a bricklayer for Gembara’s friend and customer Robert M. Kowalski, a lawyer and developer who has been charged in the embezzlement scheme.

It’s unclear how long Jack Hickey had been a shareholder in the Gembara bank. Kevin Hickey says the family has been unable to find any paperwork regarding his father’s investment.

Jack Hickey isn’t mentioned in annual reports Washington Federal Bank filed with federal regulators. Those reports required the bank to identify only people who owned at least 5% of the stock — John Gembara, his sister Janice Gembara Weston and his mother-in-law Rosemary Komperda, who had been dead for years when those reports were filed — as well as any bank officials who owned stock.

Those bank officials who also were shareholders were: Gembara; his sister; George Kozdemba, a retired employee of the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago, who replaced Eugene Gembara on the bank board; William Mahon, a deputy commissioner with the Chicago Department of Streets and Sanitation Commissioner; and Lester Stepien, comptroller of a meatpacking plant.

The bank’s annual reports disclosed the names of people who owned about 65% of Washington Federal’s stock. So about one-third of the stock was owned by people whose names haven’t been made public.

In 1997, the annual report disclosed that John Gembara’s brothers Michael Gembara and Robert Gembara also owned stock, as did an aunt and uncle who since have died.

Eugene Gembara — who was a precinct captain for the 11th Ward Regular Democratic Organization that’s been run by the late Mayor Richard J. Daley’s family for decades — died in 2009.

Kevin Tanaka / Sun-Times file

Four years later, on Nov. 14, 2013, his widow June Gembara sold the family bar for $322,500 to Kevin Hickey, who got a $236,000 loan the next day from the Gembara family bank.

Kevin Hickey, who previous was executive chef for The Four Seasons Hotels, had been working as a chef for Chicago’s Rockit Ranch Productions when he decided to open a restaurant in his old neighborhood, just down the street from his father’s home. Named after a restaurant run by his great grandmother, Hickey opened The Duck Inn in 2014, attracting diners from across Chicago and the suburbs to a neighborhood that wasn’t known then for upscale dining.

When federal regulators closed the bank on Dec. 15, 2017 — 12 days after John Gembara was found dead inside Matczuk’s home — the FDIC took control of nearly all outstanding loans the bank had, including two on The Duck Inn, one on Jack Hickey’s home and another on an apartment building he owned.

Pat Nabong / Sun-Times file

The FDIC sold those four Hickey loans to other mortgage companies in late 2018.

Soon after, Kevin Hickey repaid his original loans from Washington Federal with new mortgages from Beverly Bank.

Jack Hickey was 79 when he died on Aug. 24, 2019. He left Maggie Hickey and Kevin Hickey to settle his estate, which included his home and eight other properties.

The estate has yet to be settled. It’s being handled by an attorney in the Loop law offices of Schiff Hardin, the firm where Maggie Hickey is a partner.

Five months before her father died, Maggie Hickey was appointed by U.S. District Judge Robert M. Dow Jr. as the court monitor for Chicago police reforms spelled out in a federal consent decree that resulted from a Justice Department investigation that followed the fatal shooting of Laquan McDonald as he was walking away from a Chicago cop.

The consent decree focuses on areas including police use of force, training and records.

It’s the latest high-profile appointment for Maggie Hickey, who was chief of staff for former U.S. Sen. Peter Fitzgerald, a Republican firebrand who orchestrated the appointment of Patrick Fitzgerald as the top federal prosecutor in Chicago, with a mandate to attack corruption that led to the convictions and imprisonment of former Govs. George Ryan and Rod Blagojevich.

Maggie Hickey later worked as a federal prosecutor in Chicago under Patrick Fitzgerald and also has been tapped to investigate sexual harassment allegations within the office of then-Illinois House Speaker Michael J. Madigan. She also was the state executive inspector general under former Gov. Bruce Rauner.

It’s unclear whether federal prosecutors have talked with their former colleague regarding the collapse of Washington Federal Bank or her father’s transactions with the Gembara family.

READ SUN-TIMES’ WASHINGTON FEDERAL INVESTIGATION

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Moon Alert

There are no restrictions to shopping or important decisions. The moon is in Capricorn.

Aries (March 21-April 19)

Oh joy! Today you will enjoy the beauty of your daily surroundings as well as the company of neighbors, siblings and relatives. You feel someone cares about you, which is why you want to tell them that they matter to you, as well.

Taurus (April 20-May 20)

As the financial wizard of the zodiac, make the most of your money-making ideas today! You will attract money and favorable financial situations to you, especially something from the past, perhaps something that didn’t pan out before.

Gemini (May 21-June 20)

Today the sun in your sign and your ruler Mercury is lined up with fair Venus. Yay you! This stimulates your interest in art, music and poetry, and make you eager to share your appreciation of beauty with someone.

Cancer (June 21-July 22)

Solitude in beautiful surroundings will be a soothing escape for you. (Even 15 minutes will be wonderful.) You will feel replenished by physical beauty or beautiful ideas. You might also think about a secret crush you have on someone. Hmmm.

Leo (July 23-Aug. 22)

Today you’re quick to see the big picture and share your ideas with friends or groups. You might see a better way to relate to others, particularly if this is the goal of your group. You will also enjoy dealing with younger people, especially if they’re involved in the arts.

Virgo (Aug. 23-Sept. 22)

A conversation with a boss, parent, VIP or a member of the police will be friendly and warm today. It will be apparent that you are on the same page and have the same concerns. Someone might seek out your advice about how to make something look better. ‘Let’s paint it!”

Libra (Sept. 23-Oct. 22)

Because your appreciation of beauty is heightened today, you will enjoy galleries, museums or looking at art online. (Wikiart.org is a wonderful way to spend 20 minutes!) Some of you also will explore scientific studies. “Please pass the NaCl.”)

Scorpio (Oct. 23-Nov. 21)

Discussions about how to share something will favor you today. (You’ll be laughing all the way to the bank.) This is a good time to explore dealing with shared property, taxes, debt and insurance matters. Meanwhile, romance will be passionate and affectionate. Be still my beating heart.

Sagittarius (Nov. 22-Dec. 21)

You might surprise yourself at how articulate you are when you are talking to someone close to you today — a partner, spouse or close friend. It will be easy for you to tell them how much you care for them and how happy you are that they are in your life. (After that, you can borrow a fifty.)

Capricorn (Dec. 22-Jan. 19)

You will be productive in your job today. Even your health will feel better because you have a better sense of balance in everything you do, not just physically but intellectually. You will see what needs to be done and what needs to be avoided.

Aquarius (Jan. 20-Feb. 18)

This is a fabulous day for you, especially if you work in the arts because you are in touch with your creative muse. However, you will also enjoy teaching or sharing playful activities with kids. Sports will appeal. You will be affectionate with friends and lovers. Sweet!

Pisces (Feb. 19-March 20)

You will do what you can to make where you live more attractive today because this will please you. However, it will also please you to be warm and affectionate with family members and let them know how much you care. (They’ll lap it up. Everyone wants to know they are loved.)

If Your Birthday Is Today

Singer, songwriter, actress Gladys Knight (1944) shares your birthday. You are friendly, assertive and many of you are very stylish. You know how to make an impression. You are knowledgeable, versatile and multitalented, which allows you to pursue many different paths with success. This year, it’s time to build alliances with others because these connections will help you achieve your goals. Let teamwork and cooperation with others be your theme.

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Beer preview of Lagunitas’ StereoHopic series, an IPA with just two hops in each “Volume.”Read More

Troy McAllister, the only Public League coach to win a state football championship, has left Phillips to take over at Sandburg. 

Troy McAllister, the only Public League coach to win a state football championship, has left Phillips to take over at Sandburg.

“It was a unique opportunity at Sandburg,” McAllister said. “It’s a Class 8A program playing in what is probably the toughest public school conference in the state. There’s never a good time to leave but for me it felt like the right moment to make a move and push my professional career.”

McAllister was 94-28 in 11 years with the Wildcats. He led Phillips to the Class 4A state championship in 2015-16 and the Class 5A state championship in 2017-18. Those are the only state football titles in Public League history.

McAllister won a national coaching award sponsored by Gatorade in 2018. The Phillips program has been the face of the Public League for nearly a decade. McAllister says he’s leaving the team in good hands. Joe Winslow, the Wildcats’ offensive coordinator for the last 10 years, will take over as head coach.

“Joe was a city championship quarterback at Dunbar,” McAllister said. “He has earned this and he deserves it. He’s going to do great things at Phillips.”

The past year was emotional and challenging for every football program in the area, but even more so for Phillips. Longtime defensive coordinator Mike Larson, one of McAllister’s best friends, died in January.

“You try to put aside the emotions when you make decisions but obviously everything that has transpired in the past year takes a toll and changes what you do,” McAllister said. “The loss of [Larson] put things in perspective and sometimes you have to take advantage of opportunities that present themselves.”

Sandburg was 1-5 last season under coach Scott Peters, who resigned. The Eagles were once a powerhouse, but haven’t qualified for the playoffs in five years.

“Troy’s commitment to cultivating positive experiences for student athletes was evident throughout our process,” Sandburg Principal Derrick Smith said. “He values developing players’ football skills, but he has also designed impressive learning opportunities that support character development and real-world life skills.”

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Like ‘Booksmart,’ the sharp-witted film boasts breakthrough performances and a funny, feminist spin.

A painfully awkward sexual encounter. An impromptu road trip. A tested friendship. No, the outlines of Natalie Morales’ “Plan B” aren’t revolutionary. This is the tried and true framework of the high-school comedy. But teen comedies, almost as a rule, are made by their leads. And with Kuhoo Verma and Victoria Moroles, “Plan B” is overwhelmingly a winner.

Morales’ film seems destined to be compared to Olivia Wilde’s “Booksmart,” which arrived in theaters almost exactly two years ago. Both are helmed with a veteran filmmaker’s sense of timing by actors-turned-first-time-directors. (Morales has been a familiar face in film and TV for the past 15 years.) Both feature a pair of breakthrough performances. And both bring a funny, feminist spin to a traditionally boyish and often boorish movie genre.

But “Plan B” is it’s its own thing. It has a comic rhythm and perspective of its own. And while most teen comedies have gone for packed movie theaters, “Plan B” — more scruffily indie, more all-the-way R-rated — is only streaming (on Hulu).

Verma, who had a small role in “The Big Sick,” stars as Sunny, the high-achieving, low-self-esteem daughter of demanding Indian American parents. Her best friend Lupe (Moroles, from MTV’s “Teen Wolf” and the Disney Channel’s “Liv and Maddie”) is more self-possessed than most adults. But her brash style and two-tone hair are regularly ridiculed by her more conservative father. Both Sunny and Lupe are outsiders in small-town South Dakota, where their ethnicities are only foggily understood. Mostly, they shrug it off. When one boy, intending a compliment, tells Verma she’s “got that whole Princess Jasmine thing going,” she sheepishly notes that it’s the wrong ethnic group, but “it’s kind of the closest princess we’ve got so I’ll take it.”

The sharp-witted script, by Prathi Srinivasan and Joshua Levy, is best in the movie’s first half, set largely around high school and, as the genre’s laws decree, at a party thrown by Sunny when her parents are away. If you think you’ve seen enough Sex Ed scenes by now, you’ll want to make an exception for one with Rachel Dratch as an in-over-her-head teacher, helpless when her students take a car metaphor for virginity and run with it. The party scene, too, has its tropes (a poorly concocted punch) and its unique touches. Sunny, feeling spurned by her crush (played by Michael Provost), ends up in the bathroom instead with Kyle (Mason Cook), a sincere kid into both magic and Jesus — and to Sunny about the most regrettable person in South Dakota to lose her virginity to.

The next morning, panic sets in and Sunny needs a morning-after pill. Yet when Lupe (speaking for the too-ashamed Sunny) asks the pharmacist (Jay Chandrasekhar, the comedy director-actor of “Super Troopers”), he declines on the basis of the state’s “conscience clause,” which gives pharmacists a right of refusal due to religious beliefs.

Here, “Plan B” doesn’t turn sober, by any means. There are still scenes to come involving a drug dealer’s pierced penis, an accidental dose of speed and a stolen car. But the film’s inherent set-up is, like the comic equivalent to “Never Rarely Sometimes Always,” a poignant commentary on the hurdles to abortion. Sunny and Lupe drive Sunny’s mom’s Honda minivan to a Planned Parenthood in Rapid City, a three-hour trip that turns longer and more surreal than most Dakota drives. Here, “Plan B” sometimes drifts off course, but all of their adventures are a reminder why the typical conquests of the teen comedy are more complicated for young women.

But “Plan B” never turns didactic. Pointed as the message of “Plan B” is, nothing supersedes just letting these two characters — traditionally bit players at best in high-school comedies — be themselves. They’re a pair of the most authentic 17-year-olds lately seen at the movies, something owed very definitely to two stars in the making in Verma and Moroles. Verma is remarkably natural and soulful, while the so, so good Moroles swaggers through the film as a creature all her own. She’ll even convince you that Christian trap music can rock.

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U.S. District Judge Andrea Wood ordered Venkatesh Bhogireddy taken into custody shortly after jurors convicted him on five of six counts.

A federal jury convicted a Chicago man Thursday of a chilling plot to pay a hit man $8,000 to murder his wife’s uncle amid a contentious divorce.

Venkatesh Bhogireddy spent the last week on trial at the Dirksen Federal Courthouse, accused of trying to have the uncle murdered by someone he thought was a hit man — but who turned out to be an undercover ATF agent.

Bhogireddy even sent the undercover agent to New Jersey to conduct surveillance, and he told him to “plan, plan, plan.”

U.S. District Judge Andrea Wood ordered Bhogireddy taken into custody shortly after jurors convicted him on five of six counts. Before he was taken out of the courtroom, his lawyer asked the judge if Bhogireddy could hug his mother.

The judge gave Bhogireddy permission only to turn around and say goodbye. Bhogireddy turned and nodded.

Meanwhile, Assistant U.S. Attorney Jason Julien told the judge that Bhogireddy faced a likely sentence of at least 17 years in prison.

Prosecutors offered jurors multiple audio and video recordings of Bhogireddy as he plotted with the person he knew as “Joe.” That person turned out to be ATF special agent Andrew Karceski, who testified about his various meetings with Bhogireddy, including in a Joliet warehouse.

Jurors could see Bhogireddy meeting with the agent in a room decorated with what appeared to be a picture of Al Pacino in the movie “Scarface.” A water bottle, beer can and Crown Royal bag could be seen on a desk in one meeting while music played in the background.

“I cannot look guilty,” Bhogireddy said in another meeting in June 2019.

Bhogireddy reached out to an acquaintance in May 2019 looking for someone who could “take care of a problem” for him for money, court records show. That person called law enforcement, and he was told to have Bhogireddy call Karceski.

The men first met at the warehouse in Joliet on June 6, 2019. That’s where Bhogireddy explained he’d been having problems with his wife. He said she had been acting “crazy” and accused him in court of doing things to their children. Bhogireddy said he suspected his wife’s uncle in New Jersey had been behind the accusations made by his wife.

When the agent asked Bhogireddy whether he wanted the uncle hurt or killed, Bhogireddy said any injury to the uncle should put him in a “coma.” He agreed to pay the agent $8,000, and he even sent Karceski to New Jersey for the purpose of studying the uncle’s movements.

The men finally met at La Mex restaurant in Joliet in October 2019. When Bhogireddy arrived, records show he immediately handed Karceski a wad of cash and said, “That’s two grand.” Bhogireddy said he wanted it “done” and made to look like an accident.

“Like accident dead?” Karceski asked.

Bhogireddy replied, “yeah, yeah.”

Karceski told Bhogireddy he’d been thinking about pushing the uncle in front of a subway train. Bhogireddy left the meeting but soon walked back to the table and said, “The train thing is good.”

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PITTSBURGH — What a difference a month makes.

The Cubs were reeling the last time they left Pittsburgh in April and after dropping two of three games against the bottom-feeder of the NL Central, appeared to be headed toward some serious changes this summer if things did not improve.

But seven weeks later, not only did they take care of business with a sweep of the Pirates, but the team’s outlook has also started to change as they continue to trend upward.

“These guys kind of found who they are and kind of settled into the season after what went on last year,” manager David Ross said. “I think I think we figured some things out as well. I think you know, some things have gotten settled down in the bullpen and the starters have gotten back to who they are. I mean, it really is a complete turnaround in almost every area.”

The Cubs are now tied for first place in the NL Central and despite not being at full strength health-wise, they’ve now gone 15-7 in May and won six of their last seven series.

When the team returns to Chicago, they’ll be greeted by the largest crowd at Wrigley Field since September 2019, as the team will increase capacity to 60%.

“It’s fun,” Cubs president Jed Hoyer said at PNC Park. “Even with the capacity we’ve had [at 25%] it’s been a huge difference from last year. And I think 60%, there’ll be a ton of buzz in there.”

The increase in capacity means an increase in revenue, and after being in wait-and-see mode to determine the team’s financial situation, the larger crowds create some new possibilities.

The Cubs have been viewed as a potential seller since the offseason and as things currently sit with MLB trade season approaching, they may be in a position to be a buyer, if the team’s success continues.

“As far as flexibility, I think we’ve had these projections for a little bit and feel like we’re a bit ahead of schedule,” Hoyer said. “I think there’s definitely flexibility to make moves in-season if the right thing presents itself.”

The Cubs have played their best baseball of the season over the last four weeks and now sit a season-high five games over .500 with June just a few days away.

And with some of the team’s recent injuries and now seeing their weaknesses, the Cubs have some areas of need where they could look to improve with an addition.

The last season’s impact on the revenue around the game has been well-documented with few teams doing much in terms of spending. But with most MLB parks at least 50% capacity, the financial outlook has come as a surprise.

“I think everyone in baseball probably is a little bit,” Hoyer said. “I think that the vaccine rollout probably went a little better than everyone anticipated, and therefore, increased capacities are probably moving a little faster than we had anticipated, which is a great thing. And so yeah, I think it’s fair to say we’re a little bit ahead of schedule with those [financial] projections.”

As things currently stand, the Cubs are now heavily in the thick of things in the NL Central. Each team in the division has a strength, but they’re also flawed, which may be an added benefit for the Cubs.

While the Cubs’ upcoming series against the Reds and NL West-leading Padres next week with a west coast trip looming next week, there’s no denying their groove right now. With a few players returning from the injured list in the coming weeks, it’s not unrealistic to see the Cubs pick their lane if the good baseball continues.

“We’re playing with an edge right now,” Ross said. “That comes from confidence. That comes from guys executing in the moment and coming through. … All the areas of importance have picked up.”

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The long-awaiting reopening of 22 city beaches on Friday lifts our spirits as it hints to us that Chicago summers are coming back.

Because of COVID-19, Chicago’s celebrated beaches haven’t been open to the public since Sept. 2, 2019, which seems so long ago. Wading or swimming along miles and miles of sandy shoreline feels like a distant memory.

But now the signs of summer are around us. After a year of hiatus, Buckingham Fountain’s spectacular displays are back. Navy Pier began a phased reopening on April 30. Strolling along the city’s Riverwalk beckons us. Lollapalooza will return to Grant Park in August.

Chicago summers are what make it worth enduring The Hawk as it blasts us with winter’s icy gusts. Summers are why we put up with autumns that turn frigid too soon and springs that are so reluctant to emerge from overcast skies and slushy sidewalks.

Summer in Chicago feels like a season-long holiday. Music, street fairs and festivals — and their accompanying aromas of varied and sumptuous food — brighten almost every neighborhood. Diners enjoy sidewalk cafes. Chicagoans wander through art fairs and farmer’s markets. Kayakers paddle along the North Branch of the Chicago River. Rooftop dining offers panoramic views of the city. Artists and organizations perform around the city in Night Out in the Parks. SummerDance brings music and dancing. You can picnic in a park or walk through the neighborhoods and get tacos or barbecue or pierogi or hang out to watch the Sox or Cubs in a bar, where the beers are cheaper than in the ballpark.

Illinois hasn’t yet beaten COVID-19. On Thursday, the state announced 891 new cases and 42 more deaths. But 66% of adult Illinoisans have received at least one shot of a vaccine, and the state and city are loosening restrictions.

Enforcement of beach closings was, shall we say, less than aggressive. But now beachgoers can frolic in the water again without worrying about running afoul of the law. They can take in the sights that amaze tourists: expanses of blue water or wavy days set against a city skyline, sailboats in the distance and cyclists, joggers and strollers enjoying the lakefront trails. Lifeguards will be back.

The beaches are open. Summers are returning. It’s a moment Chicago long has awaited.

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