Over the past five months, small businesses in America have been undergoing a mass extinction event.

Bars are closed, restaurants are half empty, and retail is shuttered.

Full blocks are slipping away.

I wanted a sense of how this is playing out in the city I live in, Chicago,

not the one-off story of a beloved bar, not the frightening toll in national statistics. I wanted

the story of one block. So I went to 75th Street in the Chatham neighborhood in the heart of

Chicago's Southside.

This part of the South Side is really pretty. There are huge street trees, flowers on the steps of the bungalows, brick two flats. Al Capone used to live in one of them. Many corners have

signs from block clubs, setting the rules of the road. No loud music, no car repair, watch out for children playing.

Even in middle-class parts of the south side, commercial corridors have struggled. Redlining, big box stores, job loss, and black flight have left them full of vacancies.

There are signs for businesses that have been gone so long their phone numbers don't have area codes.

Signs for furniture stores, nurseries, food markets, stores that sold beepers.

Which is what has long made this stretch of 75th Street, just east of South Michigan Avenue, stand out,

and what makes it stand out now, even during the pandemic.

There's a handful of hair salons and barbershops.

There's a dentist and a daycare.

There's a cycling gym, where one day I visit, the DJ is wheeling bikes onto the sidewalk for afternoon classes.

I play a little bit of everything.

House music, hip-hop, R&B.

There's a cult favorite vegetarian joint, Zolvege, which always has a line inside,

and a famous barbecue joint, Lem's, which always has a line outside.

Yes, can I have a large tip, extra mouth sauce, and then extra mouth sauce on the side? There's nothing else. That's all. There are two dry cleaners where the pressed uniforms of Chicago police and transit workers hang under plastic, and a tailor who says online ordering suits him just fine. Yeah, it's going to keep good. It's never going to stop because there's nothing you can buy.

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