In May 2022, 16-year-old Seandell Holliday was shot and killed near the Bean during a large youth gathering at Millennium Park. It was a tragedy — and it set the terms for nearly every conversation Chicago has had about teen gatherings since. More police. Earlier curfews. Restricted park access.
The question driving every proposal: How do we prevent this from happening again?
That is a reasonable question, but it is not the only one. Four years later, with gatherings continuing to grow, it may not even be the most important.
I study these gatherings. The question I keep returning to is both simpler and harder: What is actually happening here, and what is it telling us?
“Teen takeover” is not a neutral term. It tells you, before you’ve looked closely, that space is being seized, that something is being taken from someone to whom it rightfully belongs. It arrives with its verdict already built in.
What if showing up at Millennium Park — or the lakefront, or Downtown — is not a seizure of space but a claim on it? The kind of claim any young person makes when they go somewhere they belong, or believe they belong?
Decades of research on how media frames Black youth in public space are consistent: presence is coded as a threat, regardless of what is actually occurring. The language of “takeover” does not describe a social reality so much as it constructs one. Once that construction is in place, every subsequent decision — about resources, response and who deserves to be where — flows from it.
I am not suggesting there are no legitimate public safety concerns — there are. Some gatherings have escalated into violence, and that matters. But escalation is not the defining feature of most of what we call “teen takeovers,” and treating it as such leads to responses calibrated to the exception rather than the norm.
What Chicago may be watching
Young people from the South Side are attending the same gatherings as those from the West Side. For anyone familiar with Chicago’s social geography — the territorial divisions that have shaped neighborhood life, sometimes violently, for generations — that is not a small thing.
Those boundaries have historically been among the most consequential and dangerous in this city. The fact that they appear to be softening, with young people crossing them publicly and in groups, is remarkable.
When you follow someone across the city and develop a sense of connection, geography becomes less determinative — the gathering becomes a place to meet someone you already know, just not yet in person. These are not random crowds. They are networked communities finding physical space for existing digital ties.
What Chicago may be witnessing is not chaos. It may be a generation quietly redrawing some of its most entrenched and dangerous social maps.
Young people gather. They always have. What changes when the sanctioned places for that gathering disappear — the recreation centers that close, the programming that gets cut, the neighborhood spaces left behind while Downtown infrastructure is maintained — is not the impulse to gather. It is the location.
Teens look for free, open space
Teen unemployment in Chicago has remained a problem, leaving many young people with time and energy but few structured outlets. Downtown public space — free, open and accessible — becomes the default. The same visibility that makes these spaces appealing also turns the gathering into a news event.
The city disinvests in youth spaces. Youth find other spaces. The city responds with enforcement. That enforcement deepens distrust and escalates the very conflicts it was meant to prevent. Then the cycle repeats.
The challenge for city leaders is not just whether to allocate more resources for enforcement, but also to invest in programming, safe spaces, economic opportunities and fostering relationships between young people and trusted adults that address the underlying issues these gatherings reveal.
Teen takeovers are not a youth crime wave. They are a legible social signal: Young people, largely low-income and of color, navigating a city that has not invested in them, claiming visibility in spaces that belong to them as much as to anyone else.
If Chicago treats that as a crisis of disorder, it will keep reaching for tools that make things worse. If it treats it as information — about what this city owes its young people — it might finally build responses that could actually help.
Almethia C. Franklin, Ph.D., is a Chicago native and postdoctoral research associate at the Institute for Research on Race and Public Policy at the University of Illinois Chicago. She is also an assistant professor of criminal justice and sociology at Concordia University Chicago. She studies large-scale youth gatherings in Chicago and cities across the country.