When she leaves for the night, they are still outside roaming the block, which is why Barfield closes her store at 7 p.m.

“I wouldn’t want to be here after eight,” she said. “The area changes drastically.”

Barfield, along with other business owners and workers on Broadway Avenue, said loiterers are keeping people away from their businesses — and the Chateau Hotel, located at 3838 N. Broadway St., is the main cause of their headaches.

“That is the problem,” Barfield said. “That’s where they come out and loiter.”

According to Barfield, the Chateau Hotel is an inexpensive, transient hotel where prostitution, drug use and violence are common.

A hotel manager said he could not disclose prices over the phone but said a one-night stay would be under $100.

Barfield said she understands the people in the hotel need a place to stay, but they are keeping customers away from her store, located directly across from the hotel at 3837 N. Broadway St.

“I don’t want them in front of my store because it discourages customers from coming in, but where do they go? They move down to Subway. They go by Starbucks,” she said.

Fabian Aguirre, 18, an employee at Subway, located at 3821 N. Broadway St., said because the restaurant is open until midnight, loiterers from the hotel try to hang out inside or receive free food.

“Sometimes we have them come in here and try to stay here, and we kick them out,” Aguirre said.

He said when loiterers are not in Subway, they stand in front of the hotel, smoke cigarettes and “do nothing.”

Over the 36 years Barfield has been in the community, she said she has done everything from community walks to meetings with police and residents in order to clean up the hotel.

“We’ve addressed the issue with them across the street. We’ve addressed it with the commander,” she said. “It’s like, well, what do we do?”

According to Barfield, the community has brought Chateau Hotel owner Jack Gore to court multiple times, and altogether the hotel has 89 building and code violations.

Gore could not be located and did not return phone calls for this article.

Denice Davis, chief of staff to Ald. Helen Shiller (46th), could not confirm the number of violations, but said she knows the city previously asked the hotel owner to take care of a flooding issue in the basement as well as a rodent problem. The Chateau Hotel is located at the border of Uptown within the 46th Ward.

Barfield said she sometimes speaks with guests of the hotel, and they tell her of the unsafe conditions inside the building.

“A few people come into the store who live there, so I talk to them to find out what’s going on, and they tell me how bad it is in there,” she said. “It’s a problem, and they move these people in until an ambulance takes them away or something.”

In 2008, three people died in a room at the hotel from an apparent drug overdose, according to news reports.

Despite the hotel’s bad publicity, Davis said the Chateau Hotel, which has been in business before she began working for the ward in 1989, is not as bad as some say.

“The Chateau has been there for years, and unfortunately, just like a lot of other things in our area, when people move in they see what they deem as eyesores,” Davis said. “If you think it’s bad, help to make it better, don’t just sit back and judge it.”

Davis said hotel management follows strict safety precautions such as requiring a state identification card or driver’s license and also run a criminal background check before allowing someone to stay there.

Management runs background checks in order to prevent sex offenders from staying there because of the hotel’s close proximity to Gill Park, located at 825 W. Sheridan Road, and Horace Greeley Elementary School, located at 832 W. Sheridan Road, according to Davis.

She said she does not want to paint a “pearly picture of heaven” about the hotel, but the reality is some people need a place to stay, and business owners should take that into consideration.

“If they’re so worried about it, why don’t they go in there and offer one of them a job?” Davis said. “Let them clean your sidewalk. Let them mop your floors, if you’re so concerned. If not, then run your business.”

Barfield said she relies on the 23rd District police officers to patrol the area, but they can only do so much, because loiterers usually come back.

That is where the local community groups come in.

Jay Lyon, executive director of Lakeview’s Northalsted Business Alliance, said the alliance established a safety council, which works with the police department, neighborhood groups, and social service organizations such as the Center on Halsted, Broadway Youth Center and Night Ministry to keep the community safe.

Lyon said cracking down on loiterers is not as easy as it sounds due to the lack of anti-loitering laws.

“The United States Supreme Court struck down anti-loitering laws, so from a legal standpoint, unless someone is breaking the law, including disturbing the peace, the police are limited in what they can do,” he said.

However, the council found a different approach to the overarching issue of loitering in Lakeview and recently began to coordinate educational programs such as court ad/wp-admin/post.php?action=edit&post=6988vocacy seminars, which train residents how to represent their community in a courtroom after police make an arrest.

The next court advocacy meeting for the 23 rd District is scheduled for May 25.

Jim Ludwig, owner of Roscoe’s Tavern, located at 3356 N. Halsted St., and member of the Northalsted Safety Council, said at a CAPS meeting he believes speaking directly to individuals who are disrupting businesses is the best solution to the problem.

“Hanging out is not an illegal activity, and the more we can engage the people that are just hanging out looking for nothing to do, we’re going to have more success as the time goes on,” Ludwig said.

But Barfield plans to stay inside her store for now.

As she fixed the antennas on the small TV she keeps next to her register, she glanced out her door, across to the hotel, where a group of men stood outside.

“What are you going to do?” she said. “It is all a part of the area here. And I don’t think we’re going to clean it up. Not when you have places like that.”

Read an October 2007 ChicagoTalks article about the Hotel Chateau.

Okanovic, now 21, is a University of Illinois at Chicago student studying psychology. Her experiences in Bosnia and beyond have shaped her in ways many students her age could not imagine.

“When the soldiers came, we went into my friend’s basement,” she said.  “I remember hearing a bunch of shots. My mom took my hand and said, ‘if someone approaches you just pretend you are really scared. Do not say a word.’ This is how my mom passed us off as the other side.”

Okanovic was born in 1988 and grew up in Velika Kladusa, a town in Bosnia by Croatia, only a few years before the Serbian and Bosnian war broke out in 1991.

According to her, the Serbian government’s goal was to keep Yugoslavia together in one country. However, the individual countries wanted out. Slovenia was the first country to declare independence followed by Croatia. Serbia, Kosovo, and Bosnia were the only countries left.

“Serbia was already mad that these countries broke off,” she said. “It is really hard to distinguish who is Serbian, Croatian, or Bosnian because we lived in one country. The only way they could differentiate between the three was through religion. If you were Catholic you were considered Croatian, or if you were Orthodox Christian you were Serbian. If you were Muslim you were Bosnian.”

Tensions only escalated, however, when Bosnia attempted its break from Serbia.

“Serbia said, ‘If they don’t want to be with us why don’t we just wipe them all out’,” she said. “That’s when they did a whole genocide against Muslims and Catholics.”

Velika Kladusa went untouched while the war intensified, but residents knew it would not be long before troops made their way in.

“We knew Serbia was going to come in and kill us,” she said. “Our leader said, ‘Don’t touch my people, we’re going to help you in return.’ My town was known for betraying its own country because of that.”

This deal stated people from Velika Kladusa would join the Serbian forces and fight against Bosnia, and in return Serbia would not touch them.

When the larger war with Serbia ended, the rest of Bosnia declared a mini-war on her home town, and this is when her war experience truly began.

At the age of five, she remembers staying at a friend’s house where they heard troops were approaching to attack the city.

“There was a whole fleet of people running toward Croatia,” she said. “I remember holding onto my mom’s hand while all around us were grenades and gun fire.”

While running toward the refugee camp, she saw a man on a white horse who was shot through the chest and collapsed onto the ground.

“I was five at the time,” Okanovic said. “I didn’t have the mental capacity to comprehend the danger of it.”

She and her mother, Mina Okanovic, arrived safely to the refugee camp, which she described as a row of chicken coops, and stayed there while her father, Esad Okanovic, and uncle, Asko Okanovic, fought in the war. The conditions in the camp were unsanitary and overcrowded.

“All these people were piled in there,” she said. “There was a forest where everyone used the bathroom, and when you changed someone had to hold a blanket in front of you.”

After four months, the refugees heard Velika Kladusa was safe, so Naida Okanovic and her mother went back to their unrecognizable neighborhood.

“Houses were blown up, windows were shattered, and gunshot holes were in every building,” she said. “It was a complete disaster.”

They were far from safe, however, because the troops came back to Velika Kladusa. She said the town started running toward Croatia again, but her mother stopped at the border and told her she was not going to run away from home any more. Mina Okanovic was able to pass them off to soldiers as the other side by bluffing names.

“Could you imagine that,” Naida Okanovic said. “A woman in a country where women are seen as powerless taking her daughter and walking through a burning town. That’s when I saw who my mom truly was.”

Mina Okanovic said this was one of the scariest moments of her life.

“Sometimes you have to do certain things no matter how scary they are in order to survive,” she said. “I kept thinking I needed to keep a brave face on.”

Asko Okanovic on the other hand, who stayed at the refugee camp, was given a visa to come to America and eventually sent application papers to the Okanovics.

They came to America in June 1996 and stayed near Kenmore and Thorndale on Chicago’s North Side.  They received food stamps and welfare for the first three months and were also enrolled in English speaking classes.

“It was hard [moving] because Bosnia was all I ever knew,” Esad Okanovic said. “I had to leave behind the soil of my ancestors to come to a different country where I would forever be a foreigner.”

The most memorable part of immigrating for Naida Okanovic was when she started school, which would foreshadow her future academic successes.

“I didn’t know a word of English,” she said. “On the first day the teacher handed out a worksheet with math problems. Because I was forced to be ahead by my mom because she wasn’t sure when schools would be open, I was the first to finish and to get a 100 percent. That’s how I fell in love with math.”

When she was in fourth grade she met her current best friend Amanda Pilipovic, 21, a student at Northeastern Illinois University, who previously lived 10 minutes outside Velika Kladusa.

“If we stayed in Bosnia we would have gone to the same high school,” Pilipovic said. “She came here before me, so she knew English better, and she would help me out.”

Like the Okanovics and other Bosnian families, education was a big factor for moving to America Pilipovic said.

“My parents are all about school,” Pilipovic said. “If you don’t finish school you’re going to work at McDonalds. That’s what I hear every day. It’s a guilt thing. We came all this way just for you, so don’t let us down.”