You might not have known this when
he was serving your breakfast order at Bridgeport Coffee, but Stephen Adzemovic
has lived across the US and around the world, he’s lived longer in Chicago than
he’s lived anywhere else in his life, and it might not be an exaggeration to
say the coffee shop job helped keep him here.
“My life in Chicago is 90% Bridgeport,” he says. And that is directly tied to connections he’s
made at Bridgeport Coffee.
So when his other part time job told
him they needed someone full time, Stephen wasn’t sure leaving the coffee shop
was the right decision, even though the other job involves doing Computer
Assisted Design work for Wayward Machine Co., a funky metal shop that builds
custom furnishings for restaurants and other commercial interiors. “My Dad is really glad I chose the metal shop,”
he says. When he told his customers at Bridgeport Coffee he says they’d
congratulate him like he was moving up in the world --“I was really surprised.” His hesitation might make you think twice
about what makes for meaningful work.
Stephen’s father was an immigrant who’d
come to New York with his parents as a child, and who worked his way into a
career in international banking. Through
a series of mergers and opportunities he’d moved his family all over the world,
with especially long stints in the Middle East that started when Stephen was 12.
There were some things Stephen
didn’t like about the Middle East. He
had that American itch to question received answers, which wasn’t common
practice there. “In some countries
you’re legally not allowed to question; in others, people are allowed, but they
don’t tend to do it. Or they don’t talk
about it, if they do.”
On the other hand he came to
appreciate that people are people, wherever you go. And more unusual, he came to appreciate the
feeling of being out of his element. “I
liked that feeling of being outside,” he says. “Where I don’t fit in, and
people don’t treat me like I fit in.”
That’s not a feeling most 12 year
olds enjoy, and he admits he might not have enjoyed it right away. But he came to appreciate the perspective, “even
when it’s confusing and harsh, it’s also exciting.” He says he expects to live internationally
again, though he does wonder if it will be different, having come to appreciate
the stimulations of parochial life. “It was new, I hadn’t experienced that
before.”
Stephen moved to Chicago in 2011 to
study architecture at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and to Bridgeport
in 2013, following an ad for an apartment on Craig’s List. UIC has a great reputation as a theory school,
and that’s what attracted him. He wasn’t
so interested in style or aesthetics, as in the power the architect has to make
decisions, but decisions that were not arbitrary, decisions that are calculated
to try formal ideas.
“Form follows function” is the
classic theory of the old Chicago school, articulated first by architects whose
designs were streamlined for modern office and manufacturing functions, without
pretending to be from some earlier era.
They came to wear their steel frame structures as an aesthetic, without
a lot of prettified details pasted on top.
Stephen says architects are pushing new limits with the terms “form” and
“function” in the post digital era, but that’s not the problem that interests
him personally.
“Initially it was a social thing,”
he says of the kind of theory he wanted to pursue: the architect’s power to create
space that affects people without them realizing, or paying attention. He describes the feeling he got in an airport
he visited recently – it was a vast space with a high ceiling, but the ceiling
swooped up at the edges, so it was concave, it felt like it was bearing down on
you, making you small. People tend to
feel small in cathedrals too, but cathedrals soar upward toward the center,
drawing your eye into the vastness. “It’s
not about you and how small you are,” Stephen says.
Stephen’s not sure he’s interested
in building a lot of large structures, right now he’s more interested in
smaller spaces, where he can design an environment, especially since that’s the
scale that’s accessible to him now.
He recently joined up with friend David
Ramis to build an experimental project at the Co-Prosperity Sphere, the gallery
just down the street from the coffee shop, where they’d helped reorganize the
basement in return for use of some of the space.
They built two walls, joined at a 5
degree rotation. The walls were built
out of regular sheetrock and studs, but it didn’t quite reach the ceiling, the
2 walls met at that odd little angle, the sheetrock was cut and distressed up
top to make a pattern in relief. “It’s
made of all the things a wall is made of, but it’s to make fun of walls, it’s
about finding ways to re-imagine something we take for granted. It forces you to pay attention.”
Stephen was very happy with the
results, they invited friends and local artists to see it, and some of
Stephen’s architecture professors came to see it too.
After school, Stephen considered
the kinds of things most people do just after architecture school. They go straight to graduate school, or they
get a low level job at an architecture firm. Neither of those options seemed all that compelling. He took the job at the coffee shop while he
was considering his options. “If you’d asked me then, I’d have told you I’d be there
for 6 months.” He ended up working there for 2 and ½ years.
“It’s more about the people than my
passion for beans. I really don’t care
about coffee beans.” The coffee shop is where he came to appreciate life in a
small neighborhood. “I’m not anonymous,”
he says. “I know people here, and I’m known.
“I don’t think it would be the same
if I worked at a coffee shop in a different part of the city.” Sure he would have had regulars, sure he
would have made friends, but the people would probably be more transient. “Neighborhood,
community, those are real things in Bridgeport.”
He lived on Lloyd Street for awhile,
where all his neighbors had been born there, not just in Bridgeport but on that
street. “The neighbor next door had been
there for 80 years.”
Meanwhile he was interacting with a
constant stream of people at the coffee shop.
He couldn’t choose who came through, though he had some control over how
much he engaged with people, which he sometimes exerted in a playful way.
“There was one guy who took years
to warm up to me,” he recalls. “He’s one
of the grumpier people, a gentleman who always came in and got the same order.” Stephen made a point of being extra friendly
“partly as a way to take some power back.” Eventually the friendliness took,
especially after they ran into each other outside the coffee shop. Now Stephen will show him projects he’s
working on to hear what he thinks – he trusts his opinion. “We’re interested in
engaging in the same conversation.”
He’s made scores of other friends
and acquaintances that way, a professor at the School of the Art Institute,
staff from the restaurants and bars nearby, transplants and people who’ve lived
or worked in Bridgeport all their lives.
Sometimes someone would make a
comment or a joke he thought was “on the less cool side of the line.” Not
necessarily about race, it might be homophobic. “Something that I don’t want to
smile at,” as Stephen puts it “but not so serious that I’m going to take myself
out of the role of smiling server to say ‘Hey, don’t say that.’”
He says he’d smile, and disagree. “I’d say ‘I don’t think that way.’”
Which, if you think about it, might
have more influence than an actual argument. Especially now, when social
divides seem so wide that even people of good will talk right past each other,
that kind of soft exposure might be exactly what we all need to make
incremental shifts in our point of view – like the kind Stephen might exert on a
patron, or the kind the neighborhood has exerted on him.
Soft influence is possible here, in
an old neighborhood with new people moving in, and the coffee shop is one of
the places, like a tidal pool, that we swirl through and brush shoulders for
awhile. But that mix is fragile too.
Stephen says he’s never had trouble
with the young gang bangers or drug dealers or occasional shootings that also
happen around Morgan Street, because the people engaged in that understand he’s
“not part of the mix.”
Where he has felt tension, it’s
been from people who see that cluster of businesses on 31st and
Morgan as an engine of gentrification that will force their families out. And they might be right.
Stephen points out that lots of
patrons come from outside the neighborhood to Kimski’s to see what
Korean-Polish fusion is, or to meet friends at Bridgeport Coffee, and they see
that it’s friendly, they know that the rents are cheap, and they find the neighborhood
seems pretty safe.
“I’m probably helping gentrify the
neighborhood,” Stephen says “but I’m gentrifying myself.”
That’s the great neo-bohemian
dilemma: the service jobs of the people who staff the establishments that make
neighborhood life dynamic don’t pay well, leaving them among the most vulnerable
to being priced out.
That might be more an accident of
labor history than natural law. There’s
no inherent reason service jobs couldn’t be organized and well compensated. The services might cost more. In the meantime, patrons can contribute directly
to the stability of their servers at the coffee shop, or the bike shop, or the
take-out counter at Johnny O’s by making good use of the tip jar.
And there’s another factor at play. Small landlords who live on their properties
are a diminishing breed across the city, even in Bridgeport where the owner
occupied 3 flat has been well represented.
But they still persist here more than elsewhere.
Stephen has lived in 3 apartments in
Bridgeport, each one of them owned by landlords who had a family member in the
building, or they lived there themselves, or, at his current place, the owner
lives next door. The fact that none of his apartments were owned by investment
groups or distant landlords in the suburbs may be a factor in the cheap rents
that drew him here. It might also help
keep some rents stable in the longer term.
At one of his apartments, the rent
was so cheap, Stephen wasn’t sure he shouldn’t tell the owner she could be
charging more. But she lived in the
building, she wanted good tenants who didn’t demand a lot but might stay
awhile. He was pretty sure she was
charging one of his immigrant neighbors something like small change to live
there, because she’d once been an immigrant too.
When the guys from Wayward Machine
Co. first started coming to the coffee shop, Stephen recalls with some
amusement that he thought there was some weird power dynamic going on, because
the boss always ordered first. At one
point, he made a joke about it, and they all thought it was pretty funny. “Now, knowing them better, it wasn’t what I
thought.”
One day, they were all standing
around outside the coffee shop, talking about a big project they had coming
down the pike that they knew they would need a lot of drawings for, and they asked
“Do you know anyone who knows CAD?” Stephen knew CAD. “A few hours later, I was
working there.”
“They care about the
neighborhood. They’ve done a lot of
projects here,” Stephen says. They also
seem to be thriving. They opened the
shop in a large garage space at 32nd Place & Morgan in 2016.
They’ve just moved to Cermak and May Street because they needed more
space. Stephen started full time when
the new shop was ready.
He won’t be doing metal fabrication
himself, though having a better understanding of how fabrication is done is
definitely one of the perks of the job. And
the scale of their projects is a lot like the kind of design he wants to do:
building restaurant and other commercial environments.
“Working there is really cool,”
Stephen enthuses. “But I don’t know if
it’s the last time I’ll work in the service industry.”
# # #
