A New Generation of Live Work Space on Halsted

On the outside, this building looks like a lot of the mystery buildings on Halsted Street, like someone has forgotten they own it, or like they’ve inherited it from their grandparents and they aren’t sure if it’s worth anything yet.

But if Halsted’s other mystery buildings are, in fact, anything like this one, that’s good news for the near term fortunes of the street, because this one has been humming with plans for several years.  Visible progress was slowed by structural problems and hurdles in the Chicago codes, but now they’re cleared, and behind the frontier-town façade the building’s insides are being rapidly rebuilt from the basement floor to the rafters.

When renovations are finished in July, there will be 2 second floor apartments, a maker of traditional Italian sausage in the basement, and a giant live work space on the first floor.

Kevin Sheehan and Bobby Lyons were both born and raised in Bridgeport. So were their parents -- Bobby’s family were cops, Kevin’s were tavern keepers. They have been close friends since grade school, they lived their wild youths together, though they’ve both settled down a lot since then.

A few years ago they started tossing around the idea of buying a building together.  They considered buying a bar out in Mount Greenwood, which seemed like a good source of easy profits, but the potential for easy profit gave way to other considerations, and if this project has one defining characteristic, it is something more like a long term view.

A Sticker Appearing Around Halsted Street

The building they finally bought, in 2011, was the first bar Kevin’s family owned in Bridgeport.  His grandfather’s brother opened it before Prohibition.  It’s across the street from Schaller’s, which holds the oldest active liquor license issued in Chicago, and a few doors south of the 11^th ward office.

Kevin’s father ran his own tavern on Union and 38^th Street, kitty corner to where the Shinnick’s tavern still operates today. Kevin’s cousin Jack Sheehan, who married a Schaller, still operates his tavern near 35^th Street on Halsted – next to the former site of Bridgeport Tattoo, whose owner once talked admiringly about wanting to tie his business in to a traditional neighborhood like Bridgeport, though he’d lived a more itinerate life himself and he’s since shuttered the shop.

One of Kevin’s uncles ran the bar at 3707 S Halsted when Kevin was a kid – he’d lived in the apartment over the bar his entire life.  After he died, the family sold it to Richard Mossman, a bricklayer they knew, who rezoned the parcel to accommodate plans for a lofty 4 story condominium development he hadn’t got around to building before the market crashed in 2006.

By 2011 Mossman had a For Sale sign in the window, and Kevin and Bobby called him up to inquire.  They knew if they bought it they would have to put time and money into it -- the building had settled and shifted over the years, the whole frame tilted to the side.  But it’s in the same corner of Bridgeport where they have anchored their lives, and it has sentimental significance. Kevin’s says his father, who has passed away, had thought about buying it, and he would have been glad to know the old building was back in the family.

Once they owned it, they went back and forth a couple times about how to proceed.  At first they got permits to renovate it, they thought they could take down a couple exterior walls and salvage the others.  For awhile it looked like they might have to tear the whole thing down and start from the ground as a new construction project.  City codes would have required them to move the structure back 15 feet from the sidewalk, and from its original foundation, which they were willing to do, but they needed a new set of permits, and the permit process dragged on through the fall of 2013. 

By December they decided to go ahead with the renovation, which they already had permits for.  They tore the insides out, down to the exterior walls; their contractor looped chains around the top beam in the north wall of the frame, and workers on the ground in the lot just south of the building pulled the whole thing straight with come-alongs.  They nailed in some reinforcing carpentry and let it stand for a month to make sure it stayed straight, then they built the interior framing that will help hold it in place over time.

Meanwhile, one of the most brutal winters in memory blasted the structure with freezes and thaws and eventually caused the foundation, exposed when they took out the floors, to crack. At this point, other investors might have turned, snarling, on each other and sued their contractor; Bobby and Kevin made parallels to the metaphorical significance of building a life on a strong foundation, and their contractor, whom they’ve known for years, proposed to split the cost of the repair.

When it’s all finished, the building will have a pretty new masonry façade facing Halsted Street.  Bobby will move out into one of the apartment on the second floor, and Mike Botica, another friend from the neighborhood, whom they’ve known for years, will rent the basement to make sopressata, a dry cured Italian sausage.

Mike makes sopressata using old family recipes he learned from his wife’s Grandma Theresa.  He says they used to hang their sausage in a spare bedroom, leaving the windows open so it could cure in the cold.  He first started helping out when he and his wife were still dating.  When Grandma Theresa saw he had an interest, she sat him down and taught him her recipe, and handed over her grinder and her press, which he still uses – they’re each over 100 years old.

Right now, Mike makes his sopressata for friends and family as a hobby, but it’s “a hobby on steroids” --- last year he made 1,200 pounds of it in a 3 day operation that brought up to 30 people to his house at a time.  Setting up all the tables and equipment is a project in itself: moving it all out from his garage into the basement at South Halsted will allow him to make the set up permanent, and also to install a walk in cooler and de-humidifier.

Eventually he would like to get all his licensing lined up and open a business – he says he’d try selling it mail order first, and if that goes well, he’d like to open a deli on the first floor of Bobby and Kevin’s building.  It would require changing the zoning back to commercial, but he’s already discussed it with Alderman Balcer, and the Alderman was enthusiastic about the idea.  They both remember a time when South Halsted had more storefronts on it – including Granata’s, next door to the Ramova Theater, which Mike describes as something like Conte di Savoia on Taylor Street, not as large, but very successful.

All that would be several years away, come July, the 1^st floor space will be ready for other uses.  Mike says Kevin and Bobby have chosen an ideal location – with the new homes being built out from Donovan Park on the west, and some of the most stable blocks in Bridgeport to the east.  The Halsted renaissance might seem slower to advance than its residential one, individual investments might take time to mature, but the foundations are good.

On the Industrial Frontier

Ten years ago the little strip of 37^th Street between Morgan and Racine was not broad and smooth and wide open like it is today.

There were more buildings on it -- the Joslyn plant sprawled the whole length of a city block -- and the street itself was narrower.  Its rolling pavement was a ruin of asphalt patches, all broken into potholes and crumbling to gravel, with stretches of the old paving stones showing underneath.  A set of rail tracks ran across it -- they were operational just up to the verge of the street, but the railcars that used it all stopped before crossing.  And somewhere underneath all that ran a very old water main -- it was broken, and it was also legally inaccessible, so it was going to stay broken for awhile.

But my friend John didn’t know that when he bought the three story warehouse at the middle of the street.  He saw industrial heritage and the opportunity to build something new.

  

I’ve told this story before.  At least the practical version, about the progress of a real estate project. About how John bought it, in 2002, with documents in hand from the city, promising to repair that water main, and from the railroad, detailing their plans for re-activating the track where it crossed the street and ran alongside the loading docks at the back of his building.  The rail siding was a feature central to the interest of the drywall distributor who was going to lease the whole first floor, and pay the rents that would help finance John’s plans to subdivide the other stories into small spaces for metal fabricators, makers and artists.

And how, after he bought it, the railroad’s lawyers squashed the idea of a grade level street crossing – too much liability risk (even though the same tracks run through the middle Racine a few blocks away).  And how the city’s plans to repair the water main were stalled by the significant detail that the city didn’t own the street.  The street was still owned by the company that originally developed the Central Manufacturing District, now a huge multinational, whose lawyers had other things to do than manage the sale of a scrap of street in Bridgeport – an inconvenient bit of industrial heritage.  It would take 3 years before they’d complete the sale and another year for the city to repair the main.

And how John still ploughed forward anyway, doing renovations himself like a really ambitious home improvement project, and attracting tenants, even before there was water, and about the cast of characters who passed through that place, from the outlaws who prowled it before he bought it, to the cast of bikers, missionaries, machinists and other curious parties, including myself, who were drawn in by John’s evolving vision for rebuilding something exciting from waste stream recycled materials, and by his skill for telling a really good story.

For a long time it wasn’t clear if he’d be successful.  He has been.  Though it took him 6 years to finish it, and start looking for the next project, which he found in the Stockyards.  He’s pursuing that one gradually too – time allows synergies to develop.

When I first tried to write about John and his building I had a hard time making a coherent story out of it, because by then I’d already spent 3 years down there, shoveling rocks and hauling debris into dumpsters, and listening to John and all the guys who came through to see what kind of progress he was making.  At night I’d pedal north, exhausted and filthy and weirdly satisfied, and the next morning I’d write down everything I could remember because every detail seemed really important.

Partly I liked it just because in my regular life, I worked at a desk and didn’t have a lot of opportunities to operate simple things like pallet jacks – I thought it was absolutely astounding that even a relatively small person could maneuver loads of material, even machine tools weighing thousands of pounds, across floors and around corners with a simple hand operated device.

But I thought it was a story about everything: the ups and downs of industry, the twists and turns of human ambition, man’s strange relationships with the stuff he manages to accumulate in this world.  There was one scene in particular that stands out in my memory -- it reminds me how the building was an opening, or a lens that made things visible that I couldn’t usually see.  It was a Sunday afternoon spent in the basement, it was cold, like it is now, and beautiful.

When John first bought the building, that basement was like a dungeon.  The windows were covered with plywood, its corners and concrete columns were clotted with cobwebs, the floor was covered with sediment that had been left after he’d pumped an inch of standing water off the floor.

Water would continue to seep back in from a phantom building next door.  When the other building was standing, it had shared drain pipes with the Lowe warehouse; after it was gone, water still entered its old pipes and backed up a drain at the bottom of the elevator shaft in John’s building. Eventually, he’d rent office space to the engineering firm that rebuilt the drainage system for the whole district.  In those early years, though, he was pumping the seepage through a hose that carried it up to a set of plastic drums on the first floor where he’d use it to operate a flush toilet.

Meanwhile, water had seeped into the tank of fluid that ran the hydraulic elevator, turning the oil into a greyish foam that spread through the lines and into the piston that raises and lowers the elevator cage.

On this particular afternoon, John was down there in the elevator pit – where everything was covered with a thick coat of slime that stank of mold and motor oil.  He had clamped a floodlight on the elevator door, which opened horizontally like 2 iron jaws, and the muck at the bottom glistened in the light.  He wasn’t intimidated by the fact he’d never fixed an elevator before – he’d basically do it by taking it apart to see what was inside, and he’d do most of it with nothing but a pipe wrench and a big allen key.

The plywood had been pried off the basement windows, and the sun was streaming in overhead.  I was sweeping sediment off the floor.  It filled the air in a sunlit haze, and the otherworldly chords of a Romanian women’s choir filtered through the space.  Every now and then, John’s voice would rise from out of the pit, exclaiming after he’d opened a line and found it was still in excellent condition inside.

And while we were down there, Santa stopped by.  Santa had been proprietor of Scooter World, a business selling used motor cycle parts that had once occupied at least 2 floors of the building, though he’d lost control of his inventory before John arrived on the scene.  He still came around to see what kind of progress John was making.  He knew a lot about the building – what had broken and how they’d fixed it before.  And if John had some scrap he wanted to get rid of, Santa would take it off his hands.

This afternoon, he fell to chatting about how he’d started Scooter World back in the 1960s, when motor scooters were very popular.  He’d started it as a repair shop, and neighborhood kids would hang around the shop and learn how to fix stuff by watching Santa do it.  He says scooters came out in a new model every year, and you could harvest parts from old bikes people would abandon in the alley when they got new ones.

As his inventory grew, he moved from one space to the next, before arriving at the old Lowe warehouse on 37^th Street, where he spread over several floors.  Now Santa looked back with nostalgia on the glory of his inventory, which had whole departments dedicated to seats, or gas tanks or carburetors.  Gesturing around, he described how the basement was filled with wheels from every kind of vehicle, from lawn-mowers to bikes.

Then the guy who owned the building died, and left it to his daughter, and his daughter let her boyfriend Cowboy move in.  Cowboy engaged in a lot of destructive pastimes before he finally went to prison.  Santa said it was for beating an old man to death for the money in his pocket, which turned out to be $37 and change.

But his real complaints about Cowboy came after Santa fell behind in his rent, and Cowboy started selling off his stuff. Because Cowboy didn’t know what anything was worth, or he didn’t care.  He’d sell parts worth hundreds of dollars for a fraction of their value in quick cash.  He’d squandered Santa’s glorious collection, accumulated over decades, it still rankled with Santa now.

After they were both gone, other guys, friends of John’s, would come through that warehouse with new collections.  Their skill sets reflected the era of industry where they’d pursued their careers; it was their collections that reflected what they’d been able to make of it all.  They weren’t accumulations of wealth, in fact they often turned out to be cumbersome objects hung round their owner’s necks, but they were fascinating to look at, to sort through, they seemed to be testament to something – to their owner’s ability to see possibility, though not necessarily their ability to grasp it.

So Santa and Cowboy both came through in the frontier days, the long interim between when the Central Manufacturing District was first built, at the cutting edge of modern industry, and when John arrived a century later to rebuild it for a new industry revival.  In that interim, Cowboy saw a vacuum for a chaotic career on the semi-legal fringe; Santa saw opportunity dealing in other people’s junk, sifting out gradations of value that could only be realized if you were willing to learn what it was all worth to the right buyer.

John’s friend Richard was a machinist.  His employer kept luring him back from retirement because his skill set can’t be hired anymore.  His collections included heaps of stuff you could buy at hardware stores, but also elegant wooden chests filled with antique instruments, sets of drill bits and dies that had been hand tooled, and a growing collection of machine tools he was buying up at fire sales and hauling to John’s building as more and more businesses shut down – some of them still had appendages from when they were hooked up to steam engines.

His friend Matt’s favorite job had been working for a company that made elaborate props – fiberglass trees that were really waitress stations, things like that.  He wanted John to fill the warehouse with craftsmen who could build objects in any material – wood, glass, metal, fiberglass – and he got him started, referring some of his earliest tenants.  Matt’s collections were accordingly eclectic: boxes of glass lenses the size of saucers, a long tray of beads and semi-precious stones, antique furniture he might someday repair and dozens of wood-framed windows he planned to someday build into a greenhouse.  His friendship with John nearly sank under that collection, he underestimated how much time we spent hauling it back and forth across the floors to get at windows John was replacing, or to core holes where he’d run new plumbing stacks through the floors.

John’s era was in high-tech end of industry.  He built virtual sets for industry trade videos using motion tracking technology originally developed for making smart bombs – it’s probably archaic now, it was a little tenuous back then.  You could build any fabulous set you could imagine, but if the tracking mechanisms lost their place the human talent could appear to go skidding across the virtual carpet, or the whole set would shiver behind their backs.  The industry turned out to be tenuous too – the company John worked for spent millions on bleeding-edge technology they were betting would become standard for the industry, and when it did, the price came down and they found themselves competing with guys working out of their basements.  Eventually, the founder would sell his business to a big media company.

But by then John’s building was up and running with water and utilities, and he’d sorted through a whole range of new age, low tech possibilities – the drywall distributor lost interest when the rail siding fell through, but then the Italian cookie company and the green architects considered moving in, and even though they never did, one by one the glass finisher, the metal workers and the artists started renting.  When the building was fully occupied, he moved on to the next one, which he bought a few blocks away.

That afternoon in the cold, in the basement, when John was banging around the elevator shaft, and the women’s voices filtered through the sun-lit haze, while Santa told wild stories of the frontier days, the whole place hummed with possibility.  It was more vivid because it was built from stuff that was workable with simple tools and human sweat, and because it resonated with the efforts and imaginings of all the guys who’d passed through there before, whether they’d been successful for a time or not.

Treasures from the Vault at Decorators Supply

At the heart of one of the oldest businesses in Bridgeport is 2 story vault behind a steel door, stacked to its lofty ceilings with shelves of wooden trays. Each tray is 4 feet wide and 6 feet deep, and each one is packed with blocks of ornament, carved by hand in hickory and oak. You cannot hire craftsmen capable of carving such detail today.



They are the surviving library of patterns Decorators Supply has used to mold plaster and composition ornament to decorate interiors for over 100 years. When Decorator’s Supply first set up shop in 1883, interior embellishment was just becoming widely available. Builders could order ornament by the linear foot from catalogues, rather than commissioning skilled craftsmen to produce custom designs. Though Decorators Supply has always done custom projects alongside its catalogue business.

They helped decorate the White City for the Columbian Exhibition that lined the Midway in 1893, and they have provided decor for Disney, and the Epcot Center in Florida. They detailed the fantasy of at least 75 of the movie theaters built in Chicago in the early part of the 20th century, including the Spanish courtyard for the Ramova Theater in Bridgeport, and they molded military emblems during World War II.

Alongside the landmark projects, they have lent elegance to private parlors and lobbies of countless banks, courthouses, and lakeshore co-ops. Occasionally President Steve Grage, whose grandfather William Grage Sr., first joined the business as an office boy in 1896, will glance up at a lobby ceiling and see patterns he is still being asked to produce for new installations today.



The patterns in the vault at their workshop at 3610 South Morgan Street represent a fraction of the creations of generations of craftsmen employed by Decorators Supply. Patterns for a grand show room were sometimes created to realize the architect’s design, and then discarded when the project was built.

Many others were left behind when the business moved to Morgan Street from their old shop at 2601 South Peoria, to make way for the Stevenson Expressway, in 1963. The building on Peoria went up in a terrific fire shortly after they had moved out – possibly as a shortcut maneuver by the demolition crew.

Today, only a fraction of the patterns stored in the treasure trove in the current shop on Morgan Street actually appear in the company catalogues. “We could create a new catalogue with entirely different patterns,” Steve says.

All told, Steve says Decorator’s Supply has about 12,000 molds – originally made by pressing the carved patterns into a bed of pitch. Many of them are variations on common patterns. They have over a hundred versions of egg and dart, bead and barrel, and lamb’s tongue. “There are so many variations, in the details, the depth of the pattern…” Steve says. They’ll add one more version of egg and dart for 29,000 square feet of crown molding – to match the exact pattern for the restoration of a grand bank lobby in Montgomery, Alabama.

Meanwhile, the old pitch molds tend to crack, so they are in the process of gouging out the pitch and replacing it with more durable polyurethane – an ongoing project Steve says is about 20% complete.

All the plaster and composition ornaments are made to order, Decorators Supply doesn’t warehouse stock. And aside from the occasional big bank or courthouse project, the bulk of their jobs today are made to add extravagance to private residences. Though they also serve millwork companies, who carve basic patterns for furniture and moldings on their own machines, then have Decorators Supply add elaborations in “compo,” or composition ornament.

While plaster moldings remain a significant fraction of their business, Steve says compo adds up to about 60% of their output. Compo is a thermoplastic made popular in the 18th century as a cheaper substitute for wood carving, but it is still 4 or 5 times more labor intensive than plaster moldings, which come out of the mold virtually ready to install.

On the other hand, compo can be molded to a finer level of detail than plaster. Because it’s still pliable out of the mold, it can also be squeezed, or stretched, or curved over rounded surfaces. In its soft state it’s sticky, so it self-adheres, and it dries to a durable finish that can be stained to look like wood – in fact it will pick up the grain from the wood carving used to make the mold.

Compo finish once carried a certain mystique: the mixture was said to have origins in the Italian Renaissance, and recipes were passed on as carefully guarded secrets. But most of them boil down to a few basic ingredients.



A batter of hide glue (sticky and pliable) and linseed oil is mixed with pine rosin (a hardening agent), and then kneaded into a dough with chalk, or whiting (a filler). The dough hardens at room temperature, but can be softened again with steam heat.

Decorators Supply uses a recipe brought from Europe that includes molasses. They used to get glue boiled from hides at the Union Stockyards; now it’s shipped from a rendering plant in Texas. To mold a decoration, they steam the dough in 150 year old bagel ovens. The kneading is done on a table with piles of whiting to prepare a smooth surface, and then pressed into a mold, which is compressed in a screw press to force the material into the tiniest crevices.



When the mold is removed and the dough cools, the pattern sets but the mixture is still rubbery, so the pattern can be sliced off the surface of the excess material with a very sharp blade. The excess can be re-steamed and reused. The patterns are kept on big cookie sheets. When it’s time to use them, they’ll be warmed, and made sticky, over a steam table, and then affixed to wood background, usually one built out of poplar in Decorators Supply’s woodshop, but sometimes they’re affixed to furniture, picture frames or woodwork built by other companies, and then shipped on to be finished with stain or gilt.



Steve says the capital of this column was layered with 60-70 distinct pieces of compo. He says they will sell it for $400 to $500, which is a bargain considering how many times the craftsman will touch it. Steve says the customer may pay 3 times as much for the finish, depending on what it is.

In 1918, near the height of a highly ornamented era, Decorators Supply reported about 150 employees and $500,000 in business a year, roughly $7.2 million in today’s dollars. Demand for ornament slowed when mid-century modernism took hold. Today, Decorators Supply employs 20 union craftsmen on the shop floor.

They are widely recognized as “manufacturers of the largest selection of classical ornament in the country,” according to Beaux Arts, a Maryland based company that advertises patterns they’ve developed in collaboration in Decorators Supply.

Others have been less above board about borrowing. Some 25 years ago, a prospective customer requested an unusually large number of samples, and those patterns are now available through the catalogue of a California based competitor.

When it comes time to refurbish Bridgeport’s own Ramova Theater, Bridgeport can secure a genuine sample of Decorators Supply's much imitated craft for new generations to enjoy.

Reinventing the Ramova

As a kid in Bridgeport, Maureen Sullivan could meet up with her friends and stroll over for a movie at the Ramova Theater without asking anybody’s parents for a ride. She says school kids are awed when she describes that to them now. The Ramova was where she saw Carrie, and waited in a line that snaked down the block for the opening of Jaws.

Maureen describes passing the shuttered façade today as seeing an old friend on her deathbed. She used to say “I wish someone would do something with that theater” nearly every time she passed it, until her husband Rob Warmowski suggested they do something about the theater themselves. They launched the Save the Ramova campaign in 2006.

Today, between paper and online petitions, they estimate they have assembled about 5,000 unduplicated signatures of people who want to see the Ramova restored. Rob does a quick tally and compares that to roughly 11,000 voters who cast ballots in the 11th ward in this year’s mid-term elections. Though support for the Ramova isn’t limited to the 11th ward. “I get e-mails from people in Italy,” Maureen says for example “wanting to know if I’m accepting donations.”

Maureen doesn’t want to start collecting donations until there is a real development plan for financing renovations. But a real development plan will be one step closer in the coming months. The Illinois Institute of Technology has taken up the Ramova as the subject for its Interprofessional Projects, or IPRO, Program. Over 2-3 semesters, an interdisciplinary seminar will draw up designs, do market research, and assemble a feasibility analysis for the redevelopment of the Ramova Theater in a new version of its old glory.

When the Ramova first opened in 1929, an amusement boom was transforming the Chicago landscape. Historian Scott Newman charts that boom on his web site Jazz Age Chicago, and links it to the development of the “modern lifestyle” that took hold in the first decades of the 20th century.

Droves of people were migrating from small towns to the big city, where their social ties were looser and their jobs were more monotonous. Newman says leisure pursuits took on new importance as a vehicle for personal identity and fulfillment. He points out that the new public venues built to supply cheap amusements -- department stores and pleasure parks, but especially theaters of all kinds -- also created an arena for unprecedented mixing among social classes. Anyone could participate for the price of admission; once you were inside, he says, the way you earned the price of the ticket was not so important.

The post-modern lifestyle is less supportive of mass entertainments. Theaters have gradually given way to television, HBO and Netflicks subscriptions, and new social venues often draw more specialized crowds. Maureen says there were once 12 theaters in Bridgeport alone, the Ramova was just the last one to close. Today, Bridgeport’s art galleries may have achieved a density theaters once had – they draw patrons from further afield, but from narrower niches.

Still, the Save the Ramova compaign has proven a strong current of nostalgia for a venue with a more general appeal persists. From students in the classroom, to officials in public office, to the buzz of friends on the Campaign’s Facebook page, people resonate with memories of the old Ramova. They also respond to Maureen’s appeal for reinventing the theater as a cultural center-point for Halsted Street – one where patrons of all kinds would rub shoulders, and bring their kids.

And a revivified Ramova could lay the ground for more good things. Maureen recalls that she and Rob lived in the neighborhood of the Music Box when it was still showing porn; she can tick off the businesses that were open on Southport on the fingers of one hand. Crowds who came to see shows in the new Music Box surely encouraged Southport’s restaurants and boutiques to find opportunity there.

The Ramova is a sister theater to the Music Box, except larger, with 1,500 seats to the Music Box’s 850. Both theaters opened in 1929, and they shared a Spanish courtyard decor, with twinkling lights in the ceiling, simulating stars in the night sky. Fifteen years of water damage have destroyed a lot of the Ramova’s décor, however. It would be hard to cover the cost of renovations with $10 movie tickets.


A little picture of the Ramova's interior, borrowed from the Ramova Theatre's Facebook Page

Maureen enlisted architect Rob Vagnieres to produce schematic drawings that show a more varied mix of revenue streams: something similar to the Beverly Arts Center, or the Historic Portage Theater, which is home base for the Silent Film Society, but which hosts a wide variety of events, and supplements ticket revenues with beer and wine sales.

She also ferreted out the company that did the original ornamental plasterwork, and which is still in business a few blocks away. Decorator’s Supply has been practicing the craft of plaster and composition ornament since 1883. Tucked back behind CL Doucette on Morgan Street, they keep a vault with tens of thousands of original wood carvings for decorative molds, and employ 20 skilled craftsmen in a venerable trade. Stimulus for a historic Bridgeport business would be just one of the other good things renovations at the Ramova could bring.

The city of Chicago issued a request for proposals for redeveloping the Ramova in 2002, and managers of the Silent Film Society were among those who looked it over, before they settled on the Portage Theater instead. They didn’t return calls to comment on the Ramova now, but one party in their troupe recalls they believed the project was physically doable “with money and time;” they were less sure that the neighborhood, as it existed 5 years ago, would draw an audience, either from within, or from without.

Maureen is sure that has changed. University Village is closer than it was 5 years ago, and more people come from elsewhere to attend Bridgeport cultural events every year. But more important, she has proven there is a strong local audience for the Ramova, eager for it to open its doors again.