Bob Dain Brings Vintage Guitars and Local Equipment Back to Bridgeport

 312 Vintage Guitars has only been open for 4 months, and it is already on the map. It’s been featured on DNA Info, mentioned in TimeOut Chicago, and this Tuesday, March 26, it will play host to a live segment for the You and Me This Morning show on WCIU.

Its 35th Street location doesn’t see crowds of pedestrians strolling past, but it is visible to streams of drivers making their way to the Dan Ryan Expressway, and it’s the kind of shop drivers will stop for. Owner Bob Dain, age 26, says he watched one customer drive by, back up, park and walk in off the street. He bought 2 guitars on the spot – a Gibson Les Paul, because he’d had his eye out for one, and a Fender Stratocaster, because he liked the price. He paid over a thousand for each instrument, then went back on his way.

Dain’s career, in fact the span of his life, fits within the emerging market for vintage guitars. The year he was born, Gibson Guitar was a tired brand struggling under foreign ownership and a diminished reputation, production was down to 1 model of electric guitar, and the company was bleeding money. That was 1986, the year Gibson was purchased by a couple young guys with business degrees. Their turn-around plan centered on the company’s heritage, and the reissue of “classic” guitars.

By 1994, the heritage plan was working. Sales had multiplied sevenfold and CEO Henry Juszkiewicz was telling the New York Times he had visions of making Gibson the biggest instrument maker in the United States – a position once traded among Chicago firms.

The Chicago makers lost their lead in the 1960s and 70s, when the center of guitar manufacture moved to Asia. But in the 1980s, Asian buyers holding strong currency also had an appreciation for old American made instruments, and prices were on the rise.

In 1999 Eric Clapton auctioned 100 of his instruments to raise money for a drug and alcohol recovery center, and set record prices. One of his Fender Stratocasters raised $450,000. In 2001, when he held a second auction, retail giant Guitar Center paid $959,000 for his favorite Stratocaster, then made its money back by selling well made copies of it.

Reissues of classic designs, peppered with fabulous prices for celebrity instruments, stoked a market for originals through the 2000s, or at least through that part that was exuberant. Looking back in 2011, Guitar Afficionado observed that a vintage Les Paul Gold Top Gibson was worth $5,500 in 2002; 4 years later, in 2006, the same instrument could fetch $85,000. Then the price crashed to about $30,000, so if you’d bought it in 2002 you’d still be pretty happy, maybe less so if you’d bought it much later than that. Today, Dain says a top quality equivalent from the late 1950s might raise $50-60,000 at auction.

Dain is a musician himself, his band, The Sweeps, plays clubs from Simone’s to the Double Door. He plays vintage instruments, but he is less likely to buy a rarefied specimen in perfect condition than to buy something that is interesting for other reasons, and modify it for his own use.

Dain bought his first vintage guitar at a church estate sale when he was 15, a couple years after Guitar Center bought its Clapton Stratocaster. Vintage Gibson’s were beyond reach for most teenagers by then. Dain bought an Airline brand electric guitar, made by Chicago based Valco Manufacturing Company in the 1950s and 1960s. Dain describes it as having a particular tone, playability, and a “New Agey, Jetson’s type” look. Today, big names like Jack White of the White Stripes and Dan Auerbach of the Black Keys play them. But back then, he says, they were still undervalued.

Dain’s been buying and selling vintage instruments ever since. The crash in prices in the late 2000s made a lot more bargains available. And the market has widened, buyers have come to appreciate more instruments, for more various reasons.

Dain recently sold a Grestch Fury amplifier built by Valco in 1968. Valco was known for its mid-market brands. In 1968 it was going out of business, it assembled the Gretsch Fury from parts it had lying around the warehouse. Today the amp is hard to find, but it’s also appreciated for its clear sound, and the fact it handles effects pedals very well, a quality that wasn’t realized in 1968.

Dain sold the Fury over the internet for $1,800, even though he says they can fetch $2,500 - $3,000, depending on their condition. He says the guy who bought it from him turned around and posted it on a European classifieds list for $5,500.

From the 19th Century, Chicago was a dominant force in the mass production of musical instruments of all kinds, and for some of the same reasons it came to dominate other industries: its innovation in modern production techniques, its situation as a logistical center, but also its place as world capital of the mail order catalog. The catalogs all offered large selections of instruments. In fact Sears Roebuck & Co once acquired the Harmony Company, one of the nation’s largest instrument makers, in a bid to corner the ukelele market. The Airline guitar Dain first bought was a brand that Valco made for Montgomery Ward.

Amplified guitars were developed on parallel tracks in Chicago and Los Angeles in the 1920s, partly to make them audible through the din of dance orchestras. In Los Angeles, the National String Instrument and Dobro Manufacturing companies both developed self-ampliphonics, but the Chicago firm Stromberg-Voisinet, which started out in the 1890s, making mandolins, is credited with making the first electric guitar for commercial production in 1928. By the mid-1930s, National and Dobro merged and migrated to Chicago to be near the center of things.

Over the next decades, Chicago’s guitar makers were a case study in agglomeration effects. Companies like Harmony, Kay (heir of Stromberg-Voisinet) and Valco (heir of National Dobro) sold guitars and amplifiers under dozens of brands, they occasionally merged, acquired or succeeded one another, and they consistently made parts, amps or whole instruments to be sold under one another’s brands.

They all prospered on the post war triumph of the guitar. They built acoustics for the folk movement, electric guitars and amps for blues and rock and roll. In the mid 1940s, the Harmony Company, which first set up shop on the present site of the Civic Opera building in 1892, moved its production to 3633 S. Racine, on the edge of Bridgeport’s Central Manufacturing District. It produced up to 350,000 instruments a year in the early 1960s – and it couldn’t produce them fast enough.

Under the British guitar band invasion, demand would not stop growing. But the fade-out of American made guitars was a staggered effect that started while sales were still peaking. One commentator observes that the Harmony Company found itself confronted with a choice between building its production capacity to meet the clamor for instruments, and making the market wait. He says it took the second option, effectively stepping aside to let cheap foreign imports fill the gap.

It was another Chicago businessman who saw the opportunity to fill that gap with inexpensive Asian made guitars. Jack Westheimer established connections with Japanese guitar makers in the 1960s, and sold them through Sears, JC Penny’s and Montgomery Wards. In the early 1973 he created a Korean based manufacturer, originally called Yoo-Ah, then Cor-Tek, it is still one of the largest guitar makers in the world.

Kay and Valco merged, then went out of business together in 1968, when Harmony’s sales were near their height. Then by the early 1970s, Harmony was struggling. Gibson was seeing record sales in the early 70s, but by 1975, Harmony stopped production, auctioned the contents of its warehouse, and licensed its name to Asian imports. In 2009, the Northbrook based Westheimer Corporation bought the name back and has began to reissue a series of “classic” Harmony guitars.

A decade after Harmony wound down, Bridgeport helped launch a new era of instrument manufacture. Ian Schneller, a sculptor trained at the School of the Art Institute, moved into a former lamp factory on Archer Avenue [a building his web-site describes fondly as a “labyrinth of funny little spaces”] in 1986. He began to build musical instruments, first for his own band, and for the bands of friends, under the name “Specimen Products” -- a wink to the anonymity of modern production.

Over time, especially after he’d moved shop to Wicker Park during 1994, he became known for his distinct designs and his skills as a luthier. In 2005, after years of fielding resumes from aspiring guitar builders, he launched the Chicago School of Guitar Making, which has trained over 1,000 students so far. In fact, Bob Dain was one of them. He took a class in guitar repair in 2011 to solidify skills he’d picked up working on instruments on his own.

Dain moved from the suburbs to Bridgeport in 2006, because he’d heard there were cheap rents, and because it would bring him closer to the clubs where his band plays. When he was ready to open his own retail store, Bridgeport was a natural location. There is a density of musicians in the Pilsen- Bridgeport area, he observes, including music studios at all points of the compass (from Hinge Studios in Pilsen and 35th Street Studios to the west, to Alien Audio in Canaryville) but no place to buy guitar strings. Until now.

Dain says that today, about half his sales are still made to Asian buyers over the internet. And it seems only fair that Asian buyers should help finance Bridgeport’s new guitar shop, and the synergies that are already circulating through the shop.

Pete Galanis, a Bridgeport based studio musician has arranged to teach guitar lessons at the shop; Ken Bonner, who also lives in the neighborhood, provides expert services in amplifier repair. Now Bonner is starting up his own business, Bridgeport Amplifier Co, to make boutique, hand wired equipment.

Dain’s display case features other local, small batch brands. Souldier brand guitar straps have appeared on the Grammy’s and episodes of Saturday Night Live – they are hand tooled from a manufacturing facility in the Carroll Street corridor. Daredevil is a brand of special effects pedal made from a musician’s apartment in Logan Square. Dain met the guy who makes them at a gig; he carries Daredevil’s pedals because they’re hand-wired, well finished and “do what they do very well.” Soon, he will also carry Emperor brand speaker cabinets – known for their sturdy, dovetail construction and custom sizes -- they are built from a plant in one of the historic warehouses that line Pershing Road.

Dylan Patterson, who founded Emperor Cabinets once told GearWire that Chicago is a great market for custom equipment, because nearly everyone in Chicago seems to be in some kind of band. 312 Vintage Guitars is already reaping the benefits, and doing its part to multiply the effects.

Bridgeport’s Slow-Pop Retail Scene

If artists really have powers to re-start neighborhood economies, Ed Marszewski and the band of co- conspirators who planned the Version 12 arts festival this year set out to deploy them, and spread the impact as far as it could go.

The Co-Prosperity Sphere was made into a department store for small batch goods of local manufacture, First Trinity Lutheran lent itself as a concert venue, Benton House hosted “Art Bowl,” the afternoon fair for “Bridgeport Day” and a Community Supper Club. Saturday nights, neighborhood food trucks gathered in the parking lot next to Maria’s so neighbors could mill around and socialize, an event that turned out to be so popular the neighbors lobbied to keep it going all summer long.

And on top of all that, a dozen storefronts on Morgan and Halsted Streets opened their doors as “pop-up shops.”

Pop-up retail is a term coined by Trendwatching.com in 2004 (according to Trendwatching.com). Elaborating the concept over the years, the group evokes the influence of the entertainment economy, the experience economy and, a new personal favorite, the “surprise economy.”

A guerilla retailer installs a collection of merchandise in a vacant storefront in an edgy location, sells it til it’s gone, then disappears. The merchandise might be one-off items from emerging designers, or get-it-while-you-can-edition products from established brands.

Trendwatching says consumers like it because it’s “discovery driven” and “massclusive.” The motives of retailers are various. Small designers can showcase their own designs. Big brands, like Target, can move with agility their big stores don’t afford them. Now, real estate agents use it to make interim use of vacant properties. But Version Festival might be unique in trying to mobilize it as a community development tool.

Whether it works or not, the Bridgeport pop-ups were certainly a good sampler of what Bridgeport is like now.

A Sample of Bridgeport as It Is Now
Spring Pop was a collaborative of 5 artists who curated stuff from their own collections at 3143 South Morgan. They had photography, scented bath salts, second hand clothes (“but they’re all our own things, not from thrifts”), and some heartbreaking boutonniere-size arrangements emerging florist Elizabeth Buchanan made from calla lilies she grows on a lot on Racine.

Ray Emerick opened his studio at 3149 South Morgan for children’s movies on Saturday afternoons. One mother told him his first Saturday would have been even better attended, but a local gang had posted plans to host a street fight that day on Facebook, so other Morgan Street mothers were keeping their kids home.

MN Gallery has been open at 3524 South Halsted Halsted Street for 13 years now. Owner Jim Molnar says he and his wife are “still looking for the best way to deploy the gallery as a for profit business, with our energy level.” During the festival they hosted 2 afternoons of salons: artists presented their work and a small audience was encouraged to discuss it.

County Commissioner John Daley donated the storefront next to his office at 3526 South Halsted to the project. It was vacant for much of the festival, but after some weeks of suspense, it now displays 2 large paintings, one of them is a vaguely menacing take on a B-News Update blog-post about childhood ballgames. (The author does recall learning to ‘defend your turf.’) B-News Update is itself a great running commentary on Bridgeport – the editors keep up with new developments, and occasionally reminisce about the neighborhood of their youth.

Back at the Version 12 pop-up project, storefronts behind Blue City Cycles opened up as Enoch’s Donuts (with bacon and bourbon, and other inspired flavors), and Paratext, a community book store fully stocked almost entirely from donations.

Finally, the third storefront behind the bike shop hosted some cool Wicker Park retailers who each took a turn for a week-end, lending Bridgeport’s retail project a little bit of their cache. Quimby’s, the famous zine-purveyor, made a brief appearance. Opening week-end, the store was occupied by Dusty Groove, a record shop sympathetic to Ed’s experiment.

In fact, Rick Wojcik, who owns Dusty Groove, says Ed Marszewski’s been trying to recruit him to open a store in Bridgeport for some time. He likes the idea, it’s one of the first neighborhood’s he’d consider. Though he hesitates over resources – staff, inventory, money – and because he’s not sure he would gain new customers, or if his Bridgeport customers already shop at his Wicker Park store.

He estimates it’s easier for Reckless Records or Dr. Wax, stores with more mainstream collections, to open branches. But adds, “I’m a big believer in retail shaping the city.” After all, “Why does anybody love a neighborhood?” It’s usually where their favorite shops and restaurants are.

So now that the Version 2012 experiment is over, how might Bridgeport retail take shape?


Bridgeport Retail as It Might Be Someday
Colleen at the South Loop Chamber of Commerce is inclined to defend Bridgeport’s retail track record now. The Chamber conducts a survey of retail vacancies every August. She declines to share the results from last year’s survey, but argues Bridgeport doesn’t have more retail vacancies than other places, it’s just that stores we have move around. “Stores occupy a space, they fail, they re-open down the street.”

Wojcik says Bridgeport today reminds him of Wicker Park 13 years ago, when Dusty Grove was looking for space there. In fact, Dusty Groove is an encouraging example of the kind of business that might take root here. The store specializes in small labels, limited edition, hard to find records in genres other than rock. It must qualify as a participant in the experience and entertainment economies. Better yet, it is the kind of business that can prosper in a retail location that has not yet taken off.

Dusty Groove actually launched from Hyde Park in the late 1990s, selling records over the internet from a back alley office. When they were ready to open a retail outlet, Hyde Park was too constrictive. “The University controlled the neighborhood, it shut down a lot of commercial space, so rents were very high there.”

Wojcik says when they went to Wicker Park, looking for space, the Wicker Park landlords were hedging their bets. “They were sick of renting to bohemians.” They were ready for residential gentrification to attract retailers who’d pay great rents, so they didn’t want to sign long term leases, or if they did, they’d only do it with a steep multiplier for annual increases.

Dusty Groove ended up buying their building at 1120 North Ashland at a time when “only idiots” would open that far from North and Damen. They needed space for their giant inventory, and the shipping and order filling apparatus that is the guts of the store. Wojcik says about 100-200 orders come in every night and staff spend the mornings picking orders. He estimates that even today, 50% of the walk-in traffic are people who were on the web-site that day, or the day before, and have placed something on hold.

Meanwhile, since they arrived, Division Street’s filled in. “Ideally we’d be the store where the boyfriends would shop while their girlfriends are shopping in boutiques on Division,” he says, though he acknowledges it’s still a bit of a walk.

Looking back, Wojcik’s been surprised by how incremental the advance of retail gentrification has been. He says the Milwaukee storefronts were occupied, but they were occupied by older retail that didn’t reflect the neighborhood’s emerging demographic. Landlords were happy to rent to the old businesses as long as they stayed, because they were reliable. But when one would close, the storefront tended to stay vacant, as the landlord hoped for The GAP to come in.

“They were hoping for the rent, but they didn’t have the properties,” Wojcik says now. Milwaukee had a lot of 25 foot storefronts with long cavernous interiors, and they were all individually owned. “The Gap isn’t going to sign a lease with multiple owners.” He says the bohemian stores were willing to put up with lack of loading docks, and having to walk around the corner to access their dumpsters.

Today, quirky boutiques are working out pretty well in Wicker Park’s quaint storefronts. The neighbors might be grateful no one got around to tearing it all down.

In fact, Wojcik thinks residential overdevelopment actually slowed the retail renaissance on Division Street – even though the city required the new 3 story condos install commercial spaces on the ground, the retail condos were too expensive for most small businesses, and large retailers didn’t want to own property.

Eventually, things worked out -- retail offerings caught up with the new demographic. Wojcik says that’s partly because the demographic enjoyed reinforcements, the “Chicago Magazine crowd” came in to shop from Lincoln Park.

South Halsted Street Today
Bridgeport doesn’t necessarily have a lot of big spenders in such close proximity. Though it has other similarities with Wojcik’s description of Wicker Park: the old storefronts, the owners hesitating on the brink of a transition that hasn’t fully declared itself yet. In fact, there are plenty of retail stores open on Halsted Street now, they just don’t match the demographic asserting itself around Morgan Street. But new business that have opened sometimes report the landlords on Halsted haven’t seemed all that eager to rent.

Claire Knipper says when they were shopping for space to open Blue City Cycles in 2008, the landlord’s they approached were divided between those who wouldn’t return their calls and the ones who wanted startling rents. They looked at the former liquor store at 3409 South Halsted. The space was in bad condition, and she says the owner asked for $3,000 a month, triple net.

Loris Basso has had an even more mixed experience. He’s the proprietor of Monster Island Toys. He sells collectible figures from comic books, with a specialty in Godzilla and his cohort – Monster Island is their home in the movies, humanity tried to exile them there. Basso is the only dealer of the Japanese Bandai brand monsters in Illinois.

The retail store is just the icing on his thriving internet business. He is also one of those Halsted Street businesses that has moved from one storefront to the next -- trying to strike the best trade-off between the best rent and the best sales.

Basso says business would be better on the north side, there’s a more spendthrift collector base, they stop at the comic stores on their way home from work. They could stop by his store and buy the action figures in the same trip. But rents in Bridgeport are half, or less than half, what they are on the north side. Would sales be twice as much? As it is, he has customers from out of town who don’t mind making a trip to the shop when they come in to Chicago for other business. He gets a yearly visit from a shop owner in France, who stocks his store with merchandise he carries home in his luggage.

In 2007, Basso had his grand opening at 3407 S. Halsted. The property is owned by the same guys who own the former liquor store Knipper looked at. Tom and Jim Koulouris bought a cluster of storefronts from 3407 to 3419 S. Halsted in 2006.

Basso says he was paying $2,100 a month for 3,000 square feet, but there was also a leak in the ceiling – he had a pail to catch drips in the middle of the floor. He liked the Koulouris’, remembers them as good landlords. He says they went to lengths to repair the roof.

And business was good when Basso first opened. But when business wasn’t as good, and he asked the Koulouris’ to come down in rent, they weren’t willing to do it. Basso says their main business is a prosperous supermarket up north, and they didn’t have to rent the space.

So he moved to 3335 South Halsted – a smaller space for $1,500 a month. Six months after he moved out of the 3407 building, the roof collapsed with such force, it blew the windows out. (The building has since been demolished.)

Then he moved again down to the building that recently housed the Ramova Grill. The space was half the size, and half the rent. The owners, who also own the Ramova Grill, were preparing to retire, they had placed the building on the market, but Tony Dimos, one of the Ramova’s owners, says they were still looking to rent, they might have held on to the building if they’d filled the units with tenants, before they settled on a sale.

Even when they found a buyer, the closing kept getting pushed back. The appraisal was disappointing. Basso says he knows some of the details because an acquaintance was waiting to come in and offer the appraised value in cash if the sale didn’t go through. But then, Dimos says, it did. Happily so – after 50 years of service you hope the owners of the Ramova Grill got a pay out in the end. The new buyer wants to combine all the storefronts for a large Chinese restaurant.

Basso found the experience a little demoralizing. He felt Dimos misled him, because he promised him a lease. Basso took him at his word, fixed up the space and moved in, then Dimos didn’t go through with it. Then in the end, he tried to rush Basso out. He did get all this rent back, though he’s still not sure he’ll go to the effort to relocate the retail store.

Looking out across the street from Monster Island Toys on its last day open, there are 3 vacant storefronts across the street. They suggest a partial picture of Halsted’s fortunes. The Pants Store building was sold once last year, but is back on the market. Aaron Share of Koenig and Strey, who represents it, says it was bought by 2 investors, then one of them backed out, so the other needs to sell. Next to it stands a 3 story new construction condo building, with a first story storefront that’s never been occupied. Basso says the developer has decided to open an office in there himself. And next to that, there is another, older storefront, the windows are shrouded, there’s no visible announcement of any intent to rent, sell or do anything at all – maybe just waiting for the surprise economy to arrive.

Up the street, Jim Koulouris declines to give an asking rent for the former liquor store, he says it would need substantial renovations before he’d make it available. They have invested in the 2 storefronts at 3417 and 3419: one of them houses KAWA, a new sushi restaurant. Koulouris says they are asking for $2,500 a month for the 2,150 square foot space.

Things are looking up, he says. There are new businesses in the condominium building across the street, and they’ve been getting a lot more calls than they were getting 5 years ago. Maybe if things pick up a little more, it’ll be worth Basso’s while to open up a retail store again.

Karma Yacht Sales Grows Boating

Lou Sandoval and Jack Buoscio, co-owners of Karma Yacht Sales at 3635 South Halsted, returned from the Strictly Sail winter boat show bustling with leads. Winter is the season when people buy yachts, and boat sales reflect consumer confidence. Apparently consumer confidence has been rousing itself.

Boat sales began to step up in 2011, according to Spader, a franchise and consultancy. During the consumer-confidence bust, used boats flooded the market. But last year, dealer inventories of used boats dropped, and sales of new boats rose 3 times as fast as sales of used boats did.

Jack says the first to start buying again were people who had the money to buy all along, they never lost it -- they were the 45 to 50 foot yacht crowd. Now, people in the 35 to 40 foot crowd are following them back into the water.

If it surprises you to find a yacht dealer on Halsted Street in Bridgeport, Jack and Lou are quick to point out that sailing isn’t just a rich man’s sport. Though they say it is a sport for the forward looking. “Sailing a boat isn’t like driving a car,” Jack says “you have to plan several steps ahead.” They named their business for the principle that “waves of good fortune follow admirable actions.” And when they are not selling yachts, they are actively trying to bring the sport to a broader demographic. Lou, who lives in Bridgeport, is interested in doing something similar for Halsted Street.

Jack and Lou grew up on Chicago’s south side, in close proximity to the lake. Jack’s father was a school teacher, Lou’s was a steel worker. Lou first experienced sailing in the scouts, Jack discovered he had what they call the ‘water gene’ later in life.

Lou Sandoval and Jack Buoscio Outside the Office

As adults, they bought their first boat together with some friends while they were still employed in their corporate careers. It was a 26-foot 1978 craft “with a yellow hull and a Brady Bunch interior,” Lou recalls. They sailed it until they calculated they were ploughing enough into repairs and maintenance that they might as well buy a new boat. They did their homework and decided to buy a Beneteau.

Benjamin Beneteau started building fishing boats in 1884. His grandchildren pioneered in pleasure boats. Today, Beneteau is the largest builder of sailing yachts in the world. Even Benjamin’s fishing boats had names like “Poursuivante” (Pursuer) and “Vanquer des Jaloux” (Vanquisher of the Jealous). The brand is still known for speed and performance, and a reasonable price. For a new, 50-foot Beneteau, a reasonable price may be half a million dollars. Karma Yacht Sales also brokers used boats -- a smaller, older boat can be bought for the price of a car.

Jack and Lou bought their first Beneteau in 1999. By 2002 they were ready to trade their corporate careers for entrepreneurship. They’d struck up a friendship with Joe and Elaine Darby, owners of Darfin Yachts, who represented Beneteau on Lake Michigan. Jack eventually quit his corporate job to sell boats through Darfin full-time. Lou had once had a side venture managing yachts for clients he met through his corporate job – when he was doing sales for Abbott pharmaceuticals – they tended to be heads of surgery with a lot more money than time.

The Darby’s ran Darfin from their home near Midway airport.When they expressed interest in selling their dealership, Jack and Lou decided to buy it. They set up shop in Pilsen first, they acquired their building in Bridgeport in 2007.

There is still a portion of their customer base that rarely travels south of Madison Street. But Bridgeport is equidistant between Crowley’s 95th Street Yacht Yard, where they keep their inventory, and Burnham Harbor downtown. And Karma will be even better poised when the new 31st Street Harbor comes online this May.

Jack estimates there are 6 to 7 sailboat dealers in the Lake Michigan market, but only 2 or 3 of them have actually invested in inventory. The others will sell you boats out of catalogues. Karma also employs 2-3 service technicians so they can guarantee reliable service on boats they sell.

They typically start the season with 4 boats on hand in representative sizes – some customers will order variations based on their models, but by late summer, they hope to be selling the last of their inventory.

A wavering customer can visit Beneteau’s US manufacturing plant in Marion, South Carolina, where 300 families build boats in a 21-step assembly process. It’s a convincing experience. Buyers sometimes visit their own boat as it is being built.

Nationally, new boat sales have waxed and waned with the economy over decades, but sales of new sailboats began to drop steadily after 2000. That may reflect the aging of the traditional yacht demographic. It does not measure trade in used boats, and Lou says sales of new yachts have been steadier in Chicago than they have been nationally.

Karma opened during the dotcom bust, and has weathered the banking crisis. At the height of it, sales shifted toward cash transactions, (from about 20% toward 40% of sales) but that’s not because marine lenders weren’t willing to make loans. Jack says financing for sailboats is still readily available.

In fact that’s a point of some pride for sailors: in the past 5 years, foreclosures hit the world of boat finance too. But 98% of those were foreclosures on motorboats. Only 2% were on sailboats, according to GE Capital, which lends to both dealers and consumers.

Jack and Lou say it’s not that sailboat owners are richer, they believe it reflects the careful instincts of the sailor, who must calculate the wind to change his course. Sailboats don’t appeal to the sportsman impatient to press a button, drop the throttle or hit the gas.

And sailboats tend to hold their value, even in crisis – they may depreciate 2-3% a year. Jack describes a customer who inherited some money 4 years ago. He considered investing in stocks, or in a vacation home, but ultimately decided to buy a boat. Two years later, he was very happy with that decision. “He came back to tell us ‘The stocks I was going to buy are down 40%, the cottage is down to half its value in 2 years,” Jack recalls, “but the boat held 94% of its value.’”

Boat loans are often amortized over 20 years – which means you can buy a yacht the price of a house for payments similar to those for a nice car. That is why Jack and Lou’s typical customer doesn’t have to be rich. Karma’s customers include police officers and school teachers, who enjoy their summers off.

The storied ‘water gene’ – which differentiates the person who goes out on a boat and isn’t all that impressed from the one who absolutely loves it – may be widely dispersed. But old social dynamics still impinge on its expression. “Grow Boating” is an industry initiative to promote the boating lifestyle.

Lou attended a Grow Boating assembly last year. It brought 160 luminaries from across boating types and industry sectors. Lou says only 15 of them were women, and he was one of 5 minorities. He believes the boat-owning grassroots is more diverse, even if that diversity is still filtering up through industry leadership. As of 2009 there were roughly 375,000 registered boats in Illinois, about 1 for every 13 households in the state, suggesting he is probably right.

Karma Yacht Sales has an activist streak – its owners are current on issues that impact their industry and advocate for measures that help it along. Locally, they have approached the public schools and city colleges about developing educational programs that might use sailing to demonstrate classroom concepts in physics and math, or offer vocational training in fiberglass and diesel mechanics – skills that could grow a local sailing industry, and are transferable to other industries as well.

Lou moved his family to Bridgeport in 2006, so he tends to see opportunities for action here too. He lived in Wicker Park for 9 years, and was active in the Chamber of Commerce that raised Wicker Park’s retail profile – he’d like to see similar efforts in Bridgeport. Wicker Park used a Special Service Area to generate revenues that merchants could invest as a group. Just as important, they coordinated their marketing efforts and used electronic media – something Bridgeport’s retail old-guard has been slow to embrace.

This summer, when the new marina opens at 31st Street, non-boaters may also feel the boost. Chicago harbors generate more than $30 million in annual revenue for the Park District, and help support 100s of jobs hospitality sector jobs.
Last year, about 5,000 boats docked at the city’s 9 marinas. The Park District has cited growing demand to justify substantial hikes in harbor fees over the last 10 years.

The new harbor at 31st Street will add 1,000 slips to the city’s inventory, according to Westrec Marinas, which operates the harbors for the Park District. Jack and Lou anticipate a salutary effect on harbor fees, not to mention new points of entry for Chicagoans just discovering their affinity for the water.

Bridgeport Tattoo Company: a Traditional Neighborhood Shop

The Bridgeport Tattoo Company is a self-described traditional shop. Tattoo is a vigorous folk art -- it's proliferated in popularity, and in variety of styles. In recent years, it’s taken on Hollywood drama, thanks to tattooed celebrities and reality tv.

When David ‘Blackjack’ Fitzgerald opened Bridgeport Tattoo Company in 2007, he papered the walls with the history of the American sailor-era style of tattoo. “That’s what we’re known for,” he says. People from other cities, who know they’ll be visiting Chicago, book ahead to add a tattoo in the traditional American style to their personal canvas.

But Blackjack wanted to make his shop traditional in a broader sense.

He generally keeps his own tattoos under wraps. But the 2 that are always visible are the tiny ‘312’ and shamrock under his right eye that mark him as Chicago Irish. He grew up on the northwest side. “Everything south of North Avenue was no man’s land,” he says. But when he saw the storefront at 3527 S. Halsted advertised on Craig’s list, he kept an open mind.

He and his longtime girlfriend, Jeanette, had a beer in a couple Bridgeport taverns, ate dinner at the Ramova Grill. He read up on the neighborhood’s history. He read about the canal diggers who linked the great inland waterways, and tied Chicago to global commerce. And about Bridgeport mayors, and the gangs of precinct captains and patronage workers who all ‘looked out for their own.’

A neighborhood that ‘looks out for its own,’ has some negative connotations. Especially, Blackjack acknowledges, if you’re looking in from the outside. “But if you’re part of it, if you live here, if you have a business here, supporting your own is a good thing.”

He wanted to open a shop that would be part of it.

“If people come [to Bridgeport Tattoo] from Lincoln Park, that’s awesome,” he says. “But I didn’t come to Bridgeport to serve them. I knew Bridgeport was a blue collar, old school community, and that’s the people I wanted to serve.” And he is enthusiastic about how Bridgeport’s heritage is poised to evolve.





Tattoo has a long outsider tradition. It has associations with circus sideshows and prison gangs. In the U.S., it has a strong association with military service. Blackjack describes traditional American style as a badge a young soldier or sailor would get to remind him of what he valued most (his mother, a pretty girl, a patriot’s eagle) before he marched off to war.

In Japan, the other traditional source for tattoo, it was an underground art, associated with organized crime, and sometimes suppressed under law.

Blackjack, who traces his artistic lineage back to Sailor "Bill" Killingsworth, has lined the walls of Bridgeport Tattoo Company with the work of old masters like Don Ed Hardy and Sailor Jerry in Honolulu.

Sailor Jerry helped link the American and Japanese traditions. He learned tattoo while riding the rails as a teenager in the 1920s. He practiced up on hobos. He joined the navy in the 30s and sailed the Pacific, where he was exposed to the Japanese tradition first hand. Then he settled in Honolulu and tattooed generations of American sailors.

Sailor Jerry tapped his Japanese acquaintances to help his protégé, Don Ed Hardy, gain access to study the art in Japan. Hardy was the first Westerner to really do so. Blackjack can show you the early results, how Hardy combined Japanese themes in an American style, in the history that ornaments his walls.

For his part, Sailor Jerry was known for an abiding mistrust of squares, who live their lives conforming to social conventions. Tattooing has thrived on the margins, where conventions were weakest. In Chicago, that used to be on south State Street, where the tattoo arcades prospered alongside bars with boozy music and go-go girls. Teen-age sailors, fresh from the Great Lakes Naval Academy, would go there to get their courage up before they hit the high seas.







Blackjack was a military man himself, before he was a tattoo artist; he did combat in Operation Restore Hope in Mogadishu, Somalia. In the service, he and his buddies sought out the seedy corners of foreign towns, where they’d stay up late getting tattooed into the early hours of the morning.

Back in the States, he took up the trade. He’s been tattooing since 1992, and came back to Chicago in 1994. For the most part, he picked up his skills on the job. Now he wants to mentor younger talent in his shop. He employs 3 younger tattooists, and an apprentice, who he’s been drilling in her drawing skills. She draws pages of hearts that already look perfect to an untrained eye.

“It’s the simplest things that are most difficult.” In the case of hearts, the trick is drawing 2 curves in perfect symmetry, in reverse. In the case of lettering, it’s learning to draw your letters, consistently, as opposed to scribbling them, the way people do when they write.
“Things I learned in 10 years of practice, she’ll learn in 2,” Blackjack says.



In all those years he’s been practicing, the industry has changed. The portion of the population who are tattooed has grown. When the American Academy of Dermatology did a survey in 2004, they found that 36% of 18-29 year olds had tattoos, compared to 24% of people in their 30s, and 15% of people in their 40s.

The practice has become more mainstream, but not necessarily more professional. There’s been a proliferation of trade shows, where artists converge, making more styles more widely available.

The first one was held in Houston in 1976. Blackjack points out those were the days before e-mail, when a long distance telephone call was expensive. The show was an opportunity for the best of the best to meet, swap stories and techniques. “That’s really cool, how did you do that?”

By the time Blackjack joined the business, conventions were open to the public. The convergence of talent meant you could get a tattoo from artists from distant cities. But Blackjack says they’ve gradually devolved into vehicles for their promoters, many of whom have no other interest in tattoos.

The biggest change in the industry he’s noticed has been the explosion of shops since the genre was made a legitimate business in Chicago.

Tattoo shops weren’t illegal before, but they weren’t explicitly allowed in the Chicago zoning code, until the rewrite in 2004. Before that, if you wanted to open a tattoo shop, you had to get the alderman’s permission to open as a special use.

“What alderman is going to say ‘Open in my ward, because that’s what we need?’ Of course not, no political person is going to say ‘Yes, we love tattoo parlors in our community.’”

Since it’s become a permitted use in commercial zones, the population of tattoo parlors has exploded. Most of them are fly-by-night. Long time practitioners have no idea who they are.

Blackjack says pretty much all you need to open a tattoo parlor is $250 for a license and lids on your garbage cans. There’s certainly no accreditation to prove you’ve got skill. In that respect, the industry is still self regulating.

He says amid the hundreds of shops crowding Chicago today, there are about 6 shops “that matter” – he counts them off in his head. “We all know each other. We all know what each other is doing. Not just as business owners, but as tattoo-ers.”




Meanwhile, the zoning change allowed him to open up his own shop in Bridgeport. He’d already been thinking about what he wanted his own legacy to be. He chose the neighborhood for its tradition. So he was careful not to offend its sensibilities.

He did the build-out behind paper in the windows. When he first opened, he didn’t even post a sign for the first 6 weeks. “I wanted the business and the community to just have time to gradually get to know each other.”





Now it's the most respectable looking storefront south of 35th Street, with its green awning, and tasteful lettering. Even the art on the walls that is visible from the windows was hand-picked to make sure all the girls were clothed. “I didn’t want some longtime Bridgeport resident to walk by and be offended by the boobs of a pin-up girl.”

He figured customers who wanted to find the shop, would find it. And when they came in, he wanted them to feel welcome. Tattoo parlors can be intimidating. Some of them cultivate a ‘Who are you?’ ‘What do you want?’ kind of vibe. Blackjack wanted to create a customer friendly establishment.

“I turned into the person we used to make fun of,” he jokes. “We were the seedy crowd, the rough and tumble party guys. It’s a different time for me, as an adult.”

Now he’s a family man. In fact, his family is installed in the apartment upstairs. There are some drawbacks to that – he rarely leaves the building, for instance. But he’s home for supper every night, and to tuck the kids in to bed.



He says one of his first requirements for employees is that they be good family men themselves, whether they are married or not. “If you’ve made a commitment to me to be a good man outside work, I know your mind is clear, and you’re going to be a good employee.”

Second, is that they be fastidious about the shop. Hygiene is one area where tattooing is regulated. Blackjack doubles the requirements -- from what parts of the machine get disposed after each use, to how they bag the bottles used to swab the skin. And of course the shop itself is military clean, because “this place gets cleaned like Mother Theresa is coming every day.”

One of Blackjack’s ideas for making the shop more community friendly was a little controversial among his peers. He wanted to try making the price of a good tattoo more affordable. “It’s expensive, you might only do 1 or 2 a day, and you’re trying to make a paycheck from those 1 or 2 walk-ins.” Lowering the price might increase the customer flow, though some of his closest associates were skeptical of the strategy.

As it is, prices for tattoos vary widely. At Bridgeport Tattoo Company, they tell clients a tattoo the size of a deck of cards will typically cost $150 – that’s based on an hourly rate of $100. They say a shop that doesn’t matter might charge as little as $30 for the same card sized tattoo; a shop that does might charge $300. And that $100 an hour doesn’t include the time spent drafting the design, which can sometimes take longer than executing the tattoo.

At any rate, their business model appears to be working. The first day Bridgeport Tattoo Company opened for business, 6 weeks before there was a sign in the window, Blackjack says he did 20 tattoos – he was up into the early morning hours doing them -- and they were all for customers from Bridgeport.

On February 5, 2012, Blackjack will celebrate the 20th anniversary of his work as a tattooist. Over the years, he has accumulated a client list from further afield. Some of them are 2nd generation -- guys who were kids when he started tattooing their fathers. Some have had standing monthly appointments for years. But he says the majority of his clientele come from Bridgeport, which is how he wanted it to be.

Most tattoo shops “are just shops in a location.” That’s not what he wants for Bridgeport Tattoo Company. He’s sponsored every charity who’s asked him. He even sounds a little disappointed when he sees a sign in a neighbors’ window who is sponsoring an organization that never approached his shop to do it, like they might have been intimidated by tattooing’s outsider image.

But Bridgeport’s retail streetscape is something Blackjack is proud to be a part of. When he’s bragging about his neighborhood to friends, he tells them about the longevity of places like Schallers, and about all the new places that have opened just since he’s been here: Zaytune's Mediterranean Grill, Nana’s Michelen rated restaurant, Blue City Cycles and Maria’s Community Bar.

“Imagine Halsted full of new and innovative stores. When you think of Halsted at Maxwell Street – it looks awesome, but it’s all Subways and Quiznos.

“In Bridgeport, it’s places you’ve never heard about. They’re small batch, locally grown. What they do matters -- they do it intentionally,” Blackjack enthuses. “Their business is an extension of who they are.” It’s a business community where Bridgeport Tattoo Company fits right in.

Notes from the Barbershop: Vince & Gino's Hair Design

The first time I got highlights in my hair I came out a little too Bridgeport blond. My landlord, who has turned out to be a source of sound advice on a surprising range of topics, suggested I try Vince and Gino’s Hair Design at 28th and Wallace instead.

I’d seen the shop before – I thought it was a barber shop. It is. But they do women’s hair too. Not only did they fix my hair, but from my perch in the ladies’ salon I could watch them barber the men, which is worth a visit in itself.

They’d finish a haircut that was less than an inch long, then apply product and blow it dry – the whole operation accompanied by lively conversation. “A lot of it’s the pampering,” Gino says of the barber’s service, but it’s also the finishing. “Barbering is all about the details.”

They use clippers for very short hair (clippers aren’t less traditional than a comb and scissors - most men probably know this, but I didn’t – there were manual clippers before there were electric ones, and their relative merits are a function of how short the cut will be).

But clippers are often the first step at Vince and Gino’s – they’ll go back over the cut with scissors to make the hair lie right; or they’ll use the clippers to shave the neck and shape around the ears, and then lather is up and perfect it with a straight razor.

Gino’s father Vince Ballone learned the barber’s trade in Italy, where training entailed a 4 year apprenticeship. You’d start out sweeping the floors and move up to applying lather before they’d let you hold a razor – a respectful pace for an art that entails applying a sharp blade across someone’s throat. Vince came to Chicago and opened the shop at 2845 South Wallace in 1960.

In the US, Gino’s path was different. He went to beautician’s school, and got recruited into an assistant-ship at an Oak Street salon. They didn’t call him an assistant, they were charging hundreds of dollars when he colored people’s hair, so they called him a color specialist and told the clients he was from Milan.

If all went well, he could expect to work his way up to his own chair in a few years. That seemed like a long time. And he wasn’t entirely comfortable with the atmosphere. “I like the people,” he says “the personal interactions.” The personal interactions were strange at the Oak Street salon.

Part of his education was to stand and observe as the master stylists performed. One afternoon, a client sat down and told her stylist “You know, I think you left this side a just little bit longer than the other last time you cut my hair...”

The stylist bit her head off. “I am an artist! You’re just a canvas!” He stormed off, leaving Gino, stunned, with the client. The client started to cry in the chair. Eventually the stylist cooled off, came back and apologized. The client apologized too.

That will never happen to you at Vince and Gino’s. Most of their clients have been coming back to them for years, some of them for 3 generations. For much of that time, Vince Ballone’s barber shop was a 2 chair operation. Gino left Oak Street and set up a 3rd chair for doing women’s hair in 1992.

John Caliscibetta joined the business eight years ago. He knew Vince from the Italian American Club. He’d been cutting hair downtown in the Loop since the 1960s. Businessmen got their hair trimmed every week, and they had people in the chair for a shave every day.

John recalls during the Civil Rights era, they’d get calls from African American men asking if they cut black hair. He’d tell them he didn’t have much experience with black hair, but he’d try. Often, they’d decide to go elsewhere, figuring he wouldn’t do the best job. “But they wanted to know if we’d turn them away.”

Today, barbers and fade shops may be more prevalent in African American neighborhoods – there are still a couple barber colleges in Chicago today. But if you google “traditional barber” you get a list of shops in distant cities with names like “Good Fellas” and “Quintessential Gentleman” – names that suggest the old-world barbershop has come near enough to extinction that it could be subject to a retro-cool revival.

But if the old-world art is going to persist uninterrupted, it makes sense that it’s doing that here. Gino says there are 2 other traditional barbershops in the vicinity – Joe’s on 26th Street and another shop on Taylor – though Vince and Gino’s is the only one that still does a hot facial shave.

Shaves aren’t as common anymore, but they’re still in demand. Vince and John used to get clients who didn’t shave themselves, they’d only get shaved at the barber shop. They would have their own razor in a mug at the shop.

A straight razor shave lasted twice as long as a DIY version, mainly because the quality of disposable razors was very bad. Gino says disposable razors improved dramatically in the last 20 years. In fact the straight razors they use at the shop are disposable, just to guarantee against any potential for spread of infection. Though a barber can still shave you closer with a straight blade. And people still appreciate the pampering.

My informal poll of male acquaintances showed significant interest in the procedure, though most respondents had never had it done. One had heard a straight blade shave would chafe his face.

Gino says some people are sensitive to the straight razor, especially if they haven’t been shaved with one before. But the barber can see that as he’s shaving, and he’ll avoid making a second pass against the grain.

The details do a lot to smooth the operation. Hot towels soften the skin; a pre-shave lotion raises the beard; the lather is applied warm. Some clients opt for a mud mask to clean their pores after the shave itself.

Five years ago, Vince and Gino expanded the shop, adding new staff and salon services. Victoria Marina does manicures, pedicures, facials and massage. She says about half the manicures she does are for women, the other half are for men. Christina Lebato joined the shop out of beautician’s school about 2 years ago – she does my hair and I come out of there looking like a much cuter version of my former self.

Paige is the newest employee, she’s trained in hair, but also in make-up. Most of her clients who want make-up done are primping for homecomings, weddings or other formal events, but she’s also been trained in theatrical make-up, which you might keep in mind for other occasions. If you’re attending an Edward Gorey Halloween party for instance. [Which I was, at the time I wrote this. Now I realize it might suggest it's her preferred style (not so). Also, the photo of the pretty ladies shows Paige, at left, and Christina. I do come out looking cuter, but not that cute.]

Now that elaborate whiskers have made a comeback, there should be a new market for traditional barber services. Another respondent in my acquaintance poll wears his hair down over his brow, and has an old world mustache. He goes to a salon to have his hair cut, because when he’s gone to a barber shop, his hair doesn’t lie right.

But the woman who does his hair won’t touch his face. She sees an imaginary line that marks the end of her expertise, somewhere in the middle of his sideburns. If that sounds familiar, you might take my landlord’s advice and go to Vince and Gino’s. They’ll shape your mustache, and make sure your hair lies just the way you want it, too.

Calabruzzi's Cafe Adds a New Reason to Visit Halsted Street

Calabruzzi’s Café is a family owned and operated restaurant of Italian American cuisine, but it also marks the return to Bridgeport’s Halsted strip of a restaurant that had disappeared for awhile. At least it reminds me of a youthful version of the kind of place my parents might have gone on a date – a place you go for a nice dinner that starts with a fancy cocktail, something like what I imagine the Governor’s Table and the Coral Key used to be.

Saturday, I went in for dinner with the friend who is my source of information about those other establishments. He hesitates at the comparison, he remembers them being more formal – the menu more surf and turf, the bartender dressed in a jacket and tie. “We wouldn’t walk into Coral Key dressed like this,” he says. Though he agrees the dress code was partly a factor of the era.

It was an era before the arrival of intentional food, cable cooking programs and the widespread use of the term “foodie” to describe the amateur food critic. When a good restaurant was a place that served a meal with roots in home cooking, except with richer ingredients, cooked skillfully by somebody else – which is what our dinner at Calabaruzzi’s was like.



Owner Rosanna Mandile comes from a cooking family, and family is strongly represented at Calabruzzi’s. Her father, Angelo, was a cook at Papa Milano’s (also of that other era) when he first came to the States from Italy in the 1970s. Later he became a mason to better support his family, but the Mandile family always cooked. In the winter, when construction trades were slow, they started cooking mid-afternoon. They cured sopresatta and made wine, they jarred eggplant and tomatoes, and mushrooms her father gathered from the woods. They bought rabbits from a farm in Michigan, her father and uncle skinned their own.

Rosanna got her first restaurant job at 15 – she worked at Maggiolini’s, a pizzeria one of her uncles owned in Gage Park, until she married at 22. Pizza is a central part of the menu at Calabruzzi’s. She says it’s the water that makes Chicago pizza superior. Her aunts mix dough with Evian -- she can’t do that at the restaurant, but even Chicago tap water makes pizza here taste better than what they make with the water in New York and LA.

When she married, she moved back to Bridgeport with her husband. Her father-in-law was in the flea-market business and she worked for him for a few years. But she had cooking at the back of her mind. She traveled to Italy shortly after her marriage, learning recipes from her Italian aunts as she travelled the south and central regions.

She began planning to open her own restaurant in earnest 4 years ago. The family owned the building at 3304 S. Halsted, but first they had to clear it out. It had been vacant since the 1980s, her father in law had gradually filled it with furniture, it was part of a network of storefronts he used to warehouse merchandise for his flea market enterprise. They sent a semi-load of donations to the victims of Hurricane Katrina and shuffled the rest to other facilities.

Then they rebuilt the storefront from the floor to the ceiling. Angelo poured the concrete floor and built the bar out of masonry. They restored the tin ceiling with a copper finish in honor of the coppersmiths of her mother’s hometown. Her cousin, Nicholas De Crescenso, painted a large mural of Rome’s Trevi Fountain for the north wall at Rosanna’s request. The south wall is hung with maps of Calabrria and Abruzzo painted on towels. Rosanna says the family name, Mandile, means towel; her father came from Calabria her mother from Abruzzo; Calabruzzi’s is a conjunction of the names. The staff, 5 of whom are cousins, all wear Italian soccer jersey’s and puma track shoes – in honor of another cousin who is a 2012 Olympic hopeful in women’s steeplechase.



After years of research and a lifetime of cooking, Rosanna had developed a menu that was 10 pages long. “Everyone said ‘You’re crazy,’” a 10 page menu would put her out of business. So she pared it down to the basics, “what people are used to around here,” and the rest of it will cycle through the specials list. There will be several preparations of rabbit; cardi soup, made with real cardoons, not American celery, for the New Year; and a pescara pizza with shrimp, clams, mussles and calamari for Lent. Meanwhile, the regular menu includes family specialties, like pizza made with their own sopresata mix, her father’s special pescara salad, and a cannoli she makes from a pizzelle cookie.

Calabruzzi’s opened for business quietly 3 weeks ago, 3 days before the Sox Home Opener, to be precise. “I wanted to give my staff time to get their bearings for a few days,” Rosanna says.

Its arrival rounds out a trio of new restaurants on Halsted Street that cover the culinary bases: Buffalo Wings and Rings is the Sports-Bar; Nana has the cutting edge organic cuisine; Calabruzzi’s is traditional Italian-American, served in a dining room with warm décor that makes you want to sit down and eat-in. And the owners of all three establishments have known each other for years; now they can lend each other mutual support.

The owner of Nana came to Calabruzzi’s to eat the first day it opened, and left a glowing comment on the restaurant’s facebook page. Rosanna says the partners at Buffalo Wings and Rings have been generous with advice and have sent her patrons when they’ve had an overflow crowd. Between the three of them, they’ve multiplied the reasons to stop in on Halsted Street.

What Alderman Balcer Sees on Halsted Street

If you ask Alderman Balcer to describe what he’d like to see happen on Halsted Street, he starts, probably naturally enough for an alderman, with what’s already been accomplished.

The ground’s been laid with major streetscape improvements – all new curbs and stamped pedestrian treads at the intersections. The sidewalk is lined with decorative lamps and bracketed with big redevelopment projects: a stately police station at one end, a handsome condominium block at the other.

In between, the Alderman rattles off a list of shops that have all come on line in the last few years. Named in sequence, there are a lot of them.

Cermak Produce will join Blue City Cycles, 123 Express Chinese Restaurant, Tacos Erendira, Ace Bakery and Nana Restaurant, Emergency Shoe Repair and Alternations, the revamped Halsted Foods, Noodles Pho You and Evolution Fitness, Rings and Wings in the condominium building, Oscar’s Jewelry in its new Halsted location, and Bridgeport Tattoo.

In fact, he missed a couple, and his list, laced with enthusiastic superlatives, actually extends from the park in the old Stearns Quarry (with “400 million year old fossils” at the bottom of it and “views of the whole city” at the top), to the quaint and very tasty Bake for Me Café across from the stockyards.



For 10 years developers lined up in his office; now that they’re scarce, people sometimes complain about what actually got done. Several of those businesses he names were already here, they just moved to new quarters or redid their facades.

In response to which, Alderman Balcer observes “People see what they want to see.” And after all, if Bridgeport’s longtime business owners see opportunity to reinvest and grow, and if the city sometimes helps them, that can’t look all bad.

I’ve heard one or two new entrepreneurs say they want to coordinate to support other small business, so their investment doesn’t just lay the ground for the big chains to come in.

I’ve heard another acquaintance speculate that if there is a master plan for what happens in Bridgeport, it’s that it not turn out like Wrigleyville – a frat house row of bars around the stadium and the speculators driving elderly voters out of the houses they’ve lived in all their lives.

When I ask Alderman Balcer if there is development he thinks would be bad for Halsted Street, he sounds more concerned about junk shops than sports bars; when I ask if there is a written planning document he’s using as a guide for what ought to come, he says “There was one, but now I play it by ear.”

The Alderman acknowledges there is one more big redevelopment project in the works for central Halsted Street -- the vacant Wendt Furniture, most recently occupied by a dollar store that sold plastic goods out of cardboard bins, will go down, and the public library will expand into its space. But other than that, he says there are no more plans to demolish swaths of old storefronts for big civic projects.

He says the future of Halsted is in lots of small shops. “It can’t all be Target and Walmart.” An avid pedestrian who pops up everywhere on his neighborhood strolls, he says “You need foot traffic, or nobody’s going to come.” And when I squeezed in one last question about Barkaat Foods, which moved into the old Chiapetti’s plant down Halsted’s wholesale food district, he affirms they are an asset, compatible with the breadth of uses on Halsted Street.

All of which is pretty much what I’d hoped to hear him say. Though I am sure I hear what I want to hear as much as anybody else.

Cermak Produce Steps Up Where Jewel Backed Out

Cermak Produce aims to open for business in the former Jewel Store on Halsted and 31st sometime between the last week of February and the first week of April. According to George Bousis, whose family opened the first Cermak Produce in 1993, the Bridgeport store will be the 12th store for the independent grocer. It is also the latest example of an unsung trend in the Chicago grocery market.

The press tends to focus on price wars between supermarket giants, and historically, chains have gained advantage over independentsby steadily consolidating their buying power. But in Chicago, the acquisition of Jewel and Dominick’s by large chains opened new footholds for independents. The behemoths proved less nimble to meet local needs.

Dominick’s lost market share after being purchased by Safeway, one local wholesaler recalls. “One of the first things they did was pull Italian sausage off the shelves,” a misstep they eventually reversed. “That was one of the things the DiMatteo Family was famous for. If you wanted a specialty product, they would get it for you.”

Regulators forced Jewel to divest some of its stores when it acquired Cub Foods 10 years ago, and both chains have gone on to close other urban stores for strategic reasons. Smaller independents – like Caputo’s, Garden Fresh and Pete’s Fresh Market – grew in the gap, sometimes in the abandoned stores.



“We like to open stores in underserved markets,” Bousis says. Like its independently owned peers, Cermak specializes in ethnic niches. Bousis names stores on the far south side and close by on Cermak that specialize in Hispanic products; he says the Bridgeport store will have more bok choy and imported Italian foods.

Meanwhile, he is busy revamping the store’s web-site to make it a portal for consumer input, so the store can respond more directly to customer requests. Whether those requests are for or food items, or for other amenities. Will the Bridgeport store have bike racks? “If people request that, we will.”

Bousis believes Cermak’s products are fresher than products in the big chains too, because the supply chain from the tree to the store is relatively short. “Our guys are at the Chicago Produce Market at 3:00 in the morning, picking out the best produce every day. Jewel has bananas ripening in a warehouse, it might be 8 weeks from the tree to the store. For us, it’s two weeks from the tree to the store.”



Cermak Produce’s stores don’t typically display large selections of organic produce –Bousis says this is partly a technicality. Organic foods in a cooler with non organic ones can’t be labeled organic anymore. “We buy apples from the same place Whole Foods does, they spend more on display and marketing as organic. Their mark up on the apples is 300%; ours is 30%.”

The day I talked to him, wholesale prices for apples at the Chicago International Produce market centered around 75 cents per pound. Apples at the Cermak Store just west of Ashland were 99 cents a pound, across varieties, from Red Delicious to Honeycrisp. Down the street, Dominick’s was selling some varieties for 99 cents a pound with a membership card, but regular prices ranged from $1.99 to $3.99 – Honeycrisps were selling for $2.59 with a member card.

A 300% margin buys more real estate, but not necessarily a better store. The aisles in Dominick’s are vast and increasingly staffless. The aisles at Cermak’s store near Ashland are far more compact: the frozen food section is contained in 2 coolers; the bakery is an electric oven at the front of the store. But you’ll find every type of product you might want at a larger grocery store, with more choices of aloe beverage. And from the meat counter, to the produce aisles, the store is humming with staff restocking the shelves. The produce displays are impeccable, and none of it is sopping wet.

Overall, Cermak’s arrival may be the best reason Bridgeport has to look forward to February

Portrait of Halsted as a Thriving Retail Strip

Patrick Falahee is an Attorney and Counselor at Law with a strong Bridgeport practice, but his office is in the Monadnock Building downtown. He looked for an office on Halsted Street, but was surprised to find the rents cost more for less than desirable space. He points out one storefront whose owner wanted $2,500 a month, even though there was a big dripping hole in the ceiling. (“You fix,” the landlord told him.)

It wasn’t always like that. Falahee remembers when Halsted and 35th Street was the State and Madison of Bridgeport. He grew up on Union Ave between 36th and 37th in the 1960s and 70s; he says the city lot alongside Jack Sheehan’s top secret bar used to be the city parking lot, marked with lights, and packed with the cars of people who’d come to shop the Halsted Strip.



He spent whole Saturdays at the Ramova Theater, going from one movie to the next, before it was overtaken by Kung Fu pictures and a tougher crowd; he says I should find another source for stories about the Lithuanian theater that used to be up the street by Bernice’s tavern, because he and his friends generally didn’t go north of 33rd Street. He doesn’t remember much about Morgan Street either, really didn’t go over there. But Halsted had everything.

It was dominated by groceries stores and taverns. Falahee can point out 5 former grocery stores between the former Pocius grocery at 36th Street and the former Tony’s supermarket near 32nd, where the Ace Bakery is now. And they were supplemented by a network of little shops on the interior streets. There was a little grocery store in the middle of his block on Union, where he used to get sent to pick up fresh chicken for supper; there was a drug store on the corner just down the street, a bona fide apothecary, who kept ingredients in antique glass jars. You’d go there and tell Louie what ailed you and he’d mix something up. He’d make jokes and chat while you waited, people used to go to his shop to hang out.

Now the most prosperous drug store in Bridgeport, and maybe in Illinois, is an anonymous pharmacy in Doctor Knapp’s building across from Nana Restaurant. Falahee recalls it ranked highest in the state for medicare billings a couple years ago. Walking by, you’d never know it was there.



Traffic on Halsted was already waning in the 1950s, before Falahee was born. Observers comparing Bridgeport’s portion of the city’s retail sales to its portion of the city’s population suggest that was when families who’d moved outward toward Brighton Park and Archer Heights, but came back to Bridgeport to do the shopping, could do the shopping in their own neighborhoods instead.

But the suburban strip malls really sucked it dry. Halsted’s sidewalk shoppers wandered off for a new kind of retail experience, one that seemed modern and convenient at the time, but that seems uniform and anonymous now. There were oceans of parking, and chain stores that could combine quality and price in a way the little independents couldn’t match.

They still can’t, but there is also a growing segment of consumers who will travel miles for the pleasure of shopping on a street that is quaint, pedestrian friendly, individually owned, diverse. Which sounds a lot like the Halsted Street Falahee remembers.

There was a fish monger where the car wash is now, the owners wore rubber aprons and laid the fish out on beds of ice in the windows, there was an Italian Bakery and Deli where they made their own sausage, and a Chinese laundry where the owner, in traditional dress and a queue, pressed shirts in the window – just in the 2 blocks between 36th Street and the Ramova.



You could buy anything you might need on Halsted back then: dress shoes for the office, back to school clothes for the kids, ladies lingerie, which was sold in a little shop where the condominium block stands at Halsted and 35th (though strictly the girdle and pantyhose variety – “it wasn’t Victoria’s Secret,” Falahee recalls). He says half the families in Bridgeport got their mortgages at Union Federal, where Citibank moved in, and then bought their furniture at Wendt’s – “their green delivery trucks were everywhere.”

You can still buy shoes, clothes and furniture on Halsted Street. But there are fewer options of lesser quality. Or, in a few cases, longtime owners will impress you with outstanding service so you vow to go back and spend more money there, but they’re nearing retirement age and are waiting for a good offer, someone they think will open up something that will be good for the street.

A handful of new businesses have opened their doors on Halsted in the past few years and seem to be thriving, recession or no recession. Bridgeport Tattoo set up shop in the old North Ice Cream Parlor, Blue City Cycles opened up where Blackie’s Barbershop once was. Nana Restaurant brought organic dining to Bridgeport, and brought Bridgeport to the attention of the mainstream press for a positive accomplishment. Across the street Calabruzzi’s has been slowly taking shape behind the bed-sheets in the windows of the old Magikist plant.

All of which seems to promise more good things are in store for Halsted Street when the recession eventually lifts. With any luck, it will skip the awkward strip-mall and big-box phase that some other neighborhoods endure, and re-populate with something more like the shops that brought crowds strolling down the sidewalk when Falahee was a kid.