Notes from Neighborhood Watch

I haven’t lived in Bridgeport all that long but I am already proud of the place as if I’ve lived here all my life, and sometimes a little defensive about its media image as a hold out of the uglier parochial sentiments. Living in Bridgeport really is like living in a small town. There are a lot of good things about that, though there are some things that are not so great. Some of both came out after a sensational murder last fall.

I hear there have been sensational murders in Bridgeport before, guys shot down outside their houses or tortured to death behind closed doors, but they often seemed to be criminals reaping the wages of their chosen careers. This was a 73 year old woman, bludgeoned to death in her garage on a nice block east of Halsted St. And it followed close on 2 startling incidents of people robbed at gun point in broad daylight around Normal and Parnell.

It was more startling because of where it was. Years ago, I’m told, Parnell was a tough street and the rail yard on Normal was inhabited by hobos who carried big sticks to beat the rats with. But since then the yard on Normal has been paved for White Sox parking and Parnell has been rebuilt with big houses with soaring atriums, in ground pools and second kitchens in finished basements (whose inhabitants still spend summer evenings sitting the garage, an unfamiliar custom that seems quaintly old world).

Our regular CAPS beat meetings used to be held at Wentworth Gardens, the public housing complex on the other side of the viaduct. After the Parnell murder in October, there was a special CAPS meeting held at Nativity of Our Lord on Lowe.

Over 400 people filled the church basement. The 9th District CAPS officer, the District Commander, the Alderman and the Chicago Police Department’s second in command, all came to address their fears.

The crowd was restive and suspicious, they seemed ready to boil over. They want to know what police were doing to address the crime wave in their neighborhood. The police seemed to be telling them there wasn’t a crime wave. At least Commander Jarmusz started out running through statistics of actual crimes for each of Bridgeport’s beats, in almost every category the number was down from the previous year.

Eventually a woman from the crowd told him, “I don’t care about statistics, I know crime is up,” a sentiment the crowd heartily approved. They told the CPD’s second in command “You’re not from here,” and they left muttering that the police were “lying through their teeth.”

The uglier sentiments were amplified through the ether in the months afterwards, through Facebook groups and reports on EveryBlock. Neighbors provoked each other with veiled, or not so veiled, references to people of other ethnicities who don’t share our values. “It’s Black Friday on Halsted Street” I see a friend post from a bar on the afternoon after Thanksgiving. He describes black youths walking Bridgeport’s quiet retail strip “in gangs of 3 and 4.” There were reports of crimes, and rumors of crimes that would never make it to the police blotter -- black men trying to lure young girls into cars and other creepy things.

I helped spread a couple of those stories myself. They were reports of home invasions I’d read about on EveryBlock this spring. In the first, a woman left the apartment building door unlocked for just a minute while she ran to the neighbor’s next door. While she was gone 2 black men walked in the building and pried open the lock on her apartment with a screw driver. Her son woke form a nap to find them in the kitchen. Luckily, when they saw him, they made excuses and left. In the second incident, a man answered his front door and 2 black men were outside. One of them punched him in the face, they grabbed everything they could get quickly and ran back to a waiting car.

These were both reported within doors from where I live – a block so confident in its security that the neighbors in my building are ideologically opposed to locking the building entrances. In fact my landlord likes to leave them standing open to let the breeze in, another custom I thought was quaint when I first moved in. It drives me nuts since I started reading EveryBlock.

Dan from Bridgeport Citizen’s Group made a point of asking about these incidents at the next CAPS meeting. The sergeant sent someone to check the database, and it turned out neither incident had actually happened. At least there had been no home invasions reported to the police on those blocks in recent months. It’s hard to imagine someone would get punched in the face and robbed in his own home and not call the police. But if he wouldn't, that’s another public safety problem.

There are people who believe the police are lying through their teeth. I don’t believe that – I think the police want us to keep our doors locked and our eyes open for trouble. I don’t believe Bridgeport’s crime wave is all hysterics either. But I wish some of that attention could be re-directed toward crime that originates here.

There was just a new murder on Friday night. A 30 year old man was gunned down on 31st and Wallace in broad daylight. Shortly after rush hour, Lynn from Bridgeport Citizen’s Group went by the police station as Commander Jarmusz was turning in. He flagged her down to tell her what was going on. He said it was a Satan’s Disciple who was killed, they didn’t have a suspect in custody yet, but he wanted her to spread the word. He asked that people stay away from the scene while police worked their investigation.

The loud complaints at the Nativity CAPS meeting last fall were balanced out by other voices. “If we’ve learned anything,” the CAPS officer reassured the crowd “It’s that statistics don’t mean anything if you don’t feel safe.” He went on to encourage us to make ourselves more safe by stepping up to participate. Come to CAPS meetings, call in tips to the police, join the Bridgeport Citizens Group, which coordinates a neighborhood watch. People in the crowd reinforced that advice, they urged their neighbors to act on their concerns and get involved.

It was April before I made it to my next CAPS meeting. By then, the beats had been redrawn and the monthly CAPS meeting was moved to the 9th District Station on Halsted Street.

I worried about the elderly ladies who had traveled from Wentworth Gardens to make the meeting, who probably face crime threats as serious as anyone in Bridgeport, and who now found themselves in a room full of white people, many of whom seemed to think all the crime that didn’t come through the viaduct came from those “Section 8 people” in public housing. One woman at the meeting asked if we couldn’t start a petition to just build a gate around the Bridgeport Homes, the public housing complex just beside the police station on 31st Street.

When the Wentworth Gardens ladies got up to leave, our CAPS Officer made a point of acknowledging them from the podium, and they explained they had to go because they’d paid a driver to bring them over, and the driver’s hour was up. But one of the ladies took the opportunity to describe some of the activities they were organizing over at Wentworth Gardens. When she’d finished, the room gave her a round of polite applause. They came back for another month or two, but I don’t see them at CAPS meetings anymore.

Dan and Lynn, who founded the Bridgeport Citizens Group, live across the street from Bridgeport Homes. They say they see more trouble coming from buildings run by absentee landlords than from public housing.

Last Spring, Dan had just gone to court to testify against a Latin King whom he’d witnessed chasing someone with a drawn gun. The police were delighted he’d do it – they thought they’d have to settle on more minor charges associated with violation of his parole, because they thought witnesses would be afraid to testify in court.

The guy went away for 6 months. While he was away, Dan and Lynn were reaching out to his grandmothers, who live on either side of the street, and an aunt who denies he lives with them, but then seems to admit he might. Dan says he and Lynn disagree to a certain extent on how to handle a situation like that. He says he has no problem pressing landlords to evict families if the family harbors a gang member who runs around with guns, though Lynn has more qualms about it.

But their strategy with landlords who harbor dangerous tenants has been to call the landlord and ask him to take responsibility first. If that doesn’t work, the alderman can sometimes send in teams of inspectors looking for violations. That might encourage a negligent owner to evict, or sell. Though sometimes, when you push a problem tenant out of one house, they reappear in a house down the block.

This summer the Citizens Group has been active on Carpenter Street. People say Carpenter has had trouble for a long time. There is nothing about the way Carpenter Street looks that would explain why that is. It has the same mix of cottages and 3 flats with pretty roof-lines as other streets in the vicinity. Neighbors can point out buildings whose 3 apartments were once occupied by 3 generations of a family, until the older generation died and the younger ones moved away. Now absentee landlords play a role here, like they do on Lituanica.

At the moment, there is one particular cottage that has been a hub of activity. The tenant in that house has a long resume with the corrections system, and it’s not just him, it’s all his friends. If you’d drive a strange car down that street they’d come out to peer in your windows when you slowed for the speed bump.

Neighbors have been calling the owner of the building, who lives in the suburbs. She’s been defensive, eventually she told them the tenant was going to move out at the end of July, though the date came and went and he’s still there.

The Bridgeport Citizen’s Group have used smoke-outs to good effect in other parts of the neighborhood. A smoke-out is a cook-out where neighbors assert their presence immediately in from of a safety hot spot. The neighbors on Carpenter had some trepidation about trying that on their street – they feared it would just rattle the hornets. But they went ahead and hosted one at the end of June.

The event itself was a success – neighbors rallied from across the neighborhood, and Commander Jarmusz came out to show his support. But once we were gone, the gangbangers held their own event, starting around 1 in the morning. And when the neighbors called the police, it took a half dozen calls and 3 hours for them to arrive.

The July CAPS meeting was acrimonious. One Carpenter Street neighbor has been working for several years to get criminals off her street. More than once she has seen bad neighbors pushed out of one house, only to have problem tenants reappear down the street. Her husband has been assaulted, they have had bricks and hand tools thrown through their windows. Now she’s alienating the CAPS officer by implying he’s personally ineffective, and she is skeptical about ideas from the Citizen’s Group, because she’s tried a lot of it before.

The police sound just as frustrated – they are understaffed, and overstretched, and Bridgeport isn’t the most dangerous part of the 9th district. Dan says when they first launched the Bridgeport Citizens Group a couple years ago, the 9th district had 9 CAPS officers. Now there are 2, 1 of them is part time, and they have to balance their policing duties with tasks like making wellness calls to seniors during heat alerts.

For his part, Dan’s not convinced police alone are the whole answer – didn’t Carpenter Street still have gang bangers when the police were fully staffed?

In the weeks since the smoke-out and the CAPS meeting where the frustrations all came out, representatives of the Bridgeport Citizens Group sat down with police to try to work out how the chain of communication might be improved. Among other things, they learned 911 calls are prioritized by an independent dispatch center. The officers responding in the car don’t know what time you first called. If they show up 3 hours later and you’re mad at them, they just absorb your frustration. The police helped the Citizens Group work out a script for following up on calls that don’t get a timely response.

The Citizens Group has also been brainstorming next step strategies for Carpenter Street -- creative ideas to make it harder to flee through gangways and vacant lots, and to hold landlords accountable. Call the landlord with problem tenants, but also call other landlords with apartments for rent to ask what their screening practices are.

And they can always use more volunteers for the neighborhood watch. On the neighborhood watch in my beat, we don’t see a lot of suspicious activity in progress. We report a lot of graffiti so no one thinks he can mark a spot and own it. Just as important though, we’re tied in to the activities of our neighbors in other beats, and to the kind of communication that might actually make the neighborhood safer, as frustrating as that process may sometimes be.

A Turn in the Local Waste Stream

Coming Soon to The Plant: A Brave New Day for Municipal Waste


Bridgeport might soon find itself in the near vicinity of not just 1 but 2 anaerobic digesters. They will transform tons of raw garbage into heat and power, with a by-product of potent soil enhancements, and they may change the local landscape for waste.

One of them, under development at The Plant, an adaptive reuse project in the Stockyards, would take in 32 tons of food waste per day, and fuel the generation of up to 500 KW of electricity per hour – mainly to power food processing, beverage brewing, and an aquaponic farm, all located on site. The Plant’s developer, John Edel, says he expects to break ground within a month, and complete construction within 8 months. Growing Power’s Iron Street Farm plans to develop a digester that would eventually consume 100 tons of food waste per day, though they are still working out the details, including where it will be located and how it will be financed.

Anaerobic digestion is a proven technology. European digesters consume a full spectrum of farm, industrial and municipal waste, often in some combination at co-digestion plants. Their use in the US is limited almost exclusively to waste water treatment plants, and to commercial farms where they are deployed mitigating the polluting power of oceans of manure. Building an urban digester, that will consume municipal solids, is still a tricky process. The contractors who build them vary widely in expertise, and the financing must be knit together from subsidies and tax credits, since biogas is still on the margins of our power grid.

But that’s not because the plants are not potentially lucrative. In fact, profits from the heat and power generated by burning biogas could be secondary to the profits to be had from consuming huge volumes of garbage.


In the US, anaerobic digestion is mainly a waste treatment process, much of the methane produced is simply flared. That’s especially true at waste water treatment plants – there are over 3,500 digesters in operation at such plants in the US, but just over 100 of them burn the gas to produce power. There are only 191 digesters at commercial livestock farms, but 186 of them use gas in combined heat and power plants. Illinois has 3 farm based digesters, with capacity to produce 2,243 MW of power. Wisconsin’s huge population of dairy cows lead the nation in farm-based generation, with 29 anaerobic digesters with 120,982 MW of electric generation capacity.

By contrast, municipal solid waste remains largely untapped. There are about 250 million tons of it generated every year, according to the EPA. Undigested food waste in particular has much more power potential than manure, which has already been depleted once. And municipal solids are a reverse commodity – there’s great value to be realized by taking it off people’s hands.

That’s been more true ever since the passage of the Resource Conservation Recovery Act in 1976. Prior to that, municipal waste was mostly disposed in open dumps, left to leak contaminants into ground water, and seep methane into the air. The Act didn’t eliminate the old city dump, but it did prohibit the opening of new ones. It established criteria for the location, design and operation of landfills, and linked federal assistance to resource recovery and sanitary practices.

Regulation made waste disposal a more capital intensive endeavor. Substandard local dumps gradually filled and closed over the years. They were replaced by large scale, state of the art, regional facilities – and a more elaborate supply chain of recycling centers and transfer stations, where waste is aggregated for long haul shipping.

A 20th Century Waste Transfer Station, also in the Stockyards


In 1988 there were 8,000 landfills in the US. By 2006, three were just 1,750. On average, they each handled four times the waste. Waste haulers underwent a parallel process of consolidation – today the biggest operate their own landfills to retain revenue from gate tipping fees.

In 1985, it cost $8, on average, to deposit a ton of waste at a landfill; by 2004, it cost $34, and the US waste disposal business was a $40 billion industry. Since then, consumption may have slowed with the recession, but tipping fees have continued to climb, to a national average of $49 per ton in 2011.

Organic waste buried in landfills already decays anaerobically – in the absence of oxygen, it produces methane gas, and less of the carbon dioxide exhaled in open air rot. Methane is more effective at creating atmospheric greenhouse conditions than carbon dioxide, so the new, reformed landfills use pumps to capture it. Some of it is simply flared, but it can also be pumped to co-generation plants.

Land and Lakes of Park Ridge is a typical new generation landfill operator. Founded as an excavation company in 1966, they are vertically integrated, operating a fleet of waste hauling trucks and transfer stations, recycling centers and landfills.

Land and Lakes reclaims methane from its landfills to generate power – it boasts that it sends enough to supply 52,000 households into the ComEd grid. It also boasts the first “bioreactor” landfill permitted in Illinois, at its River Bend Prairie landfill in Dolton. The biogreactor manipulates moisture levels to accelerate the decomposition process, and produce more methane faster.

Anaerobic digestion takes that process steps further. Digesters vary in configuration -- some farm based digesters are big, covered pits of slurry, brewing microbial reactions. Digesting solids is a more complex process. The digester at The Plant is engineered like a complete gastro-intestinal tract.

The solids, including food waste, brewers grains and possibly fats from rendering plants, will be fed through a mascerator to chew large pieces into smaller ones. The chewed solids will pass into the primary digester, a 100 foot horizontal tube, where bacteria will start a series of chemical reactions, as paddles gradually churn it through the tube over the course of a month.

Coming out the other end, digested solids will be separated from liquids with a screw press. The solids will pass out of the system into a covered pile, and eventually sold as rich organic fertilizer. The liquid will continue into the second digester, a 54 foot tank with a membrane roof. The membrane will expand as methane collects, some of it pumped in from the primary digester, and some of it exuded by the liquid digestate. The spent liquid can also be sold as soil amendment.

From there, the methane gas will be piped into the building where it will fuel a combined heat and power system. The Plant will consume both the heat and the power on site, the system is sized to meet the building’s needs. These are estimated to average 300KW per hour under normal conditions, but the system will be capable of generating up to 500KW. It will be used to power commercial food processing, breweries, and the grow lights for the aquaponic farm, all of which generate their own heat -- industrial buildings often have to be cooled off all year round. So the heat generated from The Plant’s combined heat and power system will be run through an absorption chiller to produce cooling power. They are adapting the existing, extremely well built ammonia cooling system the building came with to run cold water instead.

Every aspect of The Plant has a full-cycle logic like that. The building that was once a mass production meat processing plant is being converted to incubate small, sustainable food producers, and the indoor farm. The aquaponic growing system will recycle waste from fish to fertilize plant crops; the digester will fuel generators to make power from garbage. That will make it much more affordable to run grow lights for indoor farming. And it will all work within the regular cycle of carbon exchange that goes on all the time between biotic life and the atmosphere -- as opposed to releasing vast carbon reserves that have been sequestered underground for hundreds of millions of years by burning fossil fuels.

Building it will cost about $2 million. Most of it will be paid for with a Food Scrap Advancement grant (F-SCRAP) from the Illinois Department of Commerce, together with a Recovery Act grant (ARRA) and a loan from the Chicago Community Loan Fund. The Plant has contracted with Eisenmann Corporation to build the digester itself, and with Alcor Energy Solutions to build the combined heat and power system. Eisenmann is a family owned German engineering firm with North American headquarters in Crystal Lake. They have built at least 80 anaerobic digesters in Europe and hundreds of other kinds of facilities in the US. Alcor has also completed numerous combined heat and power systems, but its owner may be more accomplished as an engineer than as a project manager. Alcor is behind on its contract at The Plant, the delays have been costly, time will tell if they are the firm that actually finishes the combined heat and power system at The Plant.

But once it’s all up and running by spring 2013, early estimates show more than half potential revenues coming from tipping charges for accepting waste, and a smaller fraction earned by selling power to tenants. Edel anticipates the tipping fees will be quickly consumed by the cost of operations. The Plant will take on the role of waste hauler itself.

The estimates are also based on tipping charges less than half the national average rate. And there is a sub-trend in the municipal waste market that moves against the long term rise of disposal fees. New, creative users such as organic farmers, bio-fuel producers, and now anaerobic digesters, are creating value for the best organic waste products –a value not earned just by hauling it away. Brewer’s grains are one example.

Iron Street Farm: Possible Site of Greater Bridgeport's Next Anaerobic Digester

Josh Deth of Revolution Brewing says his recently expanded brewing operations generate about 8 tons of spent grains a week – all of which has been claimed as prime compost material by 2 urban farms, including Growing Power and City Farm. Deth says he pays the farms to haul the waste, because they are non profits with a mission he supports and he wants them to succeed, but he says Goose Island brewery is getting paid by farmers who want to use their waste, which can also be added to cow feed. In fact, bulk used cooking oil is already a commodity, its price tracks the price of corn. Aside from its potential use for making bio-fuel, farmers use it as an additive to soy feeds to make them more nutritious when corn costs too much.

Deth says Chicago’s other breweries still pay conventional waste haulers – probably for one of the reasons he pays Growing Power. Deth says as a business owner, he needs to be assured his waste will be hauled away consistently at regular times. But “it’s not garbage,” he says.

Still, the sources of organic waste are numerous, and plenty of producers pay to have it reliably shipped away. Edel says The Plant will offer the same service as the big waste haulers at the same price, “and you also get a gold start next to your name that says all of your waste is going to a sustainable business to make energy and food.”

The Plant is unlikely to face a shortage of fuel anytime soon. Food wastes aren’t the biggest component of municipal solid wastes generated every year, but after all the paper products are recycled, they comprise the biggest portion that goes to landfill. The EPA reports almost 34 million tons of food waste were generated in 2010, and only 3% of it was recycled. The rest could fuel a generation of urban digesters, and also help pay for them.

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.

Thank-You 9th District Police

I don’t usually post reactions to recent events - I'm not the quickest blogger in the world. But I want to broadcast a public thank you to the officers of the 9th District for how you handled the demonstration last night: cool and professional. I bet you’ll handle the NATO protests the same way.

I think there are some good reasons for peaceful demonstration, and some of them will be represented this week-end. That’s why last night was insulting.

I read they were protesting capitalism and the ‘police state.’ From the sidewalk it felt like they’d marched in to protest the neighborhood in general. And to amplify some jumbled video they saw on You Tube. I saw that video – it didn’t sound to me like the scene it’s supposed to have captured. It sounded like edgy banter encouraged along by the guy making the video. I could be wrong, I wasn’t there, you can probably hear what you're inclined to hear on that recording.

I was there last night. Thanks to the police for calmly deflecting what sometimes looked like a lot of 19 year olds hoping for a fight. And thanks to the neighbors for not taking the bait.