Yojimbo’s Garage

In 1997, Marcus Moore opened a bike shop called Yojimbo’s Garage on Clybourn Avenue, just north of Division Street. It stood in a clump of crumbling old storefronts on the frontier between Old Town, which was advancing, and the Cabrini Green public housing complex, which was in retreat. The building had no street level windows, people found Yojimbo’s by looking for the heavy red door. It was kept locked, you had to knock, and Moore would come to the door to let you in. The store inside has been variously described as “an invitation-only bike shop” and “Ali Baba’s cave.” At the time, street-side appearances gave Moore no end of trouble. Retail does best when people can see it, and suppliers were suspicious of his status as a “professional storefront.” Sales reps would drive up and take pictures of the place from the curb and drive off, concluding Yojimbo’s wasn’t the kind of retailer they wanted to represent their products. Over the years Moore talked about moving to a more visible place. At one point he signed a lease for a shop with windows and foot traffic on Orleans Street, only to find out it wasn’t zoned for use as a retail storefront, even though it looked like one. In retrospect, Moore recognizes the suppliers were trying to support their retail distributors against competition from guys who were selling parts over the internet, or out of their garages. And in the beginning that was close to what Moore was doing. He’d found a low rent space, an empty brick box he’d build-out himself. In the early years he lived in an apartment he built in back, he even rented out rooms to roommates to pay his huge gas bills. He set up a mechanic’s bench, and then he built his inventory gradually as he could pay for it. If a business is an enterprise launched with capital up front to generate profits later on, Yojimbo’s Garage has always been a hybrid between that and something else. There are start-ups with qualities like it in other neighborhoods. Short on capital, but creative with other forms of investment, their grip on profitability may be tenuous. But their owners build little worlds: they are expressive enterprises as much as they are businesses, and they can have considerable impact on the world around them. [caption id="attachment_3413" align="alignnone" width="600" caption="Yojimbo’s by Ben Speckmann"][/caption] Moore had been a courier and a mechanic before he opened Yojimbo’s, a name he loosely translates as “bodyguard,” a sort of champion of the courier tribe; defender of the bike. It was always more than a bike shop. Moore had been active in the messenger race scene, and soon after he opened Yojimbo’s, he launched a winter series of alley-cat races called the “Tour da Chicago.” It was Chicago’s answer to the summer tournaments in other cities. Gradually, Moore and his fellows got caught up in sanctioned racing. They were seduced by the velodrome first, and then started racing criteriums and cyclocross. So Moore formed a licensed racing team called XXX Racing. They sometimes seemed like the scruffy urban courier team at clean-cut suburban events. Over the years though, XXX Racing gathered momentum, with a paid coach and a membership that grew to include as many accountants and lawyers as couriers, before the team spun off from Yojimbo’s entirely and took a new primary sponsor. Moore moved on to develop the Track Cats, a youth racing program for city high school kids - kids not much younger than the couriers who gathered at the shop early on Sunday mornings for his deep winter alley cat races 10 years before. Moore’s investment was working as a business. Sales grew exponentially in the first years, and steadily every year after that, with the exception of last year, when monthly sales dropped about 30 percent. Moore still works 70 to 80 hours a week at the shop. He’s open 38 hours and he works another 38 hours maintaining inventory, building bikes, doing repairs. He’s known for being a perfectionist, and for having trouble handing work over to assistants. “I’m not very efficient,” he admits. At first, the locked door at the front of the shop reflected the neighborhood’s edge. The sidewalks were generally desolate, but at night you could hear voices through the walls - people calling to each other across the vacant lots, transactions you might think they wouldn’t want everyone to hear. On New Year’s Eve the place exploded with celebratory gunfire from the Cabrini high rises. Over the years, neighborhood fortunes have changed. The red door is still locked – but it opens to a view of expensive townhouses across the street. Yojimbo’s didn’t necessarily contribute to the change around it, and has been largely unaffected by it. Moore’s customers have always come from other neighborhoods, and for the most part, they still do. His landlord is interested in selling the building, but he thinks it is worth over $2 million and he’s holding out. Inside, the red door is papered with 12 years of fliers for sanctioned and unsanctioned races, parties and memorial rides for couriers killed in traffic. One result of keeping it locked is that Moore himself greets everyone at the door, and then sees them out when they leave. He is not a strikingly gregarious person, but he admits he values the social transactions. “I probably wouldn’t have done this for so long if it weren’t for that.”

Lagniappe

Food critics reviewing Lagniappe Cajun Creole restaurant on 79th Street almost universally acknowledge the food is worth the trip, and nearly as often acknowledge that the service is very slow. That doesn’t seem to bode well - in other neighborhoods, the tiny restaurant would have to flip tables fast to survive as a business. The place looks nice, though. The dining room is decked out in fashionable fixtures, with a display of Mardi Gras memorabilia in the counter display. The apartment upstairs has been converted into a nightclub and party room, with a chandelier, leather lounge chairs and gauzy curtains, and the staircase leading up to it is painted with murals of black entertainers, with Billie Holiday at the top. Waiting for your food, you watch the other tables being served, one dish at a time brought out by the cook himself in the afternoon, each dish proffered like a gift. The food at Lagniappe is good. But more overwhelming is the sense of great care invested there. Mary Madison opened Lagniappe in 2004 because she loves to cook, and as it happens, her business has done very well; she says profits have grown 25 percent every year. Lagniappe has received a lot of favorable press. Last year U.S. Senator Dick Durbin held a party there, and the year before that there was a party for then-Senator Barack Obama. Madison laughs at this, and credits the goodness of God. Though some credit certainly goes to her cooking, some must go to her business model which has much in common with the one Moore used to build Yojimbo’s Garage. Madison bought the building for $40,000 in 1999. The seller wanted $60,000, but took less when Madison offered to pay cash up front. She built it out gradually, relying heavily on labor from friends and family with various construction skills, and of course her own labor. “I know every aspect of the business, because I have done every job in this restaurant,” Madison says. Lagniappe’s restaurant business is reinforced with an array of ancillary services. It’s web-site offers everything from floral arrangement, anniversary consulting and answers to etiquette questions, to limousine service and live entertainment. These are aspects of the full service catering company Madison originally wanted to open. She only opened a restaurant after someone at the city suggested she navigate a zoning issue by serving a few take-out meals over the counter. But then the friendly reviews started coming in, and the restaurant took off. It’s still growing. Lagniappe recently obtained a liquor license and started to host live music on Thursday nights. “We’re bringing live music back to the south side,” Madison says Like Yojimbo’s, Lagniappe is a destination business. People travel across neighborhoods to eat there, even though there is very little else on 79th Street to draw them in. Auburn Gresham is a middle class neighborhood, but the poverty of its retail strips can be measured in “retail leakage” – the difference between the spending power of the people who live in a neighborhood, and the actual revenues of neighborhood retailers. Recently, Auburn Gresham’s retail leakage was estimated at $384 million a year. That’s $384 million consumers have to travel elsewhere to spend, but it’s also hundreds of millions of dollars that don’t get paid out as wages to local workers, business to suppliers, rents to landlords and profits to entrepreneurs. Neighborhood boosters can point to a new branch bank and a large pharmacy that has built a new store in Auburn Gresham, but they are in close proximity to at least one shuttered strip mall that couldn’t survive. A little low-debt, expressive enterprise like Lagniappe may be specially suited to take root, and thrive, in an environment where a bigger, more debt heavy operation can’t. Lagniappe is an expression of Madison’s love for food, but it is not the end of Madison’s investment. Since opening, Madison became the commissioner of the local special service area, a business association formed to promote the retail district as a whole through festivals, beautification projects, and by confronting the loitering and security issues that are said to have caused the 79th Street McDonald’s to shutter its doors in the 1990s. On alternating Sunday’s Lagniappe’s kitchen is also used to cook meals for 100-150 homeless people on Lower Wacker Drive. Madison said she was originally inspired by an encounter with a homeless man who wanted to give her a new shirt because she had bought him lunch. So she started cooking meals for the homeless at Lagniappe, whose name she translates as “a little something extra.”

Bubbly Dynamics

When John Edel gives tours of Bubbly Dynamics, which he does often these days, he starts with tales from the Bridgeport warehouse’s colorful past. It had been the home of Scooter World, a once legitimate motorcycle junkyard gone out of control. When he bought the building in 2002, the inside was covered with white supremacist graffiti and soot from when the utilities were turned off and the occupants burned trash in barrels for heat. They’d also entertain themselves by vandalizing neighboring businesses and their own building. But that was before Cowboy, the meanest one of the group, got sent off to jail. [caption id="attachment_3416" align="alignnone" width="600" caption="Bubbly’s Lobby with Bubble Detail in Railing and Light Fixtures"][/caption] The stories provide vivid contrast for what the place is now. Edel is a believer in Chicago’s industrial heritage; he wants “to prove there is a use for these old buildings.” He named the former paint warehouse Bubbly Dynamics named after Bubbly Creek which passes nearby, and transformed it into a business incubator for creative enterprise. The build-out features high efficiency and a high level of finishing, all accomplished at very low cost – Edel calculates it cost him less than $16 per square foot. To do it, he brought creative development to new levels, especially in the area of creative trades for labor and materials. Bob Krueger had owned Scooter World when it was a legitimate business, he watched Cowboy drive it into the ground, and now that Cowboy was gone, he still came around from time to time, curious to see what Edel would do. Krueger would haul off waste material as John tore it out. Krueger would sell it as scrap, and in return he brought by useful materials he’d acquired through his own channels – half used barrels of expensive industrial paints, fleets of iron radiators. Edel cleaned up the radiators and deployed them in the 16 zone, super-efficient heat system he designed and built himself. Between Krueger and other sources, Edel estimates 30 percent of the materials he used for the build-out were waste stream recycled, and he has had success with creative labor too. Edel was an early member of the Rat Patrol, a chopper bicycle gang. He’d had the guys down for a few rides around the pillars in the creepy basement, and ended up giving the Rats a space to build bikes and store their parts collection. In exchange the Rats demolished walls, framed new ones, and hauled tons of waste out of the building. The Rats also attracted the Scallywags, a tall-bike gang from the Jesus People compound in Uptown, who originally came to proselytize them. Mike Phippen, who had been a plumber, and now works for the Jesus People’s roofing supply company, came by with the Scallywags, but took an interest in the building. He has been generous with his skills. Edel also made dollar contributions to the Jesus People’s Cornerstone Shelter in Uptown in exchange for the use of a crane. As the building was gradually completed and occupied, Edel would trade rent rebates for skilled labor from tenants: almost all of the metal fabrication, including the staircases, door frames and elaborate bubble railings, was done by tenant Yuval Awazu, who has yet to owe a dollar rent. Today Bubbly Dynamics is 100 percent occupied, and there is synergy among the businesses there. Bubbly Bicycle Works is a frame-builders cooperative on the third floor. Four to five frame builders rent benches in a common space, they share some common tools and their expertise, and if they need something powder coated they go to Awazu downstairs. Synergies from Bubbly Dynamics spill out into the Bridgeport neighborhood that encircles it. When the art gallery 32nd and Urban closed its storefront on Halsted Street, it opened Chicago Urban Art Society in a less expensive space at Bubbly Dynamics. Meanwhile Owen Lloyd, a founding member of Bubbly Bicycle Works, opened Blue City Cycles, a retail store, in their old gallery on Halsted. Edel is one of the investors in Blue City Cycles because he believes bicycle sales will be a good business investment in hard times. “People can’t afford to waste money on gas,” he says. Edel’s investment habits, together with those of Yojimbo’s Garage and Lagniappe are as much an assertion of how the world ought to be as an observation of how it is. They are expressive enterprises, and such enterprises tend to sprout on the underdeveloped frontiers where cheap rents allow them to. Just as Madison has done at Lagniappe, these businesses help to change the neighborhoods around them. They are forms of development that do more than pave the way for higher rents, rather they create epicenters for which new worlds spring from. by Kristin Ostberg