Art Thieme asked me to post this, which came from the Chicago Tribune
-Joe Offer-

NO EXIT CAFE IS SHOWN THE DOOR AFTER 40 YEARS

OFF-THE-BEATEN-PATH COFFEEHOUSE COMES TO THE END OF ITS BOTTOMLESS CUP.

By Marla Donato

Tribune Staff Writer
June 29, 1999

Unless a savior appears soon, a small but important chunk of Chicago's poetry, performance art and folk music history is about to be swallowed up by a decaying street hidden behind the "L" tracks in East Rogers Park.

The No Exit Cafe, an off-the-beaten-path coffeehouse at 6970 N. Glenwood Ave., is due to shut its doors for good Wednesday, marking the end of a nearly 41-year run as one of the city's oldest coffeehouses and last bastions of bohemia offering hearty cheap eats and a bottomless cup of coffee.

A wake last Friday, an $8 benefit to pay a mountain of bills, spilled out into the street and lasted until the early morning hours--with at least 100 people showing up to pay their last respects to the cafe, which is nearly twice as old as many of them.

It was an ironic last gasp for the funky cafe, which has stubbornly survived more than four decades in three North Side locations. (Evanston's Foster Street was the original site in 1958.) But it has steadily been losing business because its street has been going downhill and its customers have been going upscale.

Brian Kozin, one of the last in a line of at least five cafe owners, said the business now requires a Herculean effort to just keep going.

"We just couldn't do it anymore," said Kozin, a jewelry-maker by trade who conceded that while he didn't get into the business to make a pile of cash, he can't afford to keep losing much either. "Nobody owns a coffeehouse like this to make money. You own it for the romance of it."

The No Exit provided an outlet for some still obscure and other now-famous regulars, including folk singer Steve Goodman, author Saul Bellow, "Saturday Night Live" writer Michael McCarthy, and actor Tracy Letts, whose play "Killer Joe" made it to the New York stage.

Even the building, which dates to the 1920s, has a colorful history. Kozin said before he moved the cafe from around the corner, the building was home to the Sherman Bridge Club, a front for an illegal card gambling club that was frequented by elderly card sharks who would wager thousands on games. He said they spit on the ground in front of the building after he transformed it into the bookish beat joint in 1984.

The No Exit still kept its gaming spirit and was one of a handful of places where the obscure Asian board game of Go was played by cafe regulars who sometimes beat Asians at their own game and have the trophies in Korean to prove it.

Its decor is basic burlap, and, scattered among the books, dusty Beethoven bust, plants and artwork, is a bear's head that was rescued from the alley. A wild boar, which treed a local beat cop vacationing in Arkansas, succumbed to a bullet from the cop's service revolver and currently is sporting a construction hat on its head and a stuffed South Park character in its mouth. It overlooks the cafe's small obligatory no-smoking section.

The cafe, named after a play about bickering characters trapped in a small room that was penned by French intellectual Jean-Paul Sartre, has had its share of intellectuals, but Kozin said mostly it has fostered its own offbeat magic and fun.

"But after 22 years, it's not fun anymore. We can't pay the bills and my wife's health is suffering," he said.

So, last year, Kozin and his wife, Sue, found a buyer for the cafe and planned to chuck most of their possessions, buy an R.V. and hit the open road.

But the deal fell through, and the Kozins' 19-year-old daughter, Lesley, managed to keep the cafe open for a year with help from family and friends, including boyfriend Pete Wolf, 26, who helped keep the cafe's legendary open-mike poetry nights.

For about 15 years before that, the open-mike music and poetry nights were run by Michael O'Toole, who recalled some of the club's more notable performances, including the tale of the tie-dyed toga poet who encouraged everyone to get naked and go to the nearby beach, and then dropped his toga.

And then there was the occasional street drunk who would wander up on stage to take part in the improv group's weekly performance. "One drunk was actually pretty good, and we were trying to work with him," said Tim Beamish of the cafe's theater group Bang Bang Spontaneous Theater.

"But he just didn't know when to end the scene," O'Toole said.