Founded in 1893 near the corner of Van Buren and Michigan, the company supplied its plaster decorations for many of Chicago’s most opulent buildings , including, structures built for the 1893 Columbian Exposition. They also crafted the ornamental plaster for movie palaces across the city, including the Ramova Theater in Bridgeport, the ceiling medallions at the Wynn Casino in Las Vegas, and the decorations for galleries in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. Now, much of their work involves producing set pieces and decorations for movies like “My Best Friend’s Wedding,” “The Cotton Club,” and “The Untouchables.”

While the company has changed over the years to meet new demands, their process remains the same. While a recent order of columns and flourishes for a late-night TV set may not be equal to the resplendent White City, the decorations are hatched from the same hand-carved wood molds. Whether it’s a home fireplace mantel, or columns for a scene in “The Dark Knight,” Decorators Supply still creates their pieces from the patterns it used in the late-19th and early-20th century, according to its president, Steve Grage. This is in part because mold crafting is a disappearing art form, he says, but also because the designs are as historically accurate as they come.

“I still hear from customers who I remember ordering from our company 33 years ago,” Grage notes. He also points to the important role that family has played in the company throughout the years. Today, the third generation of Grages runs the business. Steve Grage fondly recalls when he first started at Decorators Supply, he worked and learned alongside his grandfather, who joined the company as a teenager and was still working at age 90.

Grage says that Bridgeport, where they moved in 1909 before settling in their current location in 1963, has been very important to the development of the company. “It made sense to be in Bridgeport—it’s an industrial neighborhood, and being near the railroad, river, and roads, it’s easy to get materials in and out. And it’s a tough blue collar area, where you could find a good workforce.”

There may be a touch of irony in the fact that these elaborate creations were constructed in a district not historically noted for its elegance. But in Bridgeport—once called Hardscrabble for its rough reputation—many local businesses have thrived. Old-school meatpacking plants like Chiappetti’s and Allen Brothers have found a more stable market in upscale restaurants, and while the recession hit 121- year-old Butler Street Foundry hard, it tried to reinvent itself as an artisanal metallurgy business, teaming up with the Art Institute for some projects.  Bridgeporters may not be born with silver spoons in their mouths, but they were probably the ones who made them.

Despite Decorators Supply’s upper-crust appeal, Grage says that they are still struggling to survive in this economy. “Our products go into buildings,” he says, but “even though they’re high end, there just aren’t that many houses that go up.”

When building does happen, Grage notes, the company is still battling a powerful sociological force—changing taste. Their finely crafted ornaments—once sought-after markers of wealth and glamour—have fallen out of fashion after modernism’s “less-is-more” aesthetic. “I’ve seen a change towards a modern style, away from the highly decorated. Every now and then you see people throw in a Corinthian column, as a little splash.”

The company is doing their best to keep up with the changing marketplace, producing and selling “transitional-style moldings” that aren’t overly florid. But without carving new patterns, the most the company can do to accommodate the trend is to find the least ornate templates out of a collection of around 12,000 designs.

But Grage says that the company is ready to adapt. He says he is underlining their biggest assets: the tremendous selection, high-quality products, superior customer service, and the company’s reputation as an environmentally friendly,  family-run business.

His strategy echoes a familiar refrain from a new class of businesses on the rise in Bridgeport—artsy, charming, green, and hyper-local. But while pasty shops, craft-whiskey bars, and organic restaurants have been saying it for months, only Decorators Supply can say they have been doing it for more than a century.

“It’s like classical music. Other music comes and goes, but classical, and its fans, stick around.”

Decorators Supply, 3610 S. Morgan St. (773)847-6300

Lauren Hunter Thomas

Dan Labovitch was no stranger to the “visor, pacifier, and huge pants” look back in the day. But aesthetics come and go with the movements that define them, and Labovitch, one of the founders of ravearchive.com, can certainly attest to that. Now that he wears wristwatches rather than kandi bracelets and slacks rather than phat pants, Labovitch has turned to preserving the legacy of rave culture.

Labovitch first launched the online archive in 2008, in order to catalog the music and ephemera of the party scene from 1991 to 2000. It’s no small project. Labovitch and co-founder Adam Dorfman, have had to collect, organize, and upload thousands of gigabytes of music (originally recorded on mixtapes), in addition to scanning flyers and fan zines from across the continent. But, he is quick to emphasize, it’s a labor of true, discerning love: “I’m not objective when it comes to [collecting] this stuff, because I value what I went through, and that [music] is the stuff I want to put out there.” Labovitch is true to his word, motivated by his dedication to the subculture rather than the desire for profit—he covers out-of-pocket the operating costs not offset by donations.

Rave music isn’t a totality—it’s a subculture made up of subcultures. Under the umbrella of rave, there are many different kinds of dance music, including techno, house, trance, and Labovitch’s personal favorite, jungle. But what is behind all these types of rave, then? Well, for one thing, there’s the power of “repetitive beats.” According to the 1994 British Criminal Justice and Public Order Act, a piece of legislation created to empower police to break up large parties, this was a fundamental feature of  the various subcategories of rave. While the statute’s definition points to the music’s appeal, to Labovitch and his fellow enthusiasts, it is also a sad symptom of the public’s reductionist interpretation of the genre’s concerts. For Labovitch and the more than 8,000 on his website’s forums, rave is about a lot more than thumping drum machines and glowsticks. Nonetheless, that particular law, was both the beginning of the end for ravers and an example of the attitude that they reveled in resisting. In other words, the community was strengthened by persecution.

“Growing up, it was the youth culture,” Labovitch recalls. “You’d drive way out to one of these things and people would just be super nice…if drugs were your thing, they’d take care of you…or it would be as simple as giving someone a ride home.” Labovitch attended his first parties in 1996 at age 16, about seven years after the pioneering acid house parties in Manchester and London. He recalls the way the internet fostered connections across the rave community, which was particularly helpful given that he knew “at most a half dozen kids in the scene from [his] high school class of 800.” It also made finding a ride to a far away show much easier. Ravers could “get online and meet people from different states, different cities…and that way you’d have a way to get to the party and a couch to crash on after.” And, most importantly, for someone like Labovitch, whose adolescence in Palatine, Illinois wasn’t particularly rocky, a rave was an experience comparable to off-roading at 90 miles per hour.

Today, Labovitch has “a pretty straight job in insurance,” he says. Yet he brings little of the office home with him to the home he shares with his wife (an archival librarian by day), Dexter the Rottweiler, and a gray cat. The house is a vault for the WWII buff’s military history books and model war planes, as well as the physical relics that ravearchive.com has cast into cyberspace for eager IP addresses to cache. Balancing a bottle of Arcadia Ale in the crook of his elbow, Labovitch flicks gently through the tapes nestled tooth-to-jowl in a cabinet of 72 two-foot deep drawers. He’s looking for a tape by DJ Snuggles, a significant name in jungle music. When he finds the tape, he succumbs to nostalgia, meticulously rifling through an arresting wealth of artifacts: flyer after flyer, file boxes of zines whose Xeroxed pages trumpet the initials of now-infamous chemicals, and the first very neon issue of Reactor, a magazine that served and defined Chicago rave culture in the early 90s. As artifacts pile up, he sighs, without a hint of resentment, “We jungle fans were always at the back of the warehouse.”

Speaking to the character of the rave movement, Labovitch is careful to acknowledge the air of cliché that has developed around its credo of “Peace, Love, Unity and Respect.” But he is also adamant that this is the essential character of the scene that gave him no small number of euphoric nights. Frankie Bones, a founding father of the American rave scene, is credited with first stating the mantra. At a party in 1989, he got on the speaker system to break up a fight and said, “If you don’t start showing some peace, love, and unity, I’ll break your fucking faces.” When asked about Bones’s reaction to the archive, Labovitch is modest: “He gave us an atta-boy.” Rave musicians, he says, “are just glad somebody’s trying to keep track.”

Jamie Keiles

“This place isn’t actually an orphanage, even if some of the kids here look like orphans,” Bob Leone laughs, gesturing at the space around him. The venue, on the second floor of the community center attached to Bridgeport’s First Lutheran Church of the Trinity,  seamlessly merges luxury with punk. At last Wednesday’s show, kids in studded jackets kicked their Docs up on velvet divans and sipped on cans of cheap beer. As the music began, vibrations from the amps rattled the crystal vases that lined the shelves of the timeworn armoires around the perimeter of the room. Kids stood up to greet each other, exchanging bear hugs and fist bumps beneath the crown molding and vaulted ceilings. Nobody seemed fazed by the stained glass windows or conspicuously plush décor.

David Medina, church member by day and Doorman Dave by night, is responsible for this aesthetic juxtaposition. Medina manages God’s Closet, a one-room donation-based thrift store operated by First Trinity that distributes clothing and furniture to the needy on a pay-nothing-take-what-you-need basis. The shop is located on the first floor of the rec center, directly beneath the Orphanage.  When Medina comes across something quirky, he simply carries it upstairs. This exchange is only one of the many ways that the relationship between the Orphanage and its host First Trinity is symbiotic.

Though the Orphanage has no official religious mission, this hasn’t prevented the two organizations from establishing a kind of informal cultural exchange. On occasion, bands seize the opportunity to provide a soundtrack to Sunday mass. What was once the church’s parsonage is now home to a handful of punk kids, artists, and organizers. At one point, First Trinity’s pastor, Thomas Gaulke, was the man in charge of booking shows.

Medina sheds light on this strange image—his pastor temporarily becoming a player in the local punk scene—by sharing a bit about the history of the Orphanage. The Orphanage opened about seven years ago, when one of the church’s members went looking for a place for his band to play. Bridgeport musicians, and eventually touring bands from around the nation, took an immediate liking to the space. In its original incarnation, the Orphanage served as a rotating gallery space for local artists’ work, as well as a music venue.

“When touring bands would come through,” Medina explains. “We’d put them up in the chapel. In the morning, we’d go to the store and get a ton of eggs and cook them breakfast. People loved it.”

After about five years of successfully hosting acts, an internal conflict began to rattle the staff of the Orphanage.

“Something about the website,” says Medina.

Many members of the original team defected, and the venue fell into an involuntary hiatus. Touring acts would call the church looking to book shows, confused by the venue’s sudden disappearance.

“People wanted to play here. They’d heard good things about the crowd, the space, the hospitality,” Medina says.

Eventually, Pastor Gaulke stepped up and started dealing with the scheduling. It wasn’t the original Orphanage, Medina clarifies, but it was still a good space.  An occasional act would trickle through, but it wasn’t the same. The scene started to fizzle. For two years, the Orphanage wallowed in organizational purgatory.

This past summer, Medina, along with musician and music teacher Bob Leone, decided it was time for a resurrection. Leone, who started attending First Trinity with his now ex-wife, saw the reinstatement of the Orphanage as a chance to recapture the fun of his youth. The church, and the Bridgeport scene, welcomed a new planning team with open arms.

This new incarnation of the Orphanage held its first event this past August—playing host to the second annual Black and Brown Punk show, a semi-queer, semi-activist-oriented, entirely eclectic fundraiser. Both Leone and Medina agreed the show was a success, despite an appearance by the cops and what Medina calls “a citation for a noise violation or something.” This past Wednesday, the new Orphanage’s second event took place. Familiar and new faces flocked to the venue for what was billed simply as “a punk show.”

During the show, Medina and Leone were both at ease, confident in the ability of the new generation of kids to carry on the DIY ethic left behind by the old guard. After one particularly frantic cymbal crash, a stand fell over, with one nearby punk hurrying over to re-set the instrument before the end of the song. If the smooth set changes, respectful decorum, and earnest music are any indicator, their confidence is justified. The space’s next event, a “dual benefit for community self-defense and to help the Orphanage pay their heating bill,” takes place December 10.

For the expo attendees, there were plenty of opportunities for engagement—from makeovers to contests for prizes ranging from cars to exotic vacations. Along the walls of the center hung paintings, photographs, sculptures, and various arts pieces created by different Latino artists.

Teen Day Fashion Show and Family Pavilion started at 2pm with the fashion expo. But the runway show was to be the main event of the evening, featuring Cuban designer Jorge Pérez de la Havana’s new quinceañera line for Macy’s. As the time of the show approached, the din began to rise with excitement as more people entered through the doors. Parents of one model, Carmen Guerrero, stood waiting anxiously and announced proudly, “It’s her fist big show.”

Upstairs above the expo and mounting crowd, the runway area was full of energy.  Past several rows of white chairs—each with a Macy’s bag on it—and behind the curtains on the stage, the models prepared themselves for the big entrance. A pile of shoes were stacked up on the left, waiting to be worn in the show. Workers steam-ironed long dresses, while professional beautification staff applied make-up to the young models: hairspray, straighteners, and curling irons tossed about as they sculpted the models’ hair. Arabel Alva Rosales, one of the co-executive producers, hustled about amidst the many people backstage.

The ring shaped platform in the center of the room loomed, calmly awaiting the teen models that would soon be walking out. Colored lights shown about the room, and projections flashed over the empty chairs onto the wall.  The show was ready to start.

The exhibition is structured as a narrative beginning in the year 2040. A bright-orange Jeep sits on a lifeless beach, goat carcasses lie in a crevice, and our toxic world is seen through the window of a futuristic rover. From there, the show moves backward in time, finally returning to 2010, where nearly colorless images of the future are replaced by scenes of green plants and smiling faces. It’s a surprising conclusion to an otherwise bleak series of photographs, and by ordering the images this way—moving from dreariness to happiness—the series leaves viewers with a powerful appreciation of the present, and a dose of pessimism about the future.

The creator of this dystopian vision is a bubbly, gregarious woman. An associate professor of photography at Columbia College, Natal is dedicated to art and education, particularly the role both fields can play in fostering ecological awareness. A section of “Future Perfect” is devoted to photographs she took of children’s planet and alien paintings, which were created in an “Imagining the Future” workshop held at the Biosphere 2 facility near Tucson. Natal has served as an artist-in-residence at the artificial ecosystem facility since 2008, and her experiences clearly inform the content of “Future Perfect.”

Among the most striking pieces of the exhibition are Natal’s “steam portraits,” which show people partially obscured on rocky landscapes. One image, dated as 2030, depicts a man walking his dog through a dense fog. In another, a scared woman clutches a teddy bear in the year 2020. Back in the present, a girl smiles and a couple shares a kiss. Other images juxtapose signs of humanity with nature: a cactus is padded and turned into a telephone pole, while an outdated computer sits in the middle of a greenhouse.

While Natal seems to juxtapose the man-made and the natural, she is adamant that there shouldn’t be a distinction between the two. To properly move forward, she proposes, we should be cognizant of our inextricable relationship with the earth.

Maggie Sivit

[Show as slideshow]

Many South Side residents are used to long waits for buses. But for members of five Southwest Side neighborhoods, the wait is going on its 14th year.  In April 2008, the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning, as part of their 30-year plan for the city, held a series of meetings in Little Village, where residents vocalized their need for better transit. Soon afterwards, the community decided it was time to restore east-west bus service along a main commercial corridor in their neighborhood that was cut by the Chicago Transit Authority in 1997. Organizers from Little Village Environmental Justice Organization (LVEJO) met with community members who both remembered a historic 31st Street bus and expressed interest in bringing back the service. They worked with the CTA to locate a source of funding. That summer, the CTA received a federal grant earmarked for the 31st Street bus totaling $1,067,659.

But today, there is no bus along 31st Street. In the neighborhoods the street cuts through—Bronzeville, Armour Square, Bridgeport, McKinley Park, and Little Village—east-west bus service is lacking. Between Cermak Road and 47th Street, Chicago’s grid system of bus service breaks down, leaving large areas of white space on the CTA system map and roughly 200,000 people without a direct route. The #35, #39, and #60 buses provide service along 35th, 39th, and parts of 26th Streets, but the #35 and #39 terminate near Kedzie Avenue, and the #60 diverts north to the loop at Western Avenue. No bus provides a straight route from the lake to Chicago’s western boundary. “You have to hopscotch—go past where you need to go to get where you’re going,” says Bridgeport resident and community activist Maureen Sullivan.

The grant the CTA received in 2008 as part of the Job Access Reverse Commute (JARC) program of the U.S. Department of Transportation was a victory, but it came with a catch. The program requires that 50 percent of the transportation project’s operational budget be provided by state and local funds.

This has proven to be a major roadblock for the 31st Street bus campaign. The implementation and operations costs for the proposed route are estimated by the CTA to be approximately $2 million, not including the portion of the expense to be covered by fares. The CTA must match the $1 million grant in order for the bus to become a reality, at least for the trial period. In an e-mailed statement, the agency stated, “Currently, there are no local match funds identified to implement the project.”  Residents have waited for this to change for the past three years.

The CTA has drafted a route to connect to the Red and Orange ‘L’ Lines as well as the new Rock Island district Metra stop at 35th Street, though the proposal has not been finalized. It would provide transportation for working, transit-dependent residents of the West and near South Side to major workplaces such as Domino Sugar, Prima Plastics, and Dearborn Produce. Teens and families could access parks and the 31st Street beach. The route would end at Cicero Avenue, traveling north a few blocks through a commercial center to Target. LVEJO has also proposed that the route extend north on its eastern end, running express on Lakeshore Drive to McCormick Place and the Museum Campus. Mike Pitula, a community organizer and LVEJO’s director of public transit, claims that currently, “this area has no direct bus access from the West or South Side.”

Although the grant specifies that the 31st Street route provide access to jobs, Pitula argues that this service is important for two more reasons: to contribute to environmental efforts and to create safe routes to local schools.

The proposed bus route would service De La Salle Institute and Illinois Institute of Technology in Bronzeville, as well as Holden Elementary School in Bridgeport. And, more urgently, the 31st Street bus would provide safe transportation to a school in dire need of it. According to a survey conducted by LVEJO, Little Village-Lawndale High School is the only high school in Chicago that does not have CTA service within 2.5 blocks. According to Pitula, approximately one-quarter of the students who attend LVLHS must cross a gang boundary while walking to school. Violence has spiked along 31st Street since 2009. One of two closest CTA stops to the high school is on Cicero Avenue, but Pitula says there have been reports of young women being sexually harassed after school on a nearby bridge. “While it wouldn’t be a magic bullet, having a bus route would be one way to prevent these interactions from happening,” he says.

Schoolchildren aren’t the only population the bus would impact. Older residents have struggled with the lack of bus service for a long time. Senior citizens with limited mobility, who can’t get to checkups at Mercy Hospital or to the senior club at Piotrowski Park, have been particularly vocal in the 31st Street bus debate. Tom Gaulke, a pastor at the First Trinity Church in Bridgeport has heard his parishioners complain and summarized their dissatisfaction: “all these little old ladies at the senior home can never make it out anywhere.”

In May 2011, after three years, LVEJO decided to take action once again. “This spring, we realized there was a deadline coming up,” said Pitula, “you don’t just get a grant and sit on it forever.” The CTA claimed in an August community meeting and in an e-mail statement this past week that the $1 million will not expire. But according to the Federal Transit Authority’s website, JARC funding is available only for a total of three years after apportionment.

According to Pitula, the CTA has applied for a one-year extension of the grant. “It’s a fairly routine procedure,” he says, but the current phase in LVEJO’s campaign is to put pressure on the Federal Transit Administration to approve the extension. They expect to hear back before the end of the year.

This summer, working under pressure of an imminent deadline, the campaign expanded to encompass other communities along the route. In fact, some groups were already vocalizing their concerns about the bus route’s progress independently from LVEJO. According to Pitula, the campaign began in two places simultaneously three years ago: Little Village and Facebook. The Facebook page was created by lifelong resident of Bridgeport and video store owner Joe Trutin as part of his campaign for state representative in 2009. He and the Little Village activists have since joined forces, with Trutin rallying residents of Bridgeport and McKinley Park. He’s also taken on the task of gathering data to bolster their case—over the last few months, Trutin has been measuring the width of streets in attempt to refute one resident’s claim that 31st Street is not wide enough for bus service. He and Pitula have fought all opposition, however small, but Trutin says only two members of these communities have publicly voiced it.

Though much of the organizing has been centered in Little Village and Bridgeport, the issue crosses many neighborhood boundaries and has engaged many people. In late August, the CTA held a meeting with community members at the McKinley Park library. In addition to residents of Little Village, Bridgeport and Chinatown, senior citizens from Armour Square and McKinley Park came to emphasize their dependency on transit. “We showed them that we were a diverse group of people who had a common goal,” says Connie Ma, who works at the Chinese American Service League in Chinatown. Many community organizations have signed on to the campaign, from church groups and cultural clubs to the more extreme Citizens Against Terrible Transit. Pitula expressed that his goal this summer was to build “a cross-town coalition composed of residents along this route,” and it appears he has been successful.

At one point in this process, some residents—bus drivers and mechanics who could contribute their skills to the community—tossed around the idea of providing their own bus service. Pitula summarized this project as a “worker self-managed bus cooperative” that would be organized by the Chicago chapter of the Industrial Workers of the World. “It would be a demonstration for the CTA, but also an alternative model of transit to provide work and service for people in the community,” he said. The idea, added Ma, would be “to utilize the people the CTA has laid off.” While progress on this alternative has stagnated over the past few months, the idea of an independent bus service is not foreign to Little Village. Pitula remembers a free shuttle service along 26th Street that was disconnected a few years ago—a single school bus that residents could flag at street corners, funded by advertisements on its exterior.

The push for a 31st Street bus is a fight to provide South Side residents with easier mobility, a need that other Chicagoans recognize. Sullivan, who lives and works in Bridgeport, points out that the major expressways are easily accessible from the near South Side, but there are many people in these neighborhoods who do not own cars and their movement is, as a consequence, limited to their own neighborhoods. To some extent, a 31st Street bus would unite the neighborhoods it serves and reduce this isolation. “Once people travel, they start exploring,” Trutin explains.

The people behind the 31st Street bus campaign realize that theirs is an uphill battle—to add a route at a time when CTA trends have tended towards increased fares and cutting service—but pressure on the CTA is building. The project has received letters of support from one state senator, two state representatives, and three aldermen, according to its Facebook page. The $1 million needed to implement this route is less than one tenth of one percent of the  CTA’s annual budget, but Pitula nonetheless has taken them at their word that the agency does not have the identified funds.

Residents of these communities will not stop fighting for the 31st Street bus—some have already been fighting for 14 years. In the meantime, local organizations are simply asking for acknowledgement by transit officials. The CTA claims that service along 31st Street was originally cut in 1997 due to low ridership, but Ma argues that the people who the decision affected were the people who needed it most. “If one person needs the bus more than someone who has a car, shouldn’t it be more important that the first person receives this service?” she asks. While a bus would be a major victory on many levels, the immediate issue is a lack of communication between the CTA and the people it serves.

“We just want a confirmation that the CTA sympathizes with us on a human level,” Ma reflects, a sentiment she said many expressed at the August meeting. “But they kind of stared blankly at me.”

The art at Eastern Expansion is presented with the institutionalized irreverence that one might expect from a Bridgeport gallery. None of the pieces have titles or placards, and the names of the artist and exhibition has been scrawled on the wall in wavering penmanship. Upon entering the narrow storefront space, the viewer is confronted by a massive cardboard wall covered with white tape. A looped animation of a distorted brick wall moving ever upward pours out of the jagged opening. If one takes two paces forward, the seemingly consistent façade of the art object is summarily destroyed and its guts are laid bare.

Another television lies on the floor, nesting in a shawl of artificial Christmas tree branches. The screen is set to a similar brick wall pattern, emitting a luminous red from fronds of plastic green. A representation of nature enfolds a representation of artifice. The “natural” conifers that have been appropriated for cultural ritual show off the unflinching materiality of their construction. What lies behind our window into nature, what awaits us when we attempt to approximate that which exists apart from us? The resounding reply: a brick wall.

Kellstadt’s  drawings line the walls, lending an air of convention to the exhibition. Mostly sketchbook-sized line drawings, they are cartoonish, whimsical, and barely representational. Incomplete, distorted forms interact with sloppily written phrases that start and stop, some of which are misspelled. Even words, it seems, are susceptible to the fraying and erosions of the material world—a blaring reminder that this drawing is not a person, this TV is not a wall, this gallery is not a storefront, and this house isn’t necessarily a home.

Eastern Expansion, 244 W. 31st St. Through December 1. Hours by appointment only. easternexpansion.blogspot.com

Courtesy of the Hornswaggler Collection

Rarely does Skittle-infused vodka lead to good choices. But for Graham Hogan and Joseph Rynkiewicz, the candy cocktail led to an innovative new venture in Chicago art commerce. One night two years ago, Hogan explained, he, Rynkiewicz and a group of friends decided to flavor their vodka with Skittle candies. Ed Marszewski, the director of the Co-Prosperity Sphere, liked the concoction so much that he asked them to serve it at his gallery. “We were like, all right, we can do that,” Hogan said.

Suffice it to say, Skittle vodka only lasted two shows before the duo realized they could take any middle-of-the-road liquor and infuse it with various herbs to craft unique and appealing alcoholic potions. And so began the Hornswaggler bar—an entirely mobile cocktail bar serving up craft drinks at Chicago art exhibitions. As Hogan and Rynkiewicz began to turn a profit from their drinks, they entered what, for them, was a new part of the art world: art buying.

Unlike collectors of yore, these two are no cognac-swigging, cravat-wearing John D. Rockefellers or Greek shipping magnates. Hogan works for a doll manufacturer and Rynkiewicz is a freelance photographer and art handler. “That was our first purchase,” Rynkiewicz said, gesturing to an image of a disgruntled-looking Persian cat with daisy eyelashes.

The Hornswaggler Collection made its public debut last Friday night, in the place where it all began—Bridgeport’s Co-Prosperity Sphere. For each event, the couple crafts a new menu of $4 cocktails. Friday night’s list featured four cocktails of various herbal infusions (think lavender and Tarragon vodka) with autumnal additives, like maple syrup and apple cider. A tipsy symbiosis evolves: “You want the drinks; we want the art,” Rynkiewicz said with a smile.

The initial impression given by the exhibit was unsettling; conspicuously naked walls surrounded hordes of cocktail-armed visitors that swarmed around tables of hors d’oeuvres. However, when visitors stepped behind the partitioned room, a single wall presented a visual smorgasbord of artwork.  “All of our efforts have funneled into that wall back there,” Hogan said looking towards the cocktail bar.

The collection includes work by over three dozen Chicago artists, including Stephen Eichorn, Kristen Taylor, and Juan Angel Chavez. The single wall held a seemingly hodgepodge collection, but it was cohesive in its clever subject matter. A framed black splat with neon typeface demands, “Have you made plans for the future?” A solitary wooden potato sits on an outcropping.

“Visually, there really is no cohesiveness; our collection marries a lot of different styles,” Rynkiewicz said, arms folded, scanning the wall of acrylic fruit loops, doodles, and wooden wig-like cutouts. “It’s a time capsule, a glimpse of what’s happening in Chicago art at a certain moment. It’s not about a curatorial vision—it’s meant to be seen together.”

The latest manifestation of the Hornswaggler collection is a public art-lending library. As the collection expanded, the couple realized they had a surfeit of good art on their hands. They came to an epiphany—rather than let art collect dust in storage, they could share it with the community.

The library allows art to live in the homes of aficionados essentially free of charge. Borrowers can keep a piece for three to six months, after paying a refundable security deposit and a small fee for handling and installation.

This program has deep implications—the stuffy Sotheby’s attitude of art patronage is replaced by a vibrant, dynamic collection that is supported and shared by the community. “It’s a much more charming way of doing things,” Hogan noted.

But one question remained unanswered at Friday’s reveal: what is a Hornswaggler, anyway? “It’s a breed of Oompa-Loompa, actually,” Rynkiewicz explained. “It also means ‘to pull wool over your eyes,’ which is in a sense what we are doing—getting you drunk to help us buy art.”

Learn more about the Hornswaggler Collection at www.hornswagglerarts.org

The collection’s highlights are diverse. Smaller pieces include a hot dog and an Igloo cooler, crafted to perfectly model their real counterparts. With the addition of paint and finish, the hotdog looks good enough to eat.

The show also includes larger, technically complicated pieces. According to Kepha, a gigantic wooden robot by artist Michael Rea took a whole six months to craft. Rea is well known in the Chicago art world for his thoughtful and distinctive replicas of machinery, tools, weapons, and vehicles. The intended meaning lingering behind the wooden robot holding two lion heads in its mechanical hands is fairly nebulous, but the sculpture boasts a set of chains so large and life-like that it left the gallery owners dumbfounded as to how it could possibly have been carved from a rectangular block of wood.

Some of the show’s larger pieces do more than simply impress and mystify. Two full-size cabins, designed and assembled in the gallery by a group of young Chicago artists, highlight the environmental damage committed by the modern consumption of wood. Kazuki Guzman, a former SAIC student, built hers from materials purchased at major hardware store chains and adorned it with generic landscape wallpaper—an attempt to make a statement on the “big box consumerism” that saps deeper cultural and artistic expression from so many American homes.

Earlier this year, Kepha and his sister began an extensive search of art school exhibitions and galleries to see how both the city’s newest artists and most established pros were working to realize wood’s hidden potential as a foundation for creativity. The challenge of assembling a collection of fluid, unique works carved from one of art’s more rigid materials was an exciting prospect for Kepha.

This unique balance of assorted veteran and upstart contributions is readily visible in “Wood-Worked.” If there is any other organizing principle to the show beyond simply the uniform medium, it is the delicate equilibrium of it all: the mammoth pieces mixed with small ones and the placement of Chicago art powerhouses beside up and comers. The resulting show is a feat, not only of artistic expression, but also of the logistics and manual labor it took to display home-sized artwork  Only after two days of taking truckloads to and from galleriers were Kepha, Pacheco and their team ready to put together an exhibit. “We got back [from the last pick up] and just started working,” Pacheco says. Her brother chuckled softly and added, “We’ll see how it all breaks down.”

Chicago Urban Art Society, 2229 S. Halsted St. Thursday-Friday, 6-9pm; Saturday, 1-6pm. 773-951-8101. chicagourbanartsociety.org

Carolina Baizan

Let the smell of warm, fresh pasta wafting into the fall air guide you into one of the overstuffed leather booths at Calabruzzi’s Café. Exposed brick walls, an enormous tri-color decal of Italy on the floor, and an accordion over the speaker system typify Italian-American restaurant décor, but the sharp smell of frying garlic will snap you to attention. Calabruzzi’s is about family-style food, not kitsch.

Everyone working at Calabruzzi is noticeably related. Our friendly server, who turned out to be the owner Rosanna Mandile, confirmed that most of the people on staff share her last name. Even the name of the café—a portmanteau of Mandile’s parents’ birthplaces, Calabria and Abruzzi—underscores the importance of their family history. Mandile’s training is exclusively homegrown: her culinary skills come from her father whose first job in the United States was as a cook in Italian restaurants, from her work as a teenager in her uncle’s pizza place, and from her Italian aunts who passed down their kitchen wisdom. In short, family is a big deal at Calabruzzi’s, and you can see it in the dishes they choose to prepare and in the people that eat there: an elder member of the Mandile clan drinks at the bar, a couple argues over their meal, and a few families sit with young children for a weeknight dinner.

As expected, pasta and thin-crust pizza are the main offerings here, along with a wide selection of sandwiches and appetizers. The fried gnocchi were small pillows of creamy ricotta and potato, lightly crusted, and served with a vodka dipping sauce. The sauce, though a little bland, added a nice balance of acidity and sweetness to the already plenty tasty gnocchi.

The spaghetti carbonara, made with satisfyingly large chunks of salty pancetta, fresh peas, and velvety eggs, would be right at home served out of a giant bowl at a family dinner. Though very good, the spaghetti could have been a little more al dente, especially since the sauce was so heavy. For those with more creative flavor-pairing ideas, there is also a “make-your-own” pasta dish option, with a large assortment of sauces, noodles, herbs, and other add-ons.

The standout of Calabruzzi’s menu, and the most popular dish, was the potato pizza, a simple, but delicious medley of potatoes, rosemary, Parmesan, and mozzarella. The crust was crisp, as all good thin-crust pizza should be, the potatoes were perfectly browned, and the unfussy flavors of garlic and olive oil were spot-on. The desserts—gelato, tiramisu, and wafery pizzelle cookies with Nutella—were reliable but unremarkable. But after the giant servings, it’s unlikely anyone would be able to eat dessert anyway.

After chatting with Mandile for a bit about the history of the place, we asked what she had envisioned for Calabruzzi when she opened it. Mandile replied that she just wanted people from the neighborhood to come for some good food. With the café filled with satisfied friends and families, it seems like she has accomplished exactly that.

Calabruzzi’s Cafe, 3304 S. Halsted. Monday-Thursday, 11am-11pm; Friday-Saturday, 11am-2am; Sunday, noon-11pm. (773)247-9999. www.calabruzziscafe.com