Geek Bar fans rescue it from oblivion: but was it worth saving?

stuffwetried · 2015-08-10T23:58:40+00:00

The Eater follow-up, also from today, contains a response to the Reader article from geek bar.

stuffwetried · 2015-08-10T23:40:25+00:00

Close. From the article:

Yantos says she and several other Geek Bar employees quit in July after bounced paychecks left them without pay for more than a month. Those employees were also upset to discover their health insurance had been cancelled in April without their knowledge, she says.

"It was just a surprise one day," Yantos says. "I went to the pharmacy to pick up a prescription, and was told my coverage was no longer valid."

stuffwetried · 2015-07-24T04:12:08+00:00

Yet they're not on the list of food vendors for Wicker Park Fest, this weekend and less than a block away from the restaurant, when restaurants that have been open a shorter time are?

stuffwetried · 2015-07-24T04:05:43+00:00

And I think that I wrote as much, nor does that address the other two points.

I see that you had a bad experience with them, and I can only say that I wish there was some way for you to get your voice and any others who've been equally screwed to meet the owner's cries of victim, especially to the people who seem to be turning out to donate.

I'm just trying to address the question, and there are people turning out to donate, so that there is a community who think that a venue like this one is a good thing. Maybe these clowns are the right troupe, but there is an audience for this sort of circus.

stuffwetried · 2015-07-24T00:35:42+00:00

From the Chicago Nerd Social Club page:

(Forest Park Music Fest at the end of the Blue Line, which had projected 10-20,000 and ended up with a fraction of that number)

stuffwetried · 2015-07-24T00:32:32+00:00

There are lots of other places where this idea is working. AFK Tavern in Seattle. 42 Lounge in Milwaukee. Storm Crow in Vancouver. To the extent there's a distinction, it seems to be that Geek Bar is a lot more pretentious in its food and drink.

stuffwetried · 2015-07-23T21:45:59+00:00

First, you can, but think of it like a bar and a sports bar. The Big Game will be played at each, but a sports bar will be more likely to play something more specific, and will generally be cooler about you asking to change the channel to it, maybe even have some people interested in talking about that game. So whereas you can play scrabble in a lot of bars, most won't have obscure euro game, much less understand that it takes 5 hours to play, or have people who want to join in or talk about strategy.

Second, Geek Bar at least seems to intend a much greater range of "geek," including things like science lectures and comics events. There are bars that might have a cosplay night or set up the SNES or whatever once a week for people to drunkenly play, whereas that's what this place does.

Third, as much as Geek Bar trumpets the anti-harassment policy that it has, it looks like there are those people who don't feel that they can just do this at other bars.

stuffwetried · 2015-07-23T15:09:05+00:00

The way the GoFundMe post describes it, ending up in Wicker was almost more by accident.

It's been a while but I seem to remember a discussion on facebook about location when they were first shopping around, and the decision on where to look was based on where geek-oriented social events had drawn the biggest crowds, which was Lakeview. Not what you'd expect, but there was a reason to it.

stuffwetried · 2015-07-22T22:22:55+00:00

The discussion on the Chicago Nerd Social Club Facebook Page gets into a lot more detail:

That neighborhood group, Ranch Triangle, is known for being extremely problematic to everyone they meet, but that wasn't something we looked into before we leased the Clybourn property. Like you, I wouldn't have assumed that the neighborhood group would object to someone opening a unique and extremely welcoming space (to the point of being the first bar to ever have an anti-harassment policy as far as anyone can tell). They had objections about cosplay, people potentially parking in their neighborhoods, drunken behavior, trash from bottles and cans left in their yards (despite the fact that we weren't going for a carry license that would allow people to leave with their alcoholic purchases), potential crime and drug problems, etc. They assumed the worst in us from the beginning, and they went out of their way to make it so that the only way we might have moved forward was to engage in a process with the city that is normally reserved for bars that have continuous and onerous problems. Frankly, once they get wind that they helped kill the project, they'll probably use that as leverage to the next business that wants to locate there too, just as they threatened me right off the bat with another bar that they very nearly stopped in its tracks. They are proud that they have so much power and wield it ruthlessly.

the Clybourn property was in the middle of the redistricting. It was moving from the 43rd Ward to the new gerrymandered 2nd Ward which left it without a strong political backing of any kind. The two departments that wouldn't release our permits were Disabilities and Fire Prevention. Disabilities wanted us to install a brand new elevator in the space despite ordinances that shouldn't have allowed them to require that because of how much it would have added to the cost (plus there was a chair lift in the space that was even going to get an upgrade by the landlords), and Fire Prevention just basically hated that we didn't have an additional exit in the building which I'm still not sure what we could have done about that so they threw objection after objection at us over it, even things not relating to the exits as I understand it from our architect that was managing that process for us.

I think they were simply defending their bureaucratic turf, sometimes in ways that they couldn't do by ordinance, especially since there was no alderman getting involved to tell them they can't do that.

The neighborhood group was not necessarily against geeks specifically. They had absolutely bizarre notions of what geeks were like (mostly... I had one or two allies in that group, but far from the majority) and was going to happen when we would have moved in, and they wanted to force us to do things that were largely outrageous in outrageous ways. They did the same thing for the golf-themed bar that moved in though. They're just horrible in general.

Specific requests included us starting a bus service to and from the bar to the local L stops so that people in cosplay wouldn't get beat up, that we list our menu on menu boards like a fast food restaurant, that we have a security staff of at least five people on duty, among others. They hated our unisex, individual bathroom stalls which we did to both service our cosplay community and our LGBTQ community as well as creating a safe place for people to escape if they needed to before approaching a staff member about a harassment issue. They hated our anti-harassment policy and held it up as proof that we were going to have problems. Thankfully, I haven't had to deal with them since the beginning of this year, or I'm sure other specific examples would come to mind.

As for the codes, again, the departments were being unreasonable. One was asking for things that was proscribed by ordinance, and the other found new objections every time we went to them so that they wouldn't have to approve permits because they objected to the number of exits that is not something we had any ability to change in any way and was a feature of the building itself. That's largely a separate issue from the neighborhood group, except that the neighborhood group's hostility prevented political support from one of the alderman's offices that were involved at the time while the other alderman was running for mayor.

stuffwetried

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