CityFiles Chicago Arts & Books



This article first appeared in The Chicago Reader on 2.7.03
In "The Culture Club," section 2.

Earn As You Learn

By Deanna Isaacs

CityFiles, the all-Chicago bookstore, memorabilia shop, and gallery that writer Rich Cahan and his wife, broadcaster Cate Cahan, opened last fall, is curiously located at the corner of Greenleaf and Wesley in a mostly residential part of Evanston. "We saw the space and just fell in love with it," Rich Cahan explains. "We weren't thinking about the fact that three people a day walk by. I thought all I had to do was put beautiful art on the wall and people would come and buy it. I went to the bank to talk about a loan and they said, 'How much do you expect to make?' I had no idea. My wife, who's very impractical, says it's going to be a sort of clubhouse. I say, that's fine, who's gonna pay the rent?"

The space was an art and antique shop when the Cahans first laid eyes on it last year, and it still is. There are baskets of old Chicago History magazines, matchbooks from long-gone businesses like the Silver Frolic ("a taste of Paris" at 400 N. Wabash), and license plates from the 1920s and '30s. Plus striking new Chicago images by a dozen or more local photographers--culled with the eye Cahan developed in 16 years as picture editor at the Sun-Times and two years as director of the CITY 2000 project, which recorded Chicago life in a half million images for posterity. There are Chicago paintings (Bruno Surdo's commanding Flora of the Subway is reason enough for a visit), a thousand Chicago novels, Arthur Rubloff's custom-made size ten-and-a-half shoes, doorknobs pulled from a City Hall Dumpster, and Linda B. Lyon's exquisitely crafted new hats, indistinguishable from the vintage pieces that were her models. There's jazz in the air and hot cider to drink, and as little or as much informed conversation with the owners as you might want.

The Cahans are walking databases of Chicago lore. Cate, longtime editor of WBEZ's local morning program, Eight Forty-Eight, is now a contributing editor at the station; Rich, who does what he calls "little histories," is the author of a number of remarkable books about the city, including They All Fall Down, the biography of architectural photographer and preservationist Richard Nickel, and, coauthored with Mark Jacob, The Game That Was, a treasure trove of vintage baseball photos by George Brace. Early last year, steeped in artifacts Rich had collected for Chicago: Rising From the Prairie (published in 2000), the Cahans began thinking about a store that would "catch the spirit of Chicago" and "put things in the hands of people who love them." After four months, Rich says CityFiles is on the cusp of breaking even. A ravenous consumer of both Cahans' time, it will never take the place of Rich's writing career (he's currently working on a commissioned history of the Owen Coon Foundation). It's a gamble and a grind. But Cahan says he's intrigued by "the stories people bring in every day"--like those of the LaFramboise family, descendants of an explorer who was in the area in the 1790s. He says Cate will be setting up her tape recorder to capture some of those tales, which will be archived at a future Web site: "Cool stories, from CityFiles."