A CENTURY OF CHICAGO HISTORY
Comfort Station, a small Tudor building in Logan Square, began as a restroom and is now an arts space and outdoor theater
Acouple of Wednesdays ago, I spent a couple of hours loitering outside a public restroom facility. Dozens of us did.
Before you call the cops, let me explain. I was one of 63 — give or take a few wander-inners and passers-by who passed by, came back and stayed a while — gathered under the trees outside the tiny, century-old trolley line warming house now known as Comfort Station, the unlikeliest arts micro-organization in town.
If the modest structure resembles a tool shed that emigrated from 16thcentury England, well, the comfort station may have been built in 1927 as a comfort station, or public restroom, one of many on the West Side of Chicago in the late-trolley era, but for decades it was a tool shed.
More recently, in pre-COVID times, the demi-cottage and surrounding, shady lawn area has routinely hosted between 150 and 200 events a year: concerts, art exhibits, photography exhibits, puppet shows — the brilliant
Manual Cinema folks performed there — and larpers.
“You know larpers?” asks Comfort Station film programmer Raul Benitez, recently added to the Chicago International Film Festival programming roster. “Medieval battle role-play? We had a battle on our lawn. Oh, and during an eclipse we had over 300 people on the lawn. We teamed up with Adler Planetarium and they gave us a bunch of eclipse glasses.”
Comfort Station sits just across Milwaukee Avenue from the Illinois Centennial Monument. That one’s known in our family as “the eagle statue,” designed by Henry Bacon of Lincoln Memorial fame.
Wednesday is movie night, and Benitez works with an array of Chicago film outfits to keep audiences guessing. Last week, the Asian Pop-Up Cinema presented “Samurai Marathon.” On July 23, the Mezcla Media Collective hosts a screening of director Jennifer Reeder’s locally made 2017 feature “Signature Move,” written by Fawzia Mirza and Lisa Donato.
The night I went, some sat in folding chairs, some sat on the ground. Some were semi-permanent residents of the Comfort Station lawn, homeless
but that night, at least, among neighbors. One moviegoer and square regular, Tony Gonzalez, told me he’d been attending faithfully for years. “I’ve got nothing else to do,” he said.
That night the Chicago Film Society, the widely respected nonprofit hopelessly devoted to the history and riches of non-digital cinema, showed co-founder Julian Antos’ picks from “a random assortment of uncataloged film,” as Comfort Station’s website put it. Strange educational and corporate training footage. A Looney Tunes Foghorn Leghorn comedy. Outtakes
from a 1965 industrial film about how barbers should engage with customers without offending.
My favorite was a sublimely stultifying series of introductions to a corporate job titled “Project Health,” commissioned by Illinois Bell Telephone (date unknown; probably the late 1970s or early ’80s). In these, a man identifying himself as “Dr. Hilker, your medical director” speaks to downsizing-rattled Illinois Bell employees about the dangers of alcoholism, overeating
and various forms of stress. The doctor’s office wallpaper is dominated by huge diamond-shaped patterns that look like they were made out of sausage.
Leaning against a tree, listening to Dr. Hilker explain why we’re all headed straight for a heart attack, I thought: Well, at least it’s nice here. The Kodak whir. The random craziness of the evening’s entertainment. The democratic vibe. I hope this part of the neighborhood doesn’t change much.
“Small but mighty” is how Logan Square Preservation president Andrew Schneider refers to Comfort Station, which is gradually reopening its indoor activities for business. “It’s a unique intersection of activities,” he says.
In literal terms, that intersection and its surroundings are about to undergo a massive, 18-month (maybe longer; you know how things go) traffic-rerouting project. Inevitably, change is coming to this corner of Logan Square, a lot of it, one hopes, for the better — the greener, the safer — and maybe some of it not.
Maybe it’ll depend how much you like outdoor movies the way they’re being shown there on Wednesdays.
Long-gestating plans to reroute the roundabout circling (or ovaling) the square will eventually divert Milwaukee around it, rather than Milwaukee running through it. The Centennial Monument area and the smaller Comfort Station parcel will become one big space. Work is expected to begin this fall, to be completed in early- or mid-2023.
The plan, says Comfort Station director Jordan Martins, offers “some plusses and some minuses for us.”
In terms of “broader public space,” he says, “we’re going to have a bigger footprint.” The pedestrian plaza replacing
a portion of Milwaukee Avenue will host the Logan Square Farmer’s Market, held Sundays in warm months, right outside Comfort Station’s front door.
The plans also call for a bike path to wind directly across the lawn where the movies are now shown.
“That’s a real punch to the gut,” Martins says. “By my rough estimate that’ll cut off 30, 40 percent of that lawn area. Losing that space is a bummer, for lack of a better word. I have an immense appreciation for what the Chicago Department of Transportation has been doing, communicating with us, but they’ve
repeatedly told me, ‘We’ve looked at this from a thousand angles, and we really don’t see any other way.’ ”
Who runs what in this corner of the world? A lot of folks. The city manages the Logan Square boulevard system, where Comfort Station resides. Logan Square Preservation, a nonprofit outfit, holds the lease on the building and served as primary advocates in a successful effort to secure landmark status for the building in 2004.
Comfort Station’s programming team constitutes a separate nonprofit organization, with a rotating roster of programmers (film, handled by longtime
programmer Benitez, is the exception).
“The idea of a publicly owned building operated by a grassroots cultural organization — I can’t really think of another quite like it,” says director Martins. “The city owns it, but somehow this motley crew of weirdos got their hands on it.”
Some history. In January 1926, the West Chicago Parks Commission announced plans to build 17 “public comfort stations” (cost: $6,000 apiece; 17 later became nine) on the city’s West Side, each around 700 square feet, done up in Tudor-style trim. Utilitarian stuff. Nothing
big. They were meant to give folks waiting for a trolley a place to get out of the rain, or the snow, and buy some smokes. And use the restrooms.
A Jan. 16, 1926, Chicago Daily Tribune story mistakenly left one of the originally planned 17 off its list: That one, presumably, was the one in Columbus Park, just north of Eisenhower Expressway on Austin Boulevard. And that’s the only surviving Chicago comfort station besides Logan Square’s, though the Columbus Park structure has been dormant for decades.
The comfortstation logansquare.org website notes that the trolley era was quickly replaced by the revenge of the autos. By 1940 the Logan Square Comfort Station, where Milwaukee crosses Logan Boulevard, was listed as “vacant” and eventually became a lawn mower and tool shed. Over the years it avoided demolition many times, just as Logan Square redevelopment managed to avoid some of the city’s worst-laid plans. (Take a look at the 1970 Logan Square redevelopment proposal sometime, and weep: It’s all concrete and no life.)
Comfort Station director Martins acknowledges the ongoing efforts of the Logan Square Neighborhood Association in championing the Tudorinflected oddity hugging Milwaukee Avenue.
“They’re all about erosion prevention,” Martins says. “The real estate development that cuts through these neighborhoods, these corridors, can be brutal. And if don’t fight it, it will erode our communities.”
Sitting on the lawn the other night, with the projector throwing a bizarre procession of historical oddities on a pop-up screen, the presence of the comfort station building barely registered. For one thing, it’s hidden by trees (though some trees at the other end of the lawn will likely come down in the redesign). For another, it’s a nondescript exterior presence. But as (or if, depending on pandemic variants) the doors open more frequently this summer, even at limited capacity — five masked people at a time for now — its Chicago-meets-Stratford-ette charm comes through.
It’s a repurposed neighborhood asset most neighborhoods don’t have, and
probably wouldn’t think twice about, given everything most neighborhoods face these days.
The morning after the movies, I called Antos and asked how he thought the Chicago Film Society presentation went.
“It was our first time doing something there,” he
said. “We’d been working toward a collaboration for several years. I thought it went really well! It was a great, diverse audience and lots of young people, which is great. You had people walking by on the sidewalk, getting curious, and then stopping to check it out. That’s not really possible in an indoor screening.”
As for the future addition of a bike path cutting straight across Comfort Station’s front lawn, well … “as far as intersections of arts, culture and transportation go, that’ll be really interesting.”
The Logan Square Comfort Station is located at 2579 N. Milwaukee Ave. Events calendar and other information at comfortstationlogansquare.org.
The mixed-media exhibition ”The More You Listen, the Louder It Gets” continues through July 24, featuring the work of Brick Cassidy and Catherine Hu.
Next up for Comfort Station film programming, 8 p.m. July 21: “Frankenthologies: The Movies That Weren’t Movies,” part of the ”Released and Abandoned: Forgotten Oddities of the Home Video Era” series curated and hosted by Paul Freitag-Fey.