When the trendy Baja Beach Club, at 401 E. Illinois St., opens for business this week, it will be the first major nightspot on the water in Chicago since the 1920s, when Mayor William ”Big Bill” Thompson opened a speakeasy called the Fish Fans Club in Belmont Harbor and so many patrons climbed on board that it sank.
But unlike such defunct Chicago nighteries as the old Chez Paree or the no-nonsense Green Mill, where a comedian once had his throat slit for trying to break his contract, the Baja is, as they say, something completely different.
Located in the North Pier Terminal on a branch of the Chicago River known as Ogden Slip, it has a 180-seat restaurant, a ”state-of-the-art” nightclub and two game rooms with motorcycle simulators, billiard tables, 40 video games, four blackjack stations, 18 holes of electronic golf, five bars, a dance floor and nonstop music, including surf songs. Hamburgers, chicken fajitas and ribs will be served by persons on roller skates.
The 25,000-square-foot complex is not, its promoters say, just a meat-market for hungry singles on the prowl in the loveless concrete jungle of a great American city. ”It`s a place for total entertainment,” declared Larry Spatz, chief executive officer of the parent Heartthrob Enterprises, as he walked through construction clutter during a recent interview.
These days, with trendy restaurants sprouting throughout the city and suburbs like desert flowers after a spring rain, what, one might ask, does a once-abandoned warehouse have to do to draw crowds? Boiling down his considerable number of views on the subject, Spatz suggests:
– Group skits by the help, keeping the energy level higher than such competitors as `50s-style diner Ed Debevic`s, whose employees are limited to snappy repartee, and the Hard Rock Cafe, which is powered by intense decor.
– So many diversions that shy people who come to pick someone up, and fail, can later assert that they really came only to play the games.
– Something to look at out the window.
The vista, indeed, is pretty good, though not exactly the Pacific Ocean as seen from the heights of Acapulco. One can sit at cocktails on a glassed-in back veranda with wicker furniture and a tile floor and gaze across the Ogden Slip to a panorama of skyscrapers, rising above the parking lots that surround the place.
It is, many feel, an area whose time has come. ”We think it`s fantastic,” said Beth White, executive director of the Friends of the Chicago River, speaking of the $20 million terminal renovation that, with the adjacent North Pier Apartments, is the first project on a 39-acre site. ”It`s a constructive use, improving what`s there,” White noted. ”It`s going to be a destination point on the waterfront.”
Nor is growth likely to slow down. The terminal is part of the $3 billion Cityfront Center area, a project that calls for 13 million square feet of offices, 500,000 square feet of retailing space, 4,000 hotel rooms and 5,900 apartments, many designed for singles.
It also will mean a rebirth of night life in that part of the city, an area with a colorful history reaching back to the days of The Sands, a Near North Side area where, according to historian Emmett Dedmon, entertainment seekers found ”a collection of tumble-down shanties with the worst kinds of lodging houses, saloons, gambling dens and bordellos, including Freddy Webster`s, where one of the inmates had been neither sober nor out of the house for five years nor had her clothes on for three.”
Modern times have brought different concepts of fun. At the Baja, patrons will enter an area with bars, a ”major dance floor” and electronic baseball, basketball, arm-wrestling and golf, which enables players to ”walk” 18 of the world`s greatest holes, freed from such foursome fears as slicing shots into the crowd or being hit by lightning.
To some, catering to the singles market has created a feeding frenzy among restaurant designers, undercutting family places with sensible food.
”Why is it,” asks one dour observer, ”that I always find myself either in an ersatz `50s diner or a fake Spanish tavern?”
”It`s hard to open a restaurant with just good food these days,”
explains Peter Zakas of Zakaspace Corp., a restaurant design firm with offices in Chicago and New York. ”The `concept` restaurant came about because of competition. People wanted to do more than eat. They wanted an `experience.`
”
The process, he noted, started about 20 years ago with Steak & Ale franchises, which offered fireplaces. Restaurant owners quickly found that an ”identity” drew crowds faster than slaving toward, say, a major breakthrough in lasagna. If anything, the ”concept” trend is getting stronger. ”Competition is getting hotter,” Zakas said. One new wrinkle, he added, is to mix ”concepts,” such as a Mexican-Japanese theme in Richard Melman`s new venture, Hat Dance, at 325 W. Huron St.
Like Walt Disney hunting ideas for a jungle river ride, Chicago-based Peter Zakas and his New York-based brother, Spiros Zakas, travel 100,000 miles a year, scouting ideas to borrow for client restaurants.
In Texas, for example, Spiros Zakas saw a sign that said, ”Our coffee is so good we drink it ourselves.” A version of the sign now hangs in Ed Debevic`s. For Un Grand Cafe, in the Belden-Stratford Hotel, he flew to Europe and studied cafe floors in Paris. The company also designs McDonald`s franchises, including a new one in Vernon Hills with ”a Pee-wee Herman feeling” and ”an adult McDonald`s” in Lincolnshire that has terrazzo floors, granite walls and a Chagall-like mural.
At Baja, the help is set to do eight routines. In one, a ”shooter girl” wears a holster and mixes drinks. Staffers climb on bars and lip synch recorded songs. Others stage birthday parades.
”We let our employees have a good time, dance with the customers, relate to them,” Spatz said. ”Our people care that you enjoy your experience. We take it personally if you don`t.”
To provide such hoopla, Heartthrob Enterprises hired 150 ”young, energetic, theatrical, upbeat” people, many of them actors, actresses, models or students. ”We audition our help,” Spatz said. ”That`s better than simply hiring. It builds camaraderie. They don`t have to be talented, but they have to believe there`s no law that says that work can`t be fun.”
The result, he added, ”is loud, boisterious, fun party entertainment.”
The ”staff dynamics” allows the crowd ”to flow throughout the place,”
which is, he noted, ”the whole concept-maintaining a high energy level.”
Offering entertainment, food and dancing, Heartthrob Enterprises expects to open 15 units in the next year, with gross revenue of $65 million. A dozen more are planned by the end of 1990 in such markets as New York, Hollywood, San Jose, Coral Gables, Baltimore, Minneapolis, Arlington Heights and Schaumburg.
”We can open one a month and not lose the personal side of the business,” Spatz said, taking a few moments off, in an interview, to review what has been a tumultuous three years for him.
Spatz, 44, was born in Hyde Park. His father was a machine shop operator who developed a second career in real estate. His mother is an active club woman. The family moved to Glencoe when he was 14. He graduated from New Trier High School and ”skiied my way” through the University of Denver (Class of
`66). With little success, he tried market research, real estate sales and rehabbing buildings before hitting it big with a computerized commodity trading system.
”At 40,” he said, ”I started developing my current concept: food and nightclubs. They are both high-risk businesses, but putting them together diminishes the risk.” Crowds tend to flow back and forth and, as Spatz notes, his competition is not other enterprises. ”We compete with boredom, the VCR and the couch potato mentality,” he said. ”People are looking to come out, if you give them a reason to come.”
In 1985, Spatz opened the Heartthrob Cafe and Philadelphia Bandstand in Philadelphia, a restaurant-nightclub complex that, he said, ”wedded `50s funk to an `80s tempo and high-tech sound system.”
An immediate hit, the place spawned like-minded boites in St. Paul, Nashville and Kansas City. Last March, company gross sales reached $1 million a month. For 1989, annual sales are projected at $50 million.
Last May, the company`s first Chicago launch, the Tijuana Yacht Club, opened in the River North area, at 516 N. Clark St., its dancing area decorated with surf boards, ship sails, oil drums, a plastic wave that covers one wall and bar stools beside ”sand pits” in which patrons can dig their toes. That touch reminded an older patron of the Blue Angel, a long-gone Loop nightclub with beach decor where each day, before opening, a staffer raked the sand to wipe out mouse tracks.
Tijuana`s decor, Spatz said, is meant to be funky, not tacky, a theme carried out in paint-spattered walls, a bar in the shape of a wrecked tugboat and, in the restaurant, ”an animated mural, similar to those of moving ducks found in shooting galleries, showing a yacht pulling a water-skier chased by a shark.” At Baja, Spatz noted, ”our location on the waterfront is the perfect scenario for a southern California-style restaurant and nightclub.”
In keeping with that, dress code at Baja will be flexible, allowing everything from jacket-and-tie to bathing suits, for those who care to tie up in boats outside. Fun-in-cheek murals will include a version of an ad showing a young girl with a dog nipping at her bathing suit bottom, showing her tan line. A beach bus, with luggage and surf boards on the roof, will run around the Loop during cocktail hours, picking up tired stockbrokers, bankers and lawyers yearning to breathe free.
In what someone once called the city of the big shoulders, stormy, husky, brawling, fierce as a dog with tongue lapping for action, will the Baja fly?
Few doubt it, though Spatz admits he has done no surveys. ”My best market research,” he said, ”is that I`ve been a customer of all these places for the past 25 years.”
