Before songwriter Liz Phair immortalized Wicker Park with her “Exile in Guyville” lyrics, there was Urbus Orbis.
When this coffeehouse opened at 1934 W. North Ave. in 1989, it did so with an offbeat edge. It welcomed the tattooed, the body pierced, the philosophically open-minded. Within weeks, the neighborhood’s highly concentrated artistic element became ensconced, having found a fertile ground to network their talents while they intellectually stewed
over a cup of java.
There’s nothing flashy about the place. Its exterior was nondescript-red brick, industrial. Its weathered-looking interior was sprawling (uncharacteristic in Chicago’s then burgeoning coffeehouse scene) with 13-foot ceilings and massive windows.
Inside there was a quirky selection of magazines and the coffee bar, a 46-foot textural time line of western civilization that snaked through the space, paying homage to nearly every period known to man. A plaster bust of an Egyptian king protrudes from its base by the cash register, a neon atom split where the waitstaff crossed from an open kitchen, and memorable moments such as the advent of American suburbia were captured by a hunk of house siding, a chain-link fence and a stretch of asphalt. The counter, made of various types of flooring material, was a pun: Everyone eats on the floor, so to speak.
However, it was at the incredibly large tables, distinctively designed with alchemy symbols, that the serious activity took place: coffee drinkers dissecting the universe in smoke-filled discussions, players captivated by intense games of chess, students burying themselves in homework and artists working in sketchbooks.
Perhaps it was only a matter of time before Rolling Stone magazine discovered the place, last year touting Urbus Orbis as “by far the coolest place to suck down a cappuccino” in the city. Or that a slew of record companies started to showcase their budding talent in the coffeehouse’s acoustically sound Backroom, a black box-style theater in the rear of the cafe.
Alan Gugel, an aspiring painter-sculptor from South Dakota, was among the first to hook up with the coffeehouse. While walking by the building, he noticed a sign announcing that Urbus Orbis would soon be opening. He ventured in and was hired as the coffeehouse-bookstore’s evening and weekend manager.
“I’d been in Chicago for four months and everything was foreign to me,” says Gugel. “The largest city I’d ever lived in had about 3,500 people. It was unbelievable how many people and things were going on and I just had no clue what to do.”
Opening gallery doors
That was especially the case when it came to the city’s art scene. Gugel, like many unknown artists, had difficulty finding a way to break in.
“I didn’t know of anything in Chicago other than the galleries and they were impossible to get into. Urbus was open to whatever I wanted to do,” says Gugel, who not only made contacts at the coffeehouse, but was given the opportunity to hang his work in four solo shows.
“My career started at Urbus. People became aware of my artwork, I got other shows from it, and that inspired me to keep working,” says the artist, who is now represented by a gallery in River North.
But it wasn’t only Urbus employees who were able to make artistic inroads at the place. Shortly after a successful show at the coffeehouse, local painter Sandra Dawson was invited to exhibit her work elsewhere.
“I got a lot of exposure when I was there. That was really the starting point of getting my work into galleries,” recalls Dawson.
There was also Calliope Sol, an experimental music composer and audio artist who recently moved here from Kennewick, Wash. Last December, she was given a chance to perform her curious combination of live spoken word and electronics.
“One of the problems I faced in Seattle was that there just weren’t many venues for my work,” says Sol, who played to a full house in Urbus’ Backroom.
The intimate Backroom has provided a stage for poetry, new playwrights and theater companies and even a venue for subway musicians.
Of late, bigger name acoustic acts, promoted by the record companies, have also found their way to Urbus Orbis: the Murmurs (MCA Records), an alternative hippie chick folk duo from New York’s East Village; Ben Harper (Virgin Records), a Delta blues-style, urban folk musician; and Danielle Brisebois (Epic Records), a relatively obscure singer-songwriter.
A unique crowd
“It’s the perfect environment,” says New York agent Paul Krasner, who booked the coffeehouse as part of the Murmurs’ pre-album tour last summer. “This is where the girls need to be, in front of people who still have earrings in their noses, ears and brows and drink coffee.”
The clientele appealed to the record companies too.
“We’re looking for new avenues to expose our artists. We’ve been experimenting more and more with direct street-type promotions,” says Bill Giardini, Virgin Records’ Midwest regional sales director. At Urbus, he found the audience he was after: arts-oriented individuals on the cutting edge.
Of course, Urbus Orbis wouldn’t have evolved as such without guidance from its owner, Tom Handley, an affable iconoclastic 37-year-old who grew up in Winnetka and attended New Trier High School a few classes ahead of Liz Phair.
“Tom is the overriding spirit that permeates the place,” says artist-writer Tony Fitzpatrick, who one year spent endless hours sketching at an Urbus table, sipping iced espressos, while his studio was being built. “He’s one of these guy’s that’s curious for knowledge, curious for creative energies. I think he’s a big part of the reason why Wicker Park has flourished.”
Handley, who has worked as a headhunter and managed several bookstores, found refuge at Cafe Express in Evanston, one of the first coffeehouses in the area.
“I fell in love,” says Handley. “I found a home like I had not found before. It was a place that just totally suited my personality. I would read, drink coffee, talk to people, literally just hang out. From there, I started educating myself about the whole thing.”
He learned about the classic, 17th Century English coffeehouses where social standing outside of the establishment meant nothing. All, according to the coffeehouse code of behavior, were to be treated equal under its roof.
“Coffeehouses became the center of business, political activity, social and cultural life. They spawned ideas and newspapers like The Spectator, The Guardian. They attracted academics, writers and philosophers who debated, discussed and swapped the gossip of the day,” explains Handley. “That’s the kind of place I wanted to open. I didn’t do it strictly to sell coffee.”
A place to run wild
So in 1987, Handley decided to immerse himself in Chicago’s emerging coffeehouse culture and began working with the owners of the newly opened Scenes Coffee House and Dramatist Bookstore, 3168 N. Clark St. There, he met Larry Clyman, a guitarist, who two years later became his partner in opening Urbus Orbis.
Clyman, now in the process of being bought out by Handley, left the coffeehouse after its first year to pursue his musical career, playing with blues artist Lonnie Brooks, and then two locally based bands, Big Shoulders and the Otters.
It was Handley who gave the place its name.
“It was a phrase that a friend of mine came up with back in high school. When we were going to go and do what teenagers do-drink illegally and party-he’d call up and say that we were going to `urbus orbis’ at 9 o’clock. That just meant that we’d all meet up at a specific place and run wild in the city for a few hours,” says Handley, later learning that it’s a version of the Latin phrase for city limits.
The location of the coffeehouse was also Handley’s decision, after a frustrating search for affordable space in River North.
“I opened my doors and was open to whatever came in,” he says, noting that the climate of Urbus always has been dictated by its clientele. “I wanted the people coming in to have a huge impact on the place. I’ve always tried to be supportive of anybody who’s taking the hard road and doing what they want to do for the love of doing it. There’s a lot of people here doing what they’re doing not because they expect to get rich or receive a lot of recognition. They feel they have to do this in order to be comfortable with themselves.”
That was what Jim Happy-Delpech, a Parisian art consultant and gallery owner, recognized when he found Urbus Orbis during his vacation in 1989.
“I discovered that there was a big underground art scene, but little opportunity for the artists to emerge or gain professional exposure. An important structure was missing in Chicago to allow them to gain this exposure,” he says.
Happy-Delpech, who has since taken up residence in Wicker Park, was inspired by the coffeehouse environment to create Around the Coyote, the community’s annual multimedia arts festival that featured 800 visual and performing artists last year.
Coffee’s incidental
Although coffee is an important element at Urbus Orbis, as it would be in any coffeehouse, many of those who frequent the place don’t consider it to be the draw.
“The coffee is almost incidental to my being there,” says Michael Warr, an acclaimed poet and executive director of the Guild Complex. “There are other places that I just run by and pick up a cup of coffee and go home, but I don’t do that at Urbus Orbis. I go there, I sit down, I write and I talk to people. It’s functional for me. I go there basically to get things done in an atmosphere that is appealing to me.”
Others like Betsy Schachter, a 28-year-old, eighth-grade Englewood school teacher, gravitated to the coffeehouse even though she didn’t live in the neighborhood.
“I discovered Urbis Orbis four years ago. My friends and I didn’t like any of the cafes in the Wrigleyville area,” she says. “You’d barely get your cup of coffee down and if you weren’t spending more than that, they would literally shoo you away.”
Handley, who lives in the neighborhood, views the role of the coffeehouse as a cornerstone in the community. It is where he met his wife, attorney Petra Harris, and where they were wed.
“(Urbus) is a family, in a sense,” Handley says. “If the nuclear family is dying, it’s being replaced by the family of affinity where people are together because they enjoy each other’s company, they share perspective and just get along.”
