Many outsiders and old-timers may disagree, but when Jorge Torres looks up and down quiet Genesee Street in Waukegan, he sees opportunity beckoning to anybody with a little money and a dream.
Empty spaces are ample, both at street level and in the offices on upper floors, and rents are still cheap. There is a burgeoning market in the area, too, creating demand for products and services that aren’t even available on the street but should be.
To Torres, it’s only a matter of time before the heart of Lake County’s largest city begins to beat as strongly as it did in years past. But it will have a Latin beat.
More than half of the privately owned retail and service businesses on Genesee Street are owned and operated by Hispanic entrepreneurs. Most of the apartments above the stores are inhabited by Hispanic residents. Signs in windows are mostly bilingual, in English and Spanish. Many of those written in only one language make the sensible choice of opting for Spanish. That’s where the market is.
Civic boosters from the Waukegan Downtown Association and its subsidiary operation Waukegan Sunrise also are optimistic, predicting that they will be able to lure millions of dollars in new investment to the area, probably in the form of franchise operations with deep pockets and big plans.
Waukegan Sunrise is in the second stage of renovating the downtown area and is working with a Wisconsin urban planning firm.
About 4,000 people come to downtown Waukegan every day, mostly to go to the Lake County Courthouse or to attend to other administratrivia at the County Building. Waukegan Sunrise and others believe that with some shrewd planning, a large portion of those people can be convinced to leave a few dollars behind, especially on Genesee Street, which is only a block to the east.
Until well into the 1970s, it was easy to get people to spend money downtown. Sears, J.C. Penney, several homegrown department stores and four theaters all lured people and their wallets into the area. Police officers had to be posted on every corner on weekends just to direct traffic. Then came the outlying malls and a population boom that turned the cornfields of Lake County into subdivisions far from Waukegan.
“Right now we’re 70,000 out of about 600,000 people in Lake County,” said Ray Vukovich, 37, alderman of Waukegan’s 4th Ward, which includes downtown. “As recently as 20, 30 years ago we were, say, 60,000 out of 200,000. There weren’t any outlying shopping centers; there was just downtown Waukegan.”
But it stands to reason that the growing Hispanic market that has accompanied the increase in Waukegan’s Hispanic population since the 1970s and the largely untapped daily visitor market could provide a healthy alternative to the glory days.
Insiders say it’s just a matter of time.
But how will the small businesses currently on the street cope with an invasion of wealthy outsiders not attuned to the growing but still delicate Hispanic downtown market?
“It won’t drive them away, that’s for sure,” said Torres, 35, a Waukegan native. “Quite the contrary. I think it will be a great way to increase business for everybody. It will probably also turn some of the people on the street into better businessmen.”
Torres knows the area. In 1982 he bought a tavern on the southeast corner of Genesee and Clayton Streets. He named it Jorge’s Bar and Grill and built it into a profitable enterprise. In 1989, Torres sold it–it’s still there, now known as La Opera–and moved to the northwest corner, where he runs Fiesta Palace, a hopping nightclub and the most visible business on the street.
With a flashy marquee stretching out over the sidewalk and visible from every direction, Fiesta Palace is a magnet for Lake County’s Hispanic population, regularly packing its two main rooms with more than 1,000 people on Friday and Saturday nights.
“It’s the biggest Spanish dance club around,” said Eduardo Sanchez, 17, of Waukegan. “Chicago is the only other place.”
In a small way, Sanchez typifies the now-permanently diverse nature of Genesee Street. He patronizes the Hispanic-owned businesses on the street, and so do his parents.
Hispanic food, clothes, videos, CDs–they’re all there. He also works part time as a salesperson at Stern’s, a menswear store at the corner of Genesee and Water Streets founded by Max Stern in 1912.
One of the handful of Anglo-owned businesses still on the street that can trace its roots to the days when Genesee Street was the Michigan Avenue of Lake County, Stern’s has continued to thrive because its owners have always been willing to cater to the changing market, current owner William DeVore said.
“If Waukegan Sunrise or whomever can bring more business to downtown, I’m all for it,” said DeVore, 55. “And I don’t think that new investment will push out the small Hispanic stores. In fact, I think new merchants would be wise to incorporate the Hispanic market into their business. It’s getting bigger every day. . . . I’ll tell you, we’re looking for a full-time Hispanic salesperson because such a large component of our business comes from the Hispanic community.”
DeVore stocks fashions from Hispanic countries, as well as cowboy hats and boots, jewelry and other accessories favored by Hispanic men. He added that his business has been up in the last few years despite a national downward trend for men’s clothing stores in general.
His opinion of the strength of the Hispanic market is shared by the Soto brothers, Ruben, 41, and Antonio, 39, owners of Soto’s Jeweler’s and Furniture Mart at 124 N. Genesee St. since 1975.
Their father, Ramon, 70, started his first business on Genesee Street in 1955 after arriving from Puerto Rico with $15 in his pocket. A small grocery store, Ramon Soto’s shop was the first in Waukegan to sell the now-ubiquitous tortilla.
“I don’t think anybody’s threatened by the potential for new investment,” Ruben Soto said. “In fact, if they’re real merchants, they’ll merchandise for their market. If they get a lot of Anglos coming in, then that’s who they’ll merchandise for. But my business is about 95 percent Hispanic right now, and they’re not going anywhere.”
Waukegan Sunrise is happy to keep everybody on the street. The organization’s chairman, Jack Potter, a real estate broker, said that new investment may indeed raise the cost of doing business on Genesee Street, but having more people on the street means more business for everybody.
“A revitalization of the street may squirt a few marginal businesses around the corner onto the side streets,” he said. “It would be nice if our main street looked like our town, or about 40 percent Hispanic, 30 percent black and 30 percent white. But I think that the fabulous immigrant entrepreneurial energy has won out. I suggest that Genesee Street will eventually represent the best of our immigrant community and the best of the outside, Anglo-dominated community that will open franchise operations on the street. I welcome that.”
Oddly, Hispanic participation in Waukegan Sunrise functions is surprisingly low. Potter attributes the lack of turnout to the same mom-and-pop shop burnout that afflicts all entrepreneurs: When you already work 80 hours per week, extra activities are hard to squeeze in. He may be right.
But consultant Bert Stitt, a Madison, Wis.-based downtown guru who assisted Waukegan Sunrise in its organizing phase, thinks it may be attributable to another kind of burnout.
“European-Americans tend to be class-oriented and exclusionary, whether they realize it or not. Cultural diversity is a very real challenge, and we have to deal with this in the real world,” he said. “Hispanic participation is lower than I think it could be, and I would like to find out how we can operate in such a way that everybody will feel free to engage on an equal level. The reality of the market in Waukegan is that it has a Hispanic market, a black market and its historical Eastern European market. All of that has a great deal of potential for an exciting marketplace.”
New Genesee Street business owner Jose Zavala, 36, couldn’t care less about market studies or the intricacies of cross-cultural marketing. He’s too busy running Foto Y Video Studio Mexico, a diversified photo and video studio and clothing importing business he founded in July of this year.
“I came to Waukegan from Mexico six years ago and have been working to save money to open a business,” he said. “It’s very hard to establish a new business, but business for me is very good because I’m in the right market. This is our downtown.
“But I want to sell my merchandise, and I’m happy to sell it to anybody.”
A LOOK AT THE NEW MIX
A highly unscientific survey of the five-block stretch of Genesee Street from Belvidere Street north to Grand Avenue counted 67 storefronts being put to a variety of service and retail uses. A glance at the signs lining the street in both English and Spanish is enough to tell which has become the dominant culture in downtown Waukegan.
Thirty Hispanic-owned businesses line the strip. From clothing stores to tax preparation services, from photo studios to bakeries, businesses with a Spanish spin dominate Genesee Street’s private sector. Businesses owned by people of other ethnic backgrounds–black, white and Asian–total 25, coming in a close second but lacking the market specificity of their Hispanic neighbors and competitors.
Ten storefronts are occupied by government offices and social service agencies. Although the street’s proximity to the Lake County Courthouse and county government makes it geographically ideal for such uses, most Genesee Street business people would rather they went somewhere else.
People patronizing the Illinois Department of Employment Security office don’t make very good customers, they said, and neither do the homeless people who congregate at the southern end of the street at the headquarters of Public Action to Deliver Shelter.
Genesee Street also is home to two schools. The College of Lake County’s Lakeshore Campus occupies two former department stores, one on each side of Madison Street and linked by a sky bridge. Aurora University has a small business school that sits toward the southern end of the street in a single building.
Business owners generally agreed that they were happy to have CLC clean up two of the street’s biggest buildings when the campus was set up there a year ago, but that they have yet to feel much of an economic impact.
