In the beginning, well, at least as far back as I go, it was part of Walker Bros., a wonderful and eclectic sort of “department store” at the southeast corner of Oak Park and Lake. Walker’s was the sort of store where you could buy Waterford crystal and luggage and a blanket. And down in the basement was a pretty fair hardware department. But the brothers, who must have been dead by the time I came to shop there, didn’t carry shoes or clothes or the other things you might think they’d have. As I said, eclectic.
The store closed by the early 1980s and it was clear there wasn’t another Walker’s coming around. So the large space which fronted on both Oak Park Avenue and Lake Street, always with a carve-out for Fannie May on the corner, was subdivided into what is now Oberweis and a shoe store and a clothing store and a coffee shop, and around on Lake a never-ending procession of restaurants.
The most recent restaurant was Chara, which was actually pronounced some other way that I can’t pronounce. Call me old-fashioned but I’d still suggest that naming your business something that people don’t stumble over or have to be corrected for mispronouncing is a good first step in marketing.
Anyhow after an 18-month run, Chara is gone. It was labeled as Mediterranean, though it is all Greek to me. And, not coincidentally, it was a Greek restaurant. After all, part of its purpose was to drive a stake through the heart of the site’s former tenant, Papaspiros Greek Taverna.
Spiro Papageorge, the longtime proprietor and promoter of Papaspiros, had had a good run — 15 years — in the long accursed space. I cannot even recall all the various eateries and cuisines that had risen and crashed in that portion of the old Walker Bros. space. There was Blends (now that is a terrible name for a restaurant), Tsukiji, Pacific Rim and several more.
So at 15 years, Papaspiros was like an institution. But alas, there were landlord-tenant tensions. I cannot comprehend the sort of conversations that might have transpired between Spiro Papageorge and James Bushouse, the very longtime owner of the building. Two more intense, wildly different but wildly intense personalities I cannot imagine.
And so Papaspiros got the boot, moved across the street into a smaller space, initially with a different name, always with great drama as the restaurant opened and closed, employees protested, a partner was added. But gradually the Papaspiros name re-emerged on the awning and that odd Spiros charm survived.
Bushouse put his Greek restaurant into place, but it never gained traction. A reader commented last week on OakPark.com that Chara was cursed by too many windows, and too many empty tables behind those wide windows. No one wants to dine alone.
Or maybe, as I suggested 17 years ago when Spiro first opened there, the space is just cursed for fine dining. He didn’t like it when I said it back then. Perhaps now Spiro might be in agreement.
Spiro has won the Greek War on Lake Street. It wasn’t pretty but then food fights seldom are.
David King — he of the bright blue DK For Lease signs — has the listing. And while I would never tell David how to do his business, I might suggest it is time to bring back a crystal, luggage and blanket store.
You could do worse.
