Editorial: At Berlin, a historic nightclub and progressive icon, the end comes at the hands of self-described progressives
Given our staid reputation, we might seem to be an unlikely crew to be weighing in on the recent demise of the Lakeview alternative nightclub known as Berlin. But we’ve been around a bit more than you perhaps think.
More importantly, Berlin had been around for 40 years and in that time commanded an important place in this city’s history. From the start, it has stood for peace, diversity, entrepreneurship and tolerance.
Tim Sullivan and Shirley Mooney, a gay man and a straight woman, opened Berlin in 1983 because they dreamed of a place where gay and straight Chicagoans could be together. At the time on Chicago’s North Side, there were bars for gay men, bars for gay women, drag bars, leather bars and, of course, hundreds of bars catering to heterosexual patrons. Patrons knew their lanes. The idea behind Berlin was that everyone could drink a beer together in this arty, bohemian place on Belmont Avenue and get to know each other a little better. And it worked: Over the years, this newspaper reported that Elton John, John Waters, Bob Mackie, Donna Karan and Oliver Stone, to name but a few, all hit the artistically intimidating dance floor at one time or another.
In the years that followed, the bar became an important refuge and escape for many as the AIDS crisis tore Lakeview and other Chicago neighborhoods asunder. And for fans of alternative music in that era, Berlin was the place to go.
“Chicago’s nightclub scene is littered with the flotsam and jetsam of clubs and bars that have burned out due to the fickle nature of the business,” the Tribune’s RedEye reported a decade ago, “but not Berlin, which has always successfully mixed tattoos and transvestites, pinafores and platforms, dada and go-go and everything in between.”
That’s all over now, say the current owners, Jo Webster and Jim Schuman, the married couple who took over Berlin after Sullivan (by day, an urban planner) died in 1994 from complications due to AIDS.
Why? Berlin has been the target of a devastating strike and aggressive boycott following the unionization of its staff and a series of what would-be impossible demands for any small business, let alone one in a trade as fickle as that of a bar.
Among the demands, along with massive wage increases: that every Berlin employee represented by the union who works just one seven-hour shift per week, be considered a full-time employee and thus receive free health care coverage and pensions to be paid in full by Berlin. Few small businesses, if any, could manage that. The bar says it would like to give the union what it wants and treat every part-time server as if they had a full-time job, but that “these additional wages, health care, and pension benefits would cost Berlin over $500,000 in the first year of the contract alone.” Adding to their woes, Schuman is suffering from stage 4 cancer.
Service workers deserve to be fairly compensated, and the union says its members will “continue to fight for what we are worth.” But for all its panache, Berlin was not run by some big corporation (as are many clubs) but was a mom-and-pop business already facing a difficult environment. In such instances, it can’t just be about what employees want but also what such a business reasonably can afford and still stay alive.
In the end, Berlin was a soft target for radical overreach. For many who treasured what Berlin always stood for, for those who relied upon its enigmatic tolerance from the beginning, long before such clubs became cool, there is both sadness and irony in what has occurred.
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