![]() In 1989, he cofounded the crucial Johann’s Face Records label, which in the ’90s would release music by the Smoking Popes and Alkaline Trio. Ruvolo formed local punk band No Empathy in 1983 and fronted it till it split up in 1997-a span that overlaps significantly with the heyday of Punkin’ Donuts. “You would get to that area and you’d be, like, ‘Oh, we’re gonna walk by Punkin’ Donuts and see who’s there.'” “Punkin’ Donuts was kind of a landmark more than anything else,” says punk lifer Marc Ruvolo. The Dunkin’ Donuts operated 24/7 in those days, and because it admitted people under 21 (unlike most bars and clubs), anyone could hang out there, without regard to whether more conventional nightlife attractions were even open. In the 1980s, the intersection of Clark and Belmont was one of the busiest in Lakeview, an easy walk from a constellation of music venues and clubs as well as from Boystown’s booming Halsted Street scene. While you could reliably find kids in leather jackets, punk T-shirts, and Mohawks there, the shop also attracted lots of other folks from outside the mainstream: house-music fanatics, antiracist skinheads, trans women, skaters, drag queens, industrial-music fans, goths, runaways. Its nickname notwithstanding, Punkin’ Donuts wasn’t just a place for punks. The closest thing it had to authority figures were the Dunkin’ Donuts employees, who mostly tolerated the teens loitering outside-even the ones who never came in to buy anything. Nobody owned it or organized the gatherings there. Punkin’ Donuts didn’t help incubate a scene with a distinctive sound, a recognizable fashion sense, or a cast of characters well-known to outsiders, unlike some of the city’s clubs and record shops. In big scene retrospectives, it comes up rarely, and then usually as a curiosity. I’ve always wanted to know more about the relationship between Punkin’ Donuts and Chicago’s alternative subcultures. By the early 2000s, Fodor’s and Frommer’s had both mentioned Punkin’ Donuts in several editions of their annual Chicago guides, though by that point few punks still gathered there- the latter suggested, somewhat glibly, that it had earned the name due to “rebellious kids on tour from their homes in the ‘burbs.” I’ve sometimes seen Punkin’ Donuts invoked as a sort of synecdoche for the culture of Lakeview in the 1980s and early ’90s, when the neighborhood was seedier and more rambunctious-for instance, that’s how it came up in a Sun-Times review of the new punk musical Verböten.Įven in 2015, when local real estate company BlitzLake Partners advanced plans to build condos and a Target store at Belmont and Clark, DNAinfo repeatedly referred to the endangered doughnut shop as “Punkin’ Donuts.” Despite how long it’d been since kids had flocked to its parking lot, the name had stuck. In the years after Wild Chicago aired its “Punk Rock Park” episode, the spot’s notoriety seeped into the mainstream. ![]() I didn’t move to Chicago till 2009, more than a decade after Punkin’ Donuts had ceased to be a subcultural epicenter, but I’ve been curious about it for as long as I’ve known it existed. ![]() “He said, ‘Yeah, there’s magic here,'” Hollis says. Hollis and Davies’s footage from that night includes a couple teenagers freestyle skateboarding, crowds of enthusiastic kids dressed all in black and smiling for the camera, and a Dunkin’ employee who said some of the teens were “straight-up sugar fiends.” The two of them brought the tape to WTTW senior vice president Pat Denny, who was in charge of production for the station’s regular programs. “Just trying to figure out if you’ve got any good ideas about what brings these kids together out here. “I’m Ben Hollis with Wild Chicago, a make-believe TV show,” he explained to a middle-aged Black cop inside the doughnut shop. While Davies ran the camera, Hollis pointed a dinky microphone at just about any bystander who would talk. ![]() They’d decided to call their show Wild Chicago, and Hollis dressed like an intrepid wilderness explorer: he wore a pith helmet and a short-sleeved khaki shirt, with binoculars around his neck. ![]() What were they doing there? Why that spot, not somewhere else? And what was the appeal?Īround midnight on a Saturday in August, Davies and Hollis brought their gear to the Dunkin’ Donuts. He’d often driven past it late at night and seen groups of young people hanging out in the parking lot, and he figured it’d be worth investigating. To show the station what they had in mind, they’d shot a “guerilla demo” at a spot Hollis already knew: the Dunkin’ Donuts on the corner of Belmont and Clark in Lakeview. In 1987, Ben Hollis and John Davies pitched Chicago PBS station WTTW on a program that would capture the city’s obscure corners, unusual characters, and fringe phenomena.
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