Medill Reports: Chicago
Story by: Abby Sewell
Video production: Jessica Krinke
It’s dusk on West Lawrence Avenue, and Wafeeqa Saadeh is preparing to close up shop for the night.
Saadeh, a Palestinian immigrant who settled in the neighborhood in 1978, runs the El-Jeeb Hijab and Gifts with a handful of relatives, including her sister, niece and nephew. Her small, family-owned store in Albany Park is crowded with embroidered robes and head scarves imported from Jordan. It’s one of a handful of spots in Chicago that specialize in Muslim women’s clothing. The family has also owned a grocery store in the neighborhood for 25 years.
Two storefronts down, behind an unobtrusive façade bearing the legend “Admiral Theatre,” in a high-ceilinged lobby done up in blue and gold, cashiers are setting up for the night. Scantily clad Egyptian sirens watch them from the paintings on the walls. In a little while, tourists, businessmen, sailors and college boys heading out for a night on the town will begin lining up for another show at Chicago’s oldest strip club.
The two establishments barely take notice of each other’s existence. Both are busy enough with day-to-day operations.
“She doesn’t like it,” Saadeh’s nephew and store co-owner Sam Saadeh said, speaking about the Admiral. “But they’ve been here longer than we have, and they probably have more pull with the city. They probably have more money – they have more influence.”
Tim Brown, the Admiral’s publicist, said the club simply tries to keep its head down. Brown had never noticed the Muslim women’s clothing shop two doors down.
“We want to stay out of their way – we want to stay out of everyone’s way,” he said. “We want to be a good neighbor. I go from here to my car and I go home.”
There was a time when the club’s relationship with its surroundings was much rockier.
When owner Sam Cecola bought the theater and converted it from a pornographic movie theater to a strip club in 1989, it was the only club of its kind in the city. The building had been through numerous incarnations, beginning in 1927, when it opened as a vaudeville theater. After the theater closed in the 1950s, the building stood vacant for years. It reopened briefly as family-oriented cartoon movie theater for a few years beginning in 1969 before being reborn as a porn theater, Cecola said.
In its opening week as a strip club, police raided the theater and arrested all the dancers, although the charges were later dropped, Cecola said. The Admiral sued the city for civil rights violations in federal court, and the city ultimately settled with the theater.
But now, all is quiet between the theater, the city and the neighborhood. Chicago’s Department of Business Affairs and Consumer Protection had no record of any complaint having been filed against the Admiral. Department spokeswoman Efrat Stein said that fact speaks well for neighborhood relations.
"I would say that typically when a business is operating in such a way as to impact the standard of life of the residents, we will hear about it," she said. "So the fact that we haven't had any complaints is a good thing."
Cecola said he deliberately keeps the storefront as unobtrusive as possible.
“We are in a neighborhood, and there’s lots of families there,” he said. “Kids walk by, so we would never put something out there to be offensive.”
Roxy Ro, a 21-year-old dancer at the club, was one of those kids once. She remembers walking by the Admiral as a child without having any idea of what it was.
“I grew up not too far from here, so when I was here I used to pass it all the time and I always thought it was a movie theater for matinee movies,” she said.
But among the older set, the Admiral is a well-known institution.
“We’ve been there so long that for young guys turning 18, it’s become sort of a rite of passage,” Cecola said.
Brown agreed.
“When I was in high school – I’m 30 – I heard about this place,” he said. “Back in the day, this was the only strip club in town. You had lines around the building to get in.”
Since then, a few more strip clubs have opened in the city and many more in the suburbs, and the club has scaled back from a 24-hour showroom to a noctural business, Brown said. But the Admiral remains proud of its title as the oldest in Chicago. Faced with the new competition, the theater is trying to bring drum up business with more theatrical shows and special events.
In the meantime, the Saadehs and their customers are happy to continue ignoring its existence.
Sabah Yafai, an immigrant from Yemen who lives in the neighborhood and regularly shops at the Saadehs’ store, shrugged when asked what she thought of the theater.
“We never think about the club,” she said.
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NOTES:
This was a blast. Happily reported by Abby and myself. Abby wrote the story and I produced the video. She's currently kicking ass at the L.A. Times.
