Checkerboard’s New Lease on Life
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An in-depth February 17 story in Crain’s Chicago Business, which outlined the Checkerboard’s financial difficulties and reported that “the majority” of the club’s clientele was U. of C. students, had been brought to the attention of Shannon Pope, a senior associate with HSA Commercial Real Estate, which acquires and manages property on behalf of the university. In early March she’d contacted Thurman, asking if he would be interested in a lease at 5210 S. Harper in Hyde Park. (HSA is still in the process of acquiring the property; Pope stresses that the transaction has not yet been completed.) “I was really surprised,” says Thurman. “I thought it was over. They came down to the club and took me to see the building. I like the spot, I like the neighborhood.”
According to Thurman, the building was purchased at a tax sale about 20 years ago by Louis Wolf, whom city legal spokeswoman Jennifer Hoyle criticized severely in a Sun-Times series on landlords last year. But Thurman says his landlord woes started only about five years ago, when a man named Murphy Hughes began collecting his rent on Wolf’s behalf. The garage roof the fire department found, which shares support beams with the club, actually collapsed several years ago, and the club’s roof leaks. Thurman says nothing got fixed and little regular maintenance was done, and yet his rent kept increasing.
No Illusion
