Chug Chug, Choo Choo, Ka-Ching!
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Szostek was in the box when he started thinking outside of it. Evanston’s old concrete and brick Main Street Metra station has been his office for the last three years in his regular gig as executive director of the Custer’s Last Stand street fair, a job he fell into 21 years ago. Back then Szostek, who’s also an actor and college drama teacher, was a freelance clown who’d performed at the annual event for several years. When he called to make sure he’d be hired again, he was told there’d be no fair. The merchants who had started it were giving up after eight years because they couldn’t find anyone to run it. Unless, of course, he was interested. “I said, ‘I’ve never done this before,’” Szostek recalls. They didn’t blink. Under his stewardship the two-day event has become one of northern Illinois’ largest art fairs, drawing 60,000 people last year. This year’s fair, scheduled for June 16 and 17, will have 300 artists and craftspeople, 30 food booths, three stages, and 100 commercial vendors in blocked-off sections of Custer, Main, Chicago, and Washington streets.
Most of it has been locked up for a half century. The second floor of the Swiss-style station houses the modest waiting room, with its few benches and tables, familiar to local commuters. But when the depot was new, this was one of a pair of terra-cotta-floored, dark-paneled waiting rooms separated by a two-window ticket office and served by a two-story loading and baggage area with an elevator. In 1955, when a model-railroading group was using the lower level as its clubhouse (with a layout that spanned the length of the building), a burglar broke in and started a fire. It didn’t destroy the building’s 18-inch-thick foundation or brick exterior, but except for the north-side waiting room it turned the upper-level interior into a charred mess. The railroad hauled out the debris and closed off the burned-out rooms.
Good Hair Night
