For the past few months Mark Thomas, owner of the Alley on Belmont, has been attacking the same neighborhood business organization he spent years building up, the Central Lake View Merchants Association. He claims it’s become an “insiders’ club with no sense of how to spend all the money it raises.”
At 49, he looks like the aging hippie he is, with his baggy shirts and pants and his hair in a ponytail. “You know what I am?” he says. “I’m the son of a doctor who became the Lake County, Indiana, coroner–a very political guy named Daniel Thomas. Yeah, that’s right–same name as the entertainer. He ran for office as Danny Thomas. Probably got a lot of votes that way. He was pretty well-off, though it didn’t do me much good. I tell people I was born with a silver spoon in my mouth, but after my parents got divorced they took the spoon out of my mouth and knocked out a few of my teeth.”
The store was next to the Dunkin’ Donuts at Clark and Belmont. “This was in the day of the Medusa juice bar, where you had all these kids hanging around the doughnut shop,” Thomas says. “I was selling leather and T-shirts the kids wanted. We caught the wave. We did almost a million bucks in that first year.”
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Thomas and Toia both joined the North Halsted Merchants Association, a business group north of Belmont. “We brought over seven or eight members from our area, and they gave us a couple of seats on their board,” says Thomas. “We were there three or four years, and then we said, ‘Let’s go back to Belmont.’ Nothing against North Halsted–they’re a great group. But we had different issues from them, ’cause we’re basically in a different area.”
Thomas says he felt like the mayor of Belmont. “I loved walking along Belmont and Clark and Sheffield, shooting the breeze,” he says. “I had a ton of ideas–they were spilling out. The thing about me is, I think I have attention deficit disorder. But the way I get around it–the way I turn a weakness into a strength–is that I get involved in everything.”
The process did require a lot of paper- and legwork. “You have to draw up the boundaries, and it’s all got to be contiguous,” says Thomas. “Then you gotta search all the property titles to see who pays the taxes, and then you have to mail these people a notice telling them there’s going to be a public hearing and if they have any objections they should show up. Of course hardly anyone ever shows up, because–you wanna know the dirty little secret? Most people don’t know what’s going on. Most people barely read their mail. They get a notice from the city and they look at it and they throw it out. The SSA tax goes straight on their property-tax bill. It’s not like the city sends them a separate statement saying, ‘Here’s your SSA tax. Pay up.’ You don’t even know that you’re paying it unless you go through the fine print of your tax bill–and who reads the fine print of a tax bill? I don’t even do that, and I’m into this stuff.”
With the SSA established, Thomas figured the festival would be discontinued. “After all,” he says, “it had served its purpose.” But the other commission members pushed to have another festival in the summer of 1998, arguing that it was good for promoting the business district and for drawing people in. That irritated Thomas–the festival hadn’t brought him any business. “If you want to know the truth, the festival hurt my business,” he says. “It’s like a Cubs game. Have you ever been in the neighborhood when people are walking to the game? They’re, like, on a fucking mission–all they want to do is get to Wrigley Field and drink. Once they’re done with their game it’s not like they come out and spend money with us. They’re drunk. With a festival, it’s centered around music and beer, so it’s sort of the same thing. They don’t want to shop. They want to drink. They want to dance. It’s never been great for a lot of merchants.”
