The portraits on the wall at Bowmanville’s Leadway Bar range from an elaborate feathered peacock’s head on top of a business-suited torso to a fat-lipped gangster wearing a cocked fedora to a caricature of Bart Simpson. Most are unframed; they were done by customers using the paper, paint, and easels set out in the bar’s makeshift studio. Owner Frank Ciucur sells the pieces for $10 a pop, but he doesn’t pocket the money. “I give the ten bucks back to my customers the next time I see them,” says Ciucur, a native Romanian. “I tell everyone to write his or her name on the back so I know who gets the money.”
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Ciucur, who’s owned the 50-year-old bar on Damen just north of Foster for six years, grew up in Transylvania. When he was 16 his father crossed the border into a Yugoslav refugee camp; the family emigrated to the U.S. when he was 18, first living in Saint Louis for eight months before moving to Chicago and settling into a home near Irving Park and Elston. Ciucur worked in construction and janitorial services before landing a job as a plumber. In 1996 he noticed the Leadway had been for sale for a while, and he was ready to invest his decade’s worth of savings. “I thought I could fix the place up,” he says. He also bought two adjacent storefronts, converting the one farthest north into a hair salon, keeping the corner unit as a bar, and using the center print shop for storage.
Business stalled initially after the bar reopened, but Ciucur was determined to attract a cleaner crowd. To his benefit the neighborhood began to change; more artists began moving into this area just west of Andersonville where rents were still low. Ciucur thought painting might work well as entertainment for his new customers while they sipped a good variety of tap beers. He displays about three dozen of his customers’ finished products at a time, storing the extras in the back room. “We sell about one or two per week,” he says. This September he plans to hold a sidewalk sale of all the art and donate the money to a local public school. “I’ll get all the others out of the storeroom and fill the sidewalk. They’ll only be a few dollars each.”
