Will Duncan, then general manager of Thalia Hall in Pilsen, was stuck in westbound traffic on the Eisenhower after a long day on the job. He decided to pull off and try Roosevelt Road to get to Elmhurst, where he lived with his wife, Jessica King, and their young son.
He passed Fitzgeralds nightclub in Berwyn.
Oh my God, I remember that place, he thought, brought back to a night out long ago. That place looks so cool.
He stopped for a drink. And, like a person who had spent his entire life in the hospitality industry, he gave it the once-over. The club, he had heard, was for sale.
He started stopping by once a week.
One thing led to another, and today, seven years out, he and his wife own it.
“Never in a million years could I have imagined that,” King said.
The chance encounter has perhaps rewritten the history books on live music in the Chicago suburbs. Duncan, 45, and King, 41, turned what could have been another sad closure of a beloved historic venue into a revitalized musical and entertainment powerhouse. With what one employee called the couple’s “new-kid energy,” they set out to keep all the good parts — like the Wisconsin supper-club decor and vital relationships with a stable of American roots musicians — and improve upon everything else.
Five years in, they appear to have succeeded. Today, the three-building campus in the western suburbs is bursting at the seams with a staggering variety of music, a side of BBQ from their restaurant next door and offbeat entertainment like storytelling, gangland history and movie nights. Its newly renovated free outdoor patio — which just opened for the season and is flowing with live music, food and drink — will be a destination this summer.
At any given time, the club has 150 musicians and events on the calendar at both the main club and in the Sidebar next door, totaling 1,000 over the year. The club’s best-known gathering, the American Music Festival in July, sells out four days of performances by 50 different artists and draws audiences from across the United States.
Eut getting here has taken a leap off a cliff of debt, some solid hospitality experience and targeted capital improvements.
“What the hell did you buy?”
A traffic jam led Duncan to Fitzgeralds at 6615 W. Roosevelt Rd., but soon after the couple signed the papers on March 15, 2020, it felt more like a 10-car pileup.
The two were not independently wealthy, and Duncan was giving up a fat check and profit-sharing from his employer, the hospitality group 16 on Center. King worked on a Chicago public school salary. To come up with the $1.7 million purchase price, they did a cash-out refinancing on their home, sold a Ukrainian Village two-flat, secured loans totaling about $1 million from the Small Business Administration and coaxed eight investors — friends, family and colleagues — to throw in another half-million of equity.
King was an assistant principal, pregnant with their second child and studying for her master’s in educational leadership. A couple weeks after the deal was signed, she visited their new property for the first time. She saw the former owner’s pontoon boat parked in the middle of the sprawling, ramshackle footprint.
King still remembers her incredulity: “I was like, what the hell did you buy?”
Within a week, Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker ordered all indoor venues closed for COVID-19 protections.
“We just figured Will would walk in and keep everything going that was already going,” King said. “That didn’t happen.”
She came up with putting bands in the back of a 1984 Chevy pickup and driving around neighborhoods to do truck shows. When outdoor gatherings were allowed that summer, the two fast-tracked a plan to convert the boat-parking space between the buildings into an outdoor patio.
“It forced us to keep coming up with ideas and hustle, and [that] honestly made Fitzgeralds a better place because of it,” King said.
The patio was converted into a free public gathering place that quickly became one of the club’s most popular features. Carpenters just put the finishing touches on a $250,000 pavilion (financed with more business loans) that will keep the sun and rain off and the crowds spending.
“They got very creative and never let it get them down,” retired former owner Bill FitzGerald, 72, said of the new owners.
With King generating ideas, she decided it was time to leave the public schools, ditch her salary and benefits and go to work as the venue’s marketing manager.
“We honestly never thought about failure,” Duncan said. “We could not afford to fail. This was our family’s livelihood now. We just figured it out as we went.”
King’s engaging photos and social media posts fuel a lively online presence, and she was the driver behind the club earning a spot on the National Register of Historic Places. Besides some possible tax benefits, the owners wanted to send a message that the club was here to stay for another 100 years.
The main building has cycled through a dizzying number of incarnations, beginning in 1919 as the Oakwyn Athletic Club, a speakeasy during Prohibition.
Next came Club Ritz in 1933, a place to do the shim-sham-shimmy, a Harlem-born tap-dance routine. The mayor of Berwyn soon put an end to the shim and the sham after reports that Club Ritz had become a notorious hangout for teens. The venue cycled through six other names, including restaurants and cocktail lounges, before becoming Deer Lodge, the dark dive where Bill FitzGerald and his buddies played pool a few times before the fun-loving housepainter bought it for $60,000 on St. Patrick’s Day 1980.
Nightclub economics 101
In the world of music venues, everything is expensive: supplies and wages for owners and ticket and food prices for customers. Audiences are fickle.
Plus, having a house full of people is no guarantee of success, said Duncan, who learned the business at popular Chicago spots like the Empty Bottle and Longman & Eagle on the North Side and The Promontory in Hyde Park.
“It is shockingly easy to do a lot of business and not be profitable at all,” he said. “It’s a house of cards.”
King added: “It is sometimes down to a handful of tickets as to whether we will make a profit on this show.”
Chicago, where new venues like the Salt Shed draw enthusiastic crowds, will soon see an uptick in fresh destinations — the beloved Double Door reopening in Uptown after losing its lease in Wicker Park, the Wirtz family’s promised concert hall as part of the United Center megadevelopment. Existing venues frequently stand on a knife’s edge, like Davenport’s, which closed as a cabaret and rebranded as a nightclub earlier this year.
It sounds intimidating, but failure isn’t a foregone conclusion. “You can thrive if you know what you’re doing,” said Duncan, who has worked as a busboy, waiter and doorman.
First off, the new owners benefit by being their own landlord; they own the whole shebang. And there’s a lot of shebang for the buck, including three buildings with 71 separate doors.
Next, Duncan and King decided to own and operate the restaurant, Babygold Barbecue, to sell more food across the campus. It’s lucky if it breaks even most nights, but it’s essential to the financial and hospitality synergy, Duncan said. Private parties and off-site catering bring in additional revenue.
So far, the couple has been able to pay themselves a modest salary and distribute some profits back to investors.
Staging the next chapter
Fitzgeralds has a vibe, and the couple want to keep it that way. But they are also slowly broadening the musical menu to appeal to the changing demographics of the neighborhood — and to younger crowds, with indie bands and Latin music nights on Thursdays.
Ken Jackson, 73, of Elmhurst, has noticed the musical evolution. The folk-rock fan has been a regular at Fitzgeralds almost since the beginning, going three or four times a month, sometimes without even knowing who’s playing.
Jackson is often accompanied by his son, Eric, 34, who is developmentally disabled. Eric is a familiar face to what Jackson calls the “community” of staff and customers there.
“To have a place where he feels at home and comfortable is special,” he said. “It’s a friendly and welcoming experience.”
This is not by accident. Duncan, a self-described people pleaser, works the floor nearly every night, kibbitzing with patrons and staff, moving chairs and tables. He is hands-on, “management by walking around,” if you will.
Hospitality is hustle and hard work — and making it look easy. For the 80-some staff, many of whom (such as general manager Michelle Larson) predated the new owners, it is clear that the connection to Fitzgeralds goes beyond the paycheck.
“I feel a little spoiled here.” Larson, 40, said. “It’s hard not to feel romantic about this place.”