When, in the late 1960s, Kathy Garness wandered down a cobblestone block to the corner of Lunt and Glenwood avenues, she had no idea that the Rogers Park coffeehouse she found there would change her life.
“I remember seeing this kind of cavernous place there. It was all dark, but there was music coming from it,” Garness says of her first encounter with No Exit coffeehouse. “I could smell teas and the coffee … a whole ambiance that wafted out the door.”
Garness was one of countless youth in their teens and twenties who made coffeehouses like No Exit into a second home in Chicago. She even attributes her work as a botanical artist and natural lands steward for the Northern Illinois region to the politics and environmentalism she was exposed to there.
No Exit and many other similar Chicago cafés — notably It’s Here, the Amazingrace, the Why?, Medici on 57th and Ali’s on 63rd — were all part of the folk revival movement. From the end of the 1950s through the early 1970s, acoustic music and songs from rural areas became popular with the American public — especially young people.
Coffeehouses were key to that growth, offering young audiences and the musicians who played for them a safe gathering place without alcohol.
“You had a whole audience of younger people who had never heard this music before, and it sounded much more raw and real than what was happening on the radio,” says Mark Guarino, author of “Country and Midwestern: Chicago and the History of Country Music and the Folk Revival.” “It really was kind of an underground subculture.”
Many of the folk performers who became household names — like Steve Goodman, Michael Smith and Fred Holstein — got their first gigs at these coffeehouses. They often began as music fans themselves, seeing other folkies play and joining this burgeoning community of Chicago.
One was Art Thieme, who was a regular performer at No Exit for over three decades. The owner at the time, Joe Moore, gave him his first chance in 1959. Thieme died in 2015.
“They had a $1 cover, and he made one-quarter [of whatever money came in],” says Thieme’s son, C.T. Thieme. “It cost him more to get back home than he made that night.”
Moore credits Dodie Kallick, another local musician, as the originator of folk music at the No Exit. Once Kallick was a consistent act, more musicians and folk fans followed. “[It’s] how the coffee shop worked — things grew in it,” Moore said in a 1977 interview. “[A] chess tournament grew in it, the folk singing grew in it.”
Without the coffeehouses, young people would have been locked out of the live music scene. Some community organizations, like the YMCA, even set up coffeehouses because they were so motivated for young people to have a social place that didn’t depend on alcohol.
Other cafés opened explicitly as performance venues — It’s Here, also in Rogers Park, could seat several hundred people. It was known as “Kiddie Big Time,” after the local young folk hopefuls who would get the chance to perform when the era’s biggest stars, including John Denver and Joni Mitchell, weren’t putting on a show.
Looking back, many of the regulars from the ’60s and ’70s say these places helped shape them and find their community. That impact lives on: Lesley Kozin, whose parents owned No Exit after Moore, says that even today at her favorite neighborhood bar, she’ll instinctively look up when someone enters to see if she knows who it is — just as she would do at the No Exit.
Kozin says of the pull of the community: “If it was a place that called to you, you may never leave.”
No Exit became popular for chess tournaments each Sunday (top left). Owners Brian and Sue Kozin (top right) at No Exit. The stuffed armadillo on the mantle above the No Exit Stage (bottom left) was named Claude for his saddle and reins, after actor Claude Rains. Claude can still be found in the old No Exit storefront, now Le Piano. A photo of Roger Benson, Jan Burda and Vic Radin (bottom right) in 1981 at No Exit.
Sun-Times file; Rogers Park West Ridge Historical Society; C.T. Thieme.
By the late 1970s, the heyday of the folk revival had passed, and cafés either had to adapt or shutter. In 1977, Leslie’s parents, who had been regulars and employees, bought No Exit.
For the coffeehouse to survive, Brian and Sue Kozin turned it into a venue for more than just folk music. In the ’80s and ’90s, No Exit put on poetry readings and comedy nights. Comedian Michael Shannon performed there regularly for several years; he went on to write No Exit into a sketch on “Saturday Night Live.”
But the essential character of the community didn’t change. Over the 22 years they owned No Exit, the Kozins spent almost as much time chatting with close friends at the regulars table as they did behind the counter. No one around to answer the phone or make a drink? No problem — any patron was welcome to do it themselves.
The Kozins would host No Exit holiday parties as well. “The No Exit Thanksgivings were epic,” Lesley says. “It was just a bunch of us — we call ourselves hippie cousins.”
In 2000, No Exit was one of the last of its kind to close in Chicago. It held on for as long as it did because of the Kozins’ passion.
“We just never made any money off the damn place. … We barely made a living,” Brian Kozin says. “You know, it’s about the music. It’s not about the money. If it were about the money, we wouldn’t have been there.”
But with these coffeehouses, young Chicagoans lost an important “third space” — a place to call their own, spend hours talking with friends and see local musicians try out new songs. “I would love to see something like that return again,” C.T. Thieme says.