The Party Starter
Cecil Locke Takes Chess in The Park to the Next, Mobile Level
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Nevertheless, in the spring of 2002, the Harper Court Foundation, which manages the space, removed the benches without explanation, replacing them with “Private Property” signs, effectively banning chess-playing. Some of the store owners claimed the chess players created noise and litter. “They are rude, they are irritating, and they are non-customers,” Rich Padnos, owner of the bicycle shop Wheels & Things, told the Chicago Tribune at the time.
Today, the Hyde Park chess scene is scattered. “We find tables where we can: McDonald’s; Starbuck’s,” says Michael Aaron, a former Harper Court regular, adding that most businesses don’t mind the gatherings. “We get boisterous sometimes, but chess players are pretty easy to live with.”
Locke looked for other opportunities. When Millennium Park opened in 2004, he was there with his newly expanded, thirty-foot-long table, complete with a couple of checkers sets (“for romantic people on a date,” he explains), free Connect-4 games for children while their parents played (a concept later abandoned), and lowered ends, resulting in wheelchair accessibility. The Chess Party had gone mainstream.
His downtown location attracted new types of players. Whereas most street chess meeting areas are dominated by very experienced players, a relative amateur can always find a game at the Chess Party. Locke prohibits gambling in order to protect his permit, and that makes for friendlier competition. Tourists are attracted by the music and bright décor, and the table has even become a stop for Segway tours. During the Taste of the Town, the table ensnared people leaving the festival; overheated and overstuffed revelers with little inclination to rush to their next destination.
Locke pays his assistant King, a former hospital worker who lost his job in 2003, around $25 to $35 per day. The Party itself can net anywhere from $100 on a slow day to $200 when they set up around a festival or the Taste of Chicago.
“There’s no jobs out here sometimes,” say Locke. I made a job out of this, for me and [King].”
Although he says he’s glad to have the work, King, who splits time living between relatives’ homes and a shelter, is looking for something more substantial. “Before the summer’s up,” he says, “hopefully somebody will call about a job.”
Last winter, when the City Council banned street performers along a stretch of North Michigan Avenue and Millennium Park, Locke and King were forced a couple of blocks south, to their current spot at Grant Park. Locke was peeved, since he was there the day Millennium opened, but business hasn’t been hurt, and he feels his concept is stronger than any location. In fact, Locke wants to expand the operation further. He has plans to build another cart this spring, so next summer he and King can be at the park and a festival at the same time. If that works out, he’d consider building another one, for his son Antwan, or to rent to others.
“I’m surprised that nobody thought of it,” Locke says of the mobile chess table. “Chess has been around for thousands of years, but it takes an artist from the South Side to commercialize it.”
