New businesses continue to flock to Oak Park. So far this year, 17 new business licenses have been issued by the village. The total number of new business licenses issued in 2023 was 103, representing the third consecutive year that the village issued more than 100 new licenses.
“The store has grown and changed in ways we never expected, but in good ways,” said co-owner Rachel Weaver. “It’s been a great 20 years.” Weaver co-owns the store with her husband, Jason Smith, whom she married two years before they opened the Book Table. The two met while working at an independent bookstore, both having previously worked at other independent bookstores, so it felt natural that they would open one of their own. They first attempted to set up shop in Chicago but were unlucky in that endeavor. “No one would give us the time of day,” Weaver recalled. “We were these snot-nosed kids who wanted to open a store, selling a sort of dinosaur legacy product.”So, they set their sights on Oak Park, a place that appealed to them for its proximity to Dominican University and for being a short train ride away from the University of Illinois Chicago. The village had a lot of scholars and professors as residents, Weaver said; the type of people who would appreciate a
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Wire, a music venue and bar, used to form with nearby FitzGerald’s a twin bill of live entertainment on Roosevelt Road in Berwyn. Then the pandemic hit, upsetting even the best-laid business plans.
The owners of Wire have been forced to put their well-equipped club up for sale. It’s been closed completely since March 2020 and co-owner Christopher Neville said he saw no other way out of escalating losses.
He said he hopes the two-story building can be sold to someone who wants to keep using it for live music. “It would be nice to reopen but we were just getting deeper into a hole,” said Neville, also a member and manager of the local band Tributosaurus.