Every unfinished storefront is an empty stage. With the right props it can become anything: a clothing store, a coffee shop, an office, a restaurant, a bar. This storefront on Madison in Forest Park will be a comedy club. It’s just taking a little while.
Emily Ramirez and her husband Chase Maness are painstakingly renovating the building, which was erected between 1913 and 1915 (records vary) for the past few years. First, they renovated the upstairs apartments (where Ramirez and her husband now live) and then they set their sights on the storefront downstairs.
That space is set to become the BABS Comedy Club and is still very much a work in progress.
Yet Ramirez is happy enough with how the renovation has progressed that she began last week hosting an open mic on Thursday nights.
“I’m not sure what to expect tonight,” Ramirez emailed me the afternoon before her first open mic, “I’m calling the mic “Comedy Under Construction” for reasons that are abundantly clear to anybody walking into the space. lol.”
Ramirez gave me a tour of the space in early June. “You would be coming through this door,” she says, pointing to the entrance. “This breezeway would be closed in by these vintage double doors. And then that’s where ticketing would happen.” She points to an empty space against the wall.
Two steps forward, and we are standing in an open room, high ceilings and an exposed wood floor. There is no stage yet, and no rows of chairs facing the space where the tage will be. Above us is a ceiling of stamped tin covered in thick white paint.
“So, we’ve been painstakingly taking that down so that we can access the plumbing,” Ramirez says, pointing to a place where the tin has been peeled away. Most of plumbing, she said, is still the original cast iron.
“My husband and I just did this framing and plumbing over the weekend.”
The restoration of the building at 7316 Madison has been the largest undertaking they have done so far. Ramirez clearly relishes the challenge.
“My husband and I have been homeowners of old 100-plus-year-old homes for 20 years. So this will be our third building in the same age group that we’ve restored. And my husband is an engineer. He really enjoys restoration. I love restoration.”
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Ramirez and Maness renovated their first house in 2008, “a 1915 Dutch colonial in Columbus, Ohio.” The house was “technically unlivable” when they first moved in.
“We didn’t have electricity. We didn’t have plumbing. We basically camped in it. Luckily, we were in our early 20s. But it was an amazing trial by fire, and we absolutely loved the process.”
The profits from the sale of that building helped finance Maness’ return to college. The next early 19th century house they renovated was in Berwyn, where they relocated in 2016 because both wanted to live in the Chicago area. Even as the two were working on the house in Berwyn, Ramirez was looking for a place that could be turned into a club.
“We like to go on long walks at night,” Ramirez said, “and one night we ended up on Madison, and I was like, what a great little chunk of town. It’s just got a great feel to it.”
It was on one of those walks through Forest Park that Ramirez and Maness spotted their current building.
“I liked this space. The vibe of the building felt really good to me. And it’s a prime location. It’s really easily walkable to both the green and the blue lines of the CTA. And I love, love the demographic here in Forest Park; it’s like a really nice mix, you know, racially, socioeconomically. That diversity is a really important part of comedy doing well.”
Ramirez and her husband closed on the building September 15, 2023, and started work on renovating immediately.
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Ramirez didn’t always want to be a comedy club owner. When Ramirez was three, growing up in Houston, Texas, she wanted to be a ballerina after she saw one on the Mister Rogers Neighborhood television show. While lots of girls at three want to be ballerinas, Ramirez actually became one.
Ramirez danced professionally for 10 years, working first for a ballet company in Columbus, Ohio (BalletMet) and then for a company in Charlotte, North Carolina (then called North Carolina Dance Theater, now Charlotte Ballet.)
“My 9 to 5 job was as a professional ballerina. A lot of people would be like, what was your real job? I’m like, that is my real job.”
Ramirez’s career as a dancer was cut short when, at 29, she fractured her ACL. So, she started performing in musicals, first in regional shows, and then, later in a national tour of The Phantom of the Opera.
It was while touring that Ramirez realized she did not like life on the road. “I hated being away from my husband, and my dogs [a long-haired male chihuahua named Charlie and a Pomeranian female named Sophie].”
Ramirez and her husband had already purchased their home in Berwyn when the national tour of Phantom ended. Instead of joining a different touring show, Ramirez found jobs in local productions – she appeared in Drury Lane Oakbrook’s production of Evita – and began working her way into the local comedy scene, taking classes at Second City and I/O.
She wrote, directed, and appeared in various local comedy shows. She also joined the house improv team, The Comedy Shrine Players, at a comedy club in Aurora, the Comedy Shrine. When the club abruptly closed in June, 2022, the victim flagging post-Covid audiences, Ramirez found herself “with all of these friends of mine who I loved playing with. I felt just heartbroken that they didn’t have this home to perform in anymore. And I was like, well, you know, I’m going to, I’m going to make that home.”
Hence BABS Comedy Club.
BABS is short for Bad A** B******, because, according to its website, that’s how Ramirez’s closest friends lovingly refer to her.
Ramirez said she thinks the comedy club will be finished and fully open in late September of this year.
“It seems like the community is being pretty patient with us. I know that people are used to somebody buying a space and then opening in 60, 90 days, but I’m hoping that by letting them in on the process, they can see we want to do it right, and we want to open when it’s ready for them.”