It was last July that fledgling writer Julie Saltzman and her business partner, Susan McLaughlin Karp, first heard they might have competition. They were three months into converting a 1,200-square-foot office on Broadway into Uptown Writer’s Space, which they thought would be Chicago’s first and only fee-based shared workspace for writers, when Karp, who lives in Evanston, heard rumors of another space opening on the same street, run by an Evanston soccer mom and a partner. Saltzman, a former commodities trader and Wilmette resident, didn’t believe it. “I said, ‘Susan, this is a classic telephone game. Someone’s gotten the information wrong. It’s my son who plays soccer. One woman from Evanston? On Broadway? Come on, what are the odds of that? I’ll bet anything it’s our space they’re talking about.’” Now she says it’s a good thing no one took her up on that bet: later this month the Writers WorkSpace is set to debut less than a mile away.
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The Uptown Writer’s Space opened September 18 on the second floor at 4802 N. Broadway, above the Green Mill and a few doors down from the shuttered Uptown Theatre. Karp, a dramatist and performer (she’ll be appearing with the monologuist ensemble BoyGirlBoyGirl at Prop Thtr next week) says she and Saltzman considered Evanston as a location but were drawn to Uptown because of its diversity and affordability. And then, says Karp, “I fell in love with the view.” It’s easy to see why: the big white-walled corner studio has an expanse of windows overlooking the five-corner intersection of Broadway, Lawrence, and Racine, with the imposing Bridgeview Bank building (and a Starbucks) at dead center.
The catalyst for this pair of experiments was a New York Times article published last year about Paragraph, a writers space in Manhattan. Comparing the concept to health clubs, the Times story remarked on the ever-growing number of writers yearning for a sense of community as well as a quiet place to work, and noted that spaces in New York have two-year waiting lists. Both sets of Chicago owners turned from the article and said, “Why not here?” And both say news of the competition merely gave them pause. “If I thought there were just 50 writers in the city looking for space, I never would have opened it,” says Saltzman. “But I have to believe there’s a bigger pool out there. Is it ideal that there’s another writers space a mile away from us? Probably not. But I think we’re different enough that we’ll both be sustainable.” Karp agrees, noting that her own background and network is theatrical and journalistic, while the other space may be more fiction oriented. Still, “Would it be better if one of us was in Wicker Park? Sure.”
