Three Ukrainians–a butcher, a wedding singer, and a grave digger–are sitting around a table, giving each other good-natured hell, when a Puerto Rican punk rocker walks in.
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Kordiuk, who’s 42, likes to tell people she’s lived in the same zip code her entire life. She grew up near Campbell and Augusta, and remembers a community in which “everything was centered around the church.” But there were other gathering places–like the cobbler’s shop at the corner of Campbell and Iowa where, Kordiuk recalls, her father and other local men whiled away afternoons. (The cafe’s name is a tribute to her parents, Ivan and Jadwiga Kordiuk, who immigrated to the U.S. in 1950 aboard the USS General CC Ballou.) For years she’d wanted to open such a spot, a place “where people who were visiting the neighborhood could come in and hear the different languages,” says Kordiuk, who’s fluent in Ukrainian and Polish as well as English. She also believed the neighborhood was sorely lacking a coffee shop. “Having lived here all my life and having really deep roots,” she says, “it would have made me really sad had somebody else–not to mention a Starbucks–just looked at it as a kind of investment thing.”
While she hesitated, a used-appliance store opened there. Then in September 2002, Kordiuk’s mother was crossing the street in front of her house on Cortez when she was struck and killed by a driver reversing down the street to take an alley shortcut. For months afterward Kordiuk grieved, all the while growing more and more weary of her job at a local nonprofit. Finally, in June of last year, she quit. “People were saying, ‘Are you crazy? The economy is horrible,’ and I’m like, I can’t get out of bed to go–it doesn’t matter,” she says. Two months later she noticed that the space on Western, now slightly remodeled, was for rent again. “I stood there,” Kordiuk says, “and I went, Now’s the time.” She signed a lease that started September 1.
Cafe Ballou is at 939 N. Western, 773-342-2909.
