Paradise
Ahmadi, who’s 48, picked up a paintbrush for the first time in 1998, back when he was still running an auto shop in the building. “I stopped by a garage sale and I could tell the woman selling the stuff was pissed off,” he says. “I asked her, ‘What’s wrong?’” She told him her Cadillac wouldn’t start and that she’d just learned it would cost her around $1,800 to fix it. Ahmadi offered to take a look at the car, and when he did he discovered that all it needed was a new fuse. As a thank-you the woman gave him a set of oil paints and some brushes. “I’m not a painter,” he says he told her. “She looked at my face and she said I had something inside. A gift is a gift.”
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Ahmadi came to Chicago on a blustery October day in 1986 with $28 in his pocket. He’d spent the previous four years trying to get a visa to the U.S. “I didn’t leave Iran, I escaped it,” he says of his departure from his hometown of Tabriz, in Iran’s northwest corner, in 1982. “It took me six or seven days to reach the Turkish border on foot. My dream was to come to America. As a kid we read books about America, land of opportunity. I didn’t have a chance to improve myself in Iran.” He traveled across Europe, doing manual labor in between visits to U.S. embassies in Turkey, France, Germany, Greece, and Austria. His visa application was denied again and again. In Italy, after eight months of trying, he finally got lucky.
As good as the food is, “every time people come in here I watch them and they can’t finish theirs because they’re always looking around,” Ahmadi says. “There’s so much to see that they can’t see it all the first time. And this place will never be finished. It’s all from my imagination.”
