In 1987, Ben Hollis and John Davies pitched Chicago PBS station WTTW on a program that would capture the city’s obscure corners, unusual characters, and fringe phenomena. To show the station what they had in mind, they’d shot a “guerilla demo” at a spot Hollis already knew: the Dunkin’ Donuts on the corner of Belmont and Clark in Lakeview. He’d often driven past it late at night and seen groups of young people hanging out in the parking lot, and he figured it’d be worth investigating. What were they doing there? Why that spot, not somewhere else? And what was the appeal?
Wild Chicago debuted in January 1989, its weekly episodes each half an hour long. Once it was no longer make-believe, Hollis wanted to do a proper shoot at the Dunkin’ Donuts that had gotten the show off the ground. “Something that alive, organic, and chaotic is rare—it did stand out,” he says. In August 1990, when he arrived with a station cameraman, Hollis immediately saw that the crowd in the parking lot had ballooned in size since his previous visit. “It was on the cusp of dangerous,” he says. “It was an excited crowd, and everybody was jumping around. It was so chaotic. Everybody wanted to stick their face in the camera and say something.”
Its nickname notwithstanding, Punkin’ Donuts wasn’t just a place for punks. While you could reliably find kids in leather jackets, punk T-shirts, and Mohawks there, the shop also attracted lots of other folks from outside the mainstream: house-music fanatics, antiracist skinheads, trans women, skaters, drag queens, industrial-music fans, goths, runaways. In the 1980s, the intersection of Clark and Belmont was one of the busiest in Lakeview, an easy walk from a constellation of music venues and clubs as well as from Boystown’s booming Halsted Street scene. The Dunkin’ Donuts operated 24/7 in those days, and because it admitted people under 21 (unlike most bars and clubs), anyone could hang out there, without regard to whether more conventional nightlife attractions were even open.
While he was building up his name in the scene in the early 1980s, Shelton happened to walk past a former Independent Order of Vikings lodge at Sheffield and School. “This guy had put a handwritten note on the door, ‘For rent,’ and I walked in there and I rented it,” he says. “That was it.” Shelton turned three stories of the building into Medusa’s, which opened in October 1983.
Admission was usually restricted to people 18 and up, but at the behest of promoter Jonas Lowrance, Shelton launched teen dance nights in 1986; kids under 18 could get the Medusa’s experience, initially on Saturdays from 7 to 10 PM. Punkin’ Donuts regular Fred Ingram was 15 when he first went to Medusa’s in the mid-80s. “The fact that I was able to get into a nightclub was really exciting,” he says. “It didn’t matter who you are, or what you are, or what you wanted to be—it was allowed, accepted, and actually encouraged.”
Sean Duffy’s girlfriend at the time worked at Wax Trax!, so he was around to see the punks gathering in the Aetna park—and he noticed when they eventually moved on to Punkin’ Donuts. “They used to drink all the time and left trash, and that was their downfall,” he says. “A block away you had houses that were worth a ton of money—nowadays they’re worth millions of dollars—and those people carried influence with the alderman and the cops. I think when they finally shut that down, I want to say a lot of those people started gravitating towards Belmont and Clark.”
