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?Īround midnight on a Saturday in August, Davies and Hollis brought their gear to the Dunkin’ Donuts. They’d decided to call their show Wild Chicago, and Hollis dressed like an intrepid wilderness explorer: he wore a pith helmet and a short-sleeved khaki shirt, with binoculars around his neck. While Davies ran the camera, Hollis pointed a dinky microphone at just about any bystander who would talk. “I’m Ben Hollis with Wild Chicago, a make-believe TV show,” he explained to a middle-aged Black cop inside the doughnut shop. “Just trying to figure out if you’ve got any good ideas about what brings these kids together out here. Hollis and Davies’s footage from that night includes a couple teenagers freestyle skateboarding, crowds of enthusiastic kids dressed all in black and smiling for the camera, and a Dunkin’ employee who said some of the teens were “straight-up sugar fiends.” The two of them brought the tape to WTTW senior vice president Pat Denny, who was in charge of production for the station’s regular programs. “He said, ‘Yeah, there’s magic here,'” Hollis says. I didn’t move to Chicago till 2009, more than a decade after Punkin’ Donuts had ceased to be a subcultural epicenter, but I’ve been curious about it for as long as I’ve known it existed. In the years after Wild Chicago aired its “Punk Rock Park” episode, the spot’s notoriety seeped into the mainstream.
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