Landmarks: Enzo’s, one of the last links to Chicago Heights’ old downtown, set to close

Bill Vitale has been grabbing Italian beef and sausage combo sandwiches from Enzo’s in Chicago Heights since the 1960s, though not quite as often these days now that he’s living in Park Forest.

“If I’m out running errands,” he said Thursday, while awaiting his order at the takeout shop on Chicago Road at Hickory Street. “This will be dinner tonight.”

The neighborhood has changed quite a bit since he first started frequenting Enzo’s, he said, pointing to where a Phillips Body Shop once took care of customers nearby. Just across Chicago Road, the landscape has been altered drastically since Enzo Tribo purchased the old EZ Snack diner, moved it a block west and renamed it for himself.

Enzo’s, which has been serving up Italian beefs since 1946 and later absorbed another business that had relocated from downtown Chicago Heights to became Enzo’s & Carmelcorn, has outlasted just about all of its former neighbors.

But one of the last vestiges of what had been the city’s thriving central business district will soon be gone, according to Enzo Tribo’s grandson, Kyle Hallberg, who has owned the restaurant since 2011. He plans to close the restaurant in March.

“I posted our plans to shut it down and there was a huge response of comments, shares, likes, that kind of stuff,” he said. “Lots of people have voiced their disappointment, but they’re not the ones who have to bear the financial brunt of this thing.”

Enzo’s was a holdout from the steel town boom times of Chicago Heights. When the city’s population reached 40,000 in 1970, its factories were churning out industrial goods and the downtown was a regional hub of commerce, attracting shoppers and diners from all around to Halsted and Illinois streets.

Anchored by hotels, department stores such as J.C. Penny’s, the massive Lincoln-Dixie movie palace and restaurants and cafes, downtown Chicago Heights was doing brisk business.

But dark clouds were on the horizon. Rust Belt pressures hadn’t spared the city’s factories, and the retail experiment begun in 1949 at the nearby Park Forest Plaza, one of the nation’s first shopping malls, had proved wildly successful.

Downtown Chicago Heights wouldn’t survive the decade.

Dominic Candeloro, who along with the late Barbara Paul documented the city’s history in three books published in the 1990s and 2000s, can pinpoint when the fortunes of downtown Chicago Heights began to turn.

“There was a big fight over Goldblatt’s,” he said. “Goldblatt’s wanted to come to downtown Chicago Heights, and the downtown merchants fought it. Goldblatt’s at the time was a popular store. They undersold most of their competitors, and the merchants in Chicago Heights were afraid of Goldblatt’s undercutting them if they were allowed in. They ended up in Park Forest. That might have been the beginning of the end.”

Downtown Chicago Heights had been a destination for decades. Many buildings were old, out of style. Meanwhile, the Park Forest Plaza was literally midcentury modern, an outdoor shopping center with airy promenades and plenty of parking.

“It was hard to find a parking spot in downtown Chicago Heights,” Candeloro said. “When I was growing up, people would get dropped off to run an errand and the person driving would cruise, and then pick them up later.”

Less than 80 years after Chicago industrialists turned the sleepy Thorn Creek hamlet of Bloom into a city of factories, local leaders decided their commercial center needed an update. They formed an ambitious plan to turn the old downtown area into a modern Mecca of commerce that could compete against Park Forest Plaza and the planned Lincoln Mall in Matteson.

It was a good plan, Candeloro said.

“Chicago Heights had a really good downtown — the most viable one in the south suburbs, with maybe some exceptions here and there,” he said. “If it could be recreated with more parking, it would be a really charming downtown — theater, hotel, restaurants, all that.”

They had civic anchors in place, such as City Hall, the police station, public library and St. James hospital. A prominent bank was on board to build a high-rise headquarters that would be the focal point for the new downtown. Out with the old, in with the new.

Most of the buildings, including the Lincoln-Dixie Theater, were demolished as the girders of the new First National Bank tower were being connected. Plans called for stores set amid a garden landscape. Illinois Street, once the bustling commercial heart of the city, became a wide, flat expanse of asphalt. The new downtown would have plenty of parking.

Meanwhile, “all the manufacturers left town and went south to find nonunion workers,” Candeloro said. “The Chicago Heights economy soured.”

The bank building and its giant parking lot were completed, but the rest of the plan languished. Rising interest rates in the late 1970s and 1980s, along with federal corruption investigations of Chicago Heights officials and alleged involvement of organized crime, were the final coffin nails for the redevelopment.

As the buildings started going down, Enzo Tribo saw an opportunity, his grandson said.

“They tore the town down, it was very upsetting to him,” Hallberg said. “He was able to capitalize on everyone getting out of there, selling their properties, retiring and moving on, and he was able to buy up what was left.

“It worked out for him, but he didn’t want to see the town torn down.”

Tribo, who emigrated to the United States after World War II, bought EZ Snack in the late 1960s with his business partner Albert Tocco, Hallberg said. According to stories passed down through his family, Tocco, a notorious Chicago Heights gangster, sold his share of the Chicago Heights restaurant to Tribo and opened up a second EZ Snack at 26th Street and Chicago Road in South Chicago Heights.

Newspaper reports from the time of Tocco’s federal trial on racketeering charges in the late 1980s list among his holdings a “beef and sausage fast food operation on 26th Street and Chicago Road” and other contemporary stories identify him as a “Chicago Heights sausage maker.” He died in prison in 2005 while serving a 200-year sentence.

Despite Tocco’s sausage-making credentials, Hallberg said his restaurateur skills may have needed some work.

“My grandfather was getting complaints because that place (on 26th Street) wasn’t being run properly,” Hallberg said. “He got tired of that and of being associated with that name, so he changed the name from EZ Snack to Enzo’s.”

Tribo later opened a second Enzo’s near U.S. 30 and Governor’s Highway in Olympia Fields, and in an interesting twist Tocco’s EZ Snack on Chicago Road at 26th Street and Tribo’s second Enzo’s both were sold and became Perros Brothers gyros restaurants, Hallberg said. The Peros Brothers restaurants were operated as separate entities after the brothers had a falling out, Hallberg said, noting they’ve since changed hands again and are run by a single owner who has reached out to him about Enzo’s after hearing it was closing.

Another downtown Chicago Heights survivor, the Karmelkorn Shop, operated in a small storefront in the Lincoln-Dixie Theater.

“In those days, the operators of movie theaters were so stupid that they didn’t know they could charge $5, $10 for popcorn, so they let other people sell it and bring it in,” Candeloro said. “People would go to Karmelkorn and buy all sorts of food and then go to the movies.”

The popcorn shop was first opened in downtown Chicago by Frank Schiesher in the early 1930s before moving to Chicago Heights after World War II, according to his grandson, David Schiesher.

“My dad took over management of it with help from my grandparents and the six of us children,” he said in an email from Geneva, Switzerland, where he works as a family therapist.

Schiesher shared a video of he and his siblings discussing their experiences working at Karmelkorn. They included memories of the white tiles with eight sides on the floor of the entrance in its original location at the theater, learning how to make candy and popcorn treats, and the joy of being associated with such a beloved business.

“You’d go to a football game and there were all those taffy apples that our dad made, or in high school when ice cream was passed out and they were all his Dixie cups,” Schiesher’s sister Pat recalled in the video.

Schiesher eventually opened another Karmelkorn in Florida and the Chicago Heights shop was sold to Tribo, who already was running the sandwich shop next door.

Like the Schiesher siblings, who spent lots of time weeding the parking lot and doing other work around the business, Hallberg grew up working at the restaurant as well, albeit decades later.

“As soon as I could walk and talk I was behind the counter talking to customers,” Hallberg said.

When his grandparents were planning to close Enzo’s & Carmelcorn, which changed from Ks to Cs amid a copyright issue years earlier, Hallberg bought the place in 2011.

“I said they can’t close it, it’s an institution, a family business,” he said. “I got involved and eventually realized why. I give it all I had for 13 years and it’s just time now.”

Hallberg said he’s not interested in selling Enzo’s beyond the building and equipment. He’d already turned the Carmelcorn storefront into a gaming lounge in an effort to generate more revenue.

“I’d prefer someone to open their own concept and let our family legacy ride off into the sunset,” said Hallberg, who plans to pursue a master’s degree in business and leave the restaurant industry.

But there always will be the memories from the good ol’ days of Chicago Heights. His grandfather, now in his early 90s, still talks about the place all the time, he said.

“H said there used to be a line down the street,” Hallberg said. “He didn’t do any marketing or advertising, but they’d stay open all night long because people were always there.”

That’s no longer the case, Hallberg said.

“At this point, we’re operating for nostalgia,” he said. “It doesn’t make sense to make stuff for nostalgia if it’s not making any money.”

Landmarks is a weekly column by Paul Eisenberg exploring the people, places and things that have left an indelible mark on the Southland. He can be reached at peisenberg@tribpub.com.