For years, members of the Rogers Park community and Loyola students have flocked to Archie’s Cafe, located at 1228 W. Loyola Ave. for kinship, music and great food. With its recent closure following Loyola University’s acquisition of the building, Archie’s Cafe officially said goodbye and thank you to its loyal patrons in late August. For …
For years, members of the Rogers Park community and Loyola students have flocked to Archie’s Cafe, located at 1228 W. Loyola Ave. for kinship, music and great food. With its recent closure following Loyola University’s acquisition of the building, Archie’s Cafe officially said goodbye and thank you to its loyal patrons in late August.
For a lucky few, though, mourning for the community pillar will be short lived. Actually, it’s more of a celebration over here at The Phoenix. For in the place of a cafe and bar that served thousands every year, The Phoenix Student Newspaper humbly requests in its place the university cultivates a state-of-the-art loungeroom for its committed journalists.
Outfitted with long tables to work and an outdoor patio for when we’re feeling frisky, producing high-quality stories will, without a doubt, become second nature in this ideal writing environment. I’m not so sure about the utility of the fully-furnished kitchen though. Most of our diets consist of Celsius energy drinks, Kraft mac and cheese and Famous Amos cookies.
With these new amenities and this new creative space, we’d no longer have to worry about jammed vending machines, windowless rooms or the common riffraff peeking their heads in to disrupt the sacred writing process. By utilizing this exclusive lounge, we at The Phoenix can focus on what the Rogers Park community needs more than some family-owned hangout spot with live music — journalistic integrity.
Besides, whenever I walked past Archie’s Cafe, with its warm lights, homestyle food and boundless laughs coming from those inside, I couldn’t help but become enraptured by its pervasively seedy nature that would no doubt distract me from reaching my publication deadline of six days from now.
This new lounge for The Phoenix staff would not only act as a step in the right direction by compensating us for all those years of exile in the School of Communication’s squalid basement but would also allow us to more easily keep our ears to the ground and detect emerging stories — especially since we’d be replacing the heart of the neighborhood itself!
The building of a writer’s lounge for The Phoenix writing staff would be a major investment into campus life at Loyola. If someone is trying to grow their wealth, just as a student might want to expand their social circle, a Roth IRA is much better than a slot machine. Let this writer’s lounge become the Roth IRA to Loyola’s campus life.
What will you remember when you graduate Loyola? A night out with friends? Meeting a stranger with similar music tastes? That’s what you want to tell yourself. In reality, nothing is more memorable and gratifying than seeing your name in black ink published at the top of the student newspaper.
This is the feeling we wish to cultivate with the building of The Phoenix Writers’ lounge and I hope it shows our dedication to enhancing the student experience here at Loyola.
Though a pillar of the Rogers Park community is closing, a new opportunity is on the horizon for students at Loyola to win over the local community. My hope is every student organization can one day have their own luxury lounge to use once a week. Loyola just needs to hurry up and acquire more buildings to make this dream a reality.
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