Billy Helmkamp, 43, co-owns the Whistler (which he opened in 2008 with Rob Brenner) and Sleeping Village (opened in 2018 with Brenner and former Whistler bartender Eric Henry). He’s been a major player in the Logan Square Arts Festival for most of its history and serves on the board of I Am Logan Square, the nonprofit that organizes it. (If this summer’s fest happens, it’ll be as smaller events, on a scale deemed safe by public-health authorities.) Helmkamp is also on the board of directors at the Chicago Independent Venue League (CIVL), founded in 2018, and wears two hats at the brand-new National Independent Venue Association (NIVA): he’s one of two Illinois precinct captains and sits on the national lobbying committee.
The Chicago Independent Venue League started with a call from Katie: “Hey, can you come by the Hideout? I’ve gotta talk to you about something.” She filled me in on what we were looking at with the Lincoln Yards development, and what we were hearing Live Nation’s role in that was going to be.
The average person thinks venues are making money hand over fist, but our profit margins are pretty razor-thin. So we’re talking to our landlord about pausing rent. We have monthly expenses with our POS system provider, our ice-machine company, our glass-washer rental company—these are all people we’re reaching out to and getting our services either paused or reduced.
We’ve seen some testimonials of people who got Chicago Resiliency funds and PPP funds, who were like, “Oh, thank God I got this—my revenue’s down 20 percent because of this crisis!” And we’re all sitting here, like, “Twenty percent is just a bad month! Lose 100 percent.” v
