Nag Champa
A store and what time does with ambition
Saint Alfred is closing. Twenty-two years on Milwaukee Avenue in Chicago, and the announcement came last week. “After two decades the time has come to say goodbye.”
In December 2005 I flew to New York with friends. There’s a photo of me sitting on a hotel bed with a digital camera in one hand and my PowerBook open on my lap, wearing a green and black striped Stussy crewneck and a black and grey Stussy hat. There’s another one from later that night, doing something stupid while holding a beer up toward the camera, wearing Nike Dunk SB Low Avengers. The blue and teal ones.
I was 21. Finishing my last year of art and art history undergrad. I had a small clothing brand called Pros & Cons that I ran out of my Chicago apartment, and I’d just done a hoodie collaboration with Lupe Fiasco. Eighty units, sold out in a few minutes, promoted only on an internet forum called Hypebeast. It felt like a huge moment to me at the time. If you’re familiar with the modern day version of the site, it was way scrappier back then. Just a blog run by a guy. Lupe was releasing the Fahrenheit 1/15 mixtapes at the time and we connected over sneakers and Chicago on the forum. None of the infrastructure that exists now existed then. Sites like that were where you went to talk to other people who cared about the same things.
Saint Alfred opened in 2004. It quickly became the shop in Chicago for sneaker culture.
I was familiar with the New York scene. Places like DQM, Nort/Recon, Flight Club. STA was our version of it. Same curatorial sensibility, same feeling that someone with actual taste was deciding what came in the door.
Until STA, the culture I was interested in lived in magazines and blogs and online forums. Threads where you talked to other people who cared about the same things, and that was the whole infrastructure. The store was the first time any of it had a physical address for me. The culture became physically tangible. The thing on the shelf was the thing you’d been reading about.
You walked in and it smelled like Nag Champa. Concrete floors, white walls, big windows up front. Floating shelves on the left with the sneakers displayed like objects. On the right were a couple racks of shirts and some glass cases with stuff I couldn’t afford. Down the middle of the store was a long hollow metal tube that served as the bench where you sat to try shoes on. Checkout counter in the back, vintage cash register, simple logo on the wall behind it. That was the whole store.
Funny how a space can recontextualize a smell. Before STA, Nag Champa was the smell of a dorm room, or the mall store with black light posters and hemp necklaces.
A guy named Krabby worked there. A nod when I walked in. A simple chat about some new shoes that came in. I mostly couldn’t afford to buy anything. I bought things anyway sometimes. Thank you, credit cards.
There’s a story people will tell you about independent stores. That these places are humble. That the status grew up around them naturally, to the surprise of the owners. For a spot like STA, that feels dishonest.
That whole scene was about making a name. Streetwear and sneaker culture’s roots were tied to hip hop and graffiti. Two cultures explicitly built around being seen and carving an identity outside legacy institutions. All of it was name-building as the product. Stores like STA knew that.
I had a tiny brand and a forum account, inspired by it from the edges. The Lupe collab was partly luck. But the energy that drove that whole world drove me too. I was trying to make something, and the trying was real.
By 2009 my interests were changing. I wasn’t invested in that culture anymore. STA would go on to evolve and grow. I’d still stop in for shoes, and the DNA felt intact. But the STA I’m writing about is the earlier one. The small white room in 2005 that put a physical expression of this world I was so interested in right in my neighborhood.
I thought I wanted to be a streetwear guy. Brand owner, designer, the whole thing. It felt like a calling at the time. It wasn’t, really. Though it wasn’t nothing either. The feelings and attitudes that came with it didn’t leave. They just stopped being the form my energy took. The specific interest simmered down.
What I had wasn’t the specific ambition. It was the energy underneath it. Some kind of raw excitement that needed somewhere to go, pointed at sneakers and hoodies. I thought the target was the energy. They weren’t the same thing.
It took another fifteen years or so to figure out where that energy actually wanted to go. Looking back now I can see how the design school work and the sneaker forums and the hoodie and the trips to New York fed into the work I do now, but the work I do now isn’t what I thought I was building then. I couldn’t have pictured it from where I was standing. I’d have been confused if you’d shown it to me.
I love my life now. It’s full in ways I couldn’t have pictured. I wouldn’t trade it.
I don’t want to go back.
I’d be curious to be him for an afternoon though.
The biggest difference between then and now isn’t the energy itself. I still have that, the same chest-feeling when something clicks, when I’m building, when an idea lands. The difference is I have real outlets for it. Back then I was still trying to figure out where it went. The searching was the work of that period, and the fact that it took a long time isn’t a delay. It’s just how long it takes.
I’m still doing a version of the same thing now. Whatever I’m aiming at at 42, time will redirect it too.
Sixty-year-old me will look back at this with the same mix of love and ache and see where it actually went.
Saint Alfred is closing. The store survives as the version other people built around it. Those versions are real. It’s just not the one I’m thinking about. I’m thinking about a Saturday in 2005 with the Nag Champa burning and Krabby behind the counter and a kid in Dunks who couldn’t afford anything looking at the shelves for forty minutes and leaving.
Both are true. The versions others have, and the version I have. The ambition, and what time did with it.
You only get to be a version of yourself once.
You can’t see it from here yet.