NEWS & POLITICS
Central Camera Co. stays focused State-of-the-art and historic inventory at Central Camera Co. CAROLINA SANCHEZ FOR CHICAGO READER
The century-old camera store has weathered a fire, a flood, and COVID-19. By ZINYA SALFITI
A
t 74 years old, being the third-generation owner of Central Camera Co. is the only job Albert Donald Flesch—Don to his customers—has ever known. When he watched his 123-year-old store burn down amidst the civil unrest that swept the city in 2020 following the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police, he had one reaction: “We’re going to rebuild it and make it just as good or better.” On the evening of May 30, 2020, the pandemic raged on without an end in sight. Confrontations between police and dem-
12 CHICAGO READER - AUGUST 18, 2022
onstrators had escalated, and the Loop became the scene of riots and looting. Central Camera Co. wasn’t spared. Don perched on a metal fence wrapped around a patch of grass across the street from Central Camera, near the entrance of DePaul University’s College of Computing and Digital Media, and turned on the flash of his camera. He took pictures of the scene unfolding before him until the roll of fi lm ran out. He reached into his pocket for his phone to take a few more, only to fi nd that its battery ran out because of the countless calls he’d received earlier about a break-in at his store while he was at his home in suburban Skokie. So he did the only thing he could do that night. He sat and watched. Don looked on as people smashed the storefront windows and walked out with bags of valuable inventory that generations of his family had dedicated their lives to collecting and selling. He watched as black smoke billowed through the front door. And he watched as everything but the store’s vintage neon sign that read “Since 1899” in big bold
neon letters went up in flames. But Don says that as thousands of people marched through the Loop, he wasn’t angry with the demonstrators or what happened to his store. He was just upset about what enraged them in the fi rst place: George Floyd’s murder. When the fire trucks arrived, more than two dozen firefighters worked for hours to extinguish the blaze. In a corner of the store’s shattered storefront window, Don saw the first camera his grandfather had ever sold was still on display, fl ipped over on its back. It was an antique Kodak folding camera, sent back to the store years later in a box with a note from a customer who explained that his father had bought the camera for him from Don’s grandfather. As Don inched closer, a fi reman warned him to keep away. Breathing in the smoke was dangerous, and the fi re was still burning. He needed to create a diversion to reach in and grab it. “I said, ‘Oh, what’s that?’ And [the fi reman] turned and looked up, and I grabbed it and stuffed it under my
armpit,” Don recalled, laughing at the success of his distraction. Don snuck in every day during the week after the fire to search for family belongings and items that would help the business bounce back, such as the phone books. The floors were destroyed, the walls blackened, and the tiles in the back office so damaged that a misstep would send someone slipping through them. He searched unsuccessfully for the diary his grandfather, Albert Flesch, who founded the store, carried with him when he immigrated from Hungary to Chicago at only 13 years old. Though Don had the diary translated, copied, and distributed to the rest of the family years before, the original copy was lost in the fi re. Two years after the fire, Don stands in the store’s original location, wearing his signature black beanie, a camera perpetually hanging from his neck. Renovations aren’t completed yet, but he reopened the store out of necessity. It’s a clean slate: a white-walled warehouse that is starkly different from the
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