A coffeehouse named Two-Way Street in Downers Grove, that is. My husband David and I went there more than 10 years ago to see a folk performer named David Roth, we really could have been going all this time. Funny how time gets away from you.
Down a hallway and short flight of stairs, in a basement room of Downers Grove’s First Congregational Church, it’s not unusual to find a standing-room-only crowd on a Friday night.Not much has changed in the four decades folkies have gathered to draw bows across fiddles, strum guitars and pluck banjos, transforming the church basement into the Two Way Street Coffee House one night a week.”Why Downers Grove? I happen to be born here. I grew up here,” said Dave Humphreys, founder of the coffee shop, which opened its doors for the first time 40 years ago Wednesday.The genre-defining Newport Folk Festival, it’s not. But the Two Way Street, as Humphreys will tell you, is one of very few places in the Chicago area with a following that has remained constant as times and trends changed and folk music lost the widespread appeal it had in the ’60s.
