CHICAGO — In a city where business comes and go, one West Side institution has spent more than six decades standing its ground. The founder The Shoe Shine King is now gone but his family says what he built was never really about shoes.
For 63 years, the cramped little shop along Central Avenue has sounded exactly like a combo plate of laughter, trash talk and a whole lot of Chicago.
Long before it became a neighborhood landmark, James Cole started with a shoeshine box on a sidewalk. Through decades of change and hard times until a sidewalk hustle became a Chicago institution…