By Paulina Kwik

Medill Reports

On a snowy February morning, Debbie Gallo sat behind the counter of her small but colorful vintage store, scrubbing the forehead of a flat, palm-sized decoration shaped like a cat. She was wearing a white and purple sweater, also adorned with kitties, and her gray curls brushed over her shoulders. 

She tapped the cat plaque against her bottom teeth and said, “It’s glass.” Someone had glued a piece of blue, floral paper to the hanging decoration. A half hour later, once she finally scraped away the last of the glue residue using nail polish remover and other cleaners from the arsenal under her counter, Gallo said it was probably too much effort to waste on something with a price tag of $8. 

In 1992 she and her husband, Jim, launched the store and named it Shangri-La Vintage. It started with their shared love of flea markets and garage and estate sales. Gallo says they loved buying crazy stuff, like a taxidermy sloth, which they took a family photo with that made its way around the internet in 2013, even landing them an article in the Huffington Post. Eventually, selling to other stores became a part of the routine that fueled their hobby. 

“You find something weird and you’re like, ‘Well, I don’t want it, but I can’t just leave it there,’ because you know somebody else will want it or it’s worth some money,” Gallo said.

Gallo, originally a graphic artist, said the Shangri-La journey started when the “writing was on the wall” that her and her husband’s workplaces were both shutting down. 

Three decades later, the small, single-story shop is filled with patterned garments for “guys and gals” from mostly the 1960s to the early 2000s. But many people, including two customers looking for outfits for a themed party, view the shop as an emporium of the 1970s.

“I put a lot of ’70s in the window because it’s polyester, and it just doesn’t fade,” Gallo said. “If I put something cotton in the window, it would fade.”

Grace Provan, one of the disco-bound shoppers, said she was first drawn to the store due to her love of history. “It’s so reasonably priced here,” Provan said. “I’ve been to vintage stores where they’ll try to charge $100 for a scrap of fabric.”

Gallo said she sets the price by what she would pay for the item.

Her favorite part of running the store: “the hunt.”

Even when she needs to pull pieces from her personal collection to add to the store’s stock, Gallo said she doesn’t regret letting go of once beloved items. “Somebody got to enjoy it,” she said. “You set it free. I don’t go out much anymore. I’m more for comfort now.”

She described her most memorable outfit, one she made herself, as a three-piece ’70s glam rock suit. It was blue satin with white stars on it. 

She rocked glamorous outfits in the ’80s and ’90s when she and her husband were friends with many bands. Once they even brought Krist Novoselic, co-founder and bass player for Nirvana, to the store after a show.

“He rescued a kitten from around the corner, stuck in a tree,” Gallo said. She brought the kitten back to the store and set out to find the owner. “It was just some little kid. I wish I knew who that kid was so I could say, ‘Do you know who rescued your kitten out of a tree?’”

Having owned nine cats at one point, Gallo is a self-professed cat lady. But that’s just one of many terms that could be used to describe her. Artist. Shop owner. Vintage hunter. 

“Hustler,” Gallo said with a light laugh. “I know how to make money doing something.”

Each day, Gallo spends one hour doing laundry so she can tell customers, “Everything’s been washed.” In the summers, she goes on solo sourcing trips to Wolff’s flea market in Rosemont every Sunday at 3 a.m., according to long-time customer Gabriela Cracraft. 

During opening hours, Gallo is always fiddling with something behind the counter — polishing old jewelry, scribbling price tags or ridding cat-shaped glass of glue. Her hands are never idle.  

Jim used to run the store with his wife and loved to “talk people’s ears off” until losing his eyesight six years ago, after developing detached retinas in both eyes. He still supports the business from the sidelines.

“Debbie’s love of vintage from all eras is reflected in every cool hand-picked item in the shop. She is incredibly hard working, tireless,” Jim said in an email exchange.

Gallo also played into the Rat Hole phenomenon that gripped Chicago in early 2024. The sidewalk slab with an unfortunate imprint of a body, believed to be a rat’s, was located just blocks from Shangri-La Vintage. It was there for at least two decades, according to Gallo, before a viral tweet turned it into a pilgrimage destination. 

When curious internet users began passing through to place various offerings at the Rat Hole, Shangri-La saw an uptick in new visitors. Gallo used the opportunity to make and sell rat earrings.

The piece of cement garnered a “bananas” amount of attention, Gallo said. People came to sing, to leave trinkets, food and drugs, and even to tie the knot. Gallo described stumbling upon a wedding ceremony on her way to her car one evening. 

“My first gay Rat Hole wedding,” Gallo said, “But, in reality, it was a squirrel.”

To establish the narrative of the correct culprit, Gallo put a taxidermy squirrel in her window display with a sign: “It was me. I did it.”

Though the city removed the Rat Hole in summer of 2024, Gallo’s shop still stands. Challenges including the pandemic, her husband’s vision loss and her cancer diagnosis in 2023 cut the shop’s days of operation from seven to four a week, Gallo said, but it will live on for as long as she can run it.

Gallo laughed as she recalled how little it cost to piece together the carpet, fixtures and wall panels to make the place functional. But they seem to have held up just fine for 33 years — especially since all the nooks and crannies behind the walls are stuffed with boxes of overstock vintage.

“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” Gallo said. “Just keep riding that wave until, ultimately, the landlord is gonna have to sell the building or something.”

Paulina Kwik is a graduate student in the Magazine specialization at Medill. You can reach her at paulinakwik2025@u.northwestern.edu