Tuesday, December 16, 2025
Chicagoan of the Year in Classical Music: Seth Boustead is the musical dreamer behind CheckOut
Chicago Tribune / by Hannah Edgar / December 16, 2025 The day the CheckOut — a cozy music venue housed in a former 7-Eleven — opened to the public, one would expect founder and proprietor Seth Boustead to be working through nerves, or frantically setting up the space. Instead, he spent much of that morning and early afternoon down the street, playing piano for a neighborhood block party. Why? Simple, he says: “They asked.” Boustead takes the CheckOut’s identity as a neighborhood fixture seriously. When
