A friend listed what he liked about an 11-month stay in Los Angeles:
Nothing. Didn’t even mention the weather.
Chief among his complaints was a lack of nightlife. Not only did L.A. bars close at an unearthly 1 a.m., there were no establishments “like Chicago bars.” Places where you can sit shoulder-to-shoulder with a stranger and propose a toast or drown your sorrows.
L.A. has characters. Chicago has character. These classic taverns perhaps best represent Chicago spirit, and spirits.
“Chesborger, chesborger, Petsi! Cheeps, no fry!” John Belushi made the Greek hamburger slingers from the Billy Goat Tavern nationally famous on “Saturday Night Live.” Decorated with grease-coated pictures of long-dead pols, hoods and scribes, the Billy Goat still attracts writers from the nearby Chicago Tribune and Sun-Times. Mike Royko hunched over his rocks glass at the end of the bar, just inside the door (surprisingly, with his back to it) and down the steps. Original owner Gus Sianis was barred from bringing his pet goat into Wrigley Field during the 1945 World Series; his curse that they’d never return to the Series holds firm. The subterranean location on lower Michigan Avenue adds to its crusty charm, like a private fraternity.
“We’re like a chameleon,” says Chad Weiler, partner with brother Scott at Cork and Kerry in Beverly. He means that the 3,500-square-foot beer garden transforms the place — named for two counties in southern Ireland — from “a little North Side bar transplanted to the South Side” to a fire code-challenging destination. The beer garden is a beaut: multiple decks, flowers, nine televisions, lampposts, antiques and eight heaters that allow it to stay open year-round. C & K also is chameleon-like the day after Thanksgiving, when the lights go up on an elaborate Christmas display that contains 80 moving figures, a moving ski lift above the bar and model trains.
A living museum since its construction immediately after the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 (a few months later, city ordinance forbade frame buildings), The Green Door Tavern in River North has operated since 1921 when it was a Prohibition speakeasy. It contains what owner George Parenti calls “an essentially organic … coterie of collectibles and memorabilia” including political badges, signs, hotel keys, sports pennants and the winning cart from the 1952 Soapbox Derby. Also fire helmets, honoring those who saved the place when a seven-story brick wall fell onto it during the Gallery Place fire of 1989. About a century ago, the building’s foundation settled, or “racked,” resulting in a definite lean. “We tell customers if the walls start to straighten up,” Parenti says, “it’s time for you to go home.”
A survivor of gentrification, Old Town Ale House attracted poets, beatniks and folkies from the original Old Town School of Folk Music in the late 1950s when the area was seedy. After a fire gutted the original location, customers lugged the mahogany bar down the street to its current site, where it joins weird icons such as a bust of the late Bushman gorilla from Lincoln Park Zoo. Later it drew key players from Second City: improv guru Del Close, Betty Thomas, Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi; George Wendt’s picture is tacked up all over the appropriately sepia exterior. “It’s never changed,” says owner Bea Klug. “We’ve spent a lot of money trying to keep it the way it is. It’s an old-time saloon. There’s not too many of those.”
Heard of “smart drinks”? They can’t come any smarter than at Jimmy’s Woodlawn Tap, a watering hole for University of Chicago students after a long day of studying economics, brain surgery and nuclear fission. Dylan Thomas and Roger Ebert are among celebrities who’ve entered and rubbed elbows with local scholars. “It’s a pretty high-powered school, so you’re bound to get a certain percentage of stars,” manager Bill Callahan says. It’s got a pretty spartan interior behind three storefronts; somewhere you can see ticket stubs from a U of C game when Jay Berwanger was winning the Heisman Trophy and it was a Big Ten school. Sadly, Jimmy Wilson, the owner for 50 years, died Feb. 22, 1999.
The effective word at Berghoff is “beer,” not necessarily the alcoholic type. The Berghoff family has brewed suds since 1887, and bourbon since Prohibition ended, but about half of lunch sales are soft drinks, mainly homemade root beer. It’s an old-fashioned stand-up bar — no stools — mixing early Chicago and European styles, “a fairly accurate time capsule,” says third-generation owner Herman Berghoff, who runs the bar and adjacent German restaurant with wife, Jan, and sons Pete and Tim. “The best fish sandwich in Chicago,” Herman claims. “Halibut.” Historically catering to laborers, Berghoff once opened at 7 a.m. to serve transit workers but now runs from 10 a.m.-9 p.m. for Loop office types.
In more carefree times, when sex wasn’t potentially deadly, Rush & Division was the place to be. “We were the first ones that got the strip going,” says the eponymous proprietor of Butch McGuire’s. Open since 1961, “We’re still a neighborhood saloon,” he says, “but we have a larger neighborhood than most.” Like a good TV series, McGuire’s influence can be seen in the number of spin-offs it created: The Fireplace Inn, The Hunt Club, the entire T.G.I. Friday’s chain. The patrons are a little older than in the Swingin’ 60s, but the place endures. “We were the first singles bar the nation’s ever known,” Butch says. “A couple of New York journalists coined the term about us. It seemed to have stuck.”
Chicago is known even more for its music than for its bars. When the two mingle, the results are dynamite.
The legendary Checkerboard Lounge, a proud outpost amid abandoned and rundown buildings in the Grand Boulevard/Oakland area, was often the first stop for great young blues men coming north to Chicago from the Mississippi Delta: Muddy Waters, Chuck Berry, B.B. King all used to play here; the Rolling Stones have stepped onto the tiny stage to play homage. The place still draws blues fans from around the world with live music every night but Monday and Tuesday. During the day, it’s the site of friendly card games among the regulars.
The Green Mill Cocktail Lounge is one of Chicago’s few remaining top-notch jazz clubs. Built in 1910 as part of a Moulin Rouge-inspired Green Mill Gardens block in Uptown, the lounge is now one long narrow room with two stages. “It’s weathered all storms, from Prohibition and mobsters,” says owner Dave Jemilo. Singer Joe E. Lewis, for instance, had part of his tongue removed by Al Capone hit man Machine Gun Jack McGurn for violating a “lifetime contract” with another club. The Green Mill has hosted performers spanning the ages: Charlie Chaplin, Billie Holiday, Frank Sinatra, Liza Minnelli and David Schwimmer; Jemilo used to get drunk with Sarah Vaughan in a corner. It’s also known as the home of the Uptown Poetry Slam, but music rules. “A lot of big-name guys come and sit in,” he says. “Harry Connick Jr. comes in. It’s kind of cool because the same thing happened 50, 60 years ago.”
