Dear Bitches: I am moving to Chicago!!!

Daley Pushes Ordinance to Close Taverns By DON BABWIN, Associated Press Writer
2 hours, 32 minutes ago

Taverns and booze are entwined with Chicago's history and lore — from Al Capone's bootlegging empire to the tavern owner whose curse on the Cubs is blamed for keeping them out of the World Series for a half century. But the dark, cool watering holes where for decades laborers dropped by for a belt on the way home are drying up.

The city that once boasted as many 7,600 taverns in the early 1900s has just over 1,300 today. Now Mayor Richard Daley is pushing an ordinance that would make it easier to close taverns — the latest volley in a battle against the kinds of liquor-selling establishments that some say are magnets for everything from prostitution to littering.

Add to that rapidly changing neighborhoods and a growing number of upscale residents who'd rather see a bistro than a bar on the corner, and it keeps getting tougher to find an honest-to-goodness bar to belly up to.

"The neighborhood bar used to be the country club of the community," said John Kelly, whose father opened Kelly's Pub the day after Prohibition ended and who started running it in 1957. "They've kind of gone by the wayside."

It's a similar story in other cities, including Cleveland, Philadelphia and Boston. One official thinks the trend will continue, in large part because elected officials don't want to be seen as advocates for bars.

"If it's going to be (a liquor license) for a chi chi restaurant with a celebrity chef, wonderful," said Daniel Pokaski, chairman of the Boston Licensing Board. "But if it's for a corner bar, forget it... They are deathly afraid of their own shadows in those situations."

In Chicago's days gone by, poor and blue-collar neighborhoods looked to taverns as community centers, hiring halls, and banks. Often it seemed taverns were the only places to watch a ball game or just escape the sweltering heat.

Though those days were long gone by the time Daley took office in 1989, there still were well over 3,000 taverns in the city.

Intent on making Chicago a more attractive and family-friendly city, Daley pointed to the corner tavern. Careful to say he wasn't opposed to all of them, the mayor said some were havens for crime, garbage and noise. As evidence that the mayor is not trying to impose his own kind of Prohibition, city officials point out that the number of restaurants that serve alcohol has actually climbed in recent years.

Still, in Daley's first full year on the job, the Liquor Control Commission revoked 49 liquor licenses, compared with 11 the year before he took office. Since then, about 1,000 licenses for taverns, liquor stores and other businesses that sell liquor have been revoked.

Daley also dusted off a largely unknown law that allows residents to vote their precincts dry.

Since 1990, dozens of precincts have been voted dry (a handful have been voted wet), putting many taverns, liquor stores and restaurants out of business. Today, some 430 of the city's 2,706 precincts are dry.

The city initiated an aggressive sting operation in which the police sent minors into taverns to see if they'd sell them liquor. And Daley pushed for a state law — which ultimately passed in the mid-1990s — that allowed voters to shut down individual liquor-serving establishments.

Many residents were receptive to Daley's efforts.

"I didn't want to send my kids to the grocery store because they'd have to walk past it," Felicia Sciascia said of a tavern with a soundtrack that routinely included shattering glass, fights and even gunfire for years until it closed last year.

Tavern owners and others say some of the loudest complaints have come not from longtime residents like Sciascia but from newcomers who are turning once blue-collar enclaves into pricey hot spots.

"These people move in, pay $1 million or $2 million for houses and they have a little bit of a feeling they are entitled to say what the neighborhood should be," said Timothy Glascott, whose father in 1937 opened a tavern that today is Glascott's Groggery.

"It's like the way people will buy a house under the flight path at O'Hare and complain about the noise," said Perry Duis, author of "The Saloon: Public Drinking in Chicago and Boston, 1880-1920," and a University of Illinois-Chicago history professor.

A vote-dry referendum that came close to getting on the ballot in one precinct in the early 1990s could have forced the closure of the acclaimed restaurant Charlie Trotter's. Trotter said he would have left the city had the referendum passed — but understands residents' concerns.

"The bars are filthy and nasty behind them, they smell like urine (and they're) noisy," he said. "If I were a neighbor living here and had to deal with... these grim, pathetic places, I would get mad enough to vote the neighborhood dry."

Daly is seeking a new ordinance that would enable residents to take on individual taverns. Under his proposal, the burden of proof would be on the owners of bars or liquor stores to show they aren't hurting their neighborhoods.

"A good liquor store can be a worthwhile part of a commercial strip," Daley said when he announced the plan last month. "But a bad liquor establishment can destroy the quality of life."

But others counter that all taverns are at risk, whether they are run responsibly or not. And that, they say, will ultimately hurt the city.

"We complain about the fact that we've become cities of strangers," said Duis, "and yet for some strange reason we go out and destroy places where people meet face to face."

FUCK A DALEY

(my job's up in Roscoe/Lakeview...on Irving Park (the street))

ah c'mon, man, give me a break. in 2001 chicago was the #1 murder city (666 total). daley isn't a fascist, he's too corrupt/incompetent.

...my friends live up in Roscoe village (on Damen, a few blocks from Irving Park), and it's OK but I don't need to be THAT close to work. As long as I can get to work EASILY (not necc quickly), I think I'm alright. What can you tell me about:

Ukrainian Village, Wicker Park etc. (that general area, I guess)

(I am 24, btw. My expected roommate will be making much less money than me, also)

Feature in the Sun Times today about the 25th anniversary of The Blues Brothers -- "The best movie ever made about Chicago." I guess, but the thing is, the Chicago in The Blues Brothers is TOTALLY UNRECOGNIZABLE now.

Any mayor who pisses off developers by forcing them to build green is ok by me.

dude, kenan, i had this ex whose boss worked in the chicago film office at the time and coordinated the chase scene! how cool is that?!?

xpost - fascists aren't green, either.

Ick. That's what I was afraid of. So it's really the red/brown line for me (office 2blocks from Addison on the brown). Is Roscoe really getting all old and married (not that this is bad)? Where are the venues? My friend lives 4 blocks from the Empty Bottle (i think that's it), but it took FOREVER to get up to Roscoe.

(thanks for answering all my questions, btw!!)

The neighborhoods are kinda nebulous anyhoo. It's a little convoluted, but the Reader SpaceFinder has a list of neighborhoods and corresponding zip codes, and also a zip code map.

http://www.hotdougs.com/

dude, i've known peeps up there for years.

(I'm just the question kid today)

for some reason i can't find a good scan of the chicago neighborhood map (you know the one! it's got inaccuracies, actually) online.

...maybe this is a weird too-personal-for-the-internet: where does y'all live (generally)? I'm trying to build a mental map, here. Also, I like ILxors and would probably like their hoods.

(xpost: I'm not having much luck, either)

I think it's EXTREMELY bike-friendly. It's my preferred mode of transportation. And I'm coming from Austin, a city that touts itself as being bike-friendly, but where good ol' boys yell out their pickup truck windows at you. "Faggot!" and "Get a car!" are favorites. Also, if you're not on a bike path, you're in a death trap.

Chicago's not like that at all. People watch out for you. No one seems to resent the fact that you're riding a bike -- which is a big factor in not getting killed. Just watch our for doors on parked cars and hold your space on the road, and you're golden.

Kelsey lives in Andersonville, too. And Kenan and Amateurist both used to live there as well. It's a nice neighborhood: it's def. more gentrified than it used to be, but there seems to be a pretty good range of ages and ethnicities that reside there. It's a historically Swedish neighborhood, but now the predominant cultural groups are Middle Easterners and lesbians!

ALSO, don't miss Dusty Groove on Ashland. One of my very favorite record stores ever. They specialize in what use to be called "hip hop breaks," but what you'd now call "general interest funk, jazz, and soul." Same thing, really.

I also lived for a while in Rogers Park, on the far north side of the city. The neighborhood isn't particularly pleasant, but now that more, umm, "youth-culture focus" is heading uptown, it's not so disconnected from things to do. And it's cheap up there.

Moving up the brown line will totally take you into vast residential areas, unbustling but pleasant, filled with large, reasonably-priced apartments.

Chicagoans: So what's the current status of the Pilsen-as-next-spot concept? Has this been given up on yet?

Roscoe is great. It's on my mental list of other neighborhoods I want to apartment hunt in some day. It is very babyfied, but also very pleasant. I would totally want to live there if I was about to make babies (or not). And yeah, I feel the same way about Lincoln Square. I just know Roscoe better. It has a little strip of restaurants (Victory's Banner! Yay!) and little shops, but is much more quiet than where I live now.

I live at the edge of Wicker Park now, near Ukranian village, a few blocks away from the Damen/Division intersection. I love my neighborhood. I've only been looking elsewhere (half-assedly) because I'm broke. But I do recommend the area where I live because you can still find some stuff that's not that expensive rent-wise.

(((Oh, speaking of eating -- a warning.)))

1. If you love baseball and drinking beer while watching baseball, you’re home. It’s like those signs on the freeway. “If you lived here you’d be home now!” If you drank beer and watched baseball in Chicago, you’d be home now.

2. The parks. They’re enormous. We don’t have a Central Park, we have a Lincoln Park, which is about ten miles (!) of premium, beautiful, unstoppable lake shore, with beaches and bike paths and soccer fields until the cows come home. Statues of Abraham Lincoln, too.

3. It’s green. Not only in the enviro sense, which is as true as it can be for a city this size, but it’s literally green. Trees everywhere. Flowers. Ivy covered buildings. If you zoom in on a Google Maps satellite image of downtown, you’ll notice many skyscraper rooftops covered in greenery. This is not a new idea, but Chicago has more of this kind of rooftop than any other US city. Here’s a tip: ivy-covered buildings are very cheap to cool and heat. Serious energy saver.

4. It’s not the biggest, fastest, most intense city in the world. This is a huge relief to all of us in Chicago.

5. It has alleys. You don’t have to put your trash in front of your home. Also a huge relief. And when the garbagemen go on strike, it’s not that big a deal.

6. The endless supply of cheap food. Most of it’s really good. I ate at Burger Baron on Grand and Noble last night: a half-pound hamburger, medium rare and delicious, for under $4. If you’re feeling vegetarian, you’re no worse off -- try the falafel sandwich at Sultan’s Market. Get the spicy sauce. Or Taste of Lebanon in Andersonville. You don’t even have to get too pricey for fine cuisine -- for less than $20 a plate, you can eat at West Town Tavern and have the best lamb you’ve ever had in your life. Or for the same amount, eat at Frontera Grill, where the habanero salsa compliments anything you order. It’s not “Mexican” food, it’s Mexico food. You’ll see when you get here. We’ll go on an eating tour.

7. The architecture. For a warm, sweet rush of art deco and beaux arts and Mies Van Der Rohe modernism and, uh, other, you can’t beat the corner of Michigan and Wacker. The FLLW houses in Oak Park are not to be missed. Or don’t even go that far, and get all prairie style. The closer you get to the lakeshore, the more pre-war and better designed things get. Living in a hundred-year-old building is wonderful. The floors are hardwood and the natural ventilation actually works. It’s amazing.

8. The CTA. No, really.

9. The people are awesome. Friendly and unpretentious. They smile at you on the street.

10. Summer.

I rode my bike to work for the second time today, which is awesome, but also it will be a very hot ride back home! I need to start packin' a bikini and daisy dukes.

problem solved.

DANCE PARTY!
Sunday, July 17th
10pm - 4am
Club Rednofive
FREE. OPEN BAR 10-11:30 (!!!)

DJs:
Justin V. (OUTHUD)
Jamie Stewart (XIU XIU)
Jordan Z.
+ SPECIAL GUEST!

Spinning Disco, Rock, House, Electro, Pop.

call in sick on monday. yay.

The #9 Ashland bus is a lifesaver, too.

http://www.tildas.com/Large%20Chocolate%20Chip%20Cookie.JPG

A couple summers back I biked along Damen, from North to Montrose and back, pretty much every Sunday night, headed up to hang out with friends: it was one of the most pleasant travels I've ever had, especially once it got late enough to really cruise.

Are there any actual Wicker Park haters here? The transport thing is one of those mild criticisms, basically a way of saying that you'll be like 10/15 minutes less convenient to a few Red Line things; this is far from a major problem, so long as you don't get lazy and start spending all your money on cabs. If I were moving back to Chicago I'd happily go right back to Wicker Park or Ukranian Village; maybe I'd complain about how some of my favorite stores there have been replaced by expensive boutiques, but I'd still happily do it.

Nice list kenan! I can't wait to move!

...I just got a sweet, large map of Chicago that I am going to look at and mark the locations of things on. Like apartments and venues.

my place will probably be available soon-ish. it's cheap & large.

Where?!

its in the issue with the "MOST EXPENSIVE HOTELS IN THE WORLD" feature on the cover...