Last time we looked in on the Palace Grill, that squat box of cholesterol at 1408 W. Madison St., it was, indeed, one of the last joints still breathing on the West Side strip, a strip declared dead decades ago.
That was back in 1992, a rainy mid-September morning, when we almost knocked the yolk-and-coffee crew off their ripped-vinyl stools, dragging in Robin Leach, he of “Rich and Famous” fame, for a Denver omelet that could have doubled as a doorstop for the Taj Mahal.
Since then, big things have been happening on the street that slices the city in two: The once-frayed and faded asphalt once again is black and smooth and broad. The Stadium and the new United Center loom on the horizon, concrete ghosts of past and present; the site of the 1996 Democratic National Convention, the United Center is a meal ticket to almost any business that stands between it and the Loop. And right across from the Palace rises the city’s new five-story 911 Communications Center.
“Over the years you been waiting for something like this to happen,” says George Lemperis, 36, proprietor and grill man at the Palace since he and his late father, Pete, bought the place in 1979. “This is your ship coming in.
“We’re down here in this down-and-out neighborhood all these years, tax-paying citizens, scraping to stay. Now, they got 800 employees going in there,” he says, pointing toward the 911 center, due to be populated sometime next year.
But Lemperis didn’t always have his sunny side up. Before the groundbreaking even took place, in October 1992, Lemperis and the legions who fill his shop for breakfast and lunch and coffee in between got wind of plans for a parking garage that would be attached to the 911 center via an above-ground walkway. And the Palace would be no longer. “They were going to eminent domain us, knock us down,” Lemperis says.
Lemperis didn’t wait long to pick up the corner pay phone that doubles as the business line at the Palace. “A lot of people went to bat for us. The mayor’s brother, Bill Daley, he eats here once in a while, I talked to him about it. He says, `If I have anything to do with it-the Palace is one of my favorite restaurants-they’re not gonna take it.’ “
After some grilling, city officials pooh-poohed the notion that they’d ever planned a parking garage to swallow whole the Palace. Anyway, they said, whatever plans they might have had got poured down the grease drain when the City Council knocked the garage from the budget.
Lemperis couldn’t imagine the landscape without his place upon it, right where it has been since World War II. He says he’ll sit down and cry if anyone ever tries to take it away. “This store has history and character. It couldn’t be replaced.”