I am sitting in Orso’s, a venerable Wells Street restaurant that is all dolled up for Christmas. I am, simultaneously, drinking a bourbon, watching SportsCenter on the television above the bar and listening to Mary Clare Barker play Gershwin tunes on the piano. I am thinking, and not for the first time, that barrooms and restaurants are the principal environments for experiencing the joys of culture and sports and community.
Memories flood back, of comedy clubs and jazz joints, sports bars and billiard bars, discos and ballrooms, hotel lounges with piano bars, folk clubs and cabarets, a bygone Southport Avenue restaurant called Viennese Kaffee-Haus Brandt, a South Side polka club. . . .
Is there any form of culture not available in Chicago’s saloons?
It may seem to some members of the cultural elite that such environments are inappropriate for experiencing art. I would remind these folks that Second City, for one notably influential venue, is in essence more night club than theater; that the best musical performances traditionally have taken place not in concert halls but in night clubs; and that the blues was born in basement dives.
For those who maintain that watching sports on television and not in person somehow diminishes the visceral impact, I would invite them to any of dozens of neighborhood taverns on a Sunday when the Bears are playing; tell them to head almost anytime to the 6,790-or-so-screen emporium that is the new ESPN Zone on Ohio Street; or to remember the wild celebrations on the Division Street saloon strip in the wake of various Bulls’ championship victories.
The city has a rich and lengthy tradition of saloons catering to most of our entertainment and cultural needs. It can be traced to early settler Marc Beaubien, who would often enliven his Sauganash Inn with fine fiddle-playing balladeering in the 1830s.
The saloon has always functioned as an important social focal point, though few have been willing to admit–or understand–its significance as a culturally enriching agent.
In his book “Drink: A Social History of America,” Andrew Barr writes about saloons in the early years of this century: “In a saloon every man was equal . . . The saloon provided newspapers, billiards, card tables, bowling alleys, lavatories, and washing facilities . . . The saloon provided information and company.”
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And, in Chicago, one might add entertainment, sports and culture.
Writer A.J. Liebling spent some time here in the late 1940s and wrote a series of articles for the New Yorker–later collected in book form–that would become famous for giving the city its Second City moniker.
Liebling wrote: “A thing about Chicago that impressed me from the hour I got there was the saloons. New York bars operate on the principle that you want a drink or you wouldn’t be there. If you are civil and don’t mind waiting, they will sell you one when they get around to it. Chicago bars assume that nobody likes liquor, and that to induce the customers to purchase even a minute quantity, they have to provide a show. Restaurateurs, I was to learn, approach the selling of food from the same angle.”
The legendary Ernie Byfield set the tone for Chicago’s restaurants-as-theatrical-experiences tradition when he created the Pump Room in the Ambassador East Hotel in 1938.
It was a place modeled loosely on Bath, the 18th Century British gambling spa that was a place where, as Byfield put it, “Commoners, authors, poets and painters were encouraged to come . . . to hobnob with the titled folk.”
At the Pump Room each booth was a little stage. Byfield correctly believed–and it is true of some of the finer joints in town today–that many people came to the Pump Room to be observed by as many people as possible. And so he created 40 little well-staged dramas. All that and a dance band.
Byfield’s Pump Room was the tonier bookend of Ric Riccardo’s more bohemian Riccardo’s, the Rush Street restaurant that from 1940s was a remarkable gathering place for artists, writers, journalists, opera singers and movie stars, admen and bon vivants, real and would-be.
It was called the “Montmartre of the Midwest” and Riccardo allowed artist friends to hang their work (for sale) on his restaurant’s walls, creating an environment that pleased both painters and patrons. He painted three large female nude murals.
In 1947, after expanding into an adjacent building, he created a bar in the shape of an artist’s palette and placed above it on the wall seven murals representing the “Lively Arts”: Ivan Albright’s “Drama,” Aaron Bohrad’s “Architecture,” Rudolph Weisenborn’s “Literature,” Vincent D’Agostino’s “Painting,” William Schwartz’s “Music,” Malvin Albright’s “Sculpture,” and his own “Dance.”
The arts and booze have always mixed, and the echoes of Byfield and Riccardo are all over, from the sculpted dishes and theatrical presentation of food at Tru or Charlie Trotter’s to the paintings adorning the walls of bars in Wicker Park.
The best jazz in town is found in saloons such as Pops for Champagne, Andy’s, the Jazz Showcase and even the lobby of the Hotel Inter-Continental, where Judy Roberts is a glorious five-nights-a-week fixture.
Restaurateur Bob Djahanguiri always has live performers in his Yvette and Yvette Wintergarden restaurants. And, disdained in some quarters as they may be, what of the sounds of wandering mariachi bands in Mexican restaurants in the city and suburbs?
Byfield once said, “I don’t want grim gourmets around my restaurants. I want laughing eaters.”
Food and drink may enrich the body, but they do not enrich the soul. We demand more from the places that give us food and drink. And around Chicago we get it.
An argument could be made that the best place in which to hear that most rarefied art form, poetry, is at the Sunday night Poetry Slam at the Green Mill, an old-fashioned saloon on Broadway a few steps north of Lawrence Avenue.
Sheila Donahue, a talented poet and veteran of the Green Mill slams, told me, “In most bars people don’t have anything really to say to one another. But the slam mixes people together, lets them get to know each other . . . There is a sense of self-discovery, a sense of community.”
The same is true for those who visit saloons and taverns to watch sports.
Most people no longer can afford, or they lack the clout to get, seats for the Bulls or Bears or Hawks, so the tavern TV has become like some primitive campfire around which people gather, those seeking the heat of the action, the collective victory yelp or sigh of defeat.
There are some who will always be disdainful of saloons, deeming them unsuitable places of smoky shadows, soggy napkins, desperate hopes and busted dreams.
Nonsense. My late father, a man of culture, used to get misty-eyed recalling nights watching Billie Holiday at a South Side club, and just last week, a young person I know was raving about a theatrical reading he witnessed in a bar on Southport.
The great Buddy Charles, who until retiring this year enthralled late-night crowds with his piano at Acorn on Oak and later at the Coq D’or in the Drake Hotel, once explained the appeal of hearing music in saloons by telling me, “What makes it work is that people are inherently eager for intimacy.”
That and, I believe, inherently eager for culture and entertainment, whether from a jukebox or a polka band, the quiet tinkling of a piano or a TV set behind the bar.