Tears, not yet. But more than a few people visiting Tavern on Rush over the last few days have had a mournful look.
The reason was the recent announcement this venerable and quite good tavern/restaurant, which has fed and delighted people at the corner of Rush and Bellevue Streets for nearly 25 years, will be vanishing.
As my colleague Nick Kindelsperger informed you in a Tribune story last week, one of the “Gold Coast’s most iconic and packed restaurants” will be closing after its New Year’s Eve festivities, its last patrons wandering off into early morning darkness.
Now, I know that many of you, likely most of you, have never been to this place but something owner Phil Stefani told Kindelsperger made me consider, and not for the first time I can assure you, the important spot taverns and restaurants have in the fabric of our urban landscape.
Tavern on Rush is closing because its long lease is ending and Stefani said, “Every restaurant builds its own niche and history, and we’ve been blessed. Twenty-five years is a long time for any restaurant … That’s the thing about restaurants, it’s really the hospitality industry. People have strong memories. This is where they go on dates, have meetings and cut deals.”
I have plenty of tavern/restaurant years under my belt and have seen dozens, perhaps hundreds, of them vanish, the victims of changing neighborhoods, changing tastes, wrecking balls or economic pressures.
The pandemic has only accelerated this vanishing act.
But we have been lucky here. As Mike Royko wrote in the introduction to a book that I wrote in 1979 titled “Dr. Night Life’s Chicago, “Whoever poured the first trickle of whiskey (here) could not have known that it was the first drop of rain in what would become a monsoon … Chicago became one of the great drinking towns of the world. Those who followed the early French and English pioneers — the German, Irish, Italian, Polish, Bohemian and other ethnic groups — all had strong thirst … Chicago’s bars have always opened early and closed late.”
There were once, say around 1950, something in the neighborhood of 7,000 taverns in Chicago. Many of them served food but mostly they served as important social focal points, shelters from the storms of daily life. The best of them were able to survive because of a delicate alchemy based on booze but also because of a sense of fellowship, providing a level playing field.
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There are only about 1,000 now and paging through “Dr. Night Life’s Chicago,” I found many more places that are gone — Embers, Backroom, BBC, Otto’s, Orphans, Earl of Old Town, Sterch’s, Theresa’s (wow, the list is long) — than remain, such as the Old Town Ale House, Billy Goat Tavern, Twin Anchors, Zanies (wow, the list is short).
It’s a tough business, running a tavern or a restaurant. Stefani has had a long and justifiably successful career since he opened his first outpost, Stefani’s on Fullerton Avenue in 1980. He has owned and still owns some good places and for a time he took over one of the most famous spots in town.
It was opened in 1934 as Riccardo Restaurant and Gallery and, later, became Phil Stefani’s 437 Rush for the first 15 years of this new century. It was popular and crowded until some tussles over a new lease drove Stefani away.
It’s been closed ever since but its name came up among some people sitting outside at one of the sidewalk tables at Tavern on Rush. Those of a certain age remembered when the place across the street was not Gibsons, now into its third decade, but Sweetwater, and before that the legendary Mister Kelly’s. Someone mentioned Jay’s, which operated where the Thompson Hotel now sits. Other names of the “dead” surfaced: Gate of Horn, Cloister, Rally Alley, Arnie’s, the Happy Medium, Billy’s, Melvin’s, Singapore.
Change is a part of life, and keeps things interesting. But it is ever a healthy thing to recall the good times long gone, the good places too, and that includes not just people but restaurants and taverns.
I am reminded of something written by Samuel Johnson, the English writer and biographer who never visited Chicago before his death in 1784. He hit upon what I think is a universal truth when he wrote, “There is nothing which has yet been contrived by man, by which so much happiness is produced as by a good tavern.”