CHAPTER 44 of THE COOLEST SPOT IN CHICAGO:
A HISTORY OF GREEN MILL GARDENS AND THE BEGINNINGS OF UPTOWN
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There’s a legend about how Steve Brend got his first job at the Green Mill. Brend, who eventually became the owner, said that he’d landed his first job at the tavern with some help from “Machine Gun” Jack McGurn.
Born in 1917 in Flat River, Missouri,1 Brend grew up in Buckner, a tiny town in southern Illinois, where his stepfather worked as a coal miner. Brend was a teenager when he headed north to Chicago in the depths of the Great Depression.
“He was starving,” Brend’s son Jonathan told me.2 “And he went to the back of a restaurant. He asked them if he could dishes—or anything—for a meal. The owner of the business felt sorry for him. And that’s what he did. He started washing dishes. And he was so hungry that he ate the food off the plates. On his first day, at the end of his shift, they said it was time to eat and he said, nah, he was full. He would tell us that story all time.”
Brend started working at this Loop restaurant. “And one day he was—I don’t know if he was busing tables or waiting tables,” Jonathan said. “And Machine Gun Jack McGurn was there. You know who that was? He left a $1 tip on the table. And my father got the dollar. That’s like 100 bucks back then. My dad asked the boss who that guy was, and they said it was Machine Gun Jack McGurn.”
McGurn—whose real name was Vincent Gebardi or Vincenzo Gibaldi—was a notorious henchman in Chicago’s mobs. Back in 1927, he’d reportedly been a part-owner of the Green Mill (an earlier and larger incarnation of the nightclub). And he’d been a suspect in the brutal beating of entertainer Joe Lewis, who was attacked after he’d ended his engagement at the Green Mill to perform at a rival club.
When Steve Brend talked decades later about Lewis and McGurn, he told the Chicago Reader: “I knew the real story because Jack McGurn told me. He used to come in here for a drink, even after Prohibition. I didn’t meet him here, though. I met him downtown before I started working here.”3
Jonathan Brend recalled his father saying that McGurn “was one of the most sharp-dressed people he’d ever seen.” For some reason, McGurn decided to give a generous tip to the teenager from southern Illinois who’d stopped by his table. “He just said he liked him,” Jonathan said. “He left him a dollar.” Maybe McGurn noticed the youngster’s work ethic. “My dad was a very hard worker. He was a workaholic.”
The young Steve Brend later had another encounter with McGurn. “Somehow, somewhere they got hooked up again,” Jonathan said. “And he gave him a job at the Green Mill.”
Dave Jemilo, the Green Mill’s current owner, heard this story when he bought the nightclub from Steve Brend—and Jemilo repeated the tale to the Chicago Tribune when Brend died in 2006. In Brend’s obituary, the newspaper reported: “Working as a dishwasher in a Loop restaurant, Mr. Brend received his first dollar tip from McGurn, Jemilo said. Before long, Mr. Brend was serving drinks in Uptown, at the Mill.”4
But the timing of these events is unclear. In the 1980s, the Chicago Reader, Tribune, and Sun-Times all reported that Brend started working at the Green Mill in 1938. The Reader quoted him saying, “When I started in ’38…”5 The Tribune’s obituary also said that he’d started working there in 1938. Meanwhile, author Jacki Lyden quoted him as saying, “I’ve been here since 1939.”6
If he started in either 1938 or 1939, then the story about McGurn getting him a job seems doubtful—because McGurn was shot to death on February 15, 1936.7 As Brend told the Reader, McGurn “was gunned down in the late ’30s in a bowling alley.” When he said “the late ’30s,” perhaps he was misremembering the year of McGurn’s death.8
Is it possible that Brend actually started working earlier at the Green Mill? The tavern opened for business in 1934 or 1935, following a 1933 fire in the building. The way Jonathan remembered the stories, his father was 18 years old when he started working there—which would have been in 1935. And if Steve Brend was correct when he said that McGurn used to stop in for a drink at the Green Mill after Prohibition, that must have been in 1935 or early 1936.
It’s not clear that McGurn had any role in running the Green Mill Tavern at this time. Was he a friend or an associate of the Chamales brothers, who owned the bar during these years? Maybe McGurn had some lingering clout at the Green Mill from his earlier heyday as a dangerous mobster, despite newspaper reports suggesting that he no longer wielded much power in Chicago’s gangland in the mid-1930s. If so, that might explain how McGurn would be able to get a job at the Green Mill for a hard-working kid from southern Illinois, even if McGurn didn’t have any formal connection to the business. It’s also possible that Brend was telling the truth about meeting McGurn, but the part of the story about McGurn getting him a job may not be entirely accurate.
In any case, Steve Brend started working at the Green Mill by the late 1930s. “It was some little job on cleanup or something,” Jonathan said. But it was a job that changed Steve Brend’s life. “That was it,” his son said. “The love of his life was the Green Mill.”
The Green Mill Tavern at 4802 Broadway appeared in Chicago’s yellow pages for the first time in February 1935. The Green Mill Restaurant was next door, at 4804.
During this era, the company running the Green Mill Tavern had a mysterious name: It was known as the RM Corporation,9 but it’s unknown what those letters stood for. William Chamales was the company’s president when it received its first state liquor license on August 26, 1935.10 Brend remembered three Chamales brothers—Tom, Bill, and George—as “the owners I worked for.”11 Tom had a real estate office upstairs.12
Brend heard the Chamales brothers telling stories about the early years of Green Mill Garden—especially Tom, who’d built the nightclub and later owned the building. “He had a big personality. He was the life-of-the-party type,” Jonathan Brend said, recalling his father’s stories about Tom Chamales. “I knew an older bar owner who would go [to the Green Mill] when Chamales was the owner. He said when Chamales would see him, he would bring out the dice and they would play for money. He enjoyed gambling. Chamales was a guy who would gamble on the bar. It was all a gamble. My dad said the same thing.”
Tom Chamales also had a long history of gambling with real estate—taking out loans on his property, and essentially wagering that he’d make enough profit to pay back those loans. Millions of dollars came due in the 1930s, and Chamales was unable to pay.
His wife, Helene, filed for bankruptcy in 1936, reporting that she owed $2,934,962.42. Those were actually debts her husband had racked up, including $354,750 in unpaid loans on the Green Mill property. Helene said she had only $175 in assets to her name, including miscellaneous personal possessions: five frocks; two evening dresses; one fur coat; one cloth coat; four hats; four pairs of shoes; one lot of linen and silk garments; one lot of stockings, handkerchiefs, purses, bags, and miscellaneous apparel; one wedding ring; one wristwatch; and 20 books “of fiction, music, travel etc.”13
Tom Chamales later told a reporter that he’d lost most of his wealth during the Great Depression.14 He blamed “general economic conditions” when one of his companies, the Riviera Building Corporation, went bankrupt, unable to pay more than $600,000 in debts on the theater building across the street from the Green Mill.15 He lost control of the Riviera building, which he’d built in 1917, when it was sold at auction in 1936.16
In 1937, the tenants upstairs in the Green Mill building included Dr. Harold B. Cassidy,17 one of two physicians who’d pleaded guilty to performing plastic surgery on John Dillinger and his fellow bank robber Homer Van Meter in 1933, helping them to evade police.
Cassidy had administered anesthesia during these operations in the apartment of James Probasco at 2509 North Crawford Avenue (now Pulaski Road).
The scheme was coordinated by Dillinger lawyer Louis Piquett (whose other clients included Leo V. Brothers, the Green Mill employee convicted of killing mob-affiliated Tribune reporter Jake Lingle).18
Dillinger was pleased with the results of his surgery, but Van Meter reportedly ranted: “What a mess they made out of me! I paid out five thousand dollars, and what did I get for it? Nothing but a lot of pain!”19 A year later, Dillinger and Van Meter were each gunned down and killed by authorities. Cassidy also admitted giving medical aid in 1933 to Samuel Turriano, who was on the run after taking part in the killing of two Chicago police officers.20
It’s unknown how long Cassidy practiced medicine in the Green Mill building, but Jonathan Brend remembered his father talking about the notorious physician. “One of the alcoholics at the bar was the doctor who botched John Dillinger’s surgery,” he said. Cassidy was convicted of driving while intoxicated in 1940.21 He worked for a time as a government physician on Indian reservations and served in the military during World War II, before killing himself during a return visit to Chicago in 1946.22
A judge ordered another public auction for the Green Mill building in 1938. The highest bidder, John L. Patten, paid $210,335.57 for the property,23 before transferring it into a trust.24 Victor J. Curto, who’d been managing the building and collecting rent from tenants, continued to do so.25
In 1938, the Green Mill Ballroom appeared in Chicago phone books for the first time since the ballroom was wrecked by fire in 1933. As it reopened, it continued to have an entrance at 4806 Broadway—the same address that had functioned over the years as the entryway to entertainment venues in the building’s northwest corner. Now that the ballroom was back open, the building had three different businesses with “Green Mill” in their names.26
It may have seemed like a Green Mill entertainment complex, but each of these businesses actually had a different owner: The Green Mill Tavern at 4802 Broadway was run by RM Corporation; the state liquor license listed William Chamales as the company’s president, but corporation documents identified the president as George Cherones.27 Next door, the Green Mill Restaurant at 4802 Broadway was run by the Economy Restaurant Company, owned by the Batsis family.28 With an entrance two doors farther north, the Green Mill Ballroom was owned by brothers David and Maurice Solovy, who also ran other dancing establishments around the city, including the Granada on the South Side and Marigold Gardens on the North Side.29
Photo: Chicago & North Western Historical Society.
A photo of the Green Mill Building taken during World War II shows a new sign for the ballroom: The word “DANCE” is spelled out vertically on a sign that descends at an angle, like an arrow pointing out toward Broadway. Below that, a horizontal sign says: “GREEN MILL BALL ROOM. TUES., FRI., SAT. AND SUN.” There’s also a new sign in front of the bar at 4802 Broadway, with lightbulbs surrounding the neon script: “Green Mill Cocktail Lounge.” This is the iconic sign that still covers the top portion of the jazz club façade today.30
Whenever the Green Mill was mentioned by newspapers in the 1940s, it was the ballroom at 4806 Broadway that attracted attention, not the tavern at 4802 Broadway. The Solovy brothers sold the ballroom to Stanley Cwikla in 1944.31 The following year, ads touted it as “Chicago’s Coziest Ballroom,” while noting that it had an “intimate cocktail lounge.”32
In 1946, Kay’s Dixieland Band—conducted by a “baton girl” known simply as Kay—furnished “music for the older folks” two nights a week, while trumpeter Orville Surf and his orchestra “set the pace for itching-to-dance feet” on three nights.33 A year later, a Daily Times columnist observed: “Both the jive-cat and the serene-steppers are dancing in the North Side’s Green Mill ballroom where bandleader Rudy Austin manages to cram enough sweet and swing rhythms into each evening’s session to satisfy partisans of both brands of music.”34
The ballroom changed names in 1949, becoming the Palladium Ballroom, which lasted until around 1956.35
The Chamales brothers sold the Green Mill Tavern in 1942, ending their long history at this legendary nightspot.36 The Batsis family took over the tavern, starting a new corporation called Green Mill Cocktail Lounge Inc.37 This was when the lounge started hosting live entertainment, Steve Brend later recalled.38
But Tom Chamales hadn’t given up on using the Green Mill name quite yet. In February 1943, he opened a new version of the Green Mill in the basement of 11 North Clark Street in the Loop.39 It didn’t last long, however. That November, the space reopened as the Morocco restaurant.40
In the coming years, Chamales ran several hotels, including the Delaware Hotel in Muncie, Indiana, where he moved with his wife in 1951.41 He also ran the Commercial in Yakima, Washington; the Fox in Elgin, Illinois; and the Cliff Long Manor in Newport, Rhode Island.42
His son, Tom T. Chamales, served in the Pacific in World War II and then gained fame as a bestselling author. His war experiences inspired his debut novel, Never So Few. He reportedly became a pal of Frank Sinatra, who starred in the movie version.43
His second novel, Go Naked in the World, was about a veteran’s relationship with his Greek immigrant father, who just happened to be the former owner of a Chicago nightclub known as “the Mill.” It, too, became a bestseller and a Hollywood movie.
The younger Chamales also made headlines for his troubled second marriage, to singer Helen O’Connell, who reported him to the police several times for domestic violence. She accused him of beating her up, holding her captive,44 and threatening to kill her45 as well as their daughter, who was 18 months old at the time.46 “I think he’s violent and unsafe,” Helen told a New York magistrate in one case. “I think he’s dangerous.”47
Meanwhile, he was talking with composer Jule Styne about writing a musical about his father’s famous nightclub, Green Mill Gardens. Ethel Merman, who was starring in Styne’s musical Gypsy on Broadway, listened in with interest as they talked about the story.48 Chamales reportedly wrote an outline for a screenplay called “The Mill.”49
But he never finished those projects. On March 20, 1960, Tom T. Chamales died at the age of 35, asphyxiated during a fire in a penthouse apartment in Los Angeles.
Authorities believed that a cigarette started the fire while he was sleeping.50 He’d awakened and tried to escape. “Numerous smudged handmarks and smears of blood were found on three walls of the bedroom,” the Hollywood Citizen-News reported. “The blood smears apparently came from a wound on Chamales’ hand when he smashed a bedroom bureau mirror in his desperation, police said.”
In spite of their difficult marriage, Helen O’Connell said, “Tom’s death is a terrible loss to me, his family and his many friends. His work as a writer was very important to him. And all this is over now. Everyone who knew him well will understand the feelings of those who lived him.”51
Three years later, his father, Tom Chamales, died in Newport, Rhode Island.52
Steve Brend’s employment at the Green Mill was interrupted by World War II, when he went off to fight in Europe. “On December 7, 1941, my dad was at a football game when an announcement was made that Pearl Harbor was bombed,” his son Jonathan told me. “He decided it was his duty to join. … After being turned down by the Navy, he was accepted by the Army.”
Before going to fight in Europe, Brend married his second wife, Margaret Maxine Montgomery. “My dad had divorced his first wife,” Jonathan said. “He met my mom at the Green Mill. My mom was from Iowa. She was working as a nanny for a Jewish family. On a night out with friends she went to the Green Mill. Dad liked her and asked her out. She said no. She had a boyfriend named Heinz Becker. He played first base for the Chicago Cubs. A couple weeks later she came back and Dad was ready. He showed her a news story about how Becker had a big day at Wrigley. It also talked about his wife and kids in Texas. Adios Heinz, Hello Steve. That was the beginning of their romance. …
“Dad was put in a hospital unit in Patton’s Third Army. He did everything in the hospital. He was listed as a cook but was way more than that. He carried wounded and dead soldiers. He assisted in surgery. He cooked food and he was really good at trading and scrounging. Did you ever see the movie The Great Escape? Do you remember the James Garner character? That was my dad. He was a scrounger.
“He was on the ground in ’44, ’45. His experiences in the Army were harrowing. He saw so much devastation and death. He also was at several concentration camps, giving aid to survivors. He had some grisly photos. Once, a truck he was riding in overturned and he suffered a leg injury that haunted him the rest of his life. The only reason he didn’t get captured was because other soldiers carried him to safety.”
When Brend returned to Chicago after the war, he went back to work at the Green Mill. Outside the bar, the Uptown neighborhood was changing. “When I started in ’38, all the houses around here had live-in maids, nice girls from Iowa, Illinois, Indiana,” Steve Brend reminisced in 1982. “Then after the war they chopped those homes up into apartments and somebody opened the American Television School on Broadway here.” He was referring to the American Television Institute, which was at 5050 North Broadway as early as 1947.53 “Guys on the GI Bill went to school there and lived in those apartments. Then in the ’50s a lot of Appalachian whites moved in.”54
Uptown’s population reached its all-time peak in 1950, when the U.S. Census Bureau counted 84,462 people. Nearly all of them—98 percent—were white.55 But Uptown was no longer a magnet for shoppers. Many of its buildings were falling into disrepair. And poor white migrants from Appalachia were moving in,56 giving Uptown a reputation as “Jungles of Hillbillies,” as the Chicago Daily Tribune put it in a 1957 headline. The prejudice against these newcomers—mostly from Kentucky and West Virginia57—was blatantly obvious in Tribune reporter Norma Lee Browning’s sensational articles. She wrote about “clans of fightin’, feudin’ southern hillbillies and their shootin’ cousins, who today constitute one of the most dangerous and lawless elements of Chicago’s fast growing migrant population.”58
Mark Guarino’s 2023 book, Country and Midwestern: Chicago in the History of Country Music, includes an illuminating chapter about Uptown during this era. “Uptown is where poverty festered, where newcomers to the city were forced to survive in crowded, filthy, and unsafe living conditions that they did not create, but for which they were often blamed,” Guarino wrote. “The real culprit was density: families were forced to live in one- or two-room units, which represented over half the total housing units in 1960. More than a quarter of units lacked proper plumbing. Relocation to the city meant accepting confinement. People who once lived proudly on land that belonged to their families over generations now squeezed into close quarters that weren’t their own. Sidewalks became an extension of the home. Children played amid broken glass and trash under the elevated train tracks.”59
Photos of Uptown in 1974 by Danny Lyon. National Archives, 412-DA-13498 and 412-DA-13499.
With its juxtaposition of old movie palaces and urban hillbillies, Uptown fascinated many writers, including Todd Gitlin and Nanci Hollander. In their 1970 book, Uptown: Poor Whites in Chicago, they described a typical Chicagoan’s perception of this neighborhood: “Maybe you have heard of Uptown, but it sounds like a limbo, not a place: a vague name conjuring up only faint images of gray-brown places, somewhere on the farthest reaches of the el where no one would live by choice. Uptown stands for the empty space which is not downtown, where neon lights are few and crowds mean riots, where people mask their faces with newspapers back and forth to work every day, where ‘life goes on’ means ‘death is just around the corner.’”60
But even as the Uptown neighborhood fell on hard economic times, some of the entertainment venues from its golden age of the 1920s lived on, still drawing crowds. The Riviera and the Uptown Theatre continued showing movies. Over on Clark Street north of Lawrence Avenue, the former Rainbo Gardens reopened after the war as a ballroom, featuring performances by Tommy Dorsey, Les Brown, and Stan Kenton. In the 1950s, the Rainbo’s former jai alai arena hosted boxing and wrestling matches.61 The Aragon continued hosting ballroom dancing through the early 1960s, when owner Andy Karzas acknowledged that times were changing. “Young people today, the fellows don’t want to learn how to dance,” he told Studs Terkel in 1963. “They think it’s a sissy activity. And young people go through high schools without learning. They do a lot of gyrations in record stores, but they don’t learn beautiful ballroom dancing.”62
Among other things, Uptown became known as a place to drink. By the 1960s, taverns occupied nearly one out of every five storefronts in the neighborhood.63 “Wilson Avenue,” a 1965 song by local musician Buddy Thompson, painted the picture: “think of a street seven blocks long / and countless people who just drink and roam.”64
When Art Cohn was writing The Joker Is Wild, his 1955 book about Joe E. Lewis, he stopped into the Green Mill. “It was an ordinary bar,” he wrote. “… In the window, next to a box of faded pink paper flowers, was a sign: ‘Scotty Highlanders—No Cover Charge—Lilyan Cole Nightly at the Hammond Organ.’ Inside, a Stan Kenton record was spinning on a one-hundred-record player. Four people were drinking, three of them beer, at a long bar on one side of the narrow room. Only one of the booths that lined the other wall was occupied, by a young couple, intently tapping the beat of the music.”65
It may have seemed like “an ordinary bar” to Cohn, but Steve Brend believed it was a special place. Stanley Cwikla, who’d owned the Green Mill Ballroom in the 1940s, took over the tavern. But in June 1960, he had a heart attack while driving his car on Ashland Avenue, crashing into a lamp post and dying.66 Steve Brend and his wife bought the tavern from Cwikla’s widow.
One night in the early 1960s, two robbers attacked Brend as he returned home from a night at the Green Mill. “They waited for him in the basement,” his son Jonathan recalled. “And they jumped him and beat the crap out of him. He had his keys in his hand, and he jabbed his key into one guy’s eye, and that’s why they took off running. My pops really fought for his life. They never got the money. My dad held onto the bag.
“He really liked having a job—because he had tasted what it like to have nothing. You know, he was the star of the show. Everybody knew him. He would always be rummaging through stuff and going to stores and buying—guys bringing him deals.
“He never had a car. He took the bus to work every day. One time, we went to see Patton at the Riviera. He told us his war stories—everybody on the bus. And people were enthralled. They were clapping and cheering as he was telling his stories. He liked to tell stories.”
Steve Brend often recounted the stories he’d heard about Uptown’s era of bygone glamour, when the entertainment palace at the northwest corner of Broadway and Lawrence Avenue was known as Green Mill Gardens. “My brother would get mad when he heard the same stories over and over,” Jonathan said. “I never got tired of it.”
He didn’t always get every fact correct, but he passed down the lore that he’d learned about the place. “There’s thousands of stories here. I know them all,” Brend told author Jacki Lyden, for her 1980 book about Uptown. “… I remember when you never saw a lady in here without a hat and the men always wore ties. Now everybody comes in here, everybody from this neighborhood—Indians, Koreans, Mexicans—you name it and they come here, and I like that.”67
More people of color had begun moving into Uptown in the 1960s. By the time of the U.S. census in 1970, the neighborhood was 88 percent white, 5 percent Black, 4 percent Asian, and 3 percent “other,” a group that included Native Americans. Overlapping with those racial categories, 13 percent were “persons of Spanish language.” The median household income was about 30 percent below the number for Chicago as a whole—Uptown was the city’s poorest white neighborhood.68
Appalachian migrants, who were often blamed for Uptown’s woes, protested against their living conditions. “I just don’t like to live in a neighborhood where your wife can’t walk down the street without people’s knockin em in the head,” said John Dawson, an Appalachian migrant quoted in Gitlin and Hollander’s book. “In the spring of the year and summertime, when the weather’s warm, it’s just a knockout and a drag-in there. It’s a gang hangout. Children usin the language goin up and down the streets that they use this day and time, it’s pitiful. … I think they need some recreation for the people. … places inside where it’d be warm where the children and people could go and take the kids and they could play, place of having to be in the damn streets and sidewalks in front of the cars and everything—hell, I never seen a city like this before, about that.”69
Uptown’s bars often featured country music. So did the neighborhood’s streets, where guitar-strumming musicians were a common sight.70 But in the late 1960s, Uptown also became a hub for rock concerts. After shutting down as a dancing ballroom in 1964, the Aragon was rebranded as the Cheetah Lounge in October 1966, with white fabric covering up much of the ballroom’s Spanish-style decor. “At Cheetah, the whole place will pulse,” a manager promised.71 But it reverted to the Aragon name in 1968, after the Cheetah ran into financial trouble. (The club reportedly lost $10,000 when the Turtles canceled a concert because of the riots following Martin Luther King’s assassination.) As the newly renamed Aragon hosted concerts by the Shadows of Knight, Herman’s Hermits, and Jefferson Airplane, the drapes covering up the ballroom’s fancy decorations were removed. “Grownup people don’t need all that psychedelic light-flashing to enjoy themselves,” owner Emerson Whitney said.72
The former Rainbo became one of Chicago’s top rock venues when it reopened in April 1968 as the Electric Theater; that September, it was renamed the Kinetic Playground. It lasted less than two years but hosted many of the era’s biggest rock bands: Jefferson Airplane, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Deep Purple, and Van Morrison, to name just a few.
The concerts included some remarkable triple-bill shows: the Byrds, Muddy Waters, and Fleetwood Mac on one night; Vanilla Fudge, Led Zeppelin, and Jethro Tull on another. At one show, the Velvet Underground played as well as the Grateful Dead. Another night featured the Kinks and the Who. But the Kinetic Playground closed when it was damaged by a fire after the November 7, 1969, show by Iron Butterfly, Poco, and King Crimson.73
In the 1970s, the neighborhood’s white population plummeted from 65,644 to 30,561, while other racial groups continued to grow.74 Demolition, “urban renewal” projects, and widespread arsons helped to spur that white exodus. Truman College opened in 1976, taking over a large chunk of the neighborhood where hundreds of decrepit apartments had once stood. “Building Truman meant demolishing more than a thousand low-income housing units, which pushed thousands of people out,” Guarino wrote.75 As a result, Uptown began to lose its Appalachian culture. “The exodus silenced the music,” Guarino wrote. “The neighborhood taverns that once featured live country music or jukeboxes generously stocked with country hits closed, one after another.”76
In 1972, grad student Bob Rehak passed through Uptown on the el, fascinated and frightened by what he saw: “Streets littered with garbage. Broken pavement and sidewalks. A flop house advertising rooms for 75 cents per night. Winos passed out on sidewalks or drinking on doorsteps. Amputees on crutches dressed in tattered clothes. Stolen, stripped and abandoned cars. Crumbling, boarded-up, burned-out buildings covered with gang graffiti. Men, women and children lined up outside day labor agencies. Taverns, resale shops and pawn shops stretching as far as I could see.”
Rehak ended up taking some 5,000 photographs of Uptown between late 1973 and early 1977, later collecting them in his book Uptown: Portrait of a Chicago Neighborhood in the Mid-1970s. (Rehak offers a free PDF of his book on his website: https://bobrehak.com/portfolio-2/documentary/)
In spite of Rehak’s initial fears, “The people were remarkably open and welcoming,” he wrote. “They felt flattered that someone was paying attention to them and listening to their concerns. … In Uptown, everyone struggled to survive and to achieve some semblance of normalcy in their lives while surrounded by winos, addicts, decay, violence, bar fights and halfway homes.” Rehak called the neighborhood “one of America’s greatest melting pots.”77
Just a couple of blocks north of the Green Mill, one pocket of Uptown went through a major transformation in the 1970s. The Hip Sing Association moved its Chicago offices to Argyle Street in 1971. The Chinese cultural group’s president, Jimmy Wong, hoped to establish Chicago’s “New Chinatown” on Argyle between Broadway and Sheridan. It was a street with a bad reputation. “At one time, there were 14 taverns in the three blocks, including a topless bar. There were all kinds of drugs on the street,” P.J. McCaffrey, who owned P.J.’s Laundry at 1128 West Argyle, recalled. It was “a kind of slum, and you were scared to walk out on the streets after dark. There were all kinds of problems: muggers and prostitutes,” said Gay Nergard, the owner of the Red Rooster Lounge, 1124 West Argyle.
“We want every part of it to be beautiful—even the alleys,” Wong said in 1974. “With imagination and hard work, we can give the new Chinatown an atmosphere and elements of fantasy that may someday make it one of Chicago’s biggest drawing cards.”
But when a hip injury forced Wong to retire, he was unable to complete his plans. Another Chinese American business leader, Charlie Soo, took up the reins, becoming known as the “Mayor of Argyle Street.” By the early 1980s, this stretch of Argyle was turning into a hot spot for dining—and not just for Chinese food. “In a sense, it is an Asiatic town,” Howard Shiroma, president of the Argyle Business International Association, told the Tribune. “Argyle Street is a focal point for Viets, Thais, Cambodians, Laotians, Pakistanis, Indians, Chinese, and Japanese. Many of these people come into the neighborhood and bring their problems with them. Argyle Street is also a place to help them.” 78
The Green Mill was not especially well-known for its music during the quarter-century when Steve Brend owned it. It didn’t host concerts by big-name touring artists. “I liked it when it was Uptown’s most congenially seedy bar and the music was lounge-shlocky,” Sun-Times reporter Lloyd Sachs said.79
“There was never a time when there wasn’t music,” Jonathan Brend said. “He would run the same band for, like, a year.” The musical acts included the Cal Bandy Trio as well as Bob and Julio. “They played in the space behind the bar,” Jonathan said. “Piano, bass, guitar and singer. They also occasionally had customers sing. They also had an organist. Noreen Godin. She was a friend of my mother. They had an organ bar where people could sit around the organist. Those are the only acts I remember.
“It was like old people music when I was there,” Jonathan recalled, thinking back on the late 1970s. “They were busy every night, every weekend, when I worked there. All the servers and waitresses and bartenders would go there because he had a 4 a.m. license—and 5 a.m. on Saturday. Those people are good tippers.”
“The Green Mill was his life,” Jonathan’s brother Gregory Brend said about their father. “He introduced so many people there who eventually got married to each other. … We used to call him the Mayor of Uptown, because he could talk to anybody.”80
“It was a local hangout, pretty much,” Jonathan said. “Some of the patrons were terrific people.” But his father often had to escort out people who’d had too much to drink. In one episode, “A customer got drunk and started bothering people. Dad escorted the man out the front door on Broadway. About 30 minutes later the same guy came in the side door on Lawrence. Dad told him to get out, and the guy said, ‘Jeez, buddy, how many places do you work at?’
“One of his customers was a grifter named Harry Hardini. Yes, he was a magician. He did some amazing tricks with ropes and coins and cards. He was quite entertaining. He had to be in his late 70s. He claimed he had a railroad car full of magic tricks back east somewhere. He was interesting.”
The Green Mill’s regular customers included Michael Mann, who was directing television commercials at the time. He returned with a movie crew in April 1980, when he was making Thief, his first feature. “I used to drink here back in 1970–71,” Mann told the Sun-Times as he prepared for a day’s filming at the Green Mill. “I picked it because it’s a funky old place and it’s got a great sign outside. But the way we dressed it up brings it back to its old elegance.”81
Thief includes several scenes filmed inside the Green Mill, showing off the bar’s distinctive decor. In one climatic shot, an explosion appears to blast open the nightclub’s front window, sending shards flying into Broadway. “The neighborhood was not happy,” Mann recalled in a Thief commentary track. “This was about 3 a.m.”82
“They promised to make everything back the way it was,” Jonathan Brend said. “They did everything that they promised to do.”
Another Green Mill regular was Studs Terkel, one of Chicago’s most famous authors and raconteurs. “Studs Terkel listens to everybody, big or small, and in his neighborhood tavern, he talks—he certainly does talk,” Dan Rather said on 60 Minutes, introducing a story about Terkel that aired on December 28, 1980.
The story cut to a shot of Terkel at the bar inside the Green Mill, with Steve Brend standing next to him. Terkel was talking about Paddy Bauler, one of Chicago’s most notoriously corrupt aldermen. Bauler’s most famous quip was “Chicago ain’t ready for reform yet.” But Terkel quoted something else that Bauler often said: “Let’s all have a little drink.” With ice clinking in his glass, Studs declared: “And so, let’s all have one—on me. A round on me.”
Rather narrated: “Studs holds court in a neighborhood Chicago tavern, the Green Mill. Everybody knows Studs.”83 (The story begins at 18 minutes and 45 seconds into this video at the Media Burn website.)
By this time, the corner of Broadway and Lawrence was no longer a place to see movies, as it had been for so many years. The Uptown Theatre had shown movies as late as 1978,84 but it also started presenting rock concerts around 1975. It would eventually host 17 shows by the Grateful Dead, eight by Frank Zappa, and three by Bruce Springsteen, among many others.85
But it shut down after a concert by the J. Geils Band on December 19, 1981.
The Riviera Theatre had featured a mix of movies and concerts in the late 1970s—Star Wars along with Supertramp, Rush, and Journey. In 1985, it reopened as a “New York-inspired” nightclub for dancing, with the seats removed from the main floor. “There are some 300 speakers, 1,200 feet of neon, strobe machines and lasers,” Tribune reporter Rick Kogan observed. Someone in the crowd told him: “This neighborhood is so strange and spooky. That’s certainly got to be one of the biggest burdens this place is facing. I guess they won’t make people stand out on the street. … Too dangerous.”86 The glitzy nightclub concept didn’t last long. By 1986, the Riv—as many people call it—was hosting concerts by the Bangles, the Psychedelic Furs, Ministry, and Elvis Costello.87
In 1980, the old Rainbo building on Clark Street became a rink for roller skating.88 A Tribune story described hundreds of teenagers “careening around the rink and searching for a cute face.”89 The Rainbo Roller Rink also became a popular nightspot for DJs spinning house music. “It was huge, so you weren’t crunched up,” DJ Mario Luna told the Chicago Reader. “You weren’t shoulder to shoulder, you can’t move or you can’t dance, like the little small halls, where they can only fit in so many people. This place was enormous.” Another DJ, Rick Lenoir, told the Reader: “Ultimately it became one of the premier dance clubs in the city.”90
In the spring of 1986, Steve Brend decided to retire, selling the Green Mill to Dave Jemilo.
“My legs just gave out,” he told Tribune reporter Marla Donato that April. “I can’t move around like I used to. And if you have a business, you have to be there all the time or they’ll rob you blind. My wife’s sick, too. We’ve both been in the hospital. So I had to…” As his voice trailed off, Donato finished the sentence for him: “Sell the bar.” Brend nodded.
Donato had often heard Brend telling his stories about the glory days of Green Mill Gardens. She’d often seen his “crapbook,” as he sometimes called it—a collection of old newspaper clippings about the place. “Brend would produce it with a flashlight, point to a page and instruct you to read,” she recalled. “Then he would totter down the bar—fill a few glasses, empty a few ashtrays—and when he returned he would embellish the scrapbook clippings. … I had heard, I had read, all the tales many times before. But Brend never seemed to tire of the telling, just as a grandparent who reads the same bedtime story over and over and over again.”
As Brend told his stories to Donato one final time as the Green Mill’s owner, he commented on how the neighborhood had changed. “At one time men had to wear tuxedos to get in. All the women used to wear gloves. … Used to be you could leave cigarettes and change on the bar when you went to the bathroom; now you can’t. … They even steal the photos out of here,” he said, searching through the scrapbook. “I don’t know what is wrong with people today. They have no respect. They ripped up my booths with razors, they tore the urinals off the wall. That cost me a fortune. Why would anybody want to tear a urinal off the wall? They tore the doors off the stalls in the ladies’ room, and that was the women who did that. I just don’t understand people today.”
Donato asked Brend if he expected the neighborhood would “come up” in the next five to 10 years, as Jemilo was predicting. “I doubt it,” he said. “But all I know is my whole life is here. … When I die—well, the city told me I can`t do this—but when I die, I want them to cremate me and spread my ashes on the four corners of Broadway and Lawrence.”91
Under Jemilo’s ownership, the Green Mill held its grand opening on May 29, 1986, according to an announcement published in the Tribune. “The Green Mill has been fully restored to its original grandeur of the 1940’s,” the ad said. The music that day started at noon and continued through 2 a.m., featuring Denny Miles, Brand Goode, Ed Peterson, Vu Jazz Sextet, Johnnie Henderson & Green Mill Trio, Ron Cooper Trio, Déjà vu Big Band, Stardust, and others.92
“My dad used to hang out there in the ’30s, and when I went in there last September I immediately fell in love with it,” Jemilo told the Tribune. “I closed the place down, restored it and reopened in April, with a different attitude, I hope. What I want, and I seem to be on the right track, is a nice-looking place where it doesn’t kill you on the money, and you can go there three or four nights in a row if you want. A dollar cover Monday through Wednesday, and two dollars the rest of the week—that’s not going to break anybody. … I wanted it to be like the old days, a place where everyone can get together and it doesn’t matter what you’re like.”93
In the Sun-Times, Lloyd Sachs noted that the Green Mill “had been converted into a more upscale jazz club.”94 And the Tribune’s Larry Kart observed: “The Green Mill is as comfortable as an old shoe and as friendly as your favorite roadhouse waitress. And as a setting for music, the club is just about ideal—with a long curving bar, a plethora of booths, an ample bandstand and a good sound system.”95
As the Green Mill became established as a great jazz club, the Riv and Aragon continued hosting major rock concerts nearby. But the Rainbo Roller Rink—the last remnant of the old Rainbo Gardens and Kinetic Playground—was torn down in 2003 to make way for a condominium complex.96
Meanwhile, the Uptown Theatre remained dark. “I thought if I could just hang on until the Uptown Theatre opens, I’ll make it. Of course, it still isn’t open, which is kind of funny, but I wanted to make it into a jazz club,” Jemilo told Patrick Sisson for a 2014 Chicago Reader article, “An Oral History of the Green Mill”97—an excellent roundup of stories from Jemilo’s era. Another decade has gone by since then, and the Uptown Theatre still sits silent, though hope persists that it might someday reopen.
Two incidents caused Jonathan Brend to wonder if the Green Mill might be haunted. He read that Jemilo’s bartenders were supposedly seeing ghosts after closing time, “including one female who would sit on the piano behind the bar and sing sultry songs,” Jonathan said. “When I worked there, a lady used to do exactly that at the end of the night. Only she was no lady. She was Tonya, a transvestite. And she loved doing it. When I read that story, a chill went up my spine.”
And then came the death of his father, Steve Brend, in 2006. “My father wanted his sons to scatter his ashes on the four corners of Lawrence and Broadway,” Jonathan said. “So, my three brothers and I each took a corner. When we got to the last corner my brother Richard spread some ashes. I saw a weird-looking man with a shaved head standing right behind my brother. I looked away for a second and when I looked back, he was gone. Our family all went into the Green Mill and I looked everywhere for that person. I couldn’t find him. I asked others if they had seen him. Nobody did. Was he an angel sent from heaven or a demon sent from hell? It scares me. My dad was a good man who faced so much adversity. He deserves heaven.”
Uptown is no longer as “strange and spooky” as it used to be, though it still has its moments. Do ghosts really roam its street or dance in its dark corners? I’m not convinced of that. Call me a skeptic. But the neighborhood does feel haunted by history—in no place more so than the Green Mill. When I’m in the jazz club and I overhear someone talking about how it used to be Al Capone’s hangout, I might roll my eyes. That’s probably myth, though I’ve learned that it’s hard, if not impossible, to definitely disprove such legends. But so much fascinating history did happen at the Green Mill—some of it took place inside the lounge where the jazz club is today, and some of it transpired elsewhere in the same building, back when the bigger Green Mill Gardens venue was the center of North Side nightlife.
“It was America’s original nightclub,” Steve Brend told the Reader in 1982, during one of his many recitals of the legends he’d learned. “A fabulous place, they said. People wore tuxedos. You could see entertainers like Sophie Tucker … on the indoor stage. … There used to be a big windmill on top of the building. The arms would turn and were covered with lights. … Outside the place had high walls around it so you couldn’t see in. There were walks through the gardens and tables, around a raised outdoor dance floor. It was really somethin’.”98
THE END
(at least for now…)
PREVIOUS CHAPTER / TABLE OF CONTENTS
Footnotes
1 U.S., World War II Draft Cards Young Men, 1940-1947, Ancestry.com.
2 All of the Jonathan Brend quotes in this chapter are from a January 21, 2024, interview with the author or 2024 Facebook messages.
3 Robert Ebisch, “Whatever Happened to the Green Mill,” Chicago Reader, October 29, 1982, 1-2, 20, 22, 24.
4 Howard Reich, “Owned Green Mill Jazz Club,” Chicago Tribune, March 17, 2006, section 2, 13.
5 Ebisch, “Whatever Happened to the Green Mill”; Marla Donato, “The Romance of Art Deco,” Chicago Tribune, February 8, 1985, section 7, 3–4; Rick MacArthur, “Movie Mob Retakes Uptown Bar,” Chicago Sun-Times, April 24, 1980, 97.
6 Jacki Lyden, Landmarks and Legends of Uptown (Chicago: Jacki Lyden, 1980), 31.
7 Gusfield, 256–261; Edwin A. Lahey, “Killer Jack McGurn Is Slain; Surprised by Three Assassins,” unidentified newspaper clipping, February 15, 1936, in FBI files on Al Capone, part 11b, https://vault.fbi.gov/Al%20Capone/Al%20Capone%20Part%2035%20of%2036. (Lahey was a Central Press correspondent.)
8 Ebisch, “Whatever Happened to the Green Mill.”
9 U.S., World War II Draft Cards Young Men, 1940-1947, Ancestry.com.
10 R and M Corporation, Liquor Control Commission: License Record, ID: 404/002, Illinois State Archives, Springfield.
11 Lyden, Landmarks and Legends of Uptown, 29, 31; Ebisch, “Whatever Happened to the Green Mill.”
12 Illinois – White Pages – Chicago – June 1937 A through NAAF, 210.
13 Helene T. (Keilbach) Chamales, bankruptcy case 63106, filed March 16, 1936, Record Group 21, Records of the U.S. District Court, U.S. District Court for the Eastern (Chicago) Division of the Northern District of Illinois, Bankruptcy Act of 1898 Case Files, 1898 -1978, National Archives Identifier 570838, National Archives, Kansas City, MO.
14 Dick Greene, “Seen and Heard in Our Neighborhood,” Muncie IN Star, March 6, 1962, 4.
15 Riviera Building Corporation, bankruptcy case 56269, filed June 19, 1934, Record Group 21, Records of the U.S. District Court, U.S. District Court for the Eastern (Chicago) Division of the Northern District of Illinois, Bankruptcy Act of 1898 Case Files, 1898 -1978, National Archives Identifier 570838, National Archives, Kansas City, MO. “Middle West, Consumers Co., Seek New Setup,” Chicago Daily Tribune, June 20, 1934, 29.
16 Document 11903666, book 33317, 445-446, Cook County Clerk’s Office, Recordings Division.
17 “Retaken Felon Admits Double Police Murder,” Chicago Daily Tribune, October 10, 1937, 1, 6.
18 “Indict Him as Dillinger Aide,” (Mattoon, IL) Journal-Gazette, September 7, 1934, 1; “Jury Is Expected to Get Piquett’s Case Late Today,” Chicago Daily Tribune, January 14, 1935, 3.
19 G. Russell Girardin, “Dillinger Speaks!” New York Evening Journal, December 12, 1936, 16, 19.
20 “Retaken Felon Admits Double Police Murder,” Chicago Daily Tribune, October 10, 1937, 1, 6; “Police Killer Found Guilty; Gets 199 Years in Prison,” Chicago Daily Tribune, November 24, 1937, 3.
21 “Physician Gets 10 Days in Jail as Tipsy Driver,” Chicago Daily Tribune, April 3, 1940, 17.
22 “Face Lifting Doctor in Dillinger Gang Case Kills Himself,” Chicago Daily Tribune, July 30, 1946, 1.
23 Document 12156135, Cook County clerk’s office, Recording Division, Book 34286, p. 314.
24 Document 12241790, Cook County clerk’s office, Recording Division, Book 34751, pp. 327-328.
25 Al Chase, “Famed Uptown Night Spot of ‘Dry’ Era Sold,” Chicago Daily Tribune, Aug. 12, 1939.
26 Illinois Bell Telephone Company, Chicago Telephone Directory, December 1938, 480, https://www.loc.gov/resource/usteledirec.usteledirec04790x/?sp=251&st=image&r=0.019,-0.033,0.325,0.171,0.
27 Edward J. Hughes, compiled, Certified List of Domestic and Foreign Corporations for the Year 1939, Volume 2 (Springfield, IL: Office of Secretary of State, 1939), 2144, https://hdl.handle.net/2027/uiug.30112085193701?urlappend=%3Bseq=710%3Bownerid=115513509-714.
28 Hughes, Certified List of Domestic and Foreign Corporations for the Year 1939, 787, https://hdl.handle.net/2027/uiug.30112085193693?urlappend=%3Bseq=791%3Bownerid=115838985-825.
29 Dale Harrison, “All About the Town,” Chicago Sun, November 29, 1944, 17; “Maurice E. Solovy,” Chicago Sun-Times, September 18, 1974, 165; Philip Franchine, “David A. Solovy; ran several ballrooms,” Chicago Sun-Times, September 25, 1985, 64.
30 Chicago & North Western Historical Society, Facebook page, June 2, 2017, https://www.facebook.com/cnwhs/photos/a.869904963105899/1325259840903740/.
31 Dale Harrison, “All About the Town.”
32 Advertisement, (Chicago) Daily Times, December 23, 1945, 35.
33 “Hep Harmonicat Heals Harmonicas,” Chicago Daily News, March 23, 1946, 51; “In Front of the Band,” (Chicago) Daily Times, March 31, 1946, 46; “Cafe Circuit’s Midnight Memo,” (Chicago) Daily Times, May 12, 1946, 49.
34 Eddie Deerfield, “Night Life Note Book,” (Chicago) Daily Times, January 18, 1947, 55.
35 “Gemen Memorial Club to Hold Benefit Dance,” Chicago Daily Tribune, April 24, 1949, 83; Herb Lyon, “Tower Ticker,” Chicago Daily Tribune, May 14, 1956, 53.
36 Lyden, Landmarks and Legends of Uptown, 31.
37 Edwin J. Barrett, compiled, Certified List of Domestic and Foreign Corporations for the Year 1943, Volume 1 (Springfield, IL: Office of Secretary of State, 1943), https://hdl.handle.net/2027/uiug.30112085193768, 716, 982.
38 Lyden, Landmarks and Legends of Uptown, 31.
39 Samuel Lesner, “Cafe Table Topics,” Chicago Daily News, February 24, 1943, 22, and March 3, 1943, 20.
40 Photo caption, Chicago Daily News, November 6, 1943, 11.
41 Dick Greene, “Seen and Heard in Our Neighborhood,” Muncie IN Star, March 6, 1962, 4.
42 “T.T. Chamales Dies; Headed Many Hotels,” Chicago Daily Tribune, July 13, 1963.
43 UPI, “Chamales Dies; Author, Singer’s Mate,” Wisconsin State Journal, March 21, 1960, 5.
44 AP, “Helen’s Mate Held; ‘Beat Me,’ She Says,” Des Moines Tribune, March 6, 1959, 4.
45 UPI, “War Novelist Tom Chamales Killed in Fire,” Chicago Daily Tribune, March 21, 1960.
46 “Author Accused of Wife Beating,” Indianapolis Star, UPI, Nov. 27, 1959.
47 UPI, “Order Sanity Test for Singer’s Mate,” Chicago Defender, July 2, 1958, A21.
48 Ruth Mauzy, “McFadden Says…,” Muncie IN Evening Press, Sept. 26, 1959, 3.
49 Wikipedia, accessed Dec. 2, 2022, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_T._Chamales.
50 UPI, “War Novelist Tom Chamales Killed in Fire.”
51 “Young Novelist Chamales Dies of Asphyxiation,” (Hollywood, CA) Citizen-News, March 21, 1960.
52 “T.T. Chamales Dies; Headed Many Hotels.”
53 Edmund Brophy, “Pleads ‘Equity’ to Save Home of GI Students,” Chicago Daily Tribune, June 22, 1947, part 3, 2.
54 Ebisch, “Whatever Happened to the Green Mill.”
55 “Chicago Community Area Data,” Rob Paral & Associates, accessed August 16, 2024, https://robparal.com/chicago-data/.
56 Amanda Seligman, “Uptown,” Encyclopedia of Chicago, http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/1293.html.
57 Mark Guarino, Country and Midwestern: Chicago in the History of Country Music (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2023), 88.
58 Norma Lee Browning, “Girl Reporter Visits Jungles of Hillbillies,” Chicago Daily Tribune, March 3, 1957, 1.
59 Mark Guarino, Country and Midwestern: Chicago in the History of Country Music (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2023), 89.
60 Todd Gitlin and Nanci Hollander, Uptown: Poor Whites in Chicago (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), xvi.
61 Charles A. Sengstock, That Toddlin’ Town: Chicago’s White Dance Bands and Orchestras, 1900–1950 (Urbana: University of Illinois, 2004), 133–134.
62“Andy Karzas Discusses Aragon Ballroom,” Studs Terkel Radio Archive, broadcast August 2, 1963, https://studsterkel.wfmt.com/programs/andy-karzas-discusses-aragon-ballroom?t=NaN%2CNaN&a=BroaAug2%2CDura0035.
63 Guarino, Country and Midwestern, 90.
64 Guarino, Country and Midwestern, 103.
65 Art Cohn, The Joker Is Wild: The Story of Joe E. Lewis (New York: Random House, 1955; New York: Bantam, 1957), 253.
66 “Suffers Heart Attack, Dies While Driving,” Chicago Daily Tribune, June 15, 1960, part 3, 12.
67 Lyden, Landmarks and Legends of Uptown, 31.
68 “Chicago Community Area Data.”
69 Gitlin and Hollander, Uptown, 155.
70 Guarino, Country and Midwestern, 107.
71 Susan Nelson, “Chicago’s Cheetah to Be Unleashed,” Chicago Tribune, October 11, 1966, section 2, 3.
72 Robb Baker, “Cheetah May Be Aragon Again,” Chicago Tribune, June 8, 1968, section 1B, 19; “Aragon Ballroom Chicago Concert Setlists,” setlist.fm, accessed September 3, 2024, https://www.setlist.fm/venue/aragon-ballroom-chicago-il-usa-13d6398d.html.
73 “Kinetic Playground, Chicago, IL 4812 N. Clark Street: Performance List 1968-69,” Rock Prosopography 101, March 3, 2010, https://rockprosopography101.blogspot.com/2010/03/kinetic-playground-chicago-il-4812-n.html.
74 “Chicago Community Area Data,” Rob Paral & Associates, accessed August 16, 2024, https://robparal.com/chicago-data/.
75 Guarino, Country and Midwestern, 114.
76 Guarino, Country and Midwestern, 119.
77 Bob Rehak, Uptown: Portrait of a Chicago Neighborhood in the Mid-1970s (Chicago: Chicago’s Books Press, 2013), 5, 6, 12.
78 Kenan Heise, “N. Side’s Argyle Street Takes on Far East Flavor,” Chicago Tribune, November 20, 1981, section 2, 3; Aamer Madhani, “Jimmy Wong 1914-2001: Restaurateur helped start ‘new Chinatown,’“ Chicago Tribune, July 6, 2001, https://www.chicagotribune.com/2001/07/06/jimmy-wong-1914-2001/; Dean Congbalay, “Argyle Street Shopping Strip Weaves Pattern of Prosperity,” Chicago Tribune, March 31, 1986, https://www.chicagotribune.com/1986/03/31/argyle-street-shopping-strip-weaves-pattern-of-prosperity/; “West Argyle Street Historic District,” Wikipedia, accessed October 11, 2024, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Argyle_Street_Historic_District.
79 Lloyd Sachs, “Favorite Live Music Clubs Are Challenging and Comfortable,” Chicago Sun-Times, August 22, 1986, WeekendPlus, 8.
80 Reich, “Owned Green Mill Jazz Club.”
81 MacArthur, “Movie Mob Retakes Uptown Bar.”
82 Audio commentary featuring Michael Mann and James Caan, Thief, Criterion Collection, 2015.
83 “60 Minutes: Studs Terkel,” air date December 28, 1980, Media Burn Archive, accessed September 2, 2024, https://mediaburn.org/video/60-minutes-studs-terkel/.
84 Advertisement, Chicago Tribune, February 24, 1978, section 2, 5.
85 “Uptown Theater Chicago Concert Setlists,” setlist.fm, accessed September 3, 2024, https://www.setlist.fm/venue/uptown-theater-chicago-il-usa-1bd6c9e4.html.
86 Rick Kogan, “After Hours: Male Dancers Get Stripped of Their Gig, Too,” Chicago Tribune, September 27, 1985, section 7, 2.
87 “Riviera Theatre Chicago Concert Setlists,” setlist.fm, accessed September 3, 2024, https://setlist.fm/venue/riviera-theatre-chicago-il-usa-1bd4652c.html.
88 David Roeder, “Rainbo Rink Closing This Weekend for Condos,” Chicago Sun-Times, March 28, 2003, Financial, 54.
89 Barbara Brotman, “Teens Find First Love Just May Be Skating,” Chicago Tribune, April 28, 1987, 1.
90 Leor Galil, “Plugging Into Chicago’s Forgotten House Venues,” Chicago Reader, May 21, 2019, https://chicagoreader.com/music/plugging-into-chicagos-forgotten-house-venues/.
91 Marla Donato, “Hanging Out: The Green Mill Lounge, a Good Seedy Bar, Bites the Dust,” Chicago Tribune, April 16, 1986, section 7, 8–9, https://www.chicagotribune.com/1986/04/16/the-green-mill-lounge-a-good-seedy-bar-bites-the-dust/.
92 Advertisement, Chicago Tribune, May 23, 1986.
93 Larry Kart, “Joints Are Really Jumpin’ in a Rebirth of the Local Jazz Club Scene,” Chicago Tribune, August 3, 1986, section 13, 6.
94 Lloyd Sachs, “Favorite Live Music Clubs Are Challenging and Comfortable,” Chicago Sun-Times, August 22, 1986, WeekendPlus, 8.
95 Larry Kart, “Joints Are Really Jumpin’.”
96 David Roeder, “Rainbo Rink Closing This Weekend for Condos,” Chicago Sun-Times, March 28, 2003, Financial, 54.
97 Patrick Sisson, “An Oral History of the Green Mill,” Chicago Reader, March 20, 2014, https://chicagoreader.com/music/an-oral-history-of-the-green-mill/.
98 Ebisch, “Whatever Happened to the Green Mill.”