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Dive bars
Tales from the taps
Al Moran
Bartender at Mitchell’s Tap (3356 S Halsted St, 773-927-6073)
“There used to be an upright piano in the back of the bar with a warped soundboard. One night, [former owner] Chuck Puffer decided he didn’t want it in the bar anymore. So we dragged it through the front door, rolled it to the curb, walked inside, turned off the lights, had a beer and waited. About a half hour later, this car passes by, and then backs up. There are two guys in the car, and they’re staring at this piano. Finally, the driver stops and gets a rope from the trunk. All of a sudden he and his buddy are tying the piano to the back bumper. They drive off, and those little wheels on the piano are spinning like crazy. Finally, the wheels fall off the piano around 34th Street, and then the bumper falls off the car with the piano still tied to it! I guess those guys in the car didn’t want to deal with it anymore, because they drove off and left the piano and the bumper in the middle of Halsted. The cops eventually cleared the street, but they never asked us where the piano came from.” —As told to Chuck SudoLee Martin
Bartender at Richard’s Bar (491 N Milwaukee Ave, 312-421-4597)“I had two big women come in—this was when I was working nights—and they go in the ladies’ washroom. Well, you know, I don’t think nothing about it. Well, a little while later [a different] lady goes to the washroom and comes back out and says, “Do you know your washbowl is out of the wall?” I go, “What?” and I go in there. It wasn’t sitting on the floor or nothing, but evidently one of them had gone up and sat in the washbowl to take a leak and had tore it right out of the wall.”—As told to David Tamarkin
Teresa Wilson
Bartender at Wrigleyville North (3900 N Sheridan Rd, 773-929-9543)“It was getting close to closing time when these two little guys came in and ordered a pitcher of beer and sat down. It was like 1:25am and we serve until 1:40am. One of the guys got up and went to the bathroom and never came out. No one really noticed him missing until one of the members of the country band that played that night went to the bathroom and noticed one of the ceiling tiles had fallen down and was lying on the bathroom floor. So the band member got a ladder, poked his head up through the hole in the ceiling and saw the guy up there. He was standing on the rafters waiting for us to close so he could rob the place. The band member got down off the ladder, yelled to us that we should call the cops and held the bathroom door closed so the guy couldn’t get away. Well, as the guy was trying to find a way out of the rafters, he slipped and fell through the ceiling onto the ladies’ side of the bathroom. The police came and locked him up, but they couldn’t charge him with anything other than criminal damage to private property, because we hadn’t officially closed.”—As told to Jake Malooley
John “Sarge” Kolodziej
Bartender-owner of Jarheads (6973 N Clark St, 773-973-1907)“I bought the bar in June of 1990, and when I took over I had this big party—a sorta party to celebrate the leaving of one owner and the starting of a new one. I told everyone in the neighborhood that everything in the bar was one dollar. Everything. I said I wanted to get rid of all the old stock. But, really, I knew it was going to bring all the riffraff and gangbangers who hang out on Clark Street. And it did. The place was packed with all this trash. They didn’t know that I had some guys across the street waiting. Big guys. And when the place was packed, I locked the back door and the guys came, they locked the front door, and we frisked all these gangbangers and took their knives and guns and dope off of them and piled it on the bar, and then I told all of them that they were banned forever. In 17 years, we haven’t had any problems because all the riffraff knows that they can’t go into Jarheads and cause any problems ’cuz if they do, they’re gonna get a beat down.”—As told to Ryan Bartelmay
Time Out Chicago / Issue 125 : Jul 19–25, 2007No comments yet
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