It happened here

When the Beatles came to Chicago on August 11, 1966, they held a press conference from their room at Astor Towers Hotel (1300 N Astor St). The mop tops wanted to discuss John Lennon’s religious views in response to a March 4, 1966, interview with the London Evening Standard in which Lennon said the Beatles were “more popular than Jesus.” That August, the American fan mag Datebook picked up the comment, outraging some religious fans. David Leaf, codirector of the 2006 documentary The U.S. vs. John Lennon, thinks that Lennon’s comment “wasn’t so much taken out of context as put into a different context. John was talking to a U.K. journalist he respected and his comment wasn’t about the world or Christianity—he was just talking about what was going on in the U.K.,” Leaf says. The Fab Four survived that press conference and went on to play Chicago’s Amphitheater. Astor Towers Hotel didn’t fare as well: Designed by Bertrand Goldberg, the architect of Marina City, the 28-story hotel opened in 1962; in 1979, it became condos.