Artful dodged
"YOU'LL NEVER BE IN THERE AGAIN," a woman says to a man around midnight on Saturday night, pulling out a camera and snapping a photo of her sheepish-smiling friend in front of the Artful Dodger.
Bucktown's changed over the years, side streets now corridors of tallish condos interspersed with modest low-rise brick two- and three-flats. There's an impatient line of uninformed drinkers-to-be clamoring on the sidewalks outside the door of the tavern at Hermitage and Wabansia, which is closing after twenty years. "He sold it," the woman at the door repeats several times, meaning the building. Inside, the three rooms the length of the building have two coinciding crowds: fiftyish faces remembering O'Banion's and other since-gone Chicago taverns, and twentysomethings thronging the bar for one of the specialties from the bill of fare on a chalked wall. (For both generations, Chicago is for livers.) The 50s set shuffles out round midnight-Get the sitter home? One witness lingers: Lee Groban, decades on the Chicago scene, Guinness record-holder for begetting the world's longest poem, tall, stooped, bearded, in a mandala-patterned hippie shift, a pale-eyed Methuselah, turns from the bar with a dark draft crazed with froth.
The press-tin ceilings are painted black, the center room is hardly lit except for the blue glow of cell phone screens, crowded to the walls. A deejay palys in the back room, and it's a wonder anyone can move but the crowd dances as one. Behind the dim bar, there are layers of years of trade, notably a sticker from New Orleans' fabulous junkshop of a saloon, the Saturn Bar, and a procession of the Dodger's Mardi Gras celebration posters from years past. Intermittent flashes burst, from little silver Canons and someone who's just run out of SX-70 Polaroid film.
"If you're in, you're in, if you're out, you're out, we got a line," the doorwoman says. "If you're out, you're out, sorry. It's not a usual occurence, we have a lot in. He sold the building. He's been here twenty years." Beyond the security cameras on homely new fortresses and the strings of street-parked SUVs, the Sears Tower is a distant sentinel through the humid haze.
Bucktown's changed over the years, side streets now corridors of tallish condos interspersed with modest low-rise brick two- and three-flats. There's an impatient line of uninformed drinkers-to-be clamoring on the sidewalks outside the door of the tavern at Hermitage and Wabansia, which is closing after twenty years. "He sold it," the woman at the door repeats several times, meaning the building. Inside, the three rooms the length of the building have two coinciding crowds: fiftyish faces remembering O'Banion's and other since-gone Chicago taverns, and twentysomethings thronging the bar for one of the specialties from the bill of fare on a chalked wall. (For both generations, Chicago is for livers.) The 50s set shuffles out round midnight-Get the sitter home? One witness lingers: Lee Groban, decades on the Chicago scene, Guinness record-holder for begetting the world's longest poem, tall, stooped, bearded, in a mandala-patterned hippie shift, a pale-eyed Methuselah, turns from the bar with a dark draft crazed with froth.
The press-tin ceilings are painted black, the center room is hardly lit except for the blue glow of cell phone screens, crowded to the walls. A deejay palys in the back room, and it's a wonder anyone can move but the crowd dances as one. Behind the dim bar, there are layers of years of trade, notably a sticker from New Orleans' fabulous junkshop of a saloon, the Saturn Bar, and a procession of the Dodger's Mardi Gras celebration posters from years past. Intermittent flashes burst, from little silver Canons and someone who's just run out of SX-70 Polaroid film.
"If you're in, you're in, if you're out, you're out, we got a line," the doorwoman says. "If you're out, you're out, sorry. It's not a usual occurence, we have a lot in. He sold the building. He's been here twenty years." Beyond the security cameras on homely new fortresses and the strings of street-parked SUVs, the Sears Tower is a distant sentinel through the humid haze.
