Make Chicago green again
Memories of Green Mill days: Uptown, Chicago nightlife, and the way it was
This is a very belated second part to a two-part post on public art and entertainment venues in Chicago in the COVID era. The first part focused on film, theaters, and film festivals, in particular Michael Mann’s Chicago-set movie, Thief. This part is about the Green Mill, a famous jazz club in Uptown that features memorably in Thief.
I apologize for the long delay in getting this second part posted. In the past few months, I’ve had to put down two pets (both 19 years old), my dad has been (and still is) hospitalized, both he and my mom have just contracted COVID, and I’ve been undergoing the long road of testing to be a live organ donor to a family member (almost at the end…I think). I’ve also been working full time and freelancing at night and on weekends (but I’ve taken a break from school until January). I can’t promise to do better keeping to a regular posting schedule—just that I hope to post when I can about the rest of the topics I planned on writing about when I started this newsletter. I thank all readers for their patience.
When I was a kid, we moved out of the city to the suburbs. Right away I wanted to go back. Even a 6-year-old could recognize the difference.
For one, everything worth doing was in the city. Whenever I checked the paper for movie listings or music events, especially as I got older, the best of it was all in city limits. The suburbs were for 4th of July parades and bingo nights and church fish frys. The city was for adventure. Concerts, films, street festivals, protests, dance lessons in the park, poetry readings…
Okay, so that last thing might not appeal to everyone, but I was the kind of teen nerd who was as excited to see Allen Ginsberg live (like I did in my senior year of high school when he was touring with composer Philip Glass, who I’d never heard of) as I was to chase after The Police guitarist Andy Summers’ limo at the mall one rainy weekend afternoon (like I did at age 12 when he was side-touring with his artsy-creepy photography book, Throb, as the band was riding high around the world with Synchronicity).
I was still a teen when I heard about a new kind of poetry event going on in the city. It was called a poetry slam, and it was a down-to-earth, poetry-for-the-people kind of thing started by some blue-collar folks at the Get Me High Lounge in Bucktown in the ‘80s. Not long after, it migrated to some old jazz joint in Uptown: the Green Mill.
I can still remember reading about it in one of the local papers, a picture of poetry slam granddaddy Marc Smith and fellow poet Dean Hacker in a cowboy hat providing me a good visual of some kind of hipster honky-tonk, devil-may-care kind of event. Smith was described as a former construction worker. The words “working-class” and “blue-collar” were probably tossed around the page (it’s been a minute and I can’t find the archived article—but pushing against classism and class expectations was baked into the original poetry slam movement, so I’ve no doubt those words were in the write-up somewhere).
I was beyond intrigued. It felt like coming across your birth certificate stuck between the pages of a library book you only discovered accidentally after a long slog through shelves full of dusty assigned readings and bad recommendations from well-meaning people with dull taste. I felt like there really might be a place out there that fit me, that understood me.
From then on, I made it a goal to get to a slam someday. For the longest time it was all I wanted, more than going to any concert or to a club. But marooned in the suburbs, working in $4 to $5 an hour service jobs, and being a non-driver—and being under 21—I had no idea how to get there. For years I kept the idea of this magical sounding event at the back of my mind, intending to get to one someday. And not just any poetry slam. THE one. The Uptown Poetry Slam. The one at the Green Mill.
Well, I was pretty late getting there, but I did get there—in my later 20s after working overseas in Ireland and finally getting to college (downstate in southern Illinois). I moved to Lincoln Square at the end of 2001, just a couple neighborhoods over from Uptown. I lived right off Western and Lawrence, and it was an easy 81 bus ride up Lawrence to Broadway, to the heart of Uptown and the doorstep of the Green Mill. Sometimes I’d walk there, especially on Sundays when the whole day yawned ahead of me. Graceland Cemetery, where my great-grandparents are buried (where their graves used to be accessible, like graves are supposed to be—see the link, please), was on the way and I’d sometimes stop in and visit their graves.
There was a sad, cavernous, doomed-to-fail Borders bookstore in Uptown back then, trying to pave the way for gentrifiers to come (and they did come). Open lots and shuttered buildings that even on a bright Sunday afternoon could give you a creepy feeling while passing. (Those open lots were a sign of the aggressive displacement under way.) There were always more old-timers around than in the surrounding neighborhoods. It seemed to be a place for people who had seen better days. More than once I’d be walking along the sidewalk and suddenly come across a body stretched across the path (not dead, thankfully, just nodded out). Uptown was that kind of neighborhood—drunks peeing in doorways, drag queens sharing seats on the Broadway bus with suited-up proselytizing young Mormons (or were they Jehovah’s Witnesses?), someone screaming at an invisible devil outside the entrance of the old family-owned pharmacy where I got my prescriptions cheaper than I ever could at Walgreen’s.
Sundays was also the day of the slam—every Sunday night, starting at 7, with an open mic, then the guest slot, followed by the actual slam to close out the night. For poetry at least. You could stay on for the jazz. Which was (and is) the Green Mill’s whole raison d’etre.
The Green Mill has a memorable role in the film I wrote about in the first part of this post, the great early ‘80s neo-noir flick Thief. In the movie, James Caan’s character, Frank, a jewel thief and ex-con trying to go straight after one last big heist, is supposedly the owner of the Green Mill (as well as a Western Avenue car lot). We see him stopping in the bar on occasion to take a call or check up on the business. There’s no attempt to masquerade the bar as some other place, to give it a false storefront and a new name just for the movie. We see it as it is really looks from the street, great big neon green sign and all. At the film’s end (spoiler alert), there’s even a shot where it appears to blow up—to smithereens and everything.
The scene is kind of shocking to Chicagoans who, love the place or hate it, know the bar’s fame. Since Thief, the bar’s shown up in at least half a dozen other Chicago-set films, like it’s almost part of the filming contract with the city.
But was the Green Mill the legend it is now back when Thief was being made? Was director Michael Mann, a Chicago native, capturing a Chicago he thought or knew was on its way out? Or a Chicago he figured was timeless?
Thief is Mann’s first feature film. It’s so well done and beautifully shot, it’s easy to forget that he was still something of a novice filmmaker at the time, that he still had big and small screen masterpieces like Heat and Miami Vice ahead of him. Maybe he played it smart and stuck to familiar turf to ground him his first time around.
Mann caught the city at a great time for a stylish neo-noir story. Thief showcases a mostly pre-gentrified Chicago that was still gritty and authentically blue-collar. Even taking into account the choosiness of location—considering what well-known Chicago places were decidedly left out of the movie—local viewers can see how much the city has changed for good and for bad.
The Chicago in Thief is pre-Riverwalk, pre-Navy Pier amusement rides and theme restaurants, pre-flower beds up and down Michigan Avenue. The riverfront is still a concrete corridor of warehouses and ominous shadows in the film. The diners are empty of hipsters. Instead we see classically slightly heavy-set, definitely Midwestern, mustachioed patrons and women sporting belted and shoulder-padded polyester dresses, fabulously full makeup, and feathered perms. The lakefront, which Frank visits for his early morning run, is blessedly free of unnecessarily professionally attired cyclists who seem to equate a bike commute along Lake Michigan with the Tour de France.
Gaudy neon signs disrupt the city’s famous skyline. There’s not an architecture tour in sight. In a scene that showcases Chicago blues, as played by the Mighty Joe Young Band in the former Wise Fools pub, keen-eyed viewers might catch the original Potbelly’s location sign up the street—before the sandwich shop took over the city and suburbs and became a chain to rival the East Coast invader Subway.
Speaking of sandwich chains, in the Green Mill scenes, a perfectly unglamorous Mr. Submarine neighbors the bar. Inside the Green Mill, drinkers crowd the cozy booth seating, the bartender rings up drinks on an old-school ding-ding cash register, and Frank uses the house phone to make a call—none of which is meant to be nostalgic in a time before cell phones and computerized order screens. (Plenty of us still remember those times, that experience of being out somewhere and having to ask to use the bar or restaurant phone, of having a conversation or listening to a band performance punctuated by the sound of a register bell.)
I don’t think the movie itself is meant to be nostalgic, even if its style and themes mimic classic film noir in so many ways. The city’s infamous corruption and violence are two of the film’s major characters—they almost got top billing in its original title, Violent Streets. None of it has gone away. Flower beds and Ferris wheels can only fix so much. It’s only now, decades later, long after so many of the film’s real-life locations have been shut down, razed, or built over, that nostalgia overtakes our sense of shock at this violent, brutal, lonely city.
Still, nostalgia had to have played a role in Mann’s choice of the Green Mill as a location. Thief’s Green Mill is just a few years before the poetry slam era, but it was already a city landmark with a notorious past. Already the perfect bar for anyone looking for Capone’s Prohibition-era, jazz age Chicago. And yet, it was also a place on the definite skids.
A few years ago, Patrick Sisson published “An oral history of the Green Mill” in the Chicago Reader, which can’t be beat for learning all about the bar’s bona fide speakeasy credentials and changes over time. Starting out in 1907 as a beer garden and roadhouse (it’s right in the original name, Pop Morse’s Roadhouse), it really did become a jazzy hotspot and a gangster’s hangout. (So the framed photo of Capone that currently graces the bar isn’t just tourist bait, even if it is also a bit of an inside joke.) Billie Holliday, Anita O’Day, Joe E. Lewis, and Al Jolson really did grace the stage there. People really did get shot. Cops really did come and break up the joint for the boozing going on as much as the killing. There really are secret tunnels under the bar. And Uptown, with its beautiful Uptown Theater and Riviera movie palaces and regal Aragon Ballroom, really was a swingingly good-time hood in its day.
But by the ‘60s and ‘70s, the Green Mill—and the neighborhood—had declined. Sisson describes it as a sketchy place where “day drinking and drug use were the norm.” The Green Mill was full of people nodding off in the booths, hiding their needles and cheap liquor bottles in plain sight. The crowds at the neighborhood’s entertainment venues dwindled, attracting rougher crowds or no crowds at all (as the Uptown Theater closed for good by the ‘80s).
In other oral histories, collected by the late great Studs Terkel, a longtime resident of Uptown, the neighborhood is captured as a troubled place filled with struggling Appalachian migrants and Native Americans shifted off the reservations of the heartland states, all seeking jobs in the big city. The American Indian Center was located in Uptown on Wilson for decades, and Uptown was known locally as “Hillbilly Heaven” and “Redskin Row.” Halfway houses were a dime a dozen. Social services also opened up in the area, especially serving the area’s poor elderly, Asian, Native American, Appalachian, and Black residents. Terkel’s books featured interviews with many local people served by these agencies, as well as the workers employed by them and the activists who kept demanding better services from the city, more attention and solutions for the neighborhood’s poor and down and out.
It wasn’t until the mid-80s, when a south sider named Dave Jemilo bought the still beautiful Green Mill and nurtured it back to its glory days. The kind of joint attracting performers like Patricia Barber, Kurt Elling, Ari Brown, Bernard Purdie, Howard Levy and Ed Petersen, and Andy Brown. Jemilo turned the bar back into a jazz club and a landmark destination, a reputation it maintains to this day.
Uptown has remained a dodgy area though, with many challenges—and gentrification has only added to these, not necessarily resolved anything.
But in 1981, when Thief was released, Uptown was definitely no place for window shoppers and the Green Mill probably wasn’t being touted yet in tourist guides—not without a warning to the faint of heart.
So this is the beauty of Thief’s Chicago—a city that was what it was, that wasn’t yet there “for the gram,” a city with a broken-nose honesty to it, to steal from Nelson Algren’s famous (and perfect) take.
There’s also another layer of nostalgia that tinges the movie these days. Since COVID stole all our social lives and crippled all urban nightlife two and a half years ago, it’s bittersweet to watch all these scenes showing a crowd out and enjoying themselves in the bars, rushing through breakfast at a local diner—or having a heart to heart across a dinette in an empty one late at night in the movie’s most famous scene. Even the scenes where we see a group of bored office workers going about their jobs in a small, shared office space with no cubicle walls to shield their desks from each other is somewhat sad and odd to see in this era of empty office buildings, remote work, and zoom calls. Instead, the scene that most speaks to today’s weird new normal is the one in which James Caan visits his beloved mentor and best friend Okla, played by Willie Nelson, in prison—the thick plastic screen separating the men as they try to share an intimate conversation looks painfully familiar these days, doesn’t it?
Maybe it’s just because I first watched Thief right in the midst of the lockdown. The movie made me so homesick for the days when I lived in the city and took for granted all the places I could go to and all the things I could do with just a walk down the street or a bus or el ride away. It made me realize it’d been years since I’d been to the Green Mill, pandemic or no pandemic. In 2008, I moved away from the city—though not too far—and over time the places I used to inhabit became strangers to me.
While I was still there, the Green Mill poetry slam became a treat to myself. I didn’t make a lot of money—for a while, I worked for a measly $7 to $8 an hour at the Whole Foods in Lakeview. The poetry slam only cost $7 to get into. The Green Mill bartenders didn’t seem to care if you nursed a drink (even just Coke) all night.
At first, I could only go if friends went with me. Eventually, I could go on my own. I started to recognize the poets and have favorites, started venturing to other performances at events and places like Mental Graffiti and the Mercury Cafe. After starting a new job downtown, I went to the slam one night to notice a familiar face at the bar, my coworker “Steve in indexing.” Turned out he was part of a performance duo who had appeared many a time at the Green Mill and around the city.
I almost always left the slam inspired, energized. Sometimes instead of returning home after getting off the late-night 81 bus, I’d walk across Welles Park in my neighborhood to Jeri’s Grill at Montrose and Western, a true Nighthawks-like all-night diner that could’ve fit well into the atmosphere of Thief. Too bad, it’s gone now too.
I was shy though. I usually tried to remain inconspicuous and didn’t know how to start conversations with the poets. I never entered the slam—performance poetry doesn’t suit the stuff I write, or I don’t suit it—but I did read a poem during the open mic a couple times. The first time was to please a guy who pressured me into it. (Bad idea.) The second time was for me, just to say I could do it.
Another time I got roped with a few friends into going up on stage to “do some improv” after I stupidly opened my big mouth to Marc Smith to tell him we were all Second City students. Duh, acting students, with scripts like. Not improv. Smith led the packed bar into hounding us onto the Green Mill’s small but brightly lit stage, in an improv face-off with 4 random volunteers from the audience. Yes, it was terrifying. Yes, we sucked. Yes, I could feel the sweat running down my back like Niagara Falls. Yes, the “other team” (those 4 randos) beat us, measured by the crowd’s boos and cheers. Yes, the crowd was probably drunk and mistook us for pampered improv kids, but still. Yes, the booing was the loudest, most aggressive thing I’ve ever heard in my life.
“Well, I can never go back there,” I told myself after that. But yes, I did. It took me a few months. But I couldn’t hold a grudge against Smith, a fellow working-class creative with a mission to put poetry back into the hands of the people, inspired by Carl Sandburg. Smith is an interesting character. Onstage at the slam, he was loud, expressive, and dynamic—but every now and then he’d tell the crowd how shy he is, usually in some encouragement to people like me in the audience who might have wished to perform a poem someday, if it weren’t for being too shy. Smith claimed he was so shy when he started slamming, he couldn’t even order a pizza over the phone—he had to get a friend to do it. “If I can get up here and do this, anyone can,” he’d say.
I don’t think it was just talk. Outside the Green Mill, I’d see him every now and again in the area. Usually someplace authentically working-class, like the former Golden Angel pancake house on Lincoln Ave. (now a Lou Malnati’s) or the library. Never at the Whole Foods like a few other local celebrities I’d spy from the other side of the counter. Once, while living in a dump in Boystown before I got my downtown job, I applied for a part-time writer’s assistant job back in Ravenswood, down the street from where I lived before in Lincoln Square and would live again soon. I showed up at the address I was given over the phone by a woman named Mary. It was a house, a duplex—not an office. Turned out it was Marc Smith who was seeking an assistant. His friend Mary Fons, another fellow poet and a quilter, was cheerful and kind. Smith was soft-spoken, polite, and, yes, definitely shy. I didn’t get the job, but Mary said it was so close between me and the person they picked that she sent me to another poet who needed some part-time help. That poet, Emily Calvo, hired me and became a friend and a mentor.
I really miss that time—not all of it, of course, but definitely the Green Mill part. After moving out of the city, I went back a few times. But now I can’t even remember when the last time was.
Last summer, when things were supposed to be returning to normal, I went into the city to meet some friends at another place I used to go to now and again while I was in Lincoln Square. Martyrs’ on Lincoln Ave. There was supposed to be an Irish session on, followed by the Hoyle Brothers, a bunch of honky tonk guys who used to play during happy hour on Fridays at the Empty Bottle, yet another old haunt. This day, the session was outside, with social distancing still in swing—just in case. Before and after the session, I walked around the area and back to Lincoln Square. It was semi-bustling, which was good to see, even if more than half the places I used to know were closed for good and you could tell COVID was still impacting the businesses still open. Out of curiosity, I looked up the Green Mill and found they had limited their hours, tried moving patrons outside, had sent the poetry slam packing somewhere else…for the time being at least.
Now, here we all are another year later and it sounds like so many entertainment venues are still struggling to get the crowds back. Meanwhile, downtown Chicago is half a ghost town, half thoroughly gentrified, almost nothing like the city of Thief. The halfway houses and glorious banks and old department stores and wig shops of Uptown are mostly apartment blocks and Starbucks franchises now. Though even Starbucks can’t keep out the notorious Uptown riff raff.
The poetry slam has returned the Green Mill at long last—though at an earlier hour. It’s hard to imagine coming out of a slam with the sun still shining. Then again, during the COVID lockdown, it became hard to imagine the sun shining on our lives again at all. Hopefully, people will return to the nightlife in Chicago—the bars, the theaters, the jazz joints and dives (those few remaining anyway). Hopefully, I’ll get back out there sooner than later as well.
Connections:
Since writing part 1 of this post, James Caan passed away, at the age of 82. There was something like a million tributes after his death was announced. Without discounting the visceral impact of his performance as Sonny Corleone in The Godfather or the emotional impact of Brian’s Song or his great comeback role in Misery, many tributes mentioned Thief as possibly his best performance. (Personally, I loved him in For the Boys and Honeymoon in Vegas.) Caan was a complex, larger than life personality, as entertaining in interviews as he was onscreen. That’s a star in my book. He wasn’t perfect, which is another way of saying he wasn’t politically correct, which is another way of saying he was human. You can hold that against him, or you can be normal and human yourself and just enjoy his work for the terrific stuff it is. Here’s a couple interviews with him that show off his honesty and humor—one from a year before he died and one from the year after he made Thief.
I mentioned the Reader’s oral history of the Green Mill above. It really is a great read that tells you as much about the Uptown neighborhood and the city’s jazz scene as it does about the bar itself. Studs Terkel’s oral histories are another good source for Uptown history—his books Hard Times, Working, Division Street: America, and Race all have memorable interviews with Uptown residents about class system and social issues particular to the neighborhood back in the 1960s, ‘70s, and ‘80s. Studs was no passing tourist—born in New York in 1912, he moved to Chicago as a child in the early ‘20s and lived in Uptown from the mid-70s to the end of his life in 2008. For a taste of his work, and a chance to hear about Uptown from one its residents who became a well-known community activist, Dovie Thurman, check out this interview he recorded with Thurman a year before she died (in 1997).
Another great project worth checking out is Dis/Placements, a people’s history of Uptown, with before and after pictures, an Uptown timeline, and walking tours available.
I could post a million links to different poetry slammers at the Green Mill. I know a lot of people think poetry slammers all sound alike (true, some of them definitely do) or don’t like poetry slams or poetry in general. The video near the top called Poetry in Action is interesting for its on-the-spot opinions of Chicago people on poetry. But if you want to see what a great poetry slammer is capable of, check out this performance by the great Patricia Smith, a Chicagoan (and fellow Saluki!) who started out in the Chicago slam scene and is deservedly considered one of the world’s best. Patricia Smith wrote “Skinhead” in 1992. This performance is from Def Poetry Jam in 2002. After Charlottesville in 2017, the poem and performance went global. Warning that the language in this is raw, but this is a brilliant, essential piece of work.
Admit it. You’re still thinking about those tunnels, aren’t you? OK, then, get a tour of ‘em here: