Category: Chicago

Sad news in the Sun-Times: the last regular neighborhood watering hole in Wrigleyville is closing today. The Nisei Lounge, on the ground floor of Links Hall, is being sold, and will probably be turned into something very special, like the world’s only upside-down sake shooters bar catering to ISU grads.

When I lived at Grace and Sheffield many years ago, before Wrigley Field became a mecca for every drunken frat boy in the country, we used to stop into the Nisei for a drink after games. I remember the Peanut Shell, too, which was a couple doors north, where we were the only non-Spanish speakers. (My roommate and I didn’t own a tv, so we used to rate bars by their willingness to put the Three Stooges on the bar tv at 11 pm. The most compliant taverns would rate a “3 Woob” rating, vocalized with a clear “Woob-woob-woob.” As I remember, the Peanut Shell did it once or twice, the Nisei never did, but we were never very serious in the first place.) These were places of calm where a guy could get a Pabst without feeling like a trendy Wicker Park turd, where people with real stories hung out. There are fewer and fewer honest bars in town, and you can add the Nisei to the list.

For some fascinating history about the place, read Dave Hoekstra’s column in today Sun-Times.

Found this dropped in our mailbox today from a neighborhood restaurant:

Great idea. That should give me some time to remember your name and a chance to discuss herpes.

On Saturday night, we had the sublime pleasure of attending the first performance of Lyric Opera’s “Eugene Onegin”. Tschaikovsky’s opera about a rich aloof dweeb turning down a young girl’s love, only to hunger for it years later, was a sumptuous feast, with an all-native-Russian cast giving it their old-country best. (It was pretty cool all evening to hear audience members speaking in Russian–in the garage, in the lobby, in the seats behind us. They loves them some “Onegin”, babushka.) The standing ovations that came at the end were most spontaneous and sincere I have heard in a long time.

And Dmitri Hvorostovsky was superb in the title role. How cool is it to see “The Siberian baritone” leading off a performer’s biography. There’s no arguing with that. It even trumps Detroit on your resume.

The most wrenching scene in the opera is the duel between Onegin and his erstwhile best friend, the poet Lensky. At a boring formal ball, Onegin decides to amuse himself by flirting with Lensky’s fiance and making him jealous. Things get pushed to far, Lensky throws down the glove, and the next morning is killed. Lensky’s aria, “Kuda Kuda, vy Udalilis (“Where have you gone, o golden days of my spring?”), was truly heartbreaking, the confession of a man who loved too much who is about to be killed by one who loved too little. Frank Lopardo was magnificent.

For some strange reason, as soon as the scene was over, my mind kept replaying a news item I’d read in the Tribune that morning. The audience was moved to tears by Lensky’s death, but what kind of banality creeps around the modern city, day in and day out? Or does this really mean anything?

Man accused of shooting 3 in Chicago denied bail

Delano Horn thought he didn’t leave any of the witnesses to his January shooting rampage alive, according to prosecutors.

After allegedly shooting three people in an Englewood neighborhood home, he used one victim’s cell phone to send text messages to her family, Assistant State’s Atty. Nancy Wilder said at Horn’s bail hearing Friday.

“They all dead. Ha, ha, ha,” Horn said the messages stated. But the victims survived and identified Horn, Wilder said. Horn, 21, is charged with three counts of aggravated battery with a firearm and aggravated criminal sexual assault. …

Wilder said Horn was after revenge Jan. 17 when he broke into the home of a woman in the 5500 block of South Justine Street. The woman had told Horn’s girlfriend that he was the father of another woman’s baby, Wilder said.

Threatening her with a gun, Horn raped the woman, Wilder said. He is accused of binding her; another woman who lived in the home, Chantelle McGee; and a male friend, Shawndale Thomas; with duct tape.

“He told all three victims to choose who would die first,” Wilder said. “When they refused to choose, he threatened to bring [the woman’s] 9- and 5-year-old children to watch him shoot the adults.” Minutes later, Horn opened fire, Wilder said.

Trying to get help, Thomas then fell down a flight of stairs, Wilder said. As McGee pretended she was dead, the other woman hid her children, locked the door and jumped from a second-story window, breaking her arm.

Horn left with the cell phone of the woman he raped, Wilder said. He fled to Iowa, she said.

Horn was arrested Wednesday when police found him hiding at a cousin’s home in the 6500 block of South Harvard Avenue, Wilder said. She said he confessed to the shootings.

I guess there’s style, and then there’s style.

For those of you who weren’t at the wine auction, and those of you who couldn’t hear over the din that filled the parish hall, here’s the toast that I finally came up with.

Here’s to the parents of Queens,
Who know that a good education means
Raising cash left and right,
Like Winter Toast night,
Before Voss Center gets slapped with a lien.

And like most limericks, it got razzed. By the host. Over the microphone. Oh well.

While researching online for a toast to bring to a wine auction this weekend, I happened upon one about the City on the Make:

Here’s to Chicago, where everything dates from the Fair,
Where they know the value of good hot air.
When there’s prospect of business, they’ll always stand treat,
For their hearts are as big as their women’s feet.

I don’t know what it means, but I like it.

Before heading out of town for the three-day weekend, my eye caught something in the Tribune about a special showing of a computer-simulated, 3-D environment of Chicago’s Columbian Exposition of 1893. Excitement courses through me about the chance to sit in a movie chair and cruise through the canals in a gondola like Bertha Palmer’s errant nephew, until the article tells me the simulation would only be shown at the Museum of Science and Industry this past weekend on a first-come, first-served basis. After that, no more public showings, unless the computer people at UCLA get a whole lotsa money.

Drat and double drat.

But little tastes of the simulation are available online, so we can all imagine what it would be like to live in the pages of “The Devil in The White City”. Check them out at the UCLA site and also at the Trib.

Maybe they should sell T-shirts for the URBAN SIMULATION TEAM! to raise money.

For many years, the site Chicagocrime.org has been an indispensable tool for checking up on the nasty goings-on in the Windy City. You type in your street, zip code or ward, and you get a nice map showing you where someone was held up, verbally accosted or received a dirty phone call. Oh, and murder too. I didn’t realize someone had been offed on a friend’s little street in Ravenswood Manor until I saw it on Chicagocrime.

That site is now defunct, having been replaced by the more ambitious everyblock.com. You should check it out, it’s better than reading the neighborhood free weekly, and with no pictures of politicians and handshakes besides. It currently covers Chicago, New York, and San Fran, with more cities planned, I’m sure. At everyblock, you can find not only crime reports, but patron reviews of restaurants, bars and stores, local news, photos, lost & found, and even liquor license applications. It takes a stern constitution to peruse the listings of health department reports, but maybe that’s better entertainment than actually eating out. The Chicago site has a great collection of pictures from the Ravenswood water main break two weeks ago. One of the designers of the site is my friend Dan O’Neill, who helped us with the design of BARDBALL last spring.

Hats off to everyblock.com! Now I can get the full taste of city living without ever leaving my house.

For those of you who want to know, the huge sinkhole that erupted last week on Montrose Avenue now has its own MySpace page. A cult of personality is growing around it.

Via Gaper’s Block.

It’s always fun to read the short, police blotter articles in the Trib, esp on Saturday and Monday. They give you a perspective on how bad your weekend could have gone, but for the grace of God.

And it also delivers little gems like this one.

A drunken driver crashed into the back of a Chicago police squad car early Thursday in the 100 block of North Kilbourn Avenue in the West Garfield Park neighborhood, police said….

About 12:30 a.m., the Harrison District officers were traveling north on Kilbourn when [the driver] rear-ended their squad car with his Oldsmobile…[The driver] then drove around the squad car and continued north, until slamming his Oldsmobile into a parked vehicle…

The name of the driver?

Cornelius Comic.

What do you think the Sun-Times or the NY Post would have done with that? “Comic Crashes in West Side Debut.” “Comic Arrested After Slamming Cops.” I’ll bet the booking cop had some fun with it too. Probably the kind of thing poor Cornelius has gotten all his life. No wonder he turned to drinking. If comedy is a way to purge your inner demons, what must it be like to have to purge your own last name?

Attorneys for convicted mobster Frank Calabrese, Sr., have been calling for a new trial, saying that the jury was prejudiced when it went into deliberations at the end of summer. (I blogged about the “Family Secrets” trial briefly in September. If you follow this link, you’ll find better news coverage within.)

So what was it that may have tilted a few jurors into the “hang ’em” camp?

When they heard Calabrese tell a federal prosecutor in court, “You are a (expletive) dead man.”

Yeah, that might have gotten their attention. How’s a guy supposed to recover after that?

According to the Trib last Friday, one of the other defendants in the case is trying to use it to overturn the conviction:

Lawyers for defendant James Marcello have made the alleged threat part of a motion for a new trial. “Proof of a racketeering act — threat of murder and obstruction of justice in its most venal form — occurred before the jury’s very eyes!” Marcello’s lawyers said in their filing.

I’m not a legal eagle, but this seems a little desperate. Since the jury watched a racketeering act in the courtroom, the verdict should be overturned? Must be some kind of minutiae that escapes me. The lesson to all you killers on trial out there: Threats and outbursts can keep you from going to jail, so knock yourselves out! (It makes for entertaining copy in the papers, too.)