The first Chicago guidebook I ever read was written by a New Yorker.
One of my next discoveries was Isabella Bird’s An Englishwoman in America. Published in 1856, the book covers Bird’s travels around the United States and Canada a few years prior. Looking through the table of contents, I breezed by the chapter subheadings “The hickory stick,” “Hard and soft shells,” and “Nocturnal detention.” My eyelids began to drop and then I glimpsed the windiest one of all: “A Chicago hotel, its inmates and its horrors.”
Her review of this culinary tableau continues: “There were eight boiled legs of mutton, near raw; six antiquated fowls, whose legs were of the consistence of guitar-strings; baked pork with ‘onion fixings,’ the meat swimming in grease.”
What was the world of Chicago nightlife like before Yelp, TripAdvisor, and other sites proffering suggestions from folks like “MalortFace4U” and “RushStreetNightz”? One could ask friends, one could ask a concierge, and one could certainly flip through a copy of Dr. Night Life’s Chicago (1979) by the Tribune‘s Rick Kogan.
“Taverns are of their time and place,” he says, “and the best of them have always operated as homes away from home. The great piano bar genius Buddy Charles once told me that people go to taverns because they are eager for intimacy.”
