r/AllChicago

I keep finding stuff about this city that makes me go "wait, that can't be right" and then it turns out it is.

1. The Chicago River used to flow into Lake Michigan. In 1900 engineers reversed it so the city's sewage would flow toward the Mississippi instead. It's still flowing backwards today, more than 125 years later. St. Louis sued us over it and lost.
2. The city raised itself out of the mud in the 1850s. Entire downtown blocks of brick buildings, including the Tremont House hotel with guests still inside, were lifted up to six feet using thousands of jackscrews turned by hand. A 22 year old George Pullman ran one of the crews.
3. The skyscraper was invented here. The Home Insurance Building at LaSalle and Adams in 1885, ten stories, first building in the world held up by a steel skeleton instead of its walls. It got torn down in 1931.
4. Twinkies, brownies, the cafeteria, the zipper, spray paint, roller skates, the remote control, pinball, softball, and the Ferris wheel were all invented in Chicago.
5. The original Ferris wheel from the 1893 World's Fair was 264 feet tall, carried 2,160 people at once in 36 train-car-sized cars, and was built specifically to one-up the Eiffel Tower from the previous World's Fair in Paris.
6. The 1893 World's Fair drew 27 million visitors at a time when the entire US population was 63 million. Almost half the country went.
7. Walt Disney was born in Chicago. Hugh Hefner founded Playboy here. Both men's childhood homes are still standing on the West Side and Northwest Side respectively.
8. The four stars on the Chicago flag represent Fort Dearborn, the Great Fire of 1871, the 1893 World's Fair, and the 1933 Century of Progress fair. There's an active citizen movement to add a fifth.
9. Pope Leo XIV, elected in 2025, is from Dolton. He's the first American pope in history and he's a White Sox fan. The Vatican confirmed it.
10. The 1979 Disco Demolition Night at Comiskey Park, where a DJ blew up a crate of disco records between games of a White Sox doubleheader, ended in a riot, a forfeit, and is widely cited as the cultural moment that killed disco.
11. The "L" is older than the New York subway. The first elevated line opened in 1892. The Loop got its name from the elevated tracks that loop around downtown, not the other way around.
12. Lower Wacker Drive exists because Daniel Burnham proposed in 1909 that the city should have multiple street levels stacked on top of each other. Most of the plan was never built, but the part downtown is why Billy Goat Tavern is underground and why the Batman movies film car chases here.
13. There is a 6 mile pedestrian tunnel system, the Chicago Pedway, that connects 50 downtown buildings underground. Most Chicagoans have never used it. You can walk from the Thompson Center to Macy's to Millennium Station without going outside.
14. The Sears Tower had a hidden 14th floor for decades that wasn't on any public elevator. It housed broadcast equipment for the antennae.
15. Chicago has more Polish residents than any city outside Warsaw. It also has the second largest Mexican American population in the country after Los Angeles.
16. The first ever blood bank was opened at Cook County Hospital in 1937 by Dr. Bernard Fantus, who coined the term.
17. The Picasso sculpture in Daley Plaza, the giant rust-colored thing everyone sits on, has no official name. Picasso refused to give it one and refused $100,000 in payment. He donated it to the city.

Which ones did you not know? Got any I should add to the list?

I was visiting a friend in Denver last month and he asked me to grab a hot dog at a place near his apartment. They served it on a pretzel bun with ketchup and called it a "Chicago dog." I almost called the police.

But it got me thinking about all the stuff that's so normal here that you don't notice it until you leave. Things like:

* Saying "the" before every highway. The Kennedy, the Edens, the Eisenhower. Nobody else does this.

* How seriously we take which side of town someone is from

* The fact that "Italian beef" needs three sub-decisions before it's ordered (dipped, sweet or hot, cheese yes or no) and we all know the protocol

* Sweetened iced tea being treated like an insult

What's the thing you only realized was a Chicago thing after you left, or after someone from out of town pointed it out?

My wristband should be here Tuesday by mail . I can no longer go as I have no tribe … I don’t wanna go alone so I’m gonna sell it . $225 . Would need to come pick it up as I do not drive . Serious inquiries only . I’m sad I really wanted to go . Also wristband is for both days. Can negotiate a bit . $225 obo . More details after it arrives in the mail first come first serve . Lower than face value .

So I went down another Chicago bar rabbit hole and the Green Mill might be even better than the Billy Goat one.

Quick context for anyone who hasn't been: the Green Mill is on Broadway in Uptown, it's been on the same block since 1907, and it's widely considered the oldest continuously running jazz club in the country. Most people know it for two things, the Al Capone stuff and the green neon sign. The actual history is way weirder than either.

A few things I learned that I thought were neat:

It started as a roadhouse for mourners. In 1907 a guy named Charles "Pop" Morse opened a saloon called Pop Morse's Roadhouse at Lawrence and Broadway. The reason it survived its first few years was that it sat on the route between downtown and Graceland Cemetery, so it became the spot where funeral processions stopped for a drink on the way back from burying somebody. Chicago in 1907, in a nutshell.

The name is a Moulin Rouge reference, with a twist. In 1910 a real estate developer named Tom Chamales bought it, put a giant windmill on the roof, and named it Green Mill Gardens. He picked green specifically because the red light district was right around the corner and he didn't want anyone confusing his place with a brothel. So the name is basically "Moulin Rouge but please don't think we're a whorehouse."

It was a movie star bar before it was a mob bar. In the mid-1910s, Essanay Studios was operating in Uptown, and the Green Mill was where the executives and stars hung out. Charlie Chaplin drank there. Wallace Beery drank there. Uptown was being called the Hollywood of the Midwest at the time, and the Green Mill was the green room.

Capone didn't own it, his hitman did. This is where every Chicago bar tour gets it wrong. The owner of the Green Mill, Dave Jemilo, who has run it since 1986, has said this in basically every interview he's ever given. Capone never owned the place. Machine Gun Jack McGurn, the guy widely believed to have planned the St. Valentine's Day Massacre, owned a piece of it. Capone came in because his favorite singer Joe E. Lewis was performing there, and because McGurn was paying off the cops so the bar operated openly during Prohibition. Historian Richard Lindberg has gone on record saying 99 percent of the Capone-was-here stories in Chicago are urban legend, and the Green Mill is probably the worst offender.

The trapdoor is real though. Behind the bar, right where it curves toward the baby grand piano, there's a heavy latched door in the floor. Underneath is a network of tunnels that ran under Broadway and came up in other buildings down the block, including what's now the Shake, Rattle and Read bookstore. They were originally built for moving coal and kegs, not gangsters. But during Prohibition they doubled as escape routes during raids. There's a long-running bartender quote about it that I love: "Everyone thinks it's about Capone, but guess what they actually used this for? Hauling coal and kegs."

Capone's booth is still there. If you go in, look for the booth across from the side door on Lawrence, at the end of the bar. It faces away from the stage and toward both entrances. That was his seat, picked so he could see anyone walking in from either door. You can just sit in it. No plaque, no rope, nothing.

The Joe E. Lewis story became a Sinatra movie. In 1927 Lewis was making 650 a week at the Mill and got offered 1000 a week at the Rendezvous Club downtown. He told McGurn he was leaving. A week later McGurn's guys cornered him in his hotel room at the Commonwealth, slashed his throat, cut off part of his tongue, and left him for dead. He didn't die. He recovered, lost his singing voice, became a comedian instead, and his story got turned into the 1957 Frank Sinatra movie The Joker Is Wild. There's a poem carved into the wood behind the bar that commemorates the whole thing, ending with the line "you'll look like confetti if you try to quit the Green Mill."

The bandleader rule. When Capone walked in, the band would stop whatever it was playing mid song and switch to Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue. Apparently nobody was allowed to enter or leave the bar while he was inside.

It almost died in the 70s. By the time Dave Jemilo bought it in 1986, the place was a flophouse. He has said in interviews that on his first visit he was stepping over passed-out drunks on the floor. He bought it six months later anyway, restored the original woodwork, brought in jazz seven nights a week, and turned it back into what it had been. He still owns it. It also hosts the longest continuously running poetry slam in the country every Sunday night, started in 1986 by Marc Smith, who basically invented the modern poetry slam there.

The whole point is you can still walk in tonight, sit in Capone's booth, look down at the trapdoor a few feet away, and listen to a jazz quartet on the same stage Billie Holiday played. Nothing about it is recreated or themed. It's just still there.

Anyone here have Green Mill stories? Curious if any of the late night jazz regulars or poetry slam folks are on this sub.

Im moving from Houston to Skokie or Evanston (havent decided yet). Is there anything I should know about those 2 cities? I want to feel safe and i want enough shopping, restaurants. I also like it quiet but not too quiet where it feels like im living in the middle of nowhere.