“Three shots closed Texas Guinan’s show at the Green Mill cafe, Lawrence avenue and Broadway, at 4 o’clock yesterday morning. The internationally known night club hostess was asking the suckers to give the little girl a big hand.” —Chicago Tribune, March 24, 1930
The Mill’s Jazz Age pedigree has no equal in Chicago. Newspaper accounts of the era tell a lively tale of the locals’ proclivities and personalities. Jack “Machine Gun” McGurn, a Capone associate, supposedly owned part of the club during Prohibition, when tunnels under the bar were used to smuggle in booze, and kept a table reserved for his boss (walk into the bar, past the booths on the north wall, and it’s the first one you run into, positioned so you can see both entrances). A Tribune article from 1927 suggests McGurn threatened a cabaret singer, Joseph Lewis, who was considering a better offer at the rival Rendezvous Cafe, saying he would “take him for a ride.” Lewis was later found, throat slashed and stabbed in the gut, in his dressing room. (He survived the attack.) In the spirit of journalistic integrity, the paper also advances the theory that Lewis “had the sort of face that women love and that the man who stabbed him may have done so to punish the singer for philandering with wives or sweethearts.” (Lewis eventually returned to the Green Mill to perform comedy, inspiring the movie The Joker Is Wild, starring Frank Sinatra.)
Brad Goode, trumpet player: “Dave owned a bar called Deja Vu, on Lincoln just past Sheffield’s. He started a Sunday-night jam session there. Think I got involved there shortly after I moved to Chicago and started grad school at DePaul, ’84, ’85. That’s where I met Dave. He was also very interested in what was going on at a place called the Get Me High Jazz Lounge in Wicker Park. I was playing there a lot. He told me he was going to buy the Green Mill and open a jazz club.”
Cole: “During the 80s, Uptown had the largest collection of halfway houses, the most concentrated collection in the country. They lost funding in the 80s, and they became just cheap housing. All the people were free to roam the streets. It just became this collection of crazy people, and I don’t mean eccentric—literally insane, voices, the whole shebang. There was also for some reason a large collection of Native Americans and hillbillies. There was a bar on Lawrence called Sharon’s Hillbilly Heaven. It was a pretty rough neighborhood.”
Jemilo: “We’re trying to clean up the paintings, and inside the frames we found 90 syringes. ‘Cause all the jabbers would jab in the booth and hide the needles in the frames. I was cleaning out syringes. When you cleaned behind the booths you’d find pint bottles and half-pint bottles of Bacardi rum that were empty, because people would sneak in their own liquor and drink in the booths, and then it would slide out and fall between the seats.”
Neil Tesser, jazz critic: “The opening Friday here was packed, because he had so many friends.”
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