circa 1992
Future Mrs. S and I were living on one floor of a Wicker Park rowhouse down the street from the Opus Dei church:
A couple of blocks away, there was a bar called the Artful Dodger:
There was a bar in the front room and a dance floor in the back. The well drinks from the bar came with glow sticks in them.
and the back room had black lights and trippy graffitti on the walls. Usually something like this was playing:
The Artful Dodger stayed open until 2. If you weren't ready to go home yet (remember the glow sticks?) you could walk up to Blue Note on Armitage, which was a super smoky basement bar that stayed open until 4. The jukebox was good, filled with Blue Note jazz records as well as classic Chicago blues:
If you still weren't ready to go home (some of those *glow sticks* lasted longer than others) you could walk across the Cortland bridge
past the Finkl factory
and over to Old Town, where you could get a greasy breakfast at Nookie's Diner.
I had a friend who lived in a coach house/studio above a garage in Old Town. She tended bar and kept strange hours but she was usually good for some French press coffee, a couple of bowls and some chill music:
Then on Monday morning, load up the Walkman with appropriate tapes for the ride in to work:
Good times, back in the day.
