I'd always heard about this underground network. The Green Mill ought to conduct public tours...
Few people know it's there -- fewer know where it leads.
In the floor behind the bar at the Green Mill, a century-old jazz club in Uptown, lies a door. Beneath it: a musty labyrinth of gangster and Uptown history.
The World Below -- a series of tunnels branching underground from the Green Mill to the bookstore Shake, Rattle & Read a few doors away -- mixes myth and fable, dusty boilers and blood-splattered urinals (more on this in a moment).
In the mid-1910s, the Green Mill was an exclusive hangout for Essanay Studio executives and early film stars such as Charlie Chaplin and Wallace Beery. In recent decades, jazz musicians such as Clifford Jordan, Branford Marsalis and Harry Connick Jr. have graced its stage. But tales of Jazz Age Chicago, when gangsters such as "Machine Gun" Jack McGurn and boss Alphonse Capone defied Prohibition, are most prominent down below.
"They could either come to the tunnels and hide, or escape. Of course, the booze was stashed down here," says Ric Addy, owner of Shake, Rattle & Read. The bookstore has been in his family since 1965, which makes Addy an armchair historian and raconteur of all things Uptown.
[From A gangster underworld? -- chicagotribune.com]
I haven't even been to The Green Mill in quite a while (not pictured above), though it is a fun place to take out-of-towners. My brother ordered a glass of Old Style, on tap, for $6.99, and my sister and I thought it was the funniest thing ever.
Before the massive Uptown Theatre changed the face of Broadway's 4800 block in 1925, the Green Mill hosted a vast beer garden and dance hall, complete with underground restrooms. The original stone façade entrance still stands outside, though obscured by a fiberglass sign for the restaurant Fiesta Mexicana.
Below, only the men's restroom survives, complete with the original, tiny octagonal tiles and porcelain urinals.
"It's not too hard to imagine Capone stepping up to do his business here," Addy jokes.
Unlike the brightly lighted Green Mill storeroom, darkness permeates everything and temperatures drop 20 degrees. It's quiet. If any ghosts linger here, they keep to themselves. The corpses of a half-dozen water bugs lie scattered near the doorway.
There is evidence of life, however. I nside one of the urinals, a violent red smear clings to the porcelain - remnant of a fake mob hit shot for the 1993 movie "Excessive Force," starring Thomas Ian Griffith and James Earl Jones.
Jones and Griffith aren't the only celebrities to have visited the tunnels. Over the years, Addy has given private tours to bands such as the Beastie Boys and Suicidal Tendencies who were looking for their own pieces of gangster legacy. Years ago, one room held wooden bank vaults stacked with rotting bank documents, but they're long gone.
