![underbar chicago gay bar underbar chicago gay bar](https://s3-media0.fl.yelpcdn.com/bphoto/ZyJW7stz2KPVtfldSohZxQ/258s.jpg)
“A mecca for the young and restless and well-dressed,” wrote the Tribune, with sport memorabilia on the walls and a race car suspended from the ceiling above a strobe-lit dance floor.
![underbar chicago gay bar underbar chicago gay bar](https://urbanmatter.com/chicago/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/11935559_10153571897814805_6217665983922675597_n.jpg)
![underbar chicago gay bar underbar chicago gay bar](https://media.timeout.com/images/100898393/750/562/image.jpg)
It was called Walter Payton’s Roundhouse and within the complex was America’s Brewpub, one of the earliest microbreweries in the area, despite the fact that the slender running back wasn’t much of a beer guy.Īs the decade was coming to a close, Entertainment One would also open Thirty Four’s - Payton’s jersey number - adjacent to the Hyatt Regency Hotel. “If anyone has wondered where all the men are, or where all the women are, move to the suburbs,” wrote the Chicago Tribune in reviewing the nightclub.Ī little to the southwest, in Aurora, Illinois, a historic railroad repair station built in 1856 had been turned into a sprawling 72,000-square-foot dining and entertainment complex by 1983.
UNDERBAR CHICAGO GAY BAR CRACKED
By 1981 he had one on Hammond Drive in Schaumburg, 21 miles northwest of Chicago, “Not the twilight zone exactly, but not the main stem either,” cracked Time Magazine during a visit in 1983. He improved on the system, and he was the first guy to move to the suburbs.’”īy the mid-1970s Hoffman had Snuggerys in Edison Park and Mt. “In my estimation, he (Fred Hoffman) expanded the idea. “No one wanted to cater to (young people) in the ’60s, and we were the first bar in the country that catered to (that crowd),” McGuire explained. The Snuggery name itself was meant to define the bar as an intimate area reserved for couples and lovers. His first spot would attempt to emulate the then-“granddaddy of all singles bars,” Butch McGuire’s Saloon on Division Street. Its then-25-year-old owner, Fred Hoffman, had been raised in the suburban hospitality business, with his family owning a restaurant in Maywood. The epicenter was the Snuggery, first opened as a neighborhood bar on North Avenue in 1970 before moving to the suburbs in 1974. These were yuppies, but without the “u.” And after work and on weekends, thousands of them would jam into places with goofy names like Thumper’s Bar and Cafe, Toto’s, La Margarita, The Safari Club, Bamboo Room and Doc Weeds, dancing to multi-colored lights and music videos, smoking cigarettes, drinking white wine and peach schnapps, then driving back to their two-story homes in quiet neighborhoods near the lake. A new breed of bars, in turn, sprung up trying to attract these forty-, thirty- and sometimes even twenty-somethings who had begun to eschew urban living. Many of these suburbanites didn’t even commute to work in Chicago anymore, instead taking jobs in nearby office parks hosting companies like Motorola and Walgreens, countless insurance agencies and the back-office operations of several major corporations. Respectable people thus began moving to the city’s suburban enclaves like Schaumburg, Lombard, Hoffman Estates and Aurora. The Loop - at that point almost entirely abandoned after business hours - devolved into nothing more than seedy taverns, adult bookstores, short order grills and men’s hotels, “the type where Elwood lived in The Blues Brothers,” according to Chicago Magazine. “Not for the stretches of shopping malls and Jiffy Lubes,” explained Judy Hevrdejs, writing for the Chicago Tribune in 1989, “but for the huge dance clubs … that line the highways stretching beyond O’Hare.”īetween 19, Chicago lost 250,000 jobs as the city’s population fell from 3.8 million to under 3 million. And yet, for a brief moment in the 1980s, the Chicago’s ’burbs became a scene, a place people weren’t begrudgingly resigned to, but coveted. Visions of tree-lined neighborhoods, McMansions, lemonade stands and Little League pop into our heads. When we think of the suburbs, we often think of strip malls, drive-throughs, chain restaurants and big box stores.