Mo Lee wonders whether the neighborhood stalwart will ever be the same.
Mid-May: The bar is packed wall to wall. Actually, Jimmy's—the Hyde Park institution more formally known as the Woodlawn Tap—is less a bar than a loosely organized network of caves, dark spaces dimly lit by tired forty-watt lamps set along the walls and drooping wearily from the ceiling. Everybody's loud and laughing. People have come from far and wide to be here. There are regulars who haven't been regulars in years, making a final trip into the warm, murky darkness that cocoons the rooms. But even with everyone there, it still seems like just another night at the Woodlawn Tap.
In the center room a beer stein is filled to the rim with half a bottle of Absolut. It's a stein that I'm already determined to boost by the end of the night—just a little piece of this home away from home for me to keep. I tell the bartender to make this drink special, that it will have to hold me a while. He laughs as he lets the bottle drain into my glass. "We won't need it after tonight," he says.
Conversation around Jimmy's is light and mundane. Nobody is morose. No talk of the old days, or remembering when—it wouldn't be appropriate. There's time to reminisce later. For now, everyone enjoys the moment, the final moment. People are talking about what's going on now, what they're going to be doing over the weekend. People are seeing people they only see here, just talking shit, trying not to focus on the fact that they're saying goodbye.
Jimmy's is a neighborhood icon. Just about everybody's been there at one point or another. Those who haven't are waiting their turn. In a world that has become increasingly more withdrawn, the loss of Jimmy's is keenly felt. Jimmy's is like a chat room for people who really want to get out and see who they're talking to. To Bill Callahan, one of the bar's new owners, "Jimmy Wilson's legacy is the bar. The bar's legacy are the people." There's a little bit of everything: students, professionals, folks with the blue collars, blacks, whites, Asians, Latinos, every socio- and politico-economic demographic represented. Eclectic doesn't even begin to describe the place. And all you have to do to join in the fun is act right.
It's a seedy little dive, carefully designed to fulfill its primary purpose: to be an unpretentious place that anybody can walk into. Jimmy's is, or was, a come-as-you-are party every night of the week, a great big bowl full of life at its most organic. A place for people who want to live and not simply exist. You have to be willing to put up with a little crap if you're going to deal with other people. Everybody smokes, and that smoke sits on the rooms like a cloud of L.A. smog. It seeps into your clothes, your pores, and it permeates you after a while. Folks are getting drunk, getting real.
For months after its doors closed in May, rumors fly. Will Jimmy's re-open or not? Nobody knows what's going on, which is to say everyone's got the answer, straight from the horse's mouth—but the horse is telling everyone something different. The most prevalent lie has been that Jimmy's would open in "about a month." Jimmy's has been set to open in "about a month" since June. It's one of those situations where you don't know what you've got till it's gone. And since June, many in Hyde Park, even those who profess not to like the joint, have realized how large a void Jimmy's absence has left in the community. I tell a friend flying off to India for the holidays that Jimmy's is set to open again December 6. Reflexively, he flashes a big smile and then catches himself. "Damn, man. It's really sad to be getting so excited about this."
Sadder still is the fact that this was a lie. Of course, I didn't know I was lying at the time. It was sort of an ex-post facto lie. I asked the owner and he told me what he thought. We both probably should have known better, though. Given the vagaries of licensing and construction, the safer bet would have been to say "about a month." And we would have accidentally been about right. It seems that in the week since the initial interview, the liquor commission gave itself a thirty-five-day extension for reviewing Jimmy's case.
But there is a reason for anticipation. The simple fact is that while there are other bars in the neighborhood you could go to, none of them has the same stature. None of them has the versatility. With four big rooms, you get in where you fit in. Whatever your mood, Jimmy's has a place for you. Sitting in Jimmy's, a hollowed out, sawdust-choked embryo of the place that once drew regulars like Bill Veeck, I have a beer with Bill Callahan, one of the new owners, and get the story. Evidence of the widespread work is everywhere. There is sawdust and plaster dust and junk. The place is in need of a serious dusting and a good tornado would work wonders. "We've been at this a while," Bill chuckles.
Bill has been a manager at Jimmy's since 1968. For more than thirty years he was Jimmy Wilson's, the bar's founder and namesake, right hand. "I started working here part time while I was at Loyola, then I taught school for a year. Then Jimmy made me an offer that was better than teaching school in the sixties, so I started managing the place." When I asked him what he remembered most about Jimmy, he just sort of shrugs sadly. "He was a really nice guy... we had some good times together."
Bill's story seems a testament to the amazing lifespan Jimmy's has enjoyed. Fifty years is a long time for anything to be around. And as a place for people meeting, it's hard not to wonder how much history is tied up in walls, how many lives have crossed paths over the bar. I met my wife here. One of my best friends met his wife here, as well. It might not seem to some like the best place for such a meeting, but I say it's as good as anywhere else. The saga of Jimmy's began nine months earlier, February 22, the day Jimmy Wilson died. Sitting in my third room corner spot, writing a short story just to pass the time, the news filtered slowly through the bar. A little snippet of information passed hand over hand from patron to patron.
You couldn't help but be a little sad, even if you didn't know him. By all accounts Jimmy was a good guy. He was good to his employees, good to his customers. A good husband and father. Get right down to it and that's the best anybody can hope for after eighty-six years.
Jimmy's death came as a shock. Only a few actually knew he was sick. It was doubly shocking to some, as they didn't even know that he was still alive. It was understandable. Jimmy's is really two bars: a day bar for area tradesmen, and a night bar for everybody else. Toward the end, Jimmy didn't regularly come to the bar at night, and even when he did, there wasn't much to distinguish him from the fixtures. If you didn't know who you were looking at he was a just a man who looked like he should be in a bar.
Those who knew him pass around favorite stories and hoist beers in his memory. My favorite story about Jimmy, the "Budweiser incident," goes something like this: A man walks into the Woodlawn Tap selling Budweiser. He says to Jimmy, "If you're gonna have a bar, you gotta serve Budweiser, so you'll pay us whatever we tell you and be happy about it." So Jimmy says, "Shove it. Just for that I ain't never gonna sell Bud for as long as I'm open. And you can kiss my ass."
This is all paraphrased, of course. The truth of the matter is that the incident occurred so long ago, and has been retold so many times, that it has become something more akin to the legend of George Washington and the cherry tree than an event that might actually have happened. What is less widely known is that there is an addendum to the incident, evidence that both men involved in the incident were complete and utter hard asses.
Shortly thereafter, a beer truck from that same Bud distributor arrives at the bar while Jimmy is out. They drop off fifty or so cases of Budweiser and a bill, and then leave. Jimmy walks in a little later, and after saying something like "What the hell is this?" proceeds to take all that beer and stack it on the sidewalk outside his bar. After waiting a couple of hours, he calls the Bud guy and says, "Hey, I think you better come and get your beer. People are starting to take it."
How much of this is truth is up to you to decide, but there is one fact that remains undisputed: The Woodlawn Tap hasn't served a single Budweiser since. At one point Harry Caray, the original "Bud Man," came down to try to talk Jimmy into lifting the moratorium. Jimmy just smiled and told him, "Sorry. The next time you come in I'll give you a Bud. But I won't sell it to you." It's not hard to miss someone like that. He was an old-school character. There was something else, though. Underneath the stories and the normal, distant grief that accompanies the loss of an icon, someone known more as legend than as a man, there rode an undercurrent of dread. Did the passing of this man signal the passing of an era? What would happen to Jimmy's tap?
If you're not a barfly, you might not understand. It takes a while to find a favorite bar. You ease your way into it, and become subtly attached. Over time you build relationships with the other regulars, relationships that only exist within the context of having a couple of beers and sitting around talking about nothing. That's about as stress-free as it gets.
For fifty years it has sat, holding down the corner of 55th and Woodlawn. Born just after World War II, it survived the great urban renewal purges of the sixties, when the Chicago of old was bulldozed to make way for the Chicago of the future . Much of 55th Street, once a low down South Side hot spot crowded with bars, taverns and live music from Woodlawn to Lake Park, was razed in favor of the prissy cinderblock townhouses that now line its sides. A proven survivor, the question now seemed could Jimmy's survive Jimmy.
As it happens, when Jimmy died, his family didn't want to participate in owning the bar anymore. Apparently fifty years of bar ownership was enough. Enter the brothers Callahan, Bill and Jim. Jimmy's needed a savior, and two of its own rose to the challenge.
And so it began, the months-long battle to resurrect an entity that wasn't truly dead yet. It was only then that they began to understand the size of the job ahead. When a liquor license expires, which is to say when the original licensee lets go of the license, nothing is grandfathered. If Jimmy's family had wanted to remain involved in the business, the transition would have been smoother, because the liquor license would never have lapsed. New ownership brings city inspectors, who put the place under a microscope—anything that doesn't meet today's standards has to be brought up to code.
Up to code. Damn. I've been going to Jimmy for a long time. I have never even seen a repair truck, though God knows the old place could have used a touch up here and there. I can't remember anytime that it closed for more than a day, and then only for holidays. Nothing in Jimmy's ever really worked right. It was always hot in the summer and cold in the winter, and finding a bathroom that wasn't out of order was at best a 50-50 proposition.
"It wouldn't be an exaggeration," Bill sighs ruefully, "to say that nothing was up to code." Everything had to go. Rip it all out, the floors, ceiling, walls and everything in between, and start from scratch. "It was one of those thing where you repair as necessary, and as you go along you realize you need a lot of repair."
What began as a simple job, i.e. fix the joint enough to re-open, turned into a gut rehab. The whole building had to be completely rewired. The water closets that passed for bathrooms had to be completely transformed in order to meet twenty-first century standards. The heating and air-conditioning systems, which were as old as the bar, needed to be completely revamped. And thanks to the sanitary restrictions in Jimmy's food license, even the wood bars themselves were illegal and had to be completely torn out. The word "completely" was the adjective of choice when describing the scope of the tasks laid out before them, and it was suffering from overuse. Bill managed to sum up more elegantly: "The place had developed to the point where it needed a lot of work." To add insult to injury, there was also a question concerning Jimmy's proximity to its neighbor, the Church of St. Thomas and its adjacent elementary school. To make a long story short, no bar can be within 100 feet of a school. Depending on where you draw the line, to the church parking lot, to the church, to the front door of the school, to the back door, to the church steeple, etc., Jimmy's may potentially be in violation. Believe it or not, it was the pastor of the church who jumped in to save the day.
"Father Farry, the pastor at St. Thomas has been wonderful," Bill says. "He said, 'This is the way it's always been. Don't measure to the parking lot measure to the school.'" Then Bill shrugs and laughs. "(Jimmy's) has been here for fifty-one years, why would this all of a sudden become a problem?" He's not getting cocky, though. This particular matter won't be considered settled until they actually had their liquor license. "I hope it's not, but it's not officially not a problem yet."
And while the drama has unfolded, Hyde Park has waited with bated breath. Looking past the sawdust in this incomplete bar, it still sort of feels like Jimmy's. The renovation has been massive. Even the walls have been rebuilt, but, aside from a few gross points, I can't see it. Damn, they had this place completely gutted, a blank slate to work with. They could have done anything they wanted to it, and they remodeled Jimmy's to look like Jimmy's. "It looks basically the same, the lines of the place—we haven't changed that. The back bar is still the back bar," Bill says.
But some things are markedly different. The bathrooms, for instance, are no longer tiny cubicles where you have barely enough room to place your feet on either side of the toilet, ducking chipping plaster all the while. They have become almost luxurious affairs of ceramic tile and dimmed lighting. And the bars, themselves, no longer wood, are sheathed in black laminate. All the lighting in a room can be controlled from behind the bar, and the rooms can be dimmed or lightened to taste. The Callahans even sprang for a decent stereo. Bill says, "The guy who set it up for us asked us if we wanted to blow 'em out of their seats or to just be able to hear it." The horror of Jimmy's blasting music on a Saturday night, people dancing around and what not—hell, that would almost be as bad as putting in a jukebox. "I told him," Bill continues, "just being able to hear it at several levels of crowd noise would be fine." In mounting the renovation effort, the Callahans put out the call to several of the regulars, family as it were, to help bring Jimmy's back. The philosophy behind the reconstruction was simple because everybody was on the same page. "The people that have been involved mostly have been here a long time. Obviously you have to change things, by law, but we still wanted to keep the same air."
The director of this effort has been George Bartholomew of Hernbart Construction Management, Inc. An old-school general contractor, and a regular, George is someone with a vested interest in maintaining the old vibe of the joint. "He's brilliant. He's great at what he does. He knew what we were thinking about, and a lot of times he told us what we were thinking about. He verbalized it and then he made it happen," Bill says.
Yeah, I'm sure he didn't have any problem verbalizing. That man has the single foulest mouth I have ever had the privilege of hearing. A good guy, though. I had the pleasure of meeting George while waiting for Bill to show. Standing around, looking like I needed something to do, Vyto (just Vyto will do), one of the bartenders-turned-construction-workers, presses me into service rolling out electrical wire. "The nice thing about George is that he can just walk into an empty space and see what needs doing," he says. Just then, George comes out to ask a question, and as his mouth opens, vivid epithets fly forth of their own volition, scorching the air like lightning, leaving the scent of ozone in their wake. Damn if that boy didn't sound just like a general contractor. "It was pretty much just a regular job, except for the people," George says. The project has received unparalleled support from neighbors and regulars alike.
"It wasn't a grind, it was special because of the people I was working with—on both sides," George continues. "I've been doing this twenty years and I've never seen anything like this. The folks over at the University [of Chicago, Jimmy's landlord] were just tremendous, and sometimes people would just walk in off the street to look at what was going on and give us compliments. I've never had that happen before."
It has taken a lot of work to get Jimmy's where it is now, and the results of that labor stand before us, just waiting to be dusted off and put to use again. It has been a labor of love for those involved, payback for the years of comfort and warmth that Jimmy's has provided for so many. For the moment, Jimmy's may look the worse for wear, but in reality it's back strong as ever. Looking into the empty, disheveled room one last time, it's not hard to see the future. At the Woodlawn Tap, it looks a lot like the past.
copyright 1999 New City Communications, Inc.