GANGSTER CITY

Big Tim was small potatoes. Convicted as a mail robber, he was one of the earliest gangsters to move on into union racketeering. On the evening of June 26, 1928, he was listening on the radio as the Democratic convention moved toward nominating Al Smith to run for President. Someone knocked on his door. He opened it, saw no one, stepped outside.

He stood where we are standing now. The car rolled down this quiet street. Tim saw it too late. But he knew. He must have felt that he was in a dream himself as he turned and began to run toward his front door. He couldn’t run fast enough. Half a dozen of his gangland enemies fired thirty shots from the car.

Here, on the front of the house, are the holes that tell the story. Of all the shots fired during the 1920s, these are the clearest documented traces remaining. Two of the slugs hit Tim’s body, one shattered his forearm, another tore through his heart.

In the twilight we lift the veil for a second and glimpse the reality. Not the meaning of it, or the moral, but a flash of the notion that this was no game, that the bullets were real.

Chicago as a city continues to look on its criminal past with ambiguity. “Embarrassed,” A. J. Liebling noted, “the way a movie star is bored by being recognized.” But embarrassed nonetheless. The complicity of Chicago’s politicians and police in the fabric of crime remains a scandal to this day. “We’re at the trough now, and we’re going to feed,” said one politician of the era. Judges hefted coffins at gangster funerals, and police rode shotgun for shipments of hooch. The Illinois governor Len Small signed pardons for mobsters as fast as they were convicted.

One consequence of this embarrassment is that the preservation and promotion of the landmarks of the era’s unsavory side have been officially discouraged. Urban slough and renewal have taken their toll. But with some effort and imagination the visitor can get a taste of the decade that roared.

The place to begin a visit to Chicago’s criminal past is a spanking new attraction called Capone’s Chicago. When its creator, Michael Y. Graham, was traveling abroad as a history student, he encountered the “gangsterbang-bang” response that Chicagoans have endured for decades. He decided to cash in on the perpetual fascination with gangsters and at the same time correct some of the stereotypes of the movie and television shoot‘em-ups.

Big Jim Colosimo (the epithet “Big” was applied liberally in the city of broad shoulders) set the pattern for a generation of Chicago gangsters. Flashing diamonds and thousand-dollar bills, Colosimo reigned as lord of the city’s vice and gambling for the first twenty years of the century. He struck bargains with politicians. His patrons at City Hall, the aldermen Michael (“Hinky Dink”) Kenna and “Bathhouse” John Coughlin, were paragons of improbity in a venal city.

The prostitution and gambling from which Colosimo derived his living flourished in the Levee district, from Twenty-second to Eighteenth streets, between Clark and Wabash. There he operated Colosimo’s Café, a pleasure palace opened in 1910 at 2126 South Wabash. Chicago’s high society flocked down from Lake Shore Drive to enjoy the club’s baroque extravagance and to hear Sophie Tucker sing “Angle Worm Wriggle,” a song so suggestive it once got her arrested.

Nothing remains of the hundreds of saloons, gambling dens, and vice parlors that once lit up the Levee. The area, just south of the downtown Loop, is a collection of warehouses, vacant lots, and streets suffering from clinical depression. But the visitor can imagine some of Big Jim’s empire. The legendary Everleigh Club, a brothel at 2131 South Dearborn operated by two sisters from Omaha, was perhaps the most elegant bawdy house in the world. There a perfume machine prettied the air, gold cuspidors awaited patrons’ expectorations, and all the trappings of high society attended the liaisons.

Torrio turned over his holdings to his right-hand man. Capone had been born in Brooklyn in 1899. Standing five foot ten and weighing well in excess of two hundred pounds, Al started life as a bartender. One observer reported that he “emanated menace while saying please.” He received his famous scars not in the world war, as he often claimed, but by insulting the sister of a Brooklyn thug.

Capone shared with many of the era’s gang leaders an incendiary temper and a willingness to take a man’s life. But he was always more than the “millionaire gorilla” that he complained people viewed him as. “I have always been opposed to violence,” he said. “I want peace, and I will live and let live.” He meant it.

Capone tried to make peace with Weiss, but after two years of Weiss’s sporadic rebellion, Al ordered his murder. Gunmen waited six days in a second-story window at 740 North State overlooking Schofield’s; Weiss had continued to use an office there. On the afternoon of October 11,1926, the assassins opened up with machine guns, cutting the twentyeight-year-old Weiss down directly in front of the store. During the shooting a stream of bullets crashed into the cornerstone of Holy Name, all but obliterating its pious inscription.

“Hymie Weiss is dead because he was a bull-head,” Capone announced.

In a later renovation the steps of Holy Name were extended across the front, covering the cornerstone except for the date, 1874. A close inspection can to this day pick out the marks of stray bullets in the rough limestone.

Not long after arriving in Chicago, Al Capone bought a house at 7244 South Prairie Avenue. He lived there with his wife, Mae, an attractive blonde from a devout Irish family, and their only son, Albert Francis, called Sonny. Al’s father having died in Brooklyn, Al brought his mother and two younger sisters to live with him. His brother Ralph occupied the upstairs rooms. The house was elegantly appointed, with floor-to-ceiling mirrors and gilded cornices. The neighborhood was and continues to be solidly middle-class.

LeVell and I park in front of the fifteen-room brick building. Al installed the bars that still cover the groundfloor windows. He built a garage out back roomy enough to accommodate his seven-ton armored Cadillac limousine. The car’s fold-down rear window was a gunport.

Here in the side yard his mother grew vegetables. These are the steps that were covered in rose petals for the funeral of his brother Frank. At this front door reporters were once greeted by the criminal monarch of Chicago wearing a pink apron and cooking spaghetti sauce.

LeVell re-creates the scene when Capone’s entourage would pull up to this curb and a mass of torpedoes would fan out through the neighborhood before Al strolled inside. He pictures Capone playing Santa every Christmas at his young sister Mafalda’s school, dark-jowled elves with bulging armpits handing out the gifts. The school was attached to St. Columbanus Catholic Church, around the corner on Seventy-first Street, where the Capone family worshiped.

The modesty of the home always surprises. Perhaps Capone was emulating the conservative Torrio, who lived in an apartment farther east at 7011 South Clyde. In any case, Al was no homebody; he spent more time in hotels than in his living room.

During the mid-1920s the six Genna brothers dominated Chicago’s Little Italy, the region around Taylor Street west of the river. They amassed considerable power and wealth by organizing residents into freelance alky cookers. The still tenders mixed up a mash with yeast and sugar; the rats that inevitably fell in became part of the recipe. After the yeast did its work, the mixture was slowly heated, alcohol wrung from its vapor. For this, urban peasants were paid the tantalizing remuneration of fifteen dollars a day. The Gennas were a violent lot with a background in the strong-arm extortion methods known as the Black Hand. Their gunmen subscribed to the old-world superstition that a smear of garlic made bullets more lethal. As the Genna power grew, they came into conflict with both the North Side forces under Weiss and with their nominal ally Capone. The inevitable clashes resulted. Three of the brothers were killed during a six-week period in 1925.

Up the road from the O’Donnell shooting, LeVell and I follow the last steps of Mike (“The Devil”) Genna. He died on the morning of June 13, 1925, after a gunfight with police at the southwest corner of Fifty-ninth Street and Western Avenue. The vacant lot he crossed is still empty. We stroll down the alley to the back of 5941 South Artesian, where Genna, shot in the thigh, smashed a window to climb into the basement. When he was captured, Mike tried to kick the ambulance attendant in the face. “Take that, you son of a bitch.” He quickly bled to death.

Farther north and west, around the corner from the old Genna domain, the Maxwell Street police station still stands as a monument to the beleaguered, corrupt police force of the time. This stone fortress, at the corner of Morgan and Maxwell streets, the oldest station in Chicago, once looked out across what the Chicago Tribune called “the wickedest police district in the world.” During the twenties officers from Maxwell Street lined up at the Genna warehouse at 1022 West Taylor Street to receive their payoffs: $15 to $125 a month for beat cops, $500 for captains. The department provided the gangsters with a personnel list so that cops from other districts couldn’t elbow in on the graft. More recently the station served as a set for the television series “Hill Street Blues.”

On the night of April 27, the Big Guy himself went out to spread fear. He tailed a Lincoln carrying Klondike’s brother Myles and some of his henchmen. On the way to the Pony Inn O’Donnell had picked up twenty-five-year-old Bill McSwiggin. Bill lived at home with his parents. His father was a Chicago cop, and he himself was an assistant state’s attorney, a sharp young prosecutor who had won seven of the eleven first-degree murder convictions in the city the previous year. He’d once unsuccessfully prosecuted Myles O’Donnell for murder.

As the O’Donnell group alighted in front of the tavern, Capone’s car approached from the east. A burst of machine-gun fire ripped into three of the men. Myles and his driver escaped unharmed. They wrestled the bloody bodies of two of their companions, including McSwiggin, into the car and dumped them in another suburb.

McSwiggin’s killing shocked Chicago and the nation. Gangsters killing gangsters was one thing. To gun down a prosecutor went beyond the pale. In a spasm of indignation the police raided speakeasies and gambling parlors around the city. McSwiggin’s boss, Robert E. Crowe, who had never proved himself capable of solving a single gangland murder, swore, “We are going to get to the bottom of this.”

But as the shock subsided, the city faced troubling questions. Why was an assistant state’s attorney consorting with the very lawbreakers he was sworn to prosecute? How closely was McSwiggin linked to the underworld forces that seemed to be gaining control of the entire city? Why were gangsters allowed to kill with impunity? Cynicism began to replace sympathy.

Five grand juries failed to indict anyone for the murders. Capone was questioned and released. He reportedly handed McSwiggin’s father an automatic and told him, “If you think I did it, shoot me.”

Capone, who surely never intended to kill McSwiggin, would finally admit that the prosecutor was sharing in the graft that Al so liberally dispensed. “I paid McSwiggin,” he said. “I paid him a lot, and I got what I was paying for.”

A peace conference in the autumn of 1926 brought relative calm to Chicago gangland. Territories were again delineated; handshakes replaced bullets. The next three years would mark the pinnacle of Capone’s power. Six years after arriving in the city, he owned it.

It was no coincidence that the period also saw the return of William Hale Thompson, Jr., as Chicago’s mayor. A millionaire and the grandson of one of the city’s founders, Big Bill grew up a privileged sportsman, a devotee of cowboy culture.

In 1915 the Windy City elected this confident, windy man as its mayor. Thompson did not quibble about his stand on the dry laws, declaring himself “as wet as the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.” Bootleggers cheered.

But by 1923 voters had had enough of “the most notorious wowser of the day.” They replaced him with Judge William E. Dever, a reformer who would prove largely ineffectual. It was during Dever’s reign that Capone sought the shelter of Cicero. Four years later Thompson mounted a campaign spiced with bluster and braggadocio. He beat the America-first drum and savaged the King of England. With the help of $260,000 in campaign funds from the Capone organization, Big Bill became the city’s mayor a second time.

Back when the Franks and the Goths were trying to muscle in on the Roman Empire, a pagan priest named Valentine offered succor to persecuted Christians. Eventually he converted to the new religion and was clubbed to death for his trouble. St. Valentine’s feast day absorbed the trappings of a Roman fertility cult. It’s been linked to hearts and flowers ever since, but in Chicago it brings other associations to mind.

After the death of Hymie Weiss, the North Side mantle fell to George Moran, a thug of Polish extraction. His temper tantrums earned him the nickname Bugs.

Moran, whose qualities of leadership were minimal, continued to cause trouble for the Capone outfit during the years of relative peace. He lent at least tacit support to another North Sider with ambition named Joe Aiello. Aiello mounted a number of attempts to assassinate Capone. He offered a fifty-thousand-dollar open bounty on Al’s life. (Aiello’s elegant home stands a few blocks from the site of the Tim Murphy shooting, at 2553 West Lunt Street.) Two of Moran’s men, Pete and Frank Gusenberg, wounded Capone’s bodyguard Jack McGurn in a phone booth.

Early in 1929 Moran purchased a shipment of Canadian Old Log Cabin whiskey that had allegedly been hijacked from Capone. The hijackers soon offered another shipment for an attractive price. Moran was to oversee delivery personally—on St. Valentine’s Day.

February 14 dawned cold and dismal. By ten in the morning seven men were waiting at a garage at 2122 North Clark Street. The sign outside read S.M.C. CARTAGE co. The place was a depot for Moran’s bootleg operation. The occupants included four Moran associates and the two Gusenberg brothers. The seventh man, twentynine-year-old Reinhart Schwimmer, was a sometime oculist who thought it glamorous to hang out with hoodlums.

Before Moran arrived, perhaps as he approached the building, a police car pulled up in front. Two men in uniform and two in plain clothes entered the building.

Schwimmer must have been scared. The others had endured the nuisance of police raids before. They had little to worry about—this was Chicago—but Reinhart had no record. His mother was still supporting him.

In any case, no one was given an opportunity to explain. The men were ordered to line up along the wall, their hands in the air. The “police” then opened fire, shredding the victims with seventy shots from two machine guns and two shotgun blasts.

Eight minutes after entering, the men in uniform marched their two companions back to the car as if arresting them. They disappeared.

The men in the garage, save one, were dead. Frank Gusenberg survived to be taken to Alexian Brothers Hospital. Loyal to the underworld code of silence, Frank insisted, in spite of his perforated torso, that “nobody shot me.” He died within hours.

S.M.C. Cartage remains the bestknown crime site in Chicago. A Mr. and Mrs. Werner operated an antiques store there in the 1940s. At first they knew nothing of its history and were mystified by the steady stream of crime buffs eager to gaze at the building’s back wall. “They came from all over the world,” Mrs. Werner said, “even New Zealand.”

The building was demolished in 1967. The site is now the grassy lawn and parking lot of a nursing home. But the rest of the mixed residential block is intact, including the houses across the street, at 2135 and 2119 North Clark, where for days lookouts tracked Moran’s movements.

Not too far away, at 2221 North Lincoln Avenue, is the building that was the Drake-Braithwaite Funeral Home, from which the victims of the St. Valentine’s Day carnage were buried. The two widows of the bigamist Frank Gusenberg appeared at the wake and provided a bit of comic relief. The Tribune reported that they vied with each other in singing Frank’s praises.

Gangland slaughter was nothing new, but on St. Valentine’s Day the number of victims reached a critical mass. The affair instantly became a massacre. Suddenly the criminal infestation of the city seemed out of control. Citizens suggested that the U.S. Marines, who’d been occupying Nicaragua for three years, would be better employed patrolling Cook County. The who and why of the operation continues to inspire debate among crime buffs. Did Capone, who was soaking up the sun at his Miami estate that February, order it? Was it rogue police officers with a grudge against Moran? A Frederick R. Burke from St. Louis was later caught with the machine guns used in the massacre, but even his participation in the killing is uncertain.

The consensus is that “Machine Gun” Jack McGurn organized the killings for Capone. LeVell even suspects McGurn to have been one of the shooters. He points out that McGurn had been spotted in nearby Lincoln Park and that at least one witness claimed to have seen him outside S.M.C. Cartage that morning.

“McGurn was the epitome of the gangster,” he says. “He drove a roadster, he was a playboy, and he was probably the most dangerous gunman who ever walked the streets of Chicago.”

For years McGurn played Lancelot to Capone’s King Arthur. A true “Jazz Age sheik,” he dressed to the nines, could tear up a dance floor, and played a skillful game of golf. His companion was a striking blonde named Louise Rolfe, herself a tournament-level golfer. If McGurn’s good looks were more Latin than Celtic, it was because he was in fact Sicilian, born Vincenzo Gibaldi. He acquired the Irish moniker during a brief boxing career. In 1929 he was still only twenty-six.

“He was a hit man who hit hit men,” LeVell explains. “He took care of guys who were gunning for Capone, guys who were armed and on their guard.” McGurn may have killed twenty-two men, as the police stated, or he may have killed twice that many. Once pulled in for questioning about a mob rubout, he was asked if he knew the victim was dead. “Dead?” he replied. “I didn’t even know he was sick.”

McGurn claimed he’d spent St. Valentine’s Day in an appropriate manner: in bed with Louise at the Stevens Hotel on South Michigan—one of the swankiest addresses in the city, now the Chicago Hilton. The papers christened Louise “The Blonde Alibi” and quoted her as saying, “When you’re with Tack, you’re never bored.”

Seven years later, his glory days over, McGurn went bowling at 805 North Milwaukee Avenue. It was St. Valentine’s Day. Shortly after midnight unknown gunmen surrounded him and shot him dead. They left a comic Valentine with the body. The bowling alley is now an office-furniture store.

In 1933 Capone was in prison, his appeals exhausted. The nation had reached economic rock bottom. In March machinegun emplacements guarded Roosevelt’s inauguration as the Depression seemed to threaten the very foundation of government. In April John Dillinger walked out of an Indiana prison with five dollars and a new suit. A year later he would be known around the world.

Dillinger represented a breed that differed in fundamental respects from the gangsters who ruled Chicago. The history of the outlaw goes back at least to Jesse and Frank James, who robbed banks and trains on behalf of the Confederacy. The line runs through Butch Cassidy down to Charles Arthur (“Pretty Boy”) Floyd, the Barker gang, and other Depression-era bandits.

The gangsters grew up in urban settings and usually served apprenticeships with youth gangs. The outlaws were mostly of rural origin and lawabiding stock. A twist of fate, or sometimes a whim, propelled them into a criminal life. Gangsters pursued their ill-gotten gains through ongoing enterprises. Outlaws specialized in hitand-run crimes: robberies and kidnappings. They dreamed of a score, not a system. Gangsters rigorously kept their women at home, often hiding from them all the details of their illicit dealings. Outlaws’ women often joined in the fun. In some cases, as with Kate (“Ma”) Barker or George (“Machine Gun”) Kelly’s wife, Kathryn, they provided both the brains and the spunk.

John Dillinger epitomized the outlaw. He came from a respectable Indianapolis family that later moved to the more rural Mooresville, Indiana. Not an ambitious student, he was a good mechanic and so skilled at baseball that he dreamed of playing at Wrigley Field. In September of 1924, when Dillinger was twenty-one, an older friend induced him to rob a local grocer. They botched the holdup and were apprehended. John’s father, himself once a grocer, advised his son to plead guilty to this first offense and trust the court’s mercy. The judge, disgusted by brazenness of the crime, handed him ten to twenty years of hard time. During his nine years inside Dillinger went to school with experienced bank robbers. He emerged determined to extract payment for the patently unjust punishment.

During the summer of 1933 Dillinger visited Chicago for the first time and attended the gaudy Century of Progress, where he could gaze at what one newspaper called the “apotheosis of America’s womanly pulchritude” displaying itself in various states of undress. In the autumn he and his band pulled off successful robberies, hitting banks from rural Indiana to Racine, Wisconsin. They raided rural police stations for weapons and bulletproof vests. They escaped back to the anonymity of Chicago, where they occupied an apartment at 4310 Clarendon, still a quiet North Side neighborhood near Lincoln Park.

The newspapers of the day were on the lookout for spectacular stories that would distract readers from the dreary news of the Depression. Dillinger made headlines. His legend snowballed as even robberies he had no connection with were chalked up under his name.

In December, after one of Dillinger’s band shot a Chicago detective, the gang decamped for Florida. Wanderlust took them to Tucson, Arizona, where a portion of the gang, including Dillinger, was captured. In March of 1934 Dillinger used a wooden gun to pull off a spectacular escape from a heavily guarded jail in Crown Point, Indiana. The breakout startled the country and inflated Dillinger’s reputation a hundredfold.

Dillinger had taken up with a halfbreed Menominee Indian named Evelyn Frechette. After the escape they moved in with her sister Patsy, who had a second-floor apartment at 3512 North Halsted, two blocks from a police station. The building is still there. Note the side entrance that would have allowed an extra escape route.

He robbed more banks. On April 9, 1934, as the manhunt escalated, Dillinger almost walked into a trap. Federal men were waiting for him as he and Frechette drove up in front of a tavern at 416 North State Street. Evelyn had a bad feeling about the place. She went in to check. The government men grabbed her; Dillinger escaped. She never saw him again. Today the building houses a hot-dog emporium.

Taking a breather in northern Wisconsin, the Dillinger gang fought a gun battle with federal agents—the famous Little Bohemia shoot-out. The G-men killed an innocent bystander and lost one of their own. The incident particularly embarrassed the thirty-nine-year-old J. Edgar Hoover, head of the Justice Department’s Division of Investigation, soon to become the FBI. Hoover had assigned a special squad to hunt down Dillinger. For Hoover, Dillinger personified the wave of kidnappings and robberies sweeping the Midwest. During the Little Bohemia incident he prematurely announced Dillinger’s capture to the press.

The truth both outraged and disconcerted the public. The government appeared laughably ineffectual. Outlaws seemed to operate with impunity. In fact, a combination of elements beyond his own daring contributed to Dillinger’s success. He took advantage of the potential for speed that Detroit was increasingly engineering into its cars. He favored fleet eight-cylinder Fords and Hudson Terraplanes. Local law-enforcement officers rarely drove anything of comparable horsepower. They also lacked the mobile two-way radios that would later make hit-andrun robberies a much chancier option. To top it off, very little logistical or legal cooperation existed among various police forces, so that, in effect, crossing a state line conferred impunity.

The noose was tightening quickly around Dillinger during the summer of 1934. Some of his confederates were in prison; others considered it too dangerous to work with a man whose face was known to virtually everyone in the country. Though some of Dillinger’s robberies had netted as much as seventy thousand dollars, the expenses of living as a fugitive quickly ate into his bankroll. Plastic surgery failed to alter his looks convincingly. That June, in a publicity gimmick dreamed up by the crime fighters, the FBI designated him “Public Enemy Number 1.”

In July Dillinger was staying at 2420 Halsted, the apartment of Anna Sage, who would enter the history books as “The Lady in Red.” A former madam with ties to both the underworld and the police, Sage faced being returned to her native Romania. The vague promise of a reprieve from deportation, combined with the prospect of the fifteen-thousand-dollar reward then being offered, tempted her to turn informer.

She took her information to police officers she knew in East Chicago, Indiana. There’s always been speculation that those officers insisted on Dillinger’s death—either as revenge for another East Chicago policeman killed by him during a robbery in January or to cover the trail of bribery that led to the Crown Point escape. Dillinger’s only federal offense was his interstate transportation of a stolen car, a violation of the 1919 Dyer Act; bank robbery was not yet a federal crime. But it’s likely that the Chicago section of the FBI, headed by the dapper Southerner Melvin Purvis, conspired with the East Chicago detectives in Dillinger’s assassination.

Chicago had endured a fiveday heat wave. The temperature reached 108 degrees on Sunday, July 22, killing twenty-three people in the city. Dillinger had been staying with Sage for the past two days, along with his current lover, a waitress named Polly Hamilton. Sage informed the authorities that she and Polly would accompany John to see Manhattan Melodrama, a gangster movie starring Clark Gable, at the Biograph Theater on Lincoin Avenue, right around the corner from her apartment. In the basement of the Biograph electric fans blew on blocks of ice, and the air circulated to provide patrons with some relief from the swelter. While the movie played, sixteen federal agents and five East Chicago policemen surrounded the theater. The manager, fearful of a holdup, called the Chicago police, who knew nothing of the ambush. They were warned off by the G-men.

Though the Sage apartment is gone, movies are still shown at the Biograph, which stands at 2433 North Lincoln Avenue. The theater is the one Chicago crime site that has been added to the National Register of Historic Places. The original ticket booth, with its crown of light bulbs, is preserved in front.

Exiting the theater, Dillinger and the two women turned left. Sage wore a bright orange skirt as a signal (it appeared red under the lights). We can follow their steps along the hot sidewalk as they headed for the entrance to an alley a few doors to the south that leads back to Halsted. Before they reached it, the federal men closed in. Sensing danger, Dillinger ran toward the alley. He was shot four times. The fatal bullet pierced his back, exited below his eye. He fell facedown. Purvis rolled the corpse over with his toe. A crowd gathered. Women knelt to dip the hems of their slips in the blood, a memento of a wild time, a token of reality.

“We had a lot of fun,” Polly Hamilton would recollect. “It’s surprising how much fun we had.”

The outlaw era effectively ended in 1934. J. Edgar Hoover was still bragging about getting Dillinger thirty years later. Meanwhile, the gangsters who had made crime a business were looking at a bright future. The 1950 Kefauver hearings listed Capone men Tony Accardo, Jake Guzik, and Paul Ricca as mob powers and noted the expansion of the outfit into cities across the country’s midsection. In 1957 Sam Giancana, a onetime button man for Capone, bragged on a tapped phone line, “We got this territory locked up tight.”

The crimes that provoked outrage and revulsion seventy years ago are now safely wrapped in layers of myth and nostalgia. Today the young gangsters on Chicago’s streets, armed with weaponry that would have made Frank McErlane’s mouth water, refer to themselves as “Nitti” to advertise their facility with firearms. Gunfire still sounds in the streets, but few crime buffs venture into the lethal housing projects and gang territories to view the fresh gouges in the bricks.

Night life is one of the most ephemeral aspects of any time. Fashions change, performers pass, clubs and dance halls fade into memory. Two spots offer the Chicago visitor a chance to turn back the clock.

Tommy Gun’s Garage is a dinner theater in a warehouse at 1237 South State Street. The police department once used the place as a target range, but the guns here now shoot only blanks, and a waggish atmosphere is enforced. You need to know the password in order to gain admittance at the back-alley entrance. Waiters and waitresses all dress in period costumes and speak a contagious Damon Runyon patois. They later join in the song and dance onstage, which includes some competent torch singing and brisk comedy routines. A real 1928 Model A Ford sits in one corner, a prop for souvenir photographs.

Hokey? Yes, but Tommy Gun’s does convey something of the fun of the Prohibition era. If the Eighteenth Amendment brought Chicago Capone, it also brought a boisterous anything-goes attitude. The dry forces forgot the lesson of Eden. Citizens loved to tipple on the sly. They shook off the last vestiges of Victorian restraint and kicked up their heels in the Charleston.

Another spot to sample the flavor of those incandescent nights of the Jazz Age is the Green Mill Jazz Club at 4802 North Broadway. This apotheosis of cocktail lounges has a fascinating history in itself, documented in a scrapbook kept behind the bar. Opened in 1907, it was a regular watering hole for Wallace Beery and Broncho Billy Anderson when they were making silent Westerns at the nearby Spoor and Anderson studios.

During the 1920s the Green Mill became a popular nightclub. Headlining in 1927 was the comedian-singer Joe E. Lewis. He would retail the story that the Capone torpedo Jack McGurn owned an interest in the Green Mill and tried to persuade the entertainer to refrain from moving to another club. Others have suggested that Lewis’s problems stemmed from a jealous husband. In any case, a week after Lewis opened at the new bistro three men burst into his apartment, beat him with pistols, and almost severed his talented tongue with knives. It took him years to put his career back together. Later, Capone, a Lewis fan, asked him, “Why the hell didn’t you come to me when you had your trouble?” He offered the comedian a sizable loan.

Another personality associated with the Green Mill was Mary Louise (“Texas”) Guinan, an impresario who operated night spots in New York and Chicago. Her tag, “Hello, sucker,” became a Prohibition catchphrase. The spectacles she mounted featured an abundance of flesh and spangles. A 1930 shooting in the Green Mill led the police to close her show there for good.

Today the Green Mill retains much of its original gaudy elegance. Baroque gilt frames enclose murals; green plush upholstery lines the booths. Most nights jazz combos light up the intimate stage. They remind us that during Prohibition the city became a mecea for musicians. They added a hardswinging elegance to the exuberant ensemble play imported from New Orleans and made the improvised solo a standard feature of arrangements. Louis Armstrong made records in Chicago during the late 1920s, tunes like “Tight Like This” and “Potato Head Blues,” which musicians still listen to with awe.

The jazz masters were intimately involved with the gangsters, who ran most of the clubs and speakeasies where they played. The clarinetist Mezz Mezzrow described them as “blowtops born with ice-cubes for hearts and the appetites of a cannibal.”

—J.K.