Revival of Old Law Signals Last Call for Some Bars in Chicago

It’s just past noon at Cherry’s Cocktail Lounge, and a 72-year-old regular in a Russian fox fur hat is sitting alone, drinking his can of Heileman’s Old Style beer through a straw.

At the pool table, another regular is sipping a 7-Up and deliberately flubbing shots to keep his opponent in the game. Down the bar, their friend is telling a story about “my auntie--she’s but 4 feet tall. . . .”

Cherry’s is dark, it’s dank, and it has a sheet of gin-stained plywood where a table once stood. It hardly appears to be a den of criminal activity, but that hasn’t kept it from being targeted for closure--along with 25 other bars and liquor stores in the Roseland neighborhood--under a 64-year-old Prohibition-style law dusted off to promote community redevelopment.

In a city where visitors enjoy nostalgic bus tours of Al Capone’s bootlegging facilities, voters in November ordered 42 alcohol vendors to close up shop. After a period of vote-counting and notification, they had 30 days--which for Cherry’s and many others is just about now.

A handful of the watering holes were singled out as particularly bothersome centers of vice, noise or lawlessness. Most, however, were swept up in so-called vote-dry efforts that ban alcohol sales in entire precincts.

Mayor Richard M. Daley, the Rev. James T. Meeks of the Salem Baptist Church and others say the law is a democratic way for residents to reclaim rundown areas like Roseland, where the Hotel Toledo advertises “transients welcome” and the beauty salons have bars and wire mesh on their windows.

“Where you tolerate a certain kind of decadence and behavior, you have a higher level of crime,” says Meeks, chief architect of the Roseland sweep. His church just opened the city’s largest Christian bookstore on the site of a former tavern.

Others call the law a selective form of neo-Prohibitionism, driven less by morality and a sense of community than by economics--with the mayor, some developers and a few powerful churches likely to be the primary beneficiaries.

“You want to get [development] going on in this neighborhood, you close up the dope houses,” says Robert Nelson, a 27-year Cherry’s regular. “There’s one on each side of Rev. Meeks’ church.”

The vote-dry law was enacted in 1934, the year after Prohibition was repealed, as Chicago was coming to terms with a policy that brought the city much death, grief and bad publicity--and ultimately failed anyway.

A quirky version of local laws that can be found in dry towns and counties around the country, the ordinance was designed as a way to give residents a say over a difficult and divisive issue that the federal government had had its fill of.

The current law offers four anti-alcohol options that can be put before voters in any of the city’s 2,500 precincts: Residents can ban alcohol sales at a particular address; ban all bars but allow the sale of packaged alcohol; allow the sale of beer only; or they can ban all alcohol sales in the entire precinct. Mike Boyce, executive legal counsel for Daley’s liquor commission, says the city “encourages people to talk to licensees, to call the police” if there are problems. “If that works, you don’t have to go to the next step of vote-dry.”

Before the fall elections, however, Daley’s administration put together a brochure and sponsored workshops detailing how residents could gather signatures and put the measures on the ballot. Two weeks before election day, Daley encouraged voters to pass every measure in town, even suggesting that at the ballot box they skip over other contests and go to the very last line--the line for vote-dry measures--before worrying about who should be their next governor or U.S. senator.

Meeks also took up the cause. And with the help of his parishioners, he targeted a 20-block strip of South Michigan Avenue in Roseland. On Nov. 3, residents voted to oust 26 establishments, including Ralph’s Place, just down the street from Cherry’s.

“Can they vote too many barbershops out? No,” says owner Ralph Bellamy. “How about too many meat-packing plants? No.

“I’m all for getting rid of the people who cause problems,” Bellamy continues. “But this is the only business where voters can close down everybody.”

Indeed, following initial election-time giddiness over the success of the referendums, the consequences of the balloting have become more sobering.

Under the law, the businesses are not bought out by the city, but are simply forced to close--with no compensation for Lenwood Cherry, who has owned Cherry’s for 25 years, or Bellamy, who has been pouring beer at his place for seven years.

The employees will be laid off. The establishments no longer will pay taxes. Many of the buildings will be abandoned, in neighborhoods where abandoned buildings tend to invite more problems than even trouble-causing bars and liquor stores.

“There are less jobs, less of a tax base and less economic empowerment than there was before,” says Tracey Walker, who represents Illinois alcohol distributors as well as an association of largely minority alcohol retailers. “In the long run, there will be a few winners, but they will not be the people in the community.”

Critics suggest the mayor, Meeks and private developers--especially those with alcohol interests in wet parts of the city--have the most to gain from the closures, which could grow to include another 19 precincts after a February election. Currently about 20% of the city’s precincts are dry or partially dry.

In addition to opening the $1-million bookstore, Meeks’ church has plans to build a new 5,000-seat sanctuary in the area. The mayor, who has overseen a 25% decline in liquor licenses in the city in recent years, is up for reelection in February and is spearheading several high-profile efforts he says will make Chicago safer, including suing handgun makers and retailers.

Both Meeks and Daley say their efforts are simply aimed at making Chicago a better, cleaner place to live and visit.

Daley’s office has organized a job retraining program for laid-off workers, and Meeks’ church has offered to pay 75% of the salaries of those who go to the classes.

But only two people showed up for the first session, a city official says.

With many of the taverns and stores unable to afford a legal fight, owners are watching with great anxiety the case of the International Amphitheater.

Targeted by neighbors who complained their yards were being used as urinals and their children menaced by unruly concert-goers, the amphitheater was granted an injunction allowing it to remain open until a federal judge can determine the constitutionality of the law.

But before U.S. District Judge Charles R. Norgle makes his ruling, one that may apply only to businesses targeted individually, dozens of mostly old, mostly family-owned taverns and liquor stores are expected to be out of business.

Back at Cherry’s--which by anyone’s best guess has been around for more than 57 years--the talk is of the bar’s final days.

The man in the fur hat, who calls himself Mr. C, says he’ll get by, drinking his Heileman’s at home.

But, he says, “I’ve been coming here 20 years because I like it.”