Hell may freeze over yet. After all of daddy John’s efforts to demolish old Cook County General Hospital, Todd Stroger’s leading the charge to renovate the beast. The Toddler plans to make it an agenda at next week’s County Board meeting. Preservation and renovation carry a price tag of roughly $140 million. For now, the plan is to turn the 93-year-old structure into medical office space, libraries, a day-care center and, if there’s any space......

Chicagoist is a huge fan of our own homegrown media industry. We like the original stuff that comes out of this city and telling our folks things like how we walk through Gotham City on our way to work and visit County General every time we have a boo-boo. So, as always, it was a lot of fun to sit in on last night's taping of "Wait! Wait! Don't Tell Me". Host Peter Sagal informed......

Back in the waning days of the late 1990s, Chicagoist’s college roommate came to visit us. Since he was a big "ER" fan (remember this was the late 90s when the show was still good), he demanded to see where “County General” was. We had to delicately break it to him that there was no such place though we did take him by its doppelganger, the old Cook County Hospital building. We further shattered his......

Santa Claus, The Easter Bunny, strippers who really like you and television medical dramas. What do these things have in common? None of them are real (except for House. That shit’s all true. The woman from last season with a 30-pound tumor? Totally happened to someone at Northwestern). Confirmation of the latter was provided in an article on CNN.com about Dr. Roxanne Roberts, who is the director of the division of trauma clinical services at......

Chicago historians and architecture buffs who are in a rage over the impending demolition of Cook County Hospital will be happy to know that the National Trust for Historic Preservation named the historic site to its 11 Most Endangered Historic Places of 2004 list. Well, not happy per-se, but psyched for the backup. Cook County Hospital (handy map) was built in 1913 and was home to the first blood bank in the world in......