The Tribune is reporting that longtime newspaperman, historian, Baseball Hall-of-Famer and Chicago native Jerome Holtzman has passed away over the weekend from a major stroke at the age of 82. Born on December 11, 1926, Mr. Holtzman began his career as a copyboy at the Chicago Daily News. He eventually wrote for every major local daily published in this city before retiring from the Tribune in 1999 to become the official historian for Major League......

Photo by JVoves Go take your classic shots of Buckingham Fountain now. Come September, the landmark will be under a tent for a while as part of a $25 million restoration. The fountain was last restored back in 1994, but this is a bigger undertaking. According to the Trib, "[this restoration will] concentrate on the outer basin and surrounding grounds, while also assessing whether pieces of the fountain's machinery can be made more energy-efficient.......

Preservation Chicago announced its 7 most endangered buildings today, and on the list are surprise entries Grant Park and the Landmarks Ordinance. Also cited are Norwood Park, the American Book Company Building, the Devon Ave commercial district, the Booker Building and the Daily News building. Photo by WVAllen According to Preservation Chicago's report, Grant Park is endangered because of the plans to relocate the Children's Museum. [That plan[ would impose more than 100,000 square feet......

DN-0085338, Chicago Daily News negatives collection, Chicago History Museum The weather forecast calls for a lot of "brass bra cold" this weekend. It won't stop people from going out and enjoying their weekend, although some serious consideration should be given to hibernating on the couch with movies, a bottle of wine, and a comforter. Take, for example, these two men who thought it was a great idea to dress in Native American dress and......

There are sixty bridges spanning the Chicago River throughout the city, as we found out last month at the annual B News neighborhood pub quiz. We know about the larger bridges downtown, and we stop to stare at them when the spans are raised to allow boats to pass. However, the majority of bridges spanning the river are smaller ones allowing traffic to pass between neighborhoods. We tend to overlook those bridges. This is......

In a day packed with college football bowl games, the coolest televised sporting event on New Year's Day had to be watching the Buffalo Sabres and Pittsburgh Penguins play an NHL game outside in Buffalo, in front of over 71,000 fans. It brought the game back to its roots, played outside on frozen ponds and lakes throughout the Midwest and Canada. Now imagine that same game outside, only featuring two of the NHL's "Original......

Now that we have a day job and commute to work every morning, we have ample opportunity to sit on the train and get our fifty cents worth reading the Sun-Times. We're huge fans of Tom McNamee's "The Chicago Way" column, as it's one of the few regular features in any of the city's newspapers that successfully reflects on the city's rich past in a way that engages present-day readers. McNamee's most recent column, on......

Uck. Grey crappy icy Sunday afternoon. No Bears game - just the memories of Thursday's injury plagued horror. If only it were 1940 - it was during this weekend of that year that the most lopsided NFL games ever played took place - and the Bears whooped the Redskins' ass 73-0. The below video from that game is titled The Greatest Block in NFL History - it might not be the absolute greatest of all......

This week, we're taking another visit back to our childhood stomping grounds on the Northwest side. But we're going way back, waaayyy back to 1917. Our father's side of the family immigrated to America from Greece four years earlier, settling in Greektown. Our mother's side of the family was at least a decade away from moving to the East Village from Virginia. The photo you're looking at at the top of this entry is......

The Audit Bureau of Circulation released its Fas Fax data today, giving newspaper ombudsmen everywhere a topic for tomorrow's column. Too bad everyone's going to write largely the same story: Newspaper circulation is down. Circulation is down 2.6 percent across all major US daily newspapers, with the Trib faring worse than other papers, falling 2.9 percent over the last six months to a paid weekday circulation of 559,404. That makes the Trib the eighth biggest......

While many of you shuffle back and forth from stage to stage in Grant Park this weekend, we thought we'd take the opportunity to show you how it looked about 80 years ago. It's just a touch different today, isn't it? While the landscaping had yet to take its place in 1929, Buckingham Fountain and the general layout of the park are clear. The Art Institute is in place and looks exceptionally lonely, and while......

Did you know that there's an Oscar available for viewing right here in Chicago, and that you can even make an appointment to see it and actually hold it in your hand? It's at the Newberry Library, a private institution that's open to the public and just far enough west of Michigan Avenue that you won't have to worry about shopaholic tourists when you visit. The Oscar was awarded to Ben Hecht for Best Original......

You’ve probably noticed more posts on Chicagoist lately. We’ve been stepping up our efforts to provide coverage of daily news, events, food, the arts and all the miscellaneous things on your mind. We’ve also brought in some new blood to keep the rest of us on our toes, and cover all the important goings-on here in the city. Say hello to our newest batch of writers: On the general news beat, we’ve got Old Town......

It may seem like Chicagoist is cool, but really we're big time nerds. We get off on geeky new gadgets and websites and blogs. And we're not ashamed of it either. Let's look back at the nerdiest Chicago-area things that caught our attention in 2005. Our Biggest Nerd Crush went to Adrian Holovaty, internet wizard and co-creator of chicagocrime.org. We met him at an event and all of us were clearly drooling at how nerdy......

Last week Chicagoist wrote: "Memo to John Cruickshank: Time to fold the Red Streak. This is getting embarrassing." On Thursday, the "youth-focused" Red Streak will publish its last issue, three years after its first. While we'd like to think we had something to do with the closing, we know the Red Streak's fate was sealed long ago. Crain's is reporting that no jobs will be lost as a result of the closure, probably because most......

The Sox have spent most of this baseball season in obscurity despite the best record, banished to the depths of flyover country and treated as second class citizen within their own city. So Sox fans have been understandably upset when a Jonny Damon haircut or George Steinbrenner's lunch gets more airtime on SportsCenter than the Sox. Finally, the East Coast media have discovered that the White Sox exist. And write a story about them.......

Yesterday the RedEye busted out a long overdue topic for musical navelgazers everywhere: what is this year’s song of the summer? The Tribune's Eric Zorn blogged about this topic back in 2004 (look for the August 18th entry) thanks to a reader who sent in a list of summer songs. The reader said one could pinpoint the year you became old by “identifying the first song on the list for which you don’t know the......

Eschewing the loud and cavernous arenas in the Chicago area, Coldplay will return to the city on May 6th for a show at Metro. Tickets go on sale this Saturday at noon at the Metro box office (next door at Hi-Fi Records) and through Ticketmaster (only two tickets per person). Pre-sale tickets are available to members of the band’s official website. The high demand, low supply club gigs are designed to build a buzz for......

We should really be a headline writer. Isn't this one killer? Get it? "Killer"? Oh wait, since you only get your news from Chicagoist you wouldn't get it because you haven't heard or read anything about the story yet. So, ladies and gentlemen, without further ado, the story of a prank gone wrong in Calumet City. An off-duty Cook County corrections officer shot and killed another officer, his friend, around 1:12 a.m. Saturday. The friend,......

Michael Cooke, the editor in chief of the Chicago Sun-Times has resigned after 5 years. He's leaving to take the same position with the New York Daily News. Rumors have been flying for days, but today they were confirmed when Cooke announced in an email to Sun-Times employees that he'll take over as editor in chief of the Daily News in February. Cooke will fill the job left open when Edward Kosner retired from the......

There are few certainties in baseball--even fewer since the Red Sox actually won a World Series. However, one that remains is Greg Maddux winning a Gold Glove. For the 14th time in 15 years, Maddux won the award as the best fielding pitcher --Braves teammate Mike Hampton beat him out last year. Maddux becomes the first Cubs player to win a Golden Glove award since Mark Grace won the award at first base in......

Chicagoist is getting the munchies just thinking about this! On Sunday, Chicago police discovered 4,400 pounds of marijuana in a semi in East Garfield Park. Jose Vizcaya, 68, was backing the truck into a warehouse and Jose Lopez, 45, was guiding the truck when police showed up. Both men were charged with felony drug possession. Not that Chicagoist has ever purchased marijuana, but 4,400 pounds is a fuckload of pot. Our head spins when we......