What to expect in 2012. Or not. One person's opinion. more ›

The Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield will preserve court papers documenting the former first lady’s 1875 commitment to Batavia's Bellevue Insane Asylum. more ›

A Colonial-era cocktail that's perfect for fall. more ›

Digital incarnations notwithstanding, film is a fragile, even ephemeral thing. It is commonly observed that 90 percent of all American silent films and 50 percent of American sound films made before 1950 have already been lost forever. The great majority of those that have survived continue to suffer woeful decay and neglect. The vaults of the UCLA Film & Television Archive, with a big, dedicated staff and a 220,000-title collection that makes it second in size only to the Library of Congress, are xenon arc lamp of our burgeoning enlightenment about the need to restore and preserve our cinematic heritage so it can be shared with future generations. Throughout September, treasures plucked from that vault will be available at the Gene Siskel Film Center, and we recommend you take as much of it in as you can. more ›

Patricio Guzmán's new documentary Nostalgia for the Light, opening at the Siskel Film Center tomorrow, is an unforgettable showcase of the dreams and ghosts he found in the driest place on Earth. more ›

U of C held a red carpet ceremony for that? more ›

Two hundred and five years ago to the day, the first known description of the Cocktail appeared in print. The publication: The Balance and Columbian Repository. The recipe: "...a stimulating liquor, composed of spirits of any kind, sugar, water, and bitters..." The Museum of the American Cocktail has commemorated the appearance of this fateful passage by deeming May 13 World Cocktail Day. And that is what we call a great excuse to have a drink. more ›

Looks like we’ve been here—and we’ve been queer—since the city of Chicago was founded in the 1850s, according to the curators of “Out in Chicago,” a new, expansive LGBT-related exhibit at the Chicago History Museum. Previously these communities could only be traced as far back as the 1920s—but according to a recently uncovered ordinance from 1851 that prohibited openly dressing in opposite gender clothing, its clear these communities have been part of the Windy City’s DNA since its inception. more ›

Are you a Chicago history nerd? A food lover? An architecture geek? A fan of the Palmer House Hotel? If you're any of these things, we have just the event for you. The Palmer House and Lockwood Restaurant are running a series of lunch-time tours of the hotel, hosted by resident "historian extraordinaire" (and PR director) Ken Price. more ›

Today Art shares photos of one of his favorite subjects over the years - mobsters. more ›

Baseball came to the flowering Bronx of my boyhood via stickball played with broom handles. Yankee Stadium was only a one hour's walk away from our three sewer long stickball street and we often sneaked in to worship the Babe, Lou Gehrig and the rest of the gods, and get their autographs on our brown sandwich wrappings. more ›

A few weeks back reader Kimo "Jim" Noelani contacted Chicagoist with an offer to share some of his family's old photographs with the site. Jim says that shortly after his grandfather passed in February, he was going through some of his old personal items, trying to figure out what needed to stay with the family and what could be donated to Goodwill. Along the way, Jim discovered several boxes of photographs and negatives that gave him (and now us) a glimpse into his past, through the eyes of his grandfather, and a view of a Chicago that many had forgotten. He's has donated most of his grandfather's photographs to the Chicago Hawaiian Historical Society in River Grove for documentation and preservation, but sent along a few for us to share with you, scanned from the original film prints. We reached him by telephone earlier this week. more ›

The Internet age has been marked unprecedented access to mind boggling amounts of information. That access may used in service of the good, like tracking the influence of money in politics via opensecrets.org or slicing up census data in productive and enlightening ways. Or it can be used to answer immediately (via wikipedia) a trivia question that would never have bothered you if you hadn't just spent 20 minutes clicking on "related videos" in youtube. With great power comes great responsibility... and incredible timewasting potential. more ›

The beer wizards at Bluebird have put together a tasting designed to take you through 7000 years of beer history, serving beers that replicate a variety of ancient and modern techniques to showcase the development of brewing. If that sounds pretty dry and nerdy, ignore that first part: Bluebird is going to serve lots of different, interesting beers, at a very reasonable price. According to Bluebird, this will be "One of the only chances this year to taste smoked, blended, sour, & funky 'brews' that transcend history all on the same night." All of that education and drinking, and it'll only cost $30/person. more ›

Today, Art Shay shares his thoughts on Vivian Maier, the hidden talents of the amateur photographer, and introduces us to his great-grandson, Moses Wells Lavin. more ›

There are few shouts that fill an area more thrillingly than :"The President of the United States!" Especially when it is followed by a heavy brass band playing "Ruffles and Flourishes" with its duh duh de duh duh duh...duh duh de duh duh duh--- then Da da de dah da de dah de dah de dah dah... and then repeated. Even if you didn't vote for the guy — as I certainly didn't vote for Reagan in 1980 — the feeling of being an American where it counts in the heart is often there in the Presence. more ›

Mike Fourcher, former Chicagoisto and publisher of the Center Square Journal and the Roscoe View Journal, shared with us some of the photos his father took of the neighborhood that once stood where the Illinois Medical District is now. Taken as part of a project sponsored by University of Illinois-Chicago's Valley Project, which included a health clinic, Lou Fourcher's photography of Chicago's near West side is more than a glimpse into a part of the city that no longer exists. They're a look at a specific time and place in our city's history, as well. more ›

(Ed. Note: Whenever a blizzard comes to the area, it's always compared to the Blizzards of 1967 and 1979. With the former, it always comes down to getting the forecast wrong. In the latter, it was the response to the blizzard everyone remembers. Anyway, I was going through the archives and found this February 2008 "Friday Flashback" on the Blizzard of '79. We're reposting it today. — CS) more ›

Born August 17, 1944 in Richmond Indiana, James Ramey had a glandular condition that kept his weight fluctuating between 350-400 pounds. Matched with the fashion of the 1960s, a giant afro and a booming voice, Ramey was better known on Chicago stages as "Baby Huey." Ramey's sole album on Curtis Mayfield's Curtdom label combined the hard street soul of Mayfield with the psychedelic leanings of Sly & the Family Stone. more ›

25 years ago today the space shuttle Challenger exploded shortly after launch. Some of you might not have been born then, but this was one of those "do you remember" moments that's etched in our memory. It wasn't simply because of seeing it happen live in the classroom. The news cycle wasn't 24 hours of white noise then. It was three networks and the fledgling CNN, nowhere near the 500 channels and nothing on we see today. more ›

Today, Art Shay reflects on his time in the eye of the Bears-Packers hurricane... from the Green Bay side. more ›

Today, Art takes a look at animals through his always-seeing lens. more ›

The Museum of Broadcast Communications has an online exhibition of classic television commercials dating back to the early years of television. Glad it's online. We didn't want to have to bundle up and view the exhibit from the trunk of Bruce DuMont's car. The exhibit is a wonderful way to decrease your productivity at work. Of particular note is the section dedicated to local commercials, featuring such notables as the Victory Auto Wreckers commercial; an old Marshall Field's commercial ("As Chicago as it gets"); a Commonwealth Edison commercial from 1967 (the screencap we used for this post); and an Eagle Insurance spot featuring Mancow Muller. more ›

(Ed. Note: Art sent the photos for this week's post last Thursday, two days before the events in Arizona. Discussing plans for future posts over the phone yesterday, we agreed that these photos should still run, at the very least, to show that some of the things we face as Americans are the same now as they were back when these photos were shot. — CS) more ›

Beginning on the banks of the Ohio River at the tip of Illinois and marching 400 miles through 14 counties north to Chicago, Halsted Street is America in microcosm. Follow it from downstate, through the suburbs, along the central swathe it cuts through many of Chicago's most integral neighborhoods and you'll get a great idea of what this state and this city are all about. 13 years ago, that's just what filmmaker David E. Simpson did, and he took his camera. The result was Halsted Street USA, which you can watch online in its entirety. more ›

(Ed. Note: If you can't wait until this time every Wednesday to get your Art Shay fix, please check out the photographer's blog, which is updated regularly. Art Shay's book, Nelson Algren's Chicago, is also available at Amazon. — CS) more ›

Yeah, it's a slow news day. But it's given us a good opportunity to really dig in (pun intended) to Wikipedia's entry on parking chairs or, as they're more commonly known, "dibs." more ›

Without a doubt the most successful group to come from the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians was the Art Ensemble of Chicago. The quintet's classic lineup — Roscoe Mitchell, Joseph Jarman, Lester Bowie, Malachi Favors Maghostut and Famadou Don Moye — was a powerful musical force with a unique stage presence unseen in free jazz musicians. As recently as 2006, the AEC was still a concert draw, even after the deaths of Bowie in 1999 and Favors in 2004. more ›

[Ed. Note: Today, we're honored here at Chicagoist to introduce what we hope will be the beginning of a fruitful relationship with the legendary photographer, Art Shay. more ›

Tomorrow marks an ignominous moment in Chicago's history. 100 years ago on Dec. 22, a fire at the Union Stock Yards grew so large that it resulted in the deaths of 21 firemen. more ›